@Zezet
I am baffled as to why everyone is so harsh with you.
It does seem like there are different things going on (although it is a bit hard to understand because it's vague):
* You seem to have a cultural mismatch in how you want to organise your work day, linked to different family situations (young twenty vs mum with kids?).
* You seem to have been recruited for a speciality that is theoretically recognised as important, but that in practice is sidelined and to which templates are applied that are not particularly useful for your speciality.
* However, these internal objections/structures then clash with client expectations, because the clients do expect your speciality, not the main thing your company does.
* All that said, when push comes to shove your organisation recognises the importance of your speciality, as recognised by them putting up with it/you being a PITA.
Thoughts on this:
*Your only leverage is in the last point. If this is not true, then there is no interest, theoretical or real, to engage with you on doing things your way, and I see very little perspective for you to get anything changed.
* However, I do think you have become so discouraged and annoyed with the situation that you are thinking of it in a non-constructive way. They're not wrong to be making pies. They are not wrong to have standard procedures and templates suitable for pies. They know their job, clearly, as the company understands it (if your argument is that they all don't understand their job, then clearly you are with a company so hopeless at hiring and managing that you might as well give up). They are only wrong in applying these things to you. They are wrong not because it frustrates you, but because it confuses and displeases the clients. This is the bottom line they are going to care about.
* So I think you need to change your mind set and your tone and approach this from a much less condescending place. You also need to focus way less on the office as a whole and way more on the people who actually call the shots on your job. You have no standing to critique their handling of your coworkings/general way of doing things and doing so will only make it harder to get your reasonable point across.
Then, you need to sit them down and explain which particular feedbacks you are getting from the clients expecting curry and why you propose that for the curry clients only*, you will do things a different way. You will either get buy-in or you won't. Either way you'll have the information you need to have an informed decision on whether you can make this work place work for you. You need to stress you are making this point in the basis of the specific professional experience they hired you for, not as a matter of personal preference. You could perhaps get buy-in here from the other curry specialist.
A separate* problem and conversation is how you organise your work on terms of life/work balance. Here, again, focus way less on what others are doing and way more on what would work for your employer and you.
* It sounds like things have been quite sour for quite a while so while I think you have a good chance of getting this through, you might need to do some work, first of reframing this in your own head (they are NOT the problem, the company is NOT doing pies wrong, your coworkers' job is NOT yours to opine on) and then of conveying to them you've understood these things.
Good luck, it sounds like a difficult and frustrating situation, but one with a very good chance of being solved.
described my actual work problem better than I did.
But I think that one way or another I will be able to get on top of it, because I’m good at my job and (believe it or not) pretty easy going.
The thing that bothers me though - what I wanted to call out - is that I feel the deck is stacked against me on ‘culture fit’ before I even walked in the door.
The ‘K’ meme has made me more sensitive about how I express my ‘complaints’ (which aren’t as numerous as PP would claim - but really frustrate me in having to be the one to try to ‘sell’ it to the service users, and then spend a squillion hours trying to reconcile what I did to the paperwork. Essentially, it feels almost like fraud, but I’m being told to plough on with the procedure as written. I have no issues with a pie-makers - just I don’t feel comfortable completing forms accounting for my pies, when I really made a curry with a naan bread balanced on top.).
Because I hear the younger people use ‘K’ in jokes, it also makes me feel that affects their response to me asserting my views.
It might not. I might just be paranoid and ineffectual.
