You've Got to Have Friends

Or so sings Bette Midler. When this album first came out, back when I was in high school, I believed her. Today I'm not so sure.

Last night my best friend called me at 11:00 (9:00 his time). He needed help with a presentation that someone had just dumped on him. It's the kinda thing I'm kinda good at, so I said I'd pitch in. It took us three solid hours, which means my head didn't hit the pillow until 2:00 AM. Still, I was happy that I had been a help. He didn't seem especially grateful, only anxious about all the unexpected work he still had to do, but I didn't mind.

Today, on the other hand, I mind.

I had a little free time this morning so I reformatted what we did last night and sent it off to him. A nice little value-added surprise, or so I thought. When I got back from lunch there was a voicemail from him, telling me what I needed to do to improve the deck and asking me to look up some competitive information for him. I got an offhand "thanks" as he hung up.

Um … let's see … He works for another company now. I'm doing all this for free. Arguably, I shouldn't even be doing it at all on this company's time. (In fact, when I got out of a meeting and tried to revise the document, I got an "error" message that the file was being revised by someone else and I almost shit a brick. Thank goodness I kiss up to IT all the time! They unlocked it so I could send it off to him and trash the file.) Grateful would be nice. Not another assignment, but full-on gratitude.

And then there's my coworker. She's going through a rough spot in her marriage. But she's been going through this rough spot since July and it's getting way old. Her shrink tells her that she should develop interests all her own, outside the marriage, so that she can regain her autonomy. And she's decided that the new interest should be me.

She comes in here, sits in one of the guest chairs, and stares at me. She plays with hair and expects me to entertain her. Apparently I'm quite lacking in this regard, because she tries to hide her boredom by yawning through her nostrils. Um … get outta here. She wants to go to lunch almost every day. She wants to go see this movie or that play after work. I don't wanna. I like my alone time.

And I don't like people I have to feel sorry for, and she's in full-on victim mode. She wells up when she talks about her husband, which she does all the time. She's afraid to leave him, even though she makes more than he does. There are no kids to consider. She's simply afraid to be alone.

I simply do not understand this. I try to be sympathetic. But I've never been married. I've always lived alone. Her issues are not, and have never been, my issues. I want to be Melanie Hamilton, but I find myself behaving like an impatient Scarlett O'Hara every time she enters my office.