Work friends = Work drama?

I've been working at my job for about 9 months, so a little over half a year...All in all have strayed away from any drama. If anything I keep to myself and just do my own thing. I have developed definitely a friendship with the my direct coworkers and have hung out outside of work. Developing this closeness with some of my coworkers is kind of dangerous. I ran into a work issue that caused one of my friends to get mad at me. The situation was that her employee got written up for something and she blamed the policies and procedures of the company, aka HR. Obviously, i'm not the one who creates the rules.. I'm not going to overlook the rules because your employee gets written up. Looking at this objectively you have displaced anger toward someone who shouldn't  be blamed. If anyone should take the blame for this write up is your employee, not me. Your employee broke the rules, not me.  All I am doing is carying out the rules that were given to us, i'm not going out of my way to screw anyone over.

Work friends are really interesting, I think there needs to be some sort of barrier that separates work life and personal. Lately I have tried to not hang out with work friends and refocus myself to doing my own thing. I didn't go out of my way to say i'm not hanging out with you ladies anymore, I have simply become busier the past weeks.. which is true to some extent. Tread work/personal relationships with caution because the last thing you want to happen is an awkward work place because a personal relationship with a coworker fell apart.. So what happened to me and my coworker that got upset with me you ask? Well we are completely fine. She got over it, she understood the rules and stopped defending her employee. Though this situation really struck me and I realized that I need to manage my work friendships a little more and not get too comfortable with them personally because I don't want to bring any drama baggage into the office. I come to work to work. Being friendly with coworkers I believe is completely fine, but once you get into that area of comfort, work in the office can get messy when personal issues are brought up. Anyone else dealing with work drama or have anything to share? I'm curious if anyone else feels the way I feel. Drop a comment below. Here's to a drama free workplace, cheers!

Xoxo,

E