Unfiltered Story #314727

I’m somewhat autistic. One side effect of this is i’m very shy and tend to hide behind my customer service face.

I have a coworker that noone likes. She’s very opinionated and loud and rambles about her personal life constantly.

I don’t really mind because it relieves me of the pressure to talk about myself. I listen to her opinions, make sympathetic noises, help her talk herself through major life events, and occasionally parrot back details about her life to her to prove that i’m listening.

After a while I get the reputation of being the ‘her’ whisperer. she maintains some sort of tool or database that no one else is qualified to, and i’m the only one who can talk her into doing her actual job in regards to it.

I wind up stationed in the cubical near hers because i’m the only one who she gets along with, and one thing I notice is that she almost always rants about the same things at the same point in her work, as though these stories and political opinions are some sort of weird personal nemonic to memorize how her stuff works.

Eventually I learn how to maintain her tools from this, and start taking over from her. Management notices, and asks if i’m confident I can handle all the systems she normally does, I say yes.

The next day she’s terminated for ‘unprofessional conduct’ and not being a team player.

I almost immediately take over her role, resulting in little change for my coworkers as they were coming to me to get her work done anyway.

and she sent me an email saying I was the closest thing she had to a friend in the office, and thanking me for being there for her, which is kind sad: I didn’t really see her in the same way, I just sociopathically saw her as a box into which I put inputs to get outputs.

I feel guilty about this and about the fact that i’m the reason she was fired. At least I got a raise, I guess, and i’m now as irreplaceable as she was