Our workplace today is a landmine of emotional types – both male and female. From one day to the next, from line-staff, to management to CEO or COO, you never know when your luck will run out and you will step in the wrong direction and unleash explosive personalities of cataclysmic proportion. There is no Workplace 101 course that will ever teach us how to navigate this treacherous terrain, you learn by trial and error, trying not to get your head blown off in the process. However, there is an art to office communication and identifying the emotional types that only the shrapnel-wounded and battle-weary truly knows.

The workplace is suppose to be that sterile environment that is set off from our other worlds of home, part-time school (if that is on your schedule) and the fun stuff. These days however the lines between our various lives are blurred and boundary-less. Work morphs into down-time and intrudes into our home lives and our emotions (some of which are best left at home) are taken on this wild roller coaster ride. For, example we get e-mails from work at all hours of the day and night, even on vacation and we respond to them from where ever we are in our current environment and current frame of mind, which oft times colours and flavours our responses. When these responses hit the light of day in the workplace — that is another story.

It is presumed that when you are at work the day is organised and ordered for you to make good on your work-day deliverables rendering to Caesar and all that jazz. Work is expected to proceed in an orderly and rational manner and we, the people, are expected to perform regardless of our personal proclivities and circumstances at any point in time. So, while your co-workers within the company might sympathize about the death of your cat when you are feeling sad: the organization however expects their work to continue no matter what emotional state you are in.

To compound matters, unfortunately, there are some managers, co-workers and executives who pack the smelliest emotional aspects of their personalities in their brief cases when they get into their transport to come to work. Not content with just leaving said emotional baggage safely tucked away in their bags, they choose to unleash it on the rest of us unsuspecting suckers who are forced to share cubicle space with them. When the obnoxious behaviour is unleashed the most one can do is to look on in open mouthed wonder.

Hulking Anger: I do believe that inside everyone of us there lurks this other persona, you know, that huge hulking green-coloured, livid, angry shirt-ripped man, wild with rage. I know that your office has a hulk and it might even be you. Every person who has ever read a comic book knows of Dr Bruce Banner, who, thanks to a gamma ray experiment gone wrong, transforms into a giant green-skinned hulk whenever he becomes angry and his pulse rate gets too high. It might only take an off-the-cuff comment or a careless word to bring our screaming, menacing ‘Hulk’ to the fore. There are some of us who get up on the wrong side of bed in the morning and it takes just one harmless greeting from that chirpy colleague to set us off ‘big time’. For other persons it might just be a word that right away triggers wrath in a co-worker. I can think of such trigger words as, oh, ‘cut-backs’ ;’no-pay-for-over-time’ or ‘reduced lunch time’. Dealing with the angry co-worker takes the skill of a tight-roper walker and the grace of a ballerina. You have to spot the on-coming episode and deflect it with kind words or neutral phrases. Woe betide the new employee who has not gotten use to your office ‘hulk’.

Sad Sack: She might not be anyone’s first choice of a workplace BFF because she always has several sad and involved tales of woe and damnation. Her life seems to be a tragic mix of bad luck, obeah (she thinks) and unfortunate circumstance. Life never seemed to cut her a break -and we have to hear about it every single day. Just once you would want to hear a happy story or one that had an almost happy ending. But, no, the tales from the crypt keeper are repeated ad naseum. Then there are also the perpetual office cry-babies (male and female) who may use their tears as a tool to get what they want from ‘the system.’ The tears well up but they dry up as soon as enough attention has been gained by that colleague. Listen up, we your long suffering colleagues are on to you. We now know that we are being played so before the first tear-drop falls we are going to have a stock response prepared for you that will not see us shifting from our position. This is not primary school, this is the school of hard knocks – get over yourself and get back to work.

Grumpy: Our colleague with this cantankerous nature gives more than a true imitation of one of Snow White’s seven dwarfs. There is nothing during their work day, with which they are happy. They can see the dark side of a sunny day and their prognosis is always grim. They thrive on calamity and contention and you wonder if they were born under some unlucky star. For them we have the remedy of good cheer and kindness. Kill them with it.

Yvonne Grinam-Nicholson, (MBA, ABC) is a Business Communications Consultant with ROCommunications Jamaica, specializing in business communications and financial publications. She can be contacted at: yvonne@rocommunications.com. Visit her website at www.rocommunications.com and post your