every time you google a female specific health issue you get results like “it’s estimated between 9-34% of women suffer from this condition. its causes are unknown and treatment is either birth control or just fucking raw dogging it. diagnosis takes an average of 12 years because only 8 different doctors are informed about it and every other one will tell you you’re making it up”
Anyway last week my professor told the class “coworkers will put up with poor technical skills but they won’t put up with weird” and after class I just went and sat in my car and cried bc how am I supposed to survive if I still don’t seem “normal” even though I’ve been doing behavioral therapy since first grade but masking hurts so goddamn bad that I’m only doing two classes a week rn but I’m still falling apart and barely functioning every day and barely getting my work turned in bc i come home from class and collapse for days at a time and its just not fair, its not fair, why do other people get to be the normal, why do jobs get to be easy for other people, why are 66% of autistics unemployed/underemployed its not FAIR
This is the precise opposite of true.
Weird is fine. I do not give the slightest fuck about weird coworkers. Coworkers who can competently manage social situations well enough to cover for their incompetence to management? Those are the worst coworkers in the world.
Hoo-boy, your professor is a complete idiot who has apparently never worked a single job outside of the one they somehow landed to get paid for handing out shitty advice.
Your coworkers absolutely WILL work with weird. If you’re even halfway competent, they will accommodate weird. No seriously–because if you’re really competent, your coworkers will put up with raging assholes and miserable bitches because the bosses will love them enough to keep them no matter how terrible they are to work with, so in comparison? Weird but competent is nothing. We would pick you any day over the Queen Bee who you can’t even say “good morning” to because implying anything about the goodness or badness of the day was fighting words.
What your coworkers will NOT put up with is incompetence. People who refuse to be trained. Who make other people’s work more difficult by being so bad at doing their own. Who take the wrong kind of shortcuts or leave a task half-finished or try to wiggle out of doing what they’ve been assigned. It may not get them fired–some bosses really do believe that a warm body doing subpar work for ten years is better than taking the time to train one halfway intelligent person for one month–but your coworkers? Yeah, they’re going to notice that. You being weird? As long as you’re not making my workday more difficult, I could care less.
Speaking as someone who has been Seriously Weird in her entire career: if you are good at your job, your managers and coworkers will cherish you. If you are visibly weird, they will use you as an example of Weird But Competent.
Be weird, be polite, be good at what you do, and you will go far.
In general, don’t take job advice from a professor unless you also want to become a professor.
The norms in academia are different than the norms in almost any other sector. Sometimes they’re in direct opposition. There ARE jobs where you can’t be “weird” but far, far fewer than you think and they largely involve very specific kinds of public contact.
(Also, some of the weirdest professionals I know are academics so it’s not even broadly true there.)
Weird and competent is pretty much a normal thing in a lot of offices. If you follow procedure, get your work done on time and correctly, and don’t cause problems or safety hazards for your fellow employees, most of your co-workers will be fine with that.
What your co-workers mostly want is someone who does the job they are assigned and doesn’t make their own job harder.
