I was surrounded by people who were out of control.

Office politics haven't been easy. For quite some time now, everyone has been trying to tear my boss's team apart, by any means necessary, because his main departments, which he coordinated, have become a disaster, and that doesn't reflect well on him at all. He sought to keep those under his command subservient, by any means necessary, and even though he tried to hide it, they reacted aggressively to the slightest incident, trying to expose his hidden agenda. I distanced myself from him, precisely to his advantage. It wasn't easy, but it was possible. It was a gradual process, because one thing these kinds of cornered groups can't tolerate is arbitrariness. It's only when they're organizing their ideas that details get lost, precisely because of the pressure to maintain order. Order has to be re-established. My boss was someone who was terrified of being arbitrary, but he relied on the fact that everyone wanted him to be okay, that no one would support him. He relied on the prejudices surrounding drastic taxation and excessive reorganization, but I saw right through it and used it against him. When he believed he was in control, he ended up in a situation where there would be no rest. The group reached a point where they sought support from me, since it was out of their hands, and they couldn't get it at all. Instead, they kept falling apart, until they thought they couldn't fall any further, precisely because I wasn't doing anything. At that moment, I made my move: to denounce them and catch them off guard, so that the final rest they expected would only be a continuation of the problem. That they had interfered between my friend and me was something I wouldn't tolerate, and I wasn't going to let them forget it with a simple order lacking any bureaucratic backing. Instead, I was going to persist and persist until they saw their lives at risk. Problems would start piling up for him, because there were people waiting for something like this to happen, for it to get out of hand, so they could take advantage of the situation. He'd be out of position, unable to do anything else, unprepared, because now, the threat comes from the most unexpected places, and he can't be aware of everything. Acting hastily only condemned him further, paralyzed him—What a way of speaking! It's not contextual, just indicative, highlighting morphologies, and I don't like it; it feels out of character for me.

My friend was constantly confronting it, but she was always at the mercy of those loopholes too. There were things she was letting slide that would later explode in her face. But what gave me peace was that her spirit was innocent; she didn't perform complex maneuvers to protect herself, she was simply careless and didn't seek absolute protection from it, or expect it to be tolerated. So, in effect, we were talking about someone who acted humanly, erratically, just like me, who also fell into those traps, and who certainly rebelled when they took advantage of her, just like me. Like me, she felt like she was in the office, but her specific place there was only because of her boss's words, out of place, without it being the concrete issue. Right there we began to empathize, because like me, she felt like she didn't fit into an order, precisely because there weren't those clear job definitions. It was something that bothered her about her boss. She and I were practically the same, except she made her carelessness transparent, while I made a living by hiding it, of course, at the cost of doing other things outside the office that allowed me to stay grounded in my own world, to cultivate it. She, on the other hand, couldn't do that, because her life revolved around socializing, finding refuge in that. We were different, but at some point, we converged. My boss tried to silence the situation with her, to prevent it from continuing in the office under any circumstances, by protecting me first, then protecting his position, and then protecting her—in other words, a search for any kind of cover to protect him, always being careful about anything that could cause the situation to spiral out of control, anything that could change. He was only thinking about what was causing a stir and trying to stop it, but when he focused on her, he couldn't, because I had just made it clear that all his previous attempts were nothing more than control strategies, resulting in an impediment to socializing in the workplace. He was caught between a rock and a hard place, with me out of his control and him in his sights, radically, and that's something I sought to demonstrate. He tried to get out of it through my empathy, but he didn't succeed; he was living off what he thought I was doing, yet in the previous situation, he was living off the very thing that eradicated his ability to control me.

I have to admit that my boss wasn't as clever as I expected. He only lived by imposing rules, then focusing on his own affairs, which wasn't systematic. He always pretended his impositions wouldn't be challenged, but that's the problem. The point was to leave him without support, at the mercy of the arbitrariness inherent in our relationship. With just one such element, he was bound to shift his focus to strengthening his control. I really like how I'm speaking; talking in terms of "it" or "you" isn't pleasant because I don't see the conditions, but it can give me an idea of ​​what the journey is like in the same environment and what can be said to happen there, despite the conditions. That is, perhaps something generic that allows me to visualize other situations, but I don't think so. My friend and I exacerbated the arbitrary nature of his behavior, and it reached a point where he began to lash out at everyone around him. He no longer cared about appearances at all; he simply wanted control of the situation. He couldn't handle anything he couldn't control, anything unpredictable, because he couldn't find his footing, he was always off balance. It got to the point where he no longer knew what he was doing; instead, his own inertia of control, his dislike for her, his belief that she was a wretch, made her his enemy. He made himself his own enemy.

After I reported him for using me as he pleased in the office and behind everyone else's back, completely disregarding her, it became clear that they were acting as an isolated group pursuing their own ends, making his supposed devotion nothing more than a sad facade. Everyone knew it, but the point was to speak out at a moment when they couldn't deny it. He simply let himself be carried away, trying to resolve everything he could, but everything was already out of control. Gossip was spreading, and he didn't know where the next blow would come from. The tragedy is that the blow didn't come from where he expected, from a place connected to him, but rather from a natural disaster in my country. I think he never imagined that even nature would join in, supporting him and all the prayers he prayed to God for. Under this understanding, then, the very people he trusted most, those who had been supporting him because of their loyalty to his escape and his mistreatment, had radically abandoned him, despotically and cruelly, without any feeling, and without offering any explanation. It was me, "God," his dependencies, the rest of the staff, and then his secretary joined in. Indeed, at this point, the subject has understood that nothing about his behavior is acceptable and that continuing the situation would be tantamount to placing himself at the mercy of life's whims and its repercussions—I never thought I'd reach such a conclusion.

This whole situation also stems from my interaction with a girl; she had no respect for my personal space. She was pretty, but she took advantage of that to touch me while I was in my own world. It seemed as if she was afraid of me, because of the stress I was under while writing, and she was trying to calm me down.

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