How to be the difficult coworker

Some people have a bank account. I have an email list. This explains why nothing makes me overreact more than when something goes wrong with my email list. People who see me overreact regularly will probably disagree. They’ll be like, “I saw you throw a fit about [insert one of 10,000 things here].” But trust me, you haven’t seen anything until you’ve seen me send out 250,000 emails with a bad link.

My clearest memories of working with people are when they tell me I’m not nice to work with. I get really sad because I don’t mean to be awful and I hate working alone. I love to have a big team working with me. But all my fond memories of working with a big team are overshadowed by me losing my mind over my email list.

Recognize the life cycle of who you get to work with

When I was young and hot I could work with anyone. This cannot be overstated. The only people who will question this are women who are young and hot and think the red carpet does not roll out for them. You don’t notice you have a red carpet under your feet when your entire world is a red carpet.

In my late 30s, most women I knew stopped working or worked part time (i.e. pretended to work). So I got to work with high performers because everyone needs to have a woman in their orbit, and there are so few high-performing women in senior management.

In my 40s, I realized that there’s a reason why all women are at home with kids, and my life was impossible, so I cut back my hours to 40 a week. And I could only work with women. That’s because most people who are senior in their career have a spouse at home taking care of kids. I didn’t, so no senior person wanted to work with me. Young people would work with me, but not high performers, because high-performing young people work with people who are focused on their careers.

So I was left working with women taking care of kids. And there are no worse people to work with. After a decade, I realized a team of people with partial attention does not add up to a partial team; it adds up to incompetence. But working alone with my email list was impossible – my head exploded with notes to myself like an Ingo Maurer chandelier.

Hold onto contacts who don’t hate you

I have to believe the emails are good because I’m autistic and do not understand the concept of adults having one best friend. So I think I have 250,000 friends. And if there is one single mistake with the list, I feel like I’ve lost a friend.

So in the past four years I’ve sent about 40 emails. The gap between how good my list is and how few emails I send should earn me a Webby Award. Is there a category for moms who are self-imploding online? I know there would be a lot of competition (hello, Ruby Franke) but I think I’d be a solid candidate for the lifetime achievement award: Documenting personal catastrophe since 2008!

I live my life like a house of cards, frantically fortifying it with mismatched decks while simultaneously looking down on people whose lives are like dominoes falling too fast for them to keep up. All the while, my sanity comes from my email list. I think: even if everything falls apart, no one with an email list like mine has ever had to live on the street.

The world is big. There’s always someone new to try to get along with.

Now that my kids are both in college, something magical has happened: men are reappearing in my work life. Men whose careers I’ve watched for decades, men who disappeared while I was raising kids, are right there again.

So Derek is working with me. He is very systems focused. I am very focused on reminding everyone on my list that we are friends because I’m so interesting. I haven’t worked with someone who is so efficient and on top of things in 10 years. No offense to everyone I’ve worked with. (But seriously, you were all taking care of kids, so I can’t imagine you being offended.)

I’m trying to go back to where I was before I had kids, which means I’m losing my mind over my email list. Derek tells me he’s never seen someone get upset over something so small. “You had a .01% complaint rate. It’s okay that not every single person wants to receive your emails.”