My nemesis co-worker is CT (Cunt Trollop). She is much like TP, but she’s 17 years older than me (I’m 32). I’ve worked with her for about 10 years now. She’s the reason I finally got off my butt and went back to college. My goal is to get a career far away from her.
She is obviously insecure & attention-seeking; I try to keep that in mind and not respond in-kind to her, but she doesn’t make it easy to be civil. She told West Coast co-workers that I had gained weight and went on anti-depressants. This was true - I guess I was hoping for too much when I thought my co-workers would treat a medical condition with maturity and/or confidentiality. She also asked me if I was pregnant when I got married and bought a house. :rolleyes:
She is saccharine-sweet sometimes, and flat-out hateful at other times. I try to ignore her as much as possible. And I repeat this mantra often: “Be kinder than necessary, for everyone you meet is fighting some kind of battle.” Sometimes that works, sometimes not. Sometimes I indulge in a bit of schadenfreude (like when her adult kids are giving her trouble, or like seeing she has a MySpace page that says she’s 10 years younger than she really is).
I don’t have a nemesis anymore, but I used to at another office where I worked. She was a buttinski and a jerk and she made me want to punch her in the mouth almost every day. One day she made a joke and I didn’t laugh and she said, “I’m not talking to you anymore!” to which I responded, “Thank goodness!” She didn’t talk to me for about 3 weeks and it was the best 3 weeks I had at that job. One day she heard me discussing an issue* with a coworker that didn’t involve her at all and she took it upon herself to address it, making it 50 billion times worse than it had been previously. I still kinda hate her but I think of her so rarely that it doesn’t bother me at all.
*This guy I worked with earned himself the nickname Sexual Harrassment Ray by sexually harrassing women who worked there, but in a good natured way. You were never afraid he was going to rape you in the parking lot or anything, but when he would be coming down the hall you’d think to yourself, “Damn, here comes Ray. He is going to rub my shoulders or ask me to flash him or something inappropriate.” A coworker and I were discussing whether or not we should mention it to Ray and see if he even knew he was making people uncomfortable or if we should go to HR and explain to them that, while we didn’t want him to get fired, we didn’t want to be sexually harrassed anymore either. Buttinski overheard us and went straight to Ray and told him we wanted to get him fired because we thought he was trying to get us to have sex with him. Ray wouldn’t talk to us or come near us anymore and eventually ended up quitting his job over it, all because Buttinski couldn’t just shut her damn mouth and let us address our problem in our own way. I learned not to talk about anything at all at that job after that.
Had one at high school. He was a charismatic guy from a very rich and arty family. We used to hang out a lot and were friends - or so I thought. He amused everyone by being incredibly witty and cutting about other people. His cruelty about others disturbed me a bit, but I dismissed it because he was so very funny.
We were both good actors - the best in a very large field - and it was either he or I that would land the male lead in all of the school plays. People talked about an acting rivalry between us, but I never took it seriously, because our scope and styles were very different, and we didn’t compete for the same roles.
He, however, may have taken the rivalry myth to heart, because one day I became the butt of his humour, and he spent several months making cutting witticisms about me to everyone else, which I ended up hearing about on the grapevine, which behaviour culminated in him publically humiliating me, in an irretrievably friendship-ending manner. I never spoke to him again.
Did he get his comeuppance? We both went to drama school, but I gave up acting, whereas he went on to have a successful stage career, got a speaking part in a Hollywood movie, and ended up marrying a (very famous) pop star and living a life of luxury.
Me, not so much.
Karma’s a bitch, but sometimes for all the wrong reasons.
Oddly enough, for years it was my cousin Andy. I went to graduate school and got an MBA, but he went to a better school and got a PhD. I got a job at a large science and engineering company, but he got a better job at a large consulting company with better career options, etc., etc. - or so I would hear from my Dad all the fucking time. I hadn’t seen Andy in over a decade, until I finally decided I just didn’t care, and ran into him at a family reunion of sorts.
I flat out confronted him and said “You know, I feel like I’ve been pissed off at you most of my life because any time something good happened in my life, my father would tell me how you had done something better”. He actually looked shocked, because he said his father did the same thing to him with the roles reversed when they would talk about me :eek: Thus, it was actually our fathers who were each other’s nemeses, and we were just stupid pawns in their one up-manship game. On the plus side, I’m now a lot closer and friendlier with my cousin…
