(no subject)

[jay]

The telephone rings in my house at 7:30am. News from Atlanta? No, it's JL, requesting a copy of someone's paper... grr. I let it roll over to our answering machine. I'm tempted to not acknowledge it... go passive-aggressive, since I can't tell him off directly at work.

Comments

[dawnd.livejournal.com]

You know, in this case passive-aggressive might be appropriate. Simply do not acknowledge any message left on your home machine before 8am. (Better yet, never acknowledge any message on your home machine AT ALL--but I recognize that might be awfully hard to do). Somehow, calling you before 8am or after, say, 8pm, your answering machine never seems to work. How odd! ;^)

[advice warning ;^)]
This is one of the places I think you need more boundaries, Brian. JL does not get to run your life, no matter how much he wishes he did. Especially with something as stupid and trivial as this, holding a boundary in whatever way you can is probably a victory for you. It's not that he shouldn't have the right to ask you for a copy of a paper--but the APPROPRIATE place to communicate that is to your WORK telephone or e-mail, not your HOME phone, before working hours.

I do recognize how hard it would be to hold this boundary, especially after NOT having held it for so long. However, the better you hold this boundary, the less you're likely to feel you have to create boundaries elsewhere in your life, possibly by "stirring stuff up."