"Structured" personalities

How is avoiding her going to help?

Sounds like some form of social phobia.

I have met people and worked with people like the girl that you are talking about. And I will admit that I have always wondered the same thing. Basically what makes them tick.

But what I have discovered is that not everyone is like me and not everyone thinks like me. Not everyone is as social as we would like them to be. Especially not in the workplace.

People have problems and they may not feel like sharing them with the whole wide world. They may withdraw into themselves and only associate or mingle with who they absolutely have too.

There are also ambitious people who like to climb the ladder of success.....so when they are at work that is all they focuss on. That is the only thing on their brain and they are not out to win any popularity contests.

It is amazing that it is OK for men to be ambitious but if a woman is then she is a bitch.

Also maybe the woman is a lesbian.......or she got hurt really bad in a previous relationship so she has sworn off any type of social life.

Who knows......!!!!!

The only way you are going to find out......if you are that interested in this person is to engage her in conversation......develop a trust relationship and maybe she will tell you what makes her tick. The way I look at it is.....who doesn't need more friends in this world? ....The way she may look at it may be totally opposite of the way that I look at things. But all she can do is tell you to go jump in a lake. Or go away and leave me alone.....She isn't interested. But it would probably make her feel good that you noticed her and that you care about what makes her tick.

Just my opinion

From what I know about her, I think that you have described why she is like that kadtxgl.
The only person she mixes with at work is a happily married family man, I think that she is avoiding any relationship situations that might end up with her getting hurt, and since work is her escape from what might be a lonely home life, she will do everything to keep herself free of emotional problems.

Yes, good advice kadtxgl, I'll just continue to be as friendly with her as I am with everyone else and take the first opportunity to talk to her.

Yeah, what he said. I'd do a client, but not a co-worker.

Oh, who am I kidding? If I worked with anyone hot, I'd fuck them. But I work for old stinky lawyers.

I think dongalong's description of a "structured" personality is a bit vague, and it seems to me everyone is reading into it either based on themselves, a colleague, or someone else they know. The people that have been described thus far could actually have little in common with the woman dongalong is talking about.

At the place where I work, there are lots of people who socialize and are "chatty." They also give the impression that they don't get much work done. One woman who sits near me is almost always in conversation with someone. She never seems to work at all. These sort of people aren't performing so badly as to get fired, but they don't get promoted, either.

I'm at the opposite extreme. I come in, work a minimum of 8 solid hours (not a few hours of work and a few hours of gossip), rarely talk to anyone unless I have to, and when I feel like I've gotten enough work done (usually long after everyone else has left for the day) I leave.

I have received feedback from my supervisors that I need to be a little bit more friendly with people, particularly when making requests from another departments. One of my supervisors suggested that I try to chat people up a bit, show an interest in them as people, ask about how their kids are doing, etc. He also gave me an article about "emotional IQ."

But, the truth is, I have no interest in getting to know my colleagues as people, and I feel uncomfortable and dishonest trying to fake it. It's not that I particularly dislike anyone. In fact, there are some people whom I'm rather fond of, in my own way. But for the most part, I find my coworkers mostly disinteresting. Few of them are my age, and those that are are straight and married and all they ever talk about is their kids. I have nothing in common with them. Consequently, I have no friends at work, and I don't socialize with my coworkers outside of work.

I'd be perfectly content with that if I had friends outside of work. Unfortunately, I don't, but that's another story.

viking1, I empathize. Although I don't have much hope that my life will ever be any different than it is now, I do still have some small fragment of hope that I will someday have the life I always dreamed of. I'll be getting a late start if I do, and I won't lie and say that doesn't bother me, but that life is still worth having even if it comes later for me than for others.

I recently reconnected with a cousin who is a few years older than me and learned that he has gone through similar struggles. There are significant differences, as well (e.g., he's got a few good friends and he's been in a long-term relationship before), but I take some comfort in knowing that there are other lonely, single people out there who are my age or even older.

But if we're ever going to find happiness, something needs to change. Maybe not who we are, but how we live. There are two ways to break out of one's routine. One way is to do something different with a specific intent, a specific purpose. The other is just to break the routine for the sake of breaking the routine, just to try something new and see what happens. The former approach is more logical to me--I don't like doing things without a reason--but for me it doesn't work because most of the time I can't think of a reason to leave the house. So I need to force myself to leave the house even if there's no reason for doing so. It's hard. I don't know what I'm doing and I don't know what--if anything--is going to happen as a result.

I haven't made any major progress yet, but I haven't made any major breaks to my routine either. Frankly, I'm still working up the courage.

True, chances are she's avoiding any relationship issues that might end up with her getting hurt.. especially at work, that's the LAST place I'd look to get involved with a woman. I've done that a couple times, and both times have been horrendously bad mistakes. One morning, after a very drunken happy hour, I woke up in bed with one of the girls in our desktop publishing dept., something (at the time) I WISH I could hit the rewind button and made it never happen. I wouldn't recommend to ANYONE trying to get your honey where you get your money. She's hanging with the happily married man because of the "safe-ness" factor. It sounds like she's had bad experiences, possibly with getting tangled up in relationships at work, or just bad relationships in general. Yeah man, kadtxgl said it well, just be friendly with her as you are with everyone else in your office and you'll retain your sanity.

I have gained a further understanding of structured personalities after a disagreement with an eastern European friend which almost got violent.

Anyway he has a habit of making rules about almost every part of reality and gets angry when something or someone doesn't conform to these rules.
Like the character Borat portrays, this friend is racist, normally he hides it but alcohol removes the mask.
After a few drinks he started complaining about something which was getting a bit too racist for my taste and without being insulting I told him the reasons why I disagreed with his point of view but he had no intelligent reply so he threatened to punch me Luckily he left and that was the end of that although he hasn't been speaking to me since.

Anyway this made me analyse the situation and it seems to me that he creates and sticks to these rules to simplify life and make sense of the world.

I can't decide why some people are like this, some of the reasons that come to mind are a lower than average IQ, fear of the unknown and low confidence in their ability to react to unexpected situations.

What do you think?

Amen! I see barricudas like her all the time at work...they will sell out their own flesh and blood to get ahead, so imagine the roadkill she would make out of you. I have to get along with my coworkers to be productive as a unit...I don't have to like them.

A Serb by chance?

No, the worst they can do, especially in a work environment, is to threaten you with sexual harassment and try to force you out of your job.

Alcohol is the great remover of masks. What you eventually see can be scary.

When I drink tooo much......I get sleepy.