The World Needs More Loofs

A coworker described me as “quiet and aloof” the other day. I’m not sure what to do about it. Should I be noisy and chatter constantly? Then she’ll complain that I’m a distraction and am negatively impacting production.

I sit in a room with a group of people that I do not work directly with. I provide minor services to them on occasion, but our primary jobs do not intersect. Secondly, I am older than most of them by at least a decade, and there’s only one other that’s married with children.

Don’t get me wrong, I do like them. I’ve been social – going to lunches, movies and housewarming parties, getting the occasional drink after work, goofing around at breaks. On the whole, though, I have nothing to add, nor take away from, the majority of their conversations. I’m not involved in their work, so I can’t advise or offer opinions, and their social chatter revolves around subjects I have no stake in: movies I won’t see, music I don’t like, arguments with their boy/girlfriends that only hold historical interest for me. Conversely, they have no concern about the things that hook my mind. For example, one of them was recently talking about her favorite contestant on American Idol. At the same time, I was e-mailing a friend a link to a scholarly article about Aristophanes’ use of satire and meta in “The Clouds”.

Not a whole lot of middle ground, there.

I’m also quiet because I’m thinking. This runs counter to most office work, where if you aren’t striking the keyboard or on the phone, you are considered to be goofing off. I can easily sit with my eyes closed, listening to my headphones, and with all distractions thus blocked out, come up with enough material to allow me to complete two weeks’ worth of projects. What do you think the reaction is of any manager that comes across an employee sitting like that? Allow me to don my “misunderstood artist” hat for a moment, and submit the standard complaint that the “corporate stiffs just don’t get us creative types”. We need headspace, man, cuz, like, conceptualization has to evolve, you know?

Similarly, I jump from subject to subject like Pitfall Harry crossing crocodile-infested waters. I’ll latch on to some random trivia and run it to the ground, or I’ll go off on what seem to be unrelated tangents. It’s just how my mind works. It’s how I acquire background, context, and foundational information, which serves as a reservoir of knowledge. It may look like I’m digging up song lyrics, but I might just be trying to find a way to express a certain concept, and that song came to mind. If it hit the top 40 or got a Grammy, the songwriter obviously tapped into some universal feeling, and I want that kind of response. (To be fair, I might have just been curious as to what the singer was actually saying in the second verse, but it all goes into the same box. I’ll use it at some point.)

That’s the other reason I come across as aloof, I think. My job is mentally stimulating. I basically get to daydream, and codify the results into marketing materials. I don’t usually get bored, so I don’t feel any pressure to chat with my coworkers, who are trying to break the monotony or wake themselves up. More often than not, the inanity of their subjects is a distraction rather than an escape. Why would I participate in a process that keeps me from performing at my best? If that makes me aloof, so be it. I’m satisfied with the quality of the work I’m turning out, and isn’t that the true business measurement?