Space Invader

At work yesterday, I had something happen that seemed very traumatic for me. It would have been no big deal to most people, I know. But I almost jumped out of my skin!

My two best friends & I were eating our lunch in a common area of our work department & chatting & having a nice lunch. We had all been so busy lately and hadn’t really stopped to take time to visit with each other for a while. And we were having a nice time.

So while we are sitting there laughing & enjoying ourselves, another member of our team (actually she's one in management) started yelling at us out of her office across the way that she was on a conference call & we needed to be quiet. Okay; we quieted down even though it would have been easier for that person to just use her phone headsets for her conference call rather than have everyone on speaker phone. I don't like to hear other people's conference calls; I find it rude to put someone on speaker phone at our desks. We have conference rooms for such occasions. Our cubicles just are very sound-proof. Just a pet peeve of mine. But I digress.

A little while later, she came over to our table & was laughing and saying how sorry she was for asking us to be quiet but she didn’t know what else to do. She said she would have much rather have been having lunch with us since it sounded like we were having so much fun. That’s when IT happened.

I was the closest one to her & she came up behind me & grabbed my shoulders from behind & kind of shook me in a sort of fake hug & was laughing like we were all enjoying this pretend camaraderie she was showing. So what happened when she did this to me? Immediately, my shoulders hunched up around my ears & my bad shoulder hurt the rest of the day.

My physical therapist said I need to work on relaxing my shoulders & not scrunch them up so much. I had been doing better with this. But when this happened, I couldn’t help it. I had a difficult time the rest of the evening keeping my shoulders down. I felt myself doing this even when my husband & I went out to dinner at Logan’s last night. I had to mentally make my shoulders relax.

I had just graduated from physical therapy treatment last week. But now I feel like I’ve taken a giant step backwards. I hate that. I’m going to have to retrain my brain again. And my brain doesn't like it.

This manager probably didn’t mean anything by doing this to me. Most people don’t mind if you touch them like that. But to me, this was a major ordeal! I guess she missed the memo that I am not to be touched or hugged. (There's really no memo about this; but I'm beginning to think there should be. LOL!) Everyone else in the area knows that I don’t like to be touched & they’re all okay with it. (I like my space.) But this person does a lot of yelling & throwing of things in her office & doesn’t pay much attention to anyone but herself. Sad – really.

To top it all off, we found out today that this person has some kind of staph infection! Yikes! Why did she have to touch me? Not only did this incident freak me out & now I have to re-train my shoulder muscles to relax, I also have to worry about the possibility getting some kind of infection from this person, too. What a day!

One of the other managers is going to talk to her about this incident & about her other temper tantrums. Hopefully, this just won’t happen again.

In the meantime, it’s back to extra shoulder exercises & retraining my brain to relax those shoulder muscles again for a while. Get ready, brain!