Where's My Thirteen?

I...am not a very big fan of people. So, expectedly, most people I work with are not very big fans of me.

It is, of course, no big secret that people I work with aren't too fond of me. Why should they be? I'm abrasive. I have a large tendency to be a curmudgeon. I am entirely too judgmental about every little thing that I feel concerns me. I have next to nothing in common with them. I don't really bother to pretend to enjoy socially interacting with them. My set of values drastically differs from their own. Simply put, I don't particularly care about them, and thus give them no reason to care about me.

Some of you might say this should not be the case, and that I should be more...I don't know, human? The thing is, I came to the workplace to do one thing: work. I'm not here to make friends or socialize or play Magic, even though there are times when the last of those three seems like a much more appropriate thing to do. However, I also make it a point to actually finish my work on time. Or preferably, ahead of time.

I've managed to consistently finish ahead of the scheduled end of my shift and am, on most days, able to get all my work done before the lunch hour kicks in. Simply put, I'm faster at this than anyone else that I work with on the day shift. Not sure about nights. While I'm disinclined to believe in it completely, part of me is also starting to grasp around the possibility that I'm not only faster than they are, but that I'm better than they are.

There are many, many days when I feel nothing but utter disdain towards the people I work with. This is particularly true when I hear them complaining about how hard the tasks are, or how big the workload is, yet moments later, I see them slacking off. I'm prone to slacking off myself, but I know enough to stop and get back to work. I also understand that the best time to slack off is when you're done with your work, or when circumstances make it so that you can't continue your work. I figure, they have no right to complain about the work if they spend half their time not working. Okay, two of them are definitely guilty of this, one I can't be sure of, and the last one has an excuse for slacking off.

However, I don't think most of them have any real excuse for a practice that I'd rather not speak of, but find absolutely deplorable. I can't go into details about this because I believe that if this goes on long enough (as far as I'm concerned, it has, but this is not the opinion of the person most involved in this problem), it'll spill over into higher ranks of management anyway. It just annoys me at how unfair it is, particularly since I'm constantly and consistently finishing things at the appropriate times.

I like to think I have some level of respect, though. I've long lived by the words "you may not like me because of my personality, but you will respect me because I am good at what I do." I know what I'm doing. I'm good at what I'm doing, otherwise I wouldn't bother doing it. I'd like to think I deserve and have a little bit of respect because of that. As far as being likable or liked is concerned, that really fails to be of any real use to me and, as I said, I work because of work, not because I want to make friends.

Which puts me into an odd position. Arrogant as this may sound, I am starting to feel like I am Ascend Asia's day shift writer's equivalent of Gregory House: largely unlikable as a person, but undeniably good at what I do. With that in mind...I would now like to go back to the question that prompted this post: if I'm Gregory House, where is (or who is, if I'm really, really lucky) my Thirteen?