I Am a Difficult Person at Work and Proud of it （我难搞，我骄傲）
Last week I had a disagreement on a matterof principle with a man at work. When I got home, I gave my daughter a blow-by-blowaccount of the bust-up, expecting her loyal support. Instead she rolled her eyes.
“Poor X,” she said, siding with my adversary.
“Poor X?” I repeated, thunderstruck.
“You can be very difficult,” she explained.“I don’t think you realise it.
She is right about the about the second point.
I do not see myself as difficult – I am perfectly reasonable. To check this was the consensus view, the following morning I conducted a survey. I bearded the first colleague I saw and demanded: “Am I difficult?” He looked uncomfortable at being put on the spot when he had barely taken his coat off. “Yes,”he said. I asked three more people. Allgave the same answer.
Being difficult at work is not generally thoughtto be a good thing. On Amazon there are 1,378 titles on how to deal with difficultpeople with titles such as Since Strangling Isn’t an option. I failed to find asingle volume called What to do When the Difficult and Influence People.
As a columnist, being difficult is part of thejob – if you do not enjoy sometimes getting up the noses of readers, you aretoo bland to be any good. Indeed, as a journalist, being personally difficult canserve you rather well. I can think of one or two writers who are so impossibletheir text is never tampered with. Their words invariably command pride of placebecause no editor can face the fuss that would result form doing otherwise.
Being difficult has other advantages too. Itmeans that people tend not to lean on you for small favours. As one of the mostimportant tricks to survival in the corporate world is to avoid grunt work, thismakes it a powerful weapon. Being difficult also means you are likely to be betterat getting your own way. It is a balancing act – you must be difficult enoughto insist that things are done as you see fit, without being so difficult thatpeople refuse to work with you.
There are lots of different sorts of difficult.The books list various common varieties, all of which are unattractive: narcissists,psychopaths, victims, gossips, blamers and people who fly off the handle.
Yet there is a further sort of difficultthat I cannot find in any book, and is not at all unattractive. That is being awoman. Women are far more likely to be called difficult than men. Google revealstwice the matches for “a difficult woman” as for “a difficult man” – and most ofthe references to difficult men don’t count because they continue with “to pindown”.
