One must maintain a little bit of summer, even in the middle of winter.
… Henry David Thoreau
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“In third grade I had this teacher who would give every student the same grade on each assignment. After the A at the top of the paper, she’d mark all the wrong answers with a red pen, and then would come by each student’s desk to talk to us about where we went wrong. Together we would fix each sentence or math problem until it was right. At Parent night, one of the dad’s complained that his daughter worked hard to get her A, and that some of the other kids deserved to fail. The teacher allowed him to finish talking, and then responded in the same polite tone she always used in the classroom. “I’m not teaching your children how to pass test… I’m guiding them on how to learn.” Months later our teacher posted everyone’s final grade on the board, and at first, no one was surprised to see we all had A’s. But after looking closer at our papers, and book reports, and our final assignments, we didn’t see any red ink on them. I don’t think we should lie to children and tell them they got it all right if they didn’t. That doesn’t help anyone. But I also know that if you keep telling a child they are a failure; they messed up; or they did a bad job, after a while they’ll start agreeing.”
— Dominic Matthew Jackson, Learning to Learn
me, babbling: whos a chungky babbey??!! whos a chunkey babbey??!!
Dog: Superb, you funky little biped.
concept: a game called “john mulaney or cecil palmer?” where you have to guess if a quote was said by popular stand-up comedian john mulaney or fictional radio host cecil gershwin palmer
this might sound easy, but please keep in mind that john mulaney has
said “whoa, that tall child looks terrible! get some rest, tall child!
you can’t keep burning the candle at both ends!” and cecil palmer has
said “alligators: can they kill your children? yes.”
John has said “🎶Because we’re Delta Airlines, and life is a fucking nightmare! 🎶” and Cecil has said “Delta Airlines, because it’s not like you’re safe anywhere else.”
A concept: John Mulaney is a former radio host from Night Vale
“Big Pharma” okay are we talking about how privatization and monetization has deeply corrupted the field of medicine or are you talking about how you think chemicals in the water are making the frogs gay
“GMOs”? Are we talking seeds that grow sterile plants and patenting genetic modifications then destroying any competition no matter how small they are? Or are we talking life saving rice with vitamin a to make sure kids don’t go blind in regions not suited for other high vit a veg? … or are we talking about your chidoodle?
In the midst of all these “Humans will packbond with anything” posts, I’m going to pause and give you some actual, real-world career advice
Ready?
Humans are packbondy creatures. I mean, there’s just no arguing it. They packbond readily, and quickly, and unbelievably strongly. Once a human has packbonded with a thing, they will do anything to help and protect that thing.
There’s a downside to that, not often mentioned. It uses up a lot of their time and energy to build those packbonds, maintain those packbonds, and most especially to do the work of helping and protecting those with whom they have packbonded. It doesn’t leave them a lot of time and energy for helping other beings.
If you want a human to help you – if you want to reliably get their best effort – you have to packbond with them first.
“Yeah? So?”
So you’re probably going to be working with humans for most, if not all, of your career. No matter how good or bad you are at your job, there will come a time when you need someone else in your workspace to help you with something, whether that’s manning the fry station for 2 minutes while you pee, sending over those numbers from marketing, or dropping everything to teach you how to do a thing that your boss told you to do or else you’d be fired.
Not to mention the big things. They don’t give promotions to just their friends – at least not so much any more. Promotions go to the people who’ve completed big, visible, important projects. It seems fair until you consider,,,, who gets the big, important, visible projects assigned to them in the first place?
Humans give boosts to the people they’ve packbonded with. They mention packbondee’s accomplishments to the boss (or the boss’ boss). They cover for the mistakes of people they’ve packbonded with.
“That’s not right! It shouldn’t be a popularity contest! It should be about who does the best –”
Listen to me.
Listen.
You may be right. You may be the most correct creature to have ever spoken since the beginning of galactic civilization.
It
does
not
matter
Humans packbond. It’s what they do. I can’t stop it. You can’t stop it. No power in the ‘verse can stop it. This is how the human do.
All you can do is work with it.
If you want a human to help you – if you want to reliably get their best effort – you have to packbond with them first.
“Look, I’m introverted and scared of people and I have social anxiety so I really don’t know how to –”
Hey, my pal, I feel you. I, too, am introverted. And I have social anxiety. And I have PTSD that actually – and I recognize that this is bizarre – has ‘business networking’ as a trigger.
For you, I have good news:
Humans will packbond with anything.
Like, you don’t really actually have to do anything. You kinda just have to… exist. In their presence. They kinda do the rest.
If you can talk with them, that speeds things up. But it doesn’t have to be, like, good conversation. Like, it can totally go
You: boy, sure is hot out!
Human: Man oh man, can you believe it?
You: Wow, yeah
Human: Totally
You: ….
Human: ….
This conversation – as awkward and uncomfortable as it felt to you, has caused this human to packbond with you a little more. If you repeat it weekly, you will get good results.
THE TAKEAWAYS
- You need to packbond with the humans you come in contact with
- Taking time to do that is not only justifiable, it is an important part of your job, and should be treated as such
- That is to say that, as much as you hate it (and believe me, I understand), you have to take time away from actual work and dedicate it to packbonding with your fellow workers
Tips
- Plan out your packbonding time. It’s easier if you can initiate than if a human springs packbonding-time on you all unexpected. In an office job I like to use Friday afternoon, but adjust according to what makes sense to you and your situation.
- Keep some packbonding-time questions handy. My go-to list is:
- (If it’s Monday or Tuesday) How was your weekend?
- (If it’s Wednesday) How’s your week been so far?
- (If it’s Thursday or Friday) Any big plans for the weekend?
- How’s your day been?
- You don’t have to care about the answers to these questions. All you have to do is remember that if the human is answering questions, they are not asking you any questions. Therefore questions are your friend. If you ask follow-up questions, you may be able to get through the entire packbonding time without having to do any of the talking
- Learn to disengage from packbonding. You can use basically the same sentence (or variants on it), but you’ll want to practice it so that you can make it sound natural. I use “Awesome! Well, I gotta get going. Have a good one!”
I know it feels overwhelming, but a few minutes of packbonding, once a week, is all you need. Once you build it into your habits it can be no more annoying than doing dishes or showering.
So we’re just not gonna talk about how OP is an alien anthropologist investigating the human species before infiltrating huh
“That is to say that, as much as you hate it (and believe me, I understand), you have to take time away from actual work and dedicate it to packbonding with your fellow workers”
In many of my shittiest jobs I wasn’t allowed to talk to the other employees because the bosses say we couldn’t do our jobs if we were socializing. Now that it has been phrased this way it makes me realize how not only just how life-sucking that is but also how dehumanizing.
They won’t even let us packbond.
Pretty sure that’s by design. They know you won’t talk to the bosses, much less packbond with them, but if you bond with your coworkers? Well. That’s perilously close to unionizing, but arguably more dangerous. Now you actually care about them, like with your real *heart*.
I love that this concept has gone full circle from “let’s talk about how humans interact to aliens” to “let’s look at humans through an alien lens” to “let’s use our observations about humans to now interact with other humans.” It’s exactly what scifi is supposed to make you do: challenge your assumptions about how you view the world so that maybe you can approach your world from a new POV. Just perfect.
Girls get made fun of for everything might as well do what you want lol
not to be dramatic but this mentality literally freed me