Constructive criticism anyone? Please?

After four or five days of beautiful “Indian Summer”, when I could sit outside in the afternoon, I finally had to turn on the furnace this afternoon. It was warm this morning but took a bit of a dive this aternoon. I set the thermostat to 66 but I’ll turn it down to 62 before I crash out. Lots of leaves came down today but more will be falling in the next few weeks.

The constructive criticism thing is related to a rather contentious meeting at TeleCubelandia this morning. Our meetings are rarely contentious. This is probably the most respectful group of people I have ever had the pleasure of working with. I don’t EVER feel as if I am not listened to because I am female, for example. And yes, I HAVE been at the butt end of discrimination and unwanted sexual advances in my life. I am a woman. That’s par for the course for us. But we won’t go there tonight.

I won’t detail the meeting. It was what it was and the contentious person is a known quantity. If I am the target, as I sometimes am, I can let it go. I mean, I have successful adult children, I have buried my only sibling and both my parents, followed by a few years of hostile lawyer shitola from my sibling’s widow for reasons I still don’t understand. In other words, I’ve been in the world a while and I’m more than a little jaded.

So I don’t normally give a crap about office crapola but today the crapola was directed toward someone else and that person was doing their best at a new responsibility and did not deserve aggressive criticism. A long-time manager did their best to mitigate the situation and I (not a manager) jumped in to support them and it got calmed down. Still I spent the whole afternoon thinking about what went down and how to maybe get ahead of this in the future. But who am I kidding? I doubt things will ever change much. Whatever. This is a first world problem. Or is it?

G’night, KW

One Response to “Constructive criticism anyone? Please?”

  1. Margaret Says:

    Not knowing the people or situation well, I’m not sure the exact words I’d use. But I would rehearse what I could/should say if it happens again. Personally, I can’t BEAR to feel like I’m left with my mouth hanging silently open when I should have addressed something. I fret and fume about it for a long time.