Monday, January 29, 2007

Finding a Balance

This has been a very difficult couple of weeks for our family. It all began with the flooding of my classroom and storage room due to a broken pipe just a few days after this terrible cold spell started. The disaster/apocalypse has put me terribly behind at work, and I have been coming home unusually late. On top of this extra work, my whole family has been sick with Plantboy being just about the worst. I have a lot of empathy--it is hard to be a 100% parent when you feel lousy. There is little to be done however, other than for us all to just endure.

The problem that I need some advice from all you fellow-bloggers on is that I have a colleague whom I normally interact a lot with who has, in many ways, become a fairly good friend. I don't know that it is a very balanced friendship, however. Because we work together in our department, there is a lot of sharing of ideas and work. Sometimes I feel that I do more than my share and this perception has spread to much of the faculty somehow, though I have said nothing to anybody. The storage room disaster affected the colleague's room also and she has behaved pretty nasty through the whole thing. She seems interested in blaming everyone for the problem and finding somebody else to fix it, though it is really nobody's fault. To top everything off, she is also a part time administrator, so she does part of my teacher evaluations each year. It is like one person in my life with WAY too many hats.

My advice needed is this--how do you manage people you work with as well as have for friends? How do you strike a balance? And when colleagues act stupidly, how do you separate that from a person and keep the friendship in place? I could go on in this vein, but I think you get the gist. Any help?

3 comments:

Desmama said...

Okay, I'm going to think about this for a bit, so if I don't comment, it's not because I don't care--it's because I'm mulling it over.

Rainie said...

This is what fellow bloggers are for, advice!! Sadly, I have none to offer here. You do seem like just the gal that will get this to all work out! Good Luck!

Christy said...

That is a really tough one, from my experience it seems like you have to choose what kind of relationship you want. I have had friends who do certain things that I tolerate because I accept it as part of who they are. Once you do that it isn't so difficult to deal with... if that makes sense.