This is all just venting and bitching; feel free to tl;dr.
So I went on a glorious vacation for a week, and then really struggled with coming in to work almost every day the next week. At some point in the process, my tolerance for my new team leader just completely disappeared - he's not a bad guy, just...socially awkward? And tries too hard to compensate? Which makes him really unfunny? Not to mention that he has no ability to read when the person he's holding hostage talking to is really uninterested in the conversation and would give anything to be anywhere else?
Plus he's hyper-invested in convincing everyone that he "hates to be the bad guy" so he goes out of his way to avoid it, except in that way that is vaguely disconcerting, as if he's really just marking time until he can break bad.
Whatever. I find that the more time I spend with him, the less I want to. Which wouldn't be a problem if it weren't for his propensity for plopping himself in one's cube when he's bored and just going on and on about whatever. Which he did on Wednesday last. The conversation turned into a heated debate wherein he was trying to justify the snobby attitude "I avoid popular things" and I was trying to explain why I find that position unattractive. At least three times I said, in so many words, "I can't have this conversation anymore", which he didn't take as a hint that perhaps he should stop talking. I finally had to turn my back on him by turning toward my screen and asking him if he planned to sit there, because I don't like people watching what I'm doing over my shoulder. He, surprised, said "Oh, are we finished?"
I get the feeling that he enjoys pushing people's buttons and then acting surprised when they get annoyed. (Which is another behavior that drives me bats.)
Thursday there was some confusion over a meeting cancellation notice, which I'd not yet received, and he and I started to get into it again, but I decided to abort and disengage. Apparently I did it in a tone that he didn't like, because he came to my desk and invited me to keep the smart comments to myself. Five minutes later, when I actually got the meeting cancellation notice, I forwarded it to him with the note "this must be the source of the confusion." He replied "No problem," and took the next day off.
We basically haven't spoken since. Until this morning, when he told me about a conversation he overheard me having yesterday with a programmer and, while he believed what I was doing was mistaken, he didn't bother to correct it in the moment. Instead he waited until this morning, repeated a conversation we had already had (which he loves to do because he forgets how they end when they don't end the way he expects them to [that is, when he is wrong]), and basically told me that I had wasted a bunch of the programmer's and my time because he didn't want things done that way I was doing them. Fabulous. Whatever.
So now I'm hating coming to work every day because I find working with him to be incredibly uncomfortable. Except that maybe if he knows I don't particularly like him, he'll avoid me with all things not work-related. I have a one-on-one scheduled with him for 3 today. Yay. I'm guessing it's bad politics to tell him that I have trouble working with him because he's like nails on a chalkboard, personality-wise.
The best possible option, I guess, is to dislike him without him knowing I dislike him, but I have zero poker face. I already know that I work poorly with others. The trick is to find a position where I don't have to.
