when your colleague is a menace

Something that really irritates me is when work colleagues invite me to hang out with their families.

I know that probably sounds bad. But seriously, I have to put up with unruly screaming kids at the airport and in hotels. Why would I voluntarily hang out with them?

I'm not exactly an extrovert. I'm pretty shy. It's very difficult for me to spend all day with a client that I've just met. I get some pretty hostile and hard to work with people on my engagements, and at the end of the day all I want to do is go back to the hotel and work out and then spend the evening reading or writing. The pressure is worse when I am not only working with a client but training someone to do my job because I have two people that need my time.

And after working with a colleague, I don't want to hang out with their family. Inevitably the wife is glaring at me all night, sure I'm having an affair with her husband even though he's always fat, bald and unattractive (seriously, if I worked with good looking men, I wouldn't be single, would I). I guess the kids sense the hostility and that causes them to behave badly. I'm supposed to sit there and smile while the kids either behave like total heathens or the parents scream and yell at them to behave.

Do I want to experience my work colleague physically or verbally abusing his kids? No. Do I want to have to make nice with his wife to assure her we have so much in common even though she's a stay at home mom who doesn't even watch the news? No. I don't have much in common with these women that my colleagues tend to marry. I don't give a flying fuck about their kids' soccer scores or what prestigious elementary school they got into. I don't want to see their fucking crayon drawings. I want to go home and have a glass of wine in a quiet room so I can get ready for the next day of client torture.

If I wanted kids, I would have them. I don't want them. I want to spend as little time around them as possible. I sometimes think these colleagues feel sorry for me and that's why they try to invite me for dinner. But I like traveling (most of the time). I like to be alone.

Or, maybe they want to torture me and force me to experience how much of a big suck it is to come home to a loud dirty house and not be able to have an intelligent conversation. But, if you chose that life, it's your tough shit. I don't want to waste MY time putting up with that kind of shit.

To be fair, it's not always the kids and the wife that suck. Some times it's just the wife. But it's never a fun experience for me.

So, if you're ever contemplating inviting an out of town colleague out with your family, why not drop a hint that the invitation is there and let your colleague take the lead on whether or not to hang out with you. If the colleague doesn't say anything, or seems to be making excuses, fucking drop it. Don't hound your poor colleague every day to hang out with you because it will just annoy the fuck out of your colleague.

I should also mention that I'm not going to eat food you bring in just because you brought it. Stop trying to foist your stupid chocolate cakes and doughnuts on me. I don't eat them because I hate them. And stop trying to convert me to your religion. It's not going to happen.

Ech. Why do so many annoying people work as consultants?