Do people get shunned at work like this?

In My Humble Opinion
1

Recently we were hanging out with my friend and his wife. His wife was venting about her job, which she had recently quit because it was “too stressful”. We were curious about it because she had only been working there for nine months.

She told us how all her coworkers were in this little clique; they all knew each other from high school. They were all single, lived in the city, went out and partied, and generally “acted like kids” as she put it. And they never, in nine months, ate lunch with her; never invited her to join them nor accepted any of her invitations. Nor did they seem to want to hang out with her outside of work. She felt like because she was married and at a different point in her life she wasnt able to fit in. After nine months, she got fed up and quit.

My wife and I had a little debate later about it. I gave my wife’s friend the benefit of the doubt and ran on the assumption she was being shunned. I thought how much it would suck to have
people shun you like that, particularly in a job where you have to work closely with coworkers.

But my wife, being the devil’s advocate, had a different theory. She thought my friends wife must have been rather insufferable to be shunned like that. She focused on the words and phrasing, and was rather :dubious: that if these coworkers were so immature (she kept referring them to ‘kids’ even though they were only 23 to her 25) why care they dont want to hang out? Why care they dont want to go to a ren fair when she has plenty of friends that go with her? My wife speculated that she was probably annoying the hell out her coworkers to the point they couldnt stand her.

2

Every time I read stories like this, I wonder who the hell comprises our civilization. Or whether my industry is special. Situations like this just sound so juvenile.

Can I ask what the industry is? Or the specific office type?

3

Clearly she was either insufferable or completely socially off-putting in her interactions with her co-workers. I was willing to buy the narrative until I found out she was 25 to their 23 - I could see a 40-year-old walking into an otherwise “entry level” workplace having difficulty adjusting socially, but 25 vs. 23 is a non-difference. I’ve seen coworkers shunned - and have passively participated in shunning co-workers through not interacting with them any more than needed and only ever being politely businesslike - but they were always complete mutants who, frankly, made it incredibly hard to interact with them through a combination of their extreme social weirdness, unpleasant personalities, antisocial hygiene issues, etc. I’ve never seen it happen to someone who didn’t frankly deserve or provoke it.

Based on her reporting of the “kids’” behavior, I’d guess that she was an insufferable mommy/bossy/condescending type to people that she mistakenly felt were significantly beneath or less mature than her. She was deluding herself and it became a self-fulfilling prophecy.

4

Yup, it happens. In my workplace, we are assigned to teams, and get re-assigned every 6 month or so. In my previous team, I was the oldest member at age 50; all the others were under 30.

With me sitting right there, everyone around me would make their lunch plans, deciding where to go, calling out to one another ‘hey, so-and-so, wanna meet us at XXX for lunch?’ Never once was I included in that. Not once. Yeah, it stung. A lot.

The team I’m on now isn’t like that. We all go out for luch regularly. This is our last week together before going to a new team. I’m going to miss them.

5

This is where someone comes in and points out that women are different than men.

Next is where someone gets pissed off about that and posts how stereotyping is wrong and individual variances between women are far greater than the average variance between men and women as a group.

And that’s true. But…women are different than men. Women tend to work out status in just this sort of way, and it’s clear to the OP’s friend’s wife that her status at work is very, very low, and she wants to seek out a new tribe where she may gain higher status. If it was a group of men, this would be over a parking space, or the best cubicle, or being invited to play golf with the boss. A group of men may have no idea who goes to lunch with whom, or give a crap. But these things are indeed deadly serious status games for women.

Now, as to WHY her status was so low, I can’t tell you. I’ve seen it go many ways, depending on the low-status person. Some are low status because they’re insufferable, some because they’re threatening (sexually or professionally), some because their interests/life experiences/goals are different from the higher status individuals’. If your wife thinks it was because she’s insufferable, I’d be inclined to believe her. She noted those insufferable qualities at dinner, and they’re probably no different at work.

6

Yeah, that’s what I was thinking too. I’ve had people who are just a few years older than me play that “you’re just a kid” stuff. They tend to be people who I automatically don’t like, right off the bat.

It could also be true that they excluded her, but unintentionally. It’s still rude, but it could be that she was throwing off signals that made her hard to approach. I never invite anyone to eat lunch with me. But if someone sits down beside me in the break room, I will talk to them and include them in conversations I’m having with others. It could be that she was waiting for invitations when they weren’t needed.

7

Heh, this sounds like my dream job. The annoying coworkers leave me alone! I’d work there forever.

8

That’s considered a “stressful” job? The other kids won’t play with you?
The wife probably was insufferable. Plus the fact that she’s married (and presumably DOESN’T live in the city) and a few years older while everyone else is single and does live in the city, does make a difference. The fact is, single people (especially in their early 20s) tend to not want to hang out with married people. They are still in that post-college state where they are trying to put off real responsibility like marriage or actually giving a crap about their job for as long as possible.

9

I own a small business. My employees all get along and socialize outside of work. A few years back I hired someone who everyone else just did not like. But everyone did their jobs and covered for her when things got busy, etc.

One day she came to me and complained that none of the other employees were nice to her. I told her that I wasn’t running a cruise line, and I was not the social director. As long as everyone did their jobs well I had no problem with the situation.

A few weeks later, she quit. She then filed for unemployment and I filed my denial request and won. A few weeks later I got a call regarding a reference. I told the caller the dates she worked for me. He explained no, this was a personal reference. I laughed. He laughed.

10

I worked a job where there was a “clique” of men (ages 23-38) who went out for lunch together, hung around, etc etc. I was rarely invited to lunch or anything but it never really bothered me either.

