Lindsey Tries: Making Friends at Work

I recently got a new job. Instead of working at a drugstore, listening to old people tell me their medical problems all day, I now work at a casino, cashing out people’s poker chips and slot machine tickets. I consider it a massive upgrade, considering I get paid a lot more and get yelled at by customers a lot less.

Anyway, I’ve been trying to make friends at this new job. I would guess about 70% of people that work there are married with kids, or they’re closer to my parents’ age than mine—i.e. I can’t picture being friends with them. 

The other 30%, however, leave me very hopeful. There’s at least two groups of employees that hang out outside of work, and I am determined to make it into at least one of those groups. 

In the past, I’ve made friends easily by using these steps:

Step 1: Start dating someone.

Step 2: Make friends with their friends. (Since you’re dating their friend, they kind of HAVE to be nice to you.)
Step 3: Friends!

I decided to follow that same pattern at this job, except there was one slight problem: it appeared nearly everyone was already in a relationship. Through some pretty heavy internet research, I was able to uncover one person that was single and seemed like someone I may like hanging out with. I took note of his work schedule and started trying to make myself extra cute on the days I was going to see him.

Something weird kept happening though: I kept seeing him working at times he wasn’t scheduled, and when I would mention a past conversation, he would have no idea what I was referencing. Despite multiple conversations over several days, he would jump from being friend-level friendly to just-met-you-niceties. 

Then I found out why.

Since I was far more concerned with learning how to do my job than studying faces and names, I didn’t realize that this one guy was in fact two entirely separate people. To my credit, they look vaguely similar, but I should have taken more notice. It only became clear when I noticed the nametag had changed. I thought people calling them different names was merely an inside joke that no one had explained to me yet*.

So instead of having one good friend at work, I now have two people and no idea where I stand with either of them. I have no idea which conversations I’ve had with whom, and I don’t want to be constantly asking, “Hey, was it you that I talked about this with? Or that other guy that looks vaguely like you?”

And of course now that I know they’re two separate people, I can’t believe I mixed them up. They’re around the same height and have similar hair color, but THAT’S IT. That’s all they have in common. And now, I have to make friends with both of them to figure out which one I wanted to be friends with in the first place. 

* One employee looks like Tom Hanks in the movie “Big,” so we call him Tom sometimes. I thought this was along the same lines.