R U disrespectin’ moi famille?

In keeping with the latest fashionable social trends in Hollywood, a tale of “frienemies” follows – though the protagonists are unlikely to yield terribly high hit rates if their naked partying photos were splashed across the Internet a’ la Lohan/Hilton/Spears…

There’s something that has been bothering me for ages around the issue of friendship. I’ve been unfortunate enough to witness the phenomenon twice, and this time I vow I will not allow it to happen again.

Last night, my father’s company’s shareholders (originally he had 50% shareholding and his partner, his best friend at the time, had the other 50%) called a special meeting to attempt to resolve what currently appear to be irreconcilable differences. It’s been ten years since they bought the business together, and huge differences of opinion began to appear very shortly after that, and then thankfully his partner’s family emigrated to the UK to try and establish a branch of the business there. (This was disastrously unsuccessful, so they shut that business down, though the family continued to live there, relinquishing management control to my father to be simply shareholders).

Then, a few years ago, my Dad’s best friend/partner died of cancer, leaving his shareholding split equally between each of his two daughters, and out of friendship my father agreed to have the wife draw a salary equal to his to support themselves. Now, their family wants to come back to SA and run the business with my father, which everyone can see will be a disaster from the outset – they know each other too well, both my Father and his partner’s widow are strong-willed stubborn people who know how to push each other’s buttons, and use every available opportunity to do so. Ag well…

I observed this whole process right from the beginning, and thought that I’d learnt a valuable lesson: friends and business (and probably family and business too) don’t mix.

And then, a year ago, a friend asked me for a favour: please introduce him to my company in the hope that some vac work could be negotiated so that he could get some work experience (his varsity degree being a colourful patchwork of marks varying from the very good to the downright horrific). My boss loved him – he is an intelligent and knowledgeable fellow after all – and agreed to have him on board. Now, our friendship has always been based on argumentative banter at the best of times, so it shouldn’t have been particularly hard for me to imagine that our working relationship might have been less than ideal. But that thought hardly crossed my mind, as keen as I was to help out a mate in need.

The ‘one month’ turned into three months, and without getting into the nitty gritty, all I need say is that every moment of interaction between us was unpleasant. I believed everything would be alright in the end, because he had a ‘finite’ term of engagement with the company. Not so, because his contract was eventually converted to a permanent one, and we’ve had to accept that ‘working’ together is a daily reality. Of course, I’ll tell you here how it’s all his fault for the fighting and bickering, but to attempt to present an unbiased opinion I’ll also have to tell you that, judging by the way he has treated me in the office, he must think me the greatest idiot ever to walk the face of the planet. Perhaps I am, but in that case I used to be the greatest idiot ever to walk the face of the planet who was also a recognised good friend of this particular dude.

And, at a point about two years ago, I would have listed him as one of my closest and truest friends. Today, it’s safe to say that we’d both avoid attending the same social engagement if we knew the other was going to be there.

How is it that such great friends can drift so much apart, on the basis of what happens in an office, forfucksakes? We barely have to engage with one another, and yet always manage to find a fight to pick. And as for my father’s situation, well… the partner’s daughters are technically my oldest friends from the diaper days, but family alliances will dictate that they stick to their side of the fence while we stick to ours.

This leads me to draw one of the following possible conclusions, although being the greatest idiot to walk the face of the planet, I am unable to conclude which is correct. Some help from your side would be much appreciated:

1. We’re fundamentally different people in work contexts as opposed to social contexts – the biggest ruthless bastard in the boardroom might be the most chilled oke around the braai. If this is true, it’s in everyone’s best interests never to discuss work in a social setting, in case you let on what a punkass rat-race screw-over bitch you are in a pinstripe suit and how easy it would be to imprint your stilettoed footprint on one of your friends’ faces if ever the occasion arose. This intrinsically implies (I think, being the simple-minded moron that I am) that most friendships, if put to the test in an office environment, would falter. And, perhaps, that those people you dislike in social settings might be the ones you find most common ground with in the workplace.

2. Your best friends are those you meet at work. Why? Because you know what they’re like at work and can deal with that, and yet you’re also able to transpose that commonality out of the office and into the Baron. That means that you should judge all your friendships that have never been tested in the office with natural skepticism as to their true strength, even if many of those friendships go far further back than those from your workdays do. I don’t like this conclusion, because while I do have some very close friends I met through my jobs, a greater number of close friends stem from school/varsity days, and these are certainly not friendships I’d like to regard as ‘handle with caution’ – we’ve been through too much and shared too much for that to be a satisfactory conclusion.

3. As human beings, we’re too complex to define by our behaviour in any specific context (e.g. social circle, work environment, living environment) and we have sometimes very different ways of behaving, depending on what the activities are we expect to engage in. Given that everyone is uniquely different (similar on some fronts, different on others, but as a whole package, totally unique) it is ridiculous to expect that you should find commonality in every facet of your life. So you should enter any newly shared facet of your life with an existing friend (e.g. sharing a house with them, or starting to work with them, or starting a romantic relationship with them) with extreme caution, because the high expectations of enjoyment that you inevitably have at the beginning, will quite likely be dashed – perhaps irreparably, along with the friendship – before the party’s over.

PS: I’m not really sure what’s wrong with me at the moment. I’m moody and reflective and questioning everything that I’ve come to accept as a given. Best I consult the astrology guides to see what the hell is up with Virgo lately. Star sign swap, anybody?