Alter Ego

As she walked into the staff room, the noise of tin foil being unfurled and tupperwear boxes being burped open lifted to greet her. She sat quietly at the table; everyone else slouched in the comfy chairs. They didn't look up or greet her. It was not that they didn't like her, it was just that her presence never really registered on their radar. She was quiet, scrupulously polite, always diplomatic and could rarely be drawn into displaying an unbalanced opinion.

She was quite unreadable, really, and after many attempts at engaging in veiled stabs at other colleagues, in the hope of a reciprocated slur, went begging, the colleague would give up, feeling that they had somehow let themselves down and exposed themselves to being perceived as jealous or catty. Conversely, they also felt confident that neither would she betray them to a third party.

She was often forced to listen to pathetic confessions or overly dramatised personal monologues about someone's husband, child, boyfriend, but she did so with fortitude and what appeared to be unfeigned sympathy. These events would be, more often than not, followed by over familiarity, then sly avoidance, returning eventually to the general bland acknowledgement that was habitual.

Time up.
Inspiration: I was browsing a writing blog and saw that a previous challenge was to construct an alter-ego. This is mine.