It's always nice to know the characters of any story that you're reading. As I mentioned in Part I, I work with seven other people in my work group. I only get along with two of them. I figured that I'd go ahead and introduce these other people, as to give some perspective as to who it is I have to deal with for much of my work week. I will not refer to any of these people by their real names.
1) Gurney
Gurney is the other guy in my work group. Aside from me and Gurney, everyone else is female. Now, having said that, Gurney has some effeminate tendencies. Take that how you will.
When he joined this work group, he was ecstatic about joining us and at first, he seemed like he would be a worthy and valuable addition. We had no reason to doubt his ability and in the beginning, he looked like that he could do the job. He seemed eager. He came off as personable. He was looking like a good fit. Now, almost three years later, the luster has worn off and has given way to loads of tarnish. I see him as pyrite. "Fool's gold", some might say.
It would later be discovered that he has a poor work ethic, though he will try to convince others that he knows everything and that he is your prototypical employee. If you're asking me, he is minimally proficient and I mean that in a general capacity, not just for work purposes. As far work goes, he's serviceable, if I may use a sports term. That is, he can do that the job, but he's really not that good at it.
His documentation and writing skills are mediocre. He doesn't know how to be succinct and instead, much of what he writes is wordy and redundant. Gurney doesn't know how to summarize anything and instead, he will write down everything, including details that are unnecessary and otherwise irrelevant. In what might take me two sentences to write, it might take him two paragraphs.
Gurney is quite egotistical and believes that in some way, he is God's gift to the office. He wants to play a role in training newcomers and I think he does this to demonstrate what he considers to be his outstanding and tremendous skills to those who don't know any better and who won't readily call him out on his bullshit.
Lousy personality and overestimation of his abilities aside, these alone do not make the rotten person I consider him to be. If these weren't his only issues, he'd be all right and maybe, I'd talk to him. We wouldn't be friends or anything, but I might not ignore him the way that I do now.
Gurney's true colors eventually came out, all before he reached the one-year mark. His antics led to one of the workers in our work group to quit after he essentially bullied and intimidated her to where she no longer felt comfortable even being around him in the same office. Her cubicle was located directly behind his. She claimed that she left the department because she wanted to take on a less stressful job elsewhere because she wanted to go back to school. That was partially true, from what I understand, but she really left because she could no longer tolerate Gurney and how he treated her.
Gurney had also managed to rub (figuratively only) one of the other ladies in the work group the wrong way, to where she would transfer to another work group in the same office, also in an effort to get away from him. She had refused to continue to working with him because of his poor work ethic, the generally bad work he would produce, and because of those same bullying ways. He tried to bully her, but she was not having it and she had effectively told him off.
Why he would resort to bullying and intimidation is beyond me. He never once tried that nonsense with me, because there is no way it would have ever worked and I have to think he knew that.
Gurney had also taken it upon himself to become the unofficial welcome wagon of the work group. Whenever anybody new would join the work group after completing their formal training, he would always look to befriend those newcomers, take them under his proverbial wing, and attempt to make them feel comfortable as they settled in and became acclimated to the work group. This was never anything that management had asked him to do. He would just do it on his own. Unfortunately, his efforts would, in the end, be the furthest thing from welcome.
He would end up creating what would be a clique in our work group. I don't know if he did this on purpose, but in doing so, he would end up creating a divide amongst some of the people in the work group. You were either in Gurney's clique or you weren't.
I am proud to say that I never became part of that clique. Sadly, there were four other ladies who would eventually drink the proverbial Kool-Aid and fall for Gurney's bullshit.
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