just a quick return as I am in the middle of experiments - I'll come back this evening when I have more time to respond.
Thanks to encouraging people for encouragement, and commiserations to those who have said they udnerstand where I'm coming from.
To those who think i"m coming across as aloof - I probably am. I am miserable, I feel hunted, I have different interests from most of the people here, i'm not great at the language here, I am beginning to realise I'm seriously depressed, and I have ASD. All of that contributes to me coming across as cold. However, I'm miserable because from the beginning, this workplace has been extremely horrible.
To those asking if i"ve heard all this or am inferring stuff from a look, yes, i have heard the things i've said, out loud, more than once, and had them repeated back to me by other people beyond the one with whom I share an office. Re my interpretation of the exciting life and payscale stuff - I have had direct comments about those too, so again, I'm not inferring this from some internal monologue (though I acknowledge that i am now depressed and miserable enough to have one of those running along quite effectively).
To those saying "surely you have your own office" - no, noone has their own offices here, and it's actually pretty normal in science that noone would have an office but all would be in one big room, or seated round hte edges of the lab. I share an office with a principal investigator from another group, and the technician from my group.
I'm aware that on here i have come across as snobby about technical careers vs. academic careers - I didn't express that well, and that crapness at explaining things like this is part of my problem. I think of a technical path as a totally valid and viable path htat has its own advantages. I totally agree that one can frequently learn a lot from techs who have decades of experience.
Though in this particular case, the tech has more of an admin role because she's been moved sideways and knows nothing about what this group does in the lab, and while I try to ask her questions about how stuff works, she gets angry with me for asking questions and being stupid and thick because I don't know how the system works here and don't necessarily have the vocabulary down pat for all the admin.
The previous case where I was told I was treating someone like a servant - I was doing everything i could to acknowledge her input and knowledge, and to praise her. I tried to make things very transparent, wrote protocols for her to follow, had weekly meetings, documented everything, was polite and friendly and chatted when spoken to - but i was too busy to initiate the hour-long gossip sessions about colleagues' private lives, which she clearly felt were necessary, quite apart from the fact i think that kind of gossip in the workplace is really inappropriate.
To the one person who said "find something in common" - that is of course excellent advice. I've really tried to do it, here, but they treat that as intrusion and thus another reason to hate me. With the previous case mentioned above it was even worse because our thing in common was that she'd grown up in the town where I had previously worked - one with a large "town vs gown" divide - and she hated me because she hated "people like me" on principle, and went round telling stories about what tw*ts the university types all were and how i must be like that too. So i'd go in to the tearoom ready for a polite chat over a cup of tea, and she'd be there, talking about how much she hated my type, and others would be sympathizing with her and shooting daggers at me - and would sit in silence when I tried to join the conversation.
I'm leaving soon - and leaving science. I just can't cope with workplaces like this.