One time someone else asked if it bothered me that I wasn’t invited to their reindeer games and I said nope. Why? Because whenever it was four out of the five of them in one place, they all sat and ripped on the missing guy. Didn’t matter which one was missing, if one was absent, the conversation was all about how he fucked up this project or did this other thing too slow or wasn’t organized on this job. A bit more high school than I felt like dealing with.

As I said, these were guys and this was in a construction related industry but you still got the Junior Varsity Cheerleader treatment going on :rolleyes:

Edit: I’m not insufferable and got along well enough with any of them as individuals. They all went to universities in the same region (rival ones), talked sports that I wasn’t interested in, and stuff like that. I don’t think they were being malicious to me so much as they had no use for me socially at lunch.

11

Funny… change “lunch” to “drink” and I know many a group where you could also just flip the genders.

Was she apart from the guys? Yes. Was it her fault, their fault, a case of shit happens? Not having been there, I can not tell.

12

This woman quit because her co-workers weren’t socialable to her? And the OP feels it was justified because she was shunned? If only they had given her a participation medal…all could have been avoided. :rolleyes:

+1 to Kayaker’s post.

13

Who the hell goes to work to be buddies with everybody? If people wanted to get along, then fine; if not, then fine. I was there to do my job and earn a paycheck. To quit a paying job because ‘the other kids are mean to me’ is immature and irresponsible.

14

Yeah it really does happen. It can cause major issues in smaller work places as well. Usually the boss is tuned out to that sort of thing or doesn’t car so long as the employees are working.

15

Sometimes people harbor over-the-top hatred, but it’s not like the victim is totally innocent either.

I worked in a lab once that had two young women with big personalities. They were kind of loud and “no-nonsense” people. If they had been black, they may have fit into that “sassy black woman” stereotype. The rest of us weren’t like that, but we liked them okay.

I didn’t realize how dominant their personalities were until we had a new girl join the lab. When I say “girl”, I mean it. She was in her early 20s, but she was immature. Sheltered and pretty spoiled. A Jewish guy in the lab said she was the epitome of JAPness, my first encounter with that word. I thought she was a trip and she did grate with the cutesy-wootsy thing, but she was a nice person and also funny.

But she couldn’t have been any more different than the other two co-workers. They were salt-of-the-earth rural type people, while she was all Upper-Westside I-went-to-Columbia-oops-I-mean-Barnard! I could see the trainwreck coming a mile away. I don’t know how New Girl felt about the other two, but it was clear that they hated her very much. And they didn’t waste any time telling us about it. Every day it was one story after another. I stayed out of it, but they managed to rope many of the other co-workers into their hateration. Soon it was Lab versus New Girl. And New Girl didn’t even know it, because she was that clueless.

Until heads exploded after she’d done something really stupid (I have to agree it was stupid…even I was pissed off). We had a huddle and it was agreed that I, being the “senior” grad student at the time and the calmest head, would go to our graduate advisor and let it be known that New Girl was fucking up. It was something like right out of a sitcom. I stepped into the advisor’s office to have a quiet one-on-one with her, and then suddenly the others tumbled into the room. I was the spokesperson for the group, but they wanted to be there to chime in with their complaints.

It was awful. The graduate advisor was a socially clueless woman who shouldn’t have been entrusted with something like this. We had just wanted her to tell New Girl to buckle down, her slip was showing. We didn’t want her to name names, but that’s exactly what she did when she talked to her. She basically demanded that New Girl apologize to each of us individually for all the bad things she had done. And this she did, crying the whole time. I felt awful for her. “Everyone HATES me!” she said. I told her it wasn’t true, but she was kinda right.

She didn’t last much longer after that. But it’s hard for me to put the blame on any one person. She most certainly could have tried harder to blend in, that’s for sure. But her personality was only mildly bothersome, and I think we would have eventually learned to tolerate her quirks if the other two co-workers hadn’t poisoned the well against her.

16

Righto. So she’s a crybaby and she has this “more adult than thou” attitude even though she and the people she’s referring to are essentially the same age. I’m going to assume she deserved to be shut out by being whiny and obnoxious, but even if that weren’t the case, get over it. Being left out for lunch isn’t the worst thing in the world. Unless they were going full-throttle Mean Girls on her, just do your job and go out with your own friends.

17

Too many variables to say, but I’ve seen it happen both ways, especially in extremely high-stress customer facing jobs.

18

I’m going to differ from the prevailing opinion here and say that there’s not enough evidence to say.

Is it possible that the wife is just a pain in the ass in some way? Yes, that’s possible. I would think the OP would know if the wife comes across as a pain in the ass, as the OP knows her. He might not find her annoying, but surely with a little insight one can tell if their friends are capable of rubbing others the wrong way. The insight of the OP’s wife may not may not be dispositive, it is hard to be sure.

Is it also possible that the examples of the clique members not being social is only telling part of the story? Seems quite reasonable to me. It’s one thing to be annoyed at your coworkers for not inviting you to things, it’s a more serious matter if that “Heathers” type attitude bleeds over into professional situations, like passive-aggressiveness, eye-rolling, sandbagging, whispering and rumor-spreading, etc. But just hearing about a clique of 20-somethings who have known each other since school and all work in the same job doesn’t exactly strike me as very… open-minded people who are interested in new social experiences.

If the job was not strictly necessary for the family income or whatnot, I can see that putting up with teenagers playing dress-up in the workplace may be too much to take.

19

She worked in a small office job; there were only 17 employees in the whole company. She acted like she was being treated like a pariah.

20

My last job was like this to the extreme, to the point where people weren’t even professional anymore. In an office where everyone was over 30. It was a snake pit.

I’m too old to play clique-y games, so I was friendly with everyone. Even the queen bees, because it infuriated them. You could see the wheels turning in their heads, haven’t I been mean enough? Why doesn’t she get it? That part was fun.