The workplace is a strange thing because at the workplace you spend more time with people than you do with your own family yet the people you work with are, more often than not, anything but family.

     The workplace is an environment rife with politics and everything else you can imagine, some of it easily visible, most of it not apparent- at first. But over time you get to figure out everybody's m.o. and then after that you start to get weirdly warm with each other because now you KNOW and allow them to get through their days at work doing things their way and there's no judgement. For the sake of operations, you get along, for the sake of cordial relations with each other you get along. They constantly test the boundaries of acceptable behavior and you test them as well because all the workers are placed in a box, a framework, and like electrons holding the same charge in a container, the workers push to the edges of the container because all have an equal charge and that equal charge, that mutual understanding, is that nobody really wants to be there.
     But there they are, and for so many hours it boggles the mind! This is considered quite normal in our present capitalistic society. Howzit, indeed.
     Free (quality) time is everybody's goal but that comes at a price and the paycheck is too small so back to work people go, averaging forty hours a week. I have had my share of this, I have done loads of time, and through it all I have learned a heckuva lot about myself and about what runs other people. I suppose I could have learned these things another way but in the intensity of the work environment I have found that you learn so much more than if people weren't thrown together on the same lifeboat and had to learn how to deal with one another.

     Early on in my work career, which has spanned numerous jobs, I worked at close quarters with a lot of other worker bees but for the last decade or so I have worked mostly autonomously (without supervision) and customers have been my focus. Thousands upon thousands of customers. These customers, the majority of them, see their interaction with me as a singular event while I see my interactions with them as patterns. I typecast them, a lot of them, which is a way of using customer shorthand, a skill that you develop due to exposure to facial cues, body language positions, and auditory responses, these 'tells' riding inevitably along with common patterns of human behavior.
    It's amazing that people who don't know me or each other act in a similar way, how utterly predictable most of them are, yet I'm never bored because, like my wily and incredibly creative coworkers were, some still manage to surprise me, every single day.
     Never assume that you have seen it all from your coworkers or customers because, brothah, you haven't!