Interruptions: Coworkers in memory

I wanna take a minute to talk about work friends. And coworkers. Those you spend most of your waking hours with that can either make your day better oooor a living hell. Depends on their moods. 

I worked on an assembly line.

Half of the assembly line made half the part and the other half finished it. At least with the part they were running when I start working there. Either way the assembly doesn't run without team work and one person being a whiny bitch can really throw a wrench in the metaphorical and proverbial wheels of an assembly line. 

Also, training.
Everyone's eyes on you.
You're the new meat.
The new interesting shiny thing
or the thing that is fucking up everyone's day.
There's really no in between. 

BECAUSE I was around these people every day I thought I would make an effort to get to know them and here I want to talk a little about them if more in memory than anything else. 

Tanya was my first real friend from work. She was from Oklahoma. She was in her late twenties. She had a son whom she didn't have custody of because of her drug addiction and battles with depression. She was a super up beat chick who was always trying to crack a joke and put everyone in a good mood so work went more smoothly and was more enjoyable. She "adopted" me at work and basically showed me the ropes. We'd party outside of work...I say this loosely because she drank like a sailor and I don't drink. So we hung out while intoxicated? We cooked together sometimes and she taught me how to make the best tater tot casserole in the whole world.

 

Randy and Nickolas both were strange guys that wanted to get in my pants that I hung out with because they were interesting but kept firmly in the friend box. I only interacted with Nick at work. But I did flirt with him like crazy because I knew nothing was ever going to happen there. I did interact with Randy outside of work but *shrugs* I was lonely and he was very needy and friendly. 

Charity was the mean old lady of the line, well her and Patsy. Both of those old cunts hated me before I even did anything. And then when I could do the same job as them while reading a book they really hated me. 

I went to school with Kel, so I'd known him my whole life except the couple of years I was out of town. He was a big gamer with these coke bottle glasses that was sometimes the most dense person I'd ever talked to in my life. He liked Wow and LoL, and he was a Playstation junkie so he was fun to argue with about Xbox vs. Playstation. We liked to talk about people we went to elementary school with and make up stories about what they were up to in their lives.

Chris, oh Chris, manic bipolar jerkwad of a face. He worked directly in front of me for a while because he was also a gamer and I tended to talk to guys who play a certain style of games. And he happened to play these games but he was also a total cunt. Sometimes he was interesting but most of the time he just made me growl at his arrogance. I'm going to tack Jason on the end of Chris because though I liked Jason, there at the end of me working at Winegard he was acting more like my Dad than a friend and I don't like that behavior.

And finally, as far as people I worked with regularly, like the people around me on the line, there was Nathan. Nathan Bennett not Gentry.
He started assembling shortly after I had. Like around the time that I finally was getting the hang of it. And when he started on my line he worked directly in front of me. He was there for about a week, at the same table in front of me, and he never said a word. So I thought to myself "If he's gonna be working around me I might as well talk to him" as almost everyone else on the line talked to me whether I wanted them to or not. And thus began a beautiful friendship.

 Nathan was an ex-marine with a specialization in automotive repair. He liked to play Wow and LoL. He liked to read and watch movies. He ate mac and cheese for lunch every day because it was cheap. We would race to assemble our parts because our skill level was pretty even.
The more I talked to Nathan about the little things in life, the closer we became.
He's actually the one that figured out how to build a book holder so that he could read at work and after watching him use it for idk a week? i asked him to build me one. which he kindly did. and it made work 1000x more bearable.
We also both lived in ft. madison so I gave him rides to and from work.
I met his girlfriend. 

In 2012 we got kaizaned, which is a work efficiency thing, so our line got reorganized. After that Nathan and I worked side by side until I quit Winegard. We talked about anything and everything. We gave each other relationship advice, we explored trauma, we talked about literally anything that came to mind. Including kinky sex things that we liked or didn't like.

I thought we were just friends, like the best of friends, we babysat each others kids, I mean...idk i didn't see it coming. One night I got messages from Nathan and he was dressed in his girlfriends lingere asking me if I'd fuck him with a strap on. I was very confused and explained this to him. I was dissatisfied in my relationship and Nathan knew this, but I wasn't trying to look elsewhere at this point. He then confessed that he was in love with me. And it literally killed any feelings I had for him at all. I didn't even want to be around him anymore because I thought we were just friends and he had been harboring secret feelings for me for over a yearrr.... *sigh* People never turn out to be what I thought they were. Sometimes I wonder if I'm really that blind. for all my outside of myself and ideas thinking I try to do I'm still too egocentric.

None of these people are a part of my life anymore.
But for 3+ years I saw them everyday.
I think  about some of them sometimes but most of them not at all.