Meh. Indifference over something that is none of my fucking business to begin with? I train a new employee and before I’ve even recovered my investment she quits without notice. Because nobody likes her? A group of women who all get along just fine? And then uses me as a personal reference and attempts to collect unemployment?
:rolleyes:
I guess it all boils down to what “civil” means in this context. Most employees wouldn’t quit over minor slights. Major hostility, even if mostly passive hostility, can become quite intolerable.
So I may be reading too much into this, but kayaker also said that when he laughed, the person who called him also laughed. My reading of that was that the caller had figured out some of this for him(her?)self before even calling kayaker.
(Frankly, otherwise, were I calling a personal reference, I would not take a laugh as necessarily meaning “I am stabbing this person in the back!” There are many reasons to laugh, including “Oh, she thought we were good friends! Well, she’s a nice kid,” or “Oh, I thought it would be a work reference!”)
And anyway, what do you expect kayaker to do? Lie? I thought references were supposed to tell the truth. Now if kayaker had assured the woman that he’d give her a glowing reference regarding her social skills, then yeah, that wouldn’t be nice at all. But that’s not what happened.
You do NOT list someone as a personal reference without asking them first. If I call someone you’ve listed and they’re surprised by my request, your resume gets shit-canned, and rightly so.
What exactly did she do wrong?
Well, I see it as a matter of different situations. She’s struggling to survive because she has no job. You’re still employed, have your own company, etc. She is much more vulnerable, at greater risk than you. It would have cost you very little to have done things differently, but might have made a great deal of difference to her. So, yah … still flunking. And I agree … she should not have used you as a reference without making enquiries. Very foolish indeed. But you still seem, well, how to put this … overly indifferent.
It was foolish, but not necessarily evil, of her. I said so in my post. Would you like to stab her or what?
You should have hired her back and fired the rest of the company… wouldn’t have done you any good, of course, but at least we would get the pleasure of watching EC’s head explode. 
No argument from me.
I dunno, at my company we have higher standards than “let’s hire anyone who isn’t overtly evil.” And at Ruken’s too, apparently. Don’t know how that translates to stabbing her.
I shun all of my coworkers.
To get off the Evil Captor hijack because it’s really boring,
Being shunned at work isn’t any fun and I think most of us would eventually quit a job where we were being shunned, but I think most of us would quit inviting people who obviously aren’t interested, too. I suspect there was fault on both sides in this case.
Because your friend was only 25, I also suspect that she handled it differently than I would at 45 - like Athena, I would just take indifference from my co-workers as a blessing - yay, no gossiping and boring conversations with people I don’t care about!
It sounds like you handle people with arrested development just right. 
?? The rest of your post makes complete sense but I have no idea what Japness is.
Why was she inviting people she didn’t like to join her for weekend activities? Isn’t that something you do when a friendship is already established? She could have invited me to see Prince and Annie Lennox together on stage, singing David Bowie songs and dancing like Michael Jackson, and I would have turned her down. Especially if we hadn’t even eaten lunch together. I imagine those invitations marked her as weird right off the bat.
JAP = Jewish American Princess. One of those phrases I trust only Jewish people to use correctly.
Been plenty of places where cliquism is rampant. But then, this is Minnesota, Land of 10,000 Cliques. Not uncommon for one person to get into a place and then get all their friends/drinking buddies jobs at the same place so they can all hang out together during and after work.
And then it’s just a matter of (petty) course that people not in the clique tend to get shunned, ignored, sabotaged, whatever. Some people just never grow past junior high school.
As a matter of personal policy, I do not socialize with my co-workers any more than I have to. I see them 8-9 hours a day, why would I want to hang out with them on my down time and listen to more shit about the workplace? So for the most part, I don’t give a shit if they ignore or shun me, it says nothing about me and everything about them.
They are Management.
I agree that you do not list someone as a reference without asking them. But not everyone is aware of the social convention of requesting first. I’d certainly tell if someone listed me as a reference and I had not been asked, but I wouldn’t laugh at their ignorance to a stranger.
I worked in a Mean Girls environment right out of high school and lasted there for almost ten years. Although those women in that small office were equally awful, I was pretty cocky and it would’ve been intrusive to insert myself into dynamics that had been going on forever.
So, I stayed in a pretty hostile situation until I could happily move on. Since then, I’ve matured and I’ve never had the same problems again. I figure I can put on a happy face while I’m there and I don’t have to be any more overly involved than is like.
To me, it sounds like she was pretty condescending if she saw that much of a divide between herself and her co-workers, when in reality it was only a couple of years. Yes, if you’re in different places in your lives (like single versus married), the gap will seem wider, but it’s up to all interested parties if they want to bridge it. Due to her attitude, I think they passed and she wasn’t as adult as she’d like to portray.
I wouldn’t join an employee at a ren fair, I guess I’m a shunner.