Dating Someone Who is Bat-S**t Crazy

It always starts off great!

Years back, I had been between relationships and just decided that perhaps I needed time to myself, basically dating no one. I was in the middle of undergraduate work for genetics at the time, planning to eventually move onto medical school when a long-term relationship just fell apart on me. Realizing I had a number of years of tough education ahead of me, I realized this was probably not the time to get involved in any kind of future relationship.

Life doesn’t really work that way, unfortunately.

During that summer, I took a part time temp job to just pass the time (and keep up my finances before school work made that impossible), so I got this really mundane job working for a subsidiary of Pacific Bell. They were moving one section of the business to another location, so the job consisted of a bunch of temp workers literally transferring physical files from one place to another. Very boring work.

But kind of exactly what I needed after a break-up.

There were a few dozen other workers there with me, and there were a couple of supervisors. I kept being offered one of the mid-level supervisory positions, due to education, but as I wasn’t really there for longevity or intentions of rising up, I chose to remain at the bottom and just do the grunt work. Again, it was exactly what I needed.

The job was supposed to last about three months, and about a few weeks into it, the cliques already started to form, and as you would suspect, it’s very easy to get cast into certain corners, even without doing anything to make it happen.

One of the first things I noticed was that because of the horrible management of this project, we had lots and lots of time of sitting around in conference rooms just talking. I quickly started bringing books to read to pass the time, but all around me, people did the sort of things you might expect happen when people have lots of time and nothing to do. Add in those cliques I talked about, and you might get the impression that things might turn sour really quick-like.

The place had a real feral activity to it that resonated with herd mentality. The group would often find a weaker member of the room and then pounce on him or her, pretty much turning that person’s life into a nightmare until…