Nobody likes to feel like everyone is hanging out without them, even at work. 

It’s a tough thing to realize that you’re on the outskirts of a group. Maybe this happened to you when you were in school, and you felt left out of the group. It’s happened to everyone at some point, and it’s a crushing feeling. When you find out that you’re not in the group chat, not invited to the party, or generally being excluded from something. It can make us feel like that rejected little kid again, and not in a good way. It triggers our old fears of feeling like an outcast. 

Luckily, this tends to happen less and less as you get older. You find out who your people are, and you get good at identifying them. You don’t worry about the parties that you’re not invited to because you don’t want to be there. You’d rather be exactly where you are, with your friends and with your interests. You realize that you’re not everyone’s cup of tea, and everyone is not yours. This is a beautiful part of growing up. We get more self-assured and more okay with ourselves. But sometimes something will just come up out of the blue and make you remember how you felt all those years ago. It can even happen to us at work, which is sort of the last place you’d expect it to. That’s what happened in this story, where one employee learned the hard way that he was being left out.