This just in: I come across as blunt, abrasive, aloof, distant, and ostensibly averse to small talk – and damned if some people don’t much care for that.”Pardon me, allow me to clarify: this just in from my supervisor, who took five minutes to get [above] across to me. I knew exactly what was coming halfway into the “Well, I’m not quite sure how to tell you this, but sometimes in large groups ” prelude, but coaxing it out of him any faster would have required me to bypass the requisite small talk and cut straight to bluntness, and never let it be said that I can’t take a hint.”Anyway, this is apparently a problem. Not just to my supervisor, but to the anonymous chorus of indeterminate size (”some people”) that has approached him with concerns about my demeanor. Oh, they all know I mean well, but would it kill me to smile a bit more? Spend more of my lunch breaks indoors with others in the lunchroom, instead of running errands or relaxing at the park? Interrupt my work (which I’m apparently doing quite well, thankyouverymuch), whenever the circumstances demand it, with multi-word commentary about how by gosh, it is raining again, whenever will the madness end?”It’s not that I’m not aware of all of this, mind you; it’s that what others see as friendly banter, I see as distractions from my work – work that no one else in the office can do. I am a task-oriented person, dammit, not a people-oriented person! It’s that, much as I like my coworkers, I don’t come to work to better my social life. It’s that in my metric, it’s better to approach people, possibly bluntly, than it is to mediate your concerns through a third party, so that the offending individual is left suspecting all of the friendly chit-chatters of filing complaints with that party and leaving her to guess whether this modification of her behaviour is enough, because it’s not like she’s had the chance to speak directly (that word again!) with anyone who actually wanted her to modify it. So help me, this all strikes me as remarkably inefficient, not to mention, highly inconducive to creating a pleasant working environment, at least for me. I’m just saying.”In summary: damned if I know what precisely I need to change (goddamn, it’s hard to get straight answers from the directness-averse HR set), and damned if I could make whatever changes are necessary without driving myself insane even if I did know exactly what they were. The good news is, I continue to provide my employer with a sort of specialized expertise that they’ve been seeking for years; and by all accounts, I do a very good job of what I was hired to do.”Call me old-fashioned, but right now, I plan to just continue to do my job well, and I reckon that’ll be enough.