I worked at a start-up 10 years or so ago… one of my co-workers accidentally sent me an instant message (instead of another guy at work) which clearly stated that “RedBloom did this and that and boy is she dingy and stupid”… so I wrote back and asked if he meant to send that to me. One hour goes by, then he sends out an email to everyone at work stating that his IM was hacked and someone else wrote that. Uh-huh.
He was always so nice to my face, a real charmer. This bothered me terribly for a long time. Thankfully I was laid off shortly after.
The company I work for doesn’t limit our internet access, so I used youtube as a radio, just leaving it up on one monitor and working on the other. A guy who sits behind started telling people here that all I do is watch youtube videos all day. He made an offhand joke about it one day, and I found this out after asking around. He’s basically been telling people that I don’t do any work, and apparently it’s made it’s way to some of the managers, including my own.
Seems having people talk behind your back at work is just the norm, I don’t pay much attention to it. However, I have had a coworker approach me and want to speak confidentially, she told me something two other coworkers had said about me in a meeting that could affect me professionally… but finished with “I thought you should know, but please don’t say anything because they’ll know it was me”. Umm, too bad, you brought it to my attention so I’m going to follow up on it.
I was working for a nonprofit that was organizing an international conference for unions of the working poor. Small group–5 employees total–and I was the new kid. Because we were so small, it didn’t make sense to hire a van to pick up out-of-town guests, and I passed my opinion along to my boss, along with information about everyone’s flight numbers and schedules: in years past she’d picked up international guests from the airport, and my understanding was that this was the schedule she needed to do it again that year. She left to go get ready for the conference (in another city), and I flew down a couple of days later, to find out that she hadn’t picked anyone up from the airport and had concocted a story about how I was supposed to have arranged transportation for them. One poor guy from El Salvador didn’t speak a word of English and ended up spending the night outside in downtown Atlanta before walking a dozen miles the next day to where he knew of another nonprofit that could help him out. My boss blamed me for the whole thing, claiming I’d never given her the list.
What’s more, her hotel room was right next to mine, and I woke up that night to hear her bitching about me to my co-worker. I got up, knocked on her door, and chewed her out for it.
When we got back to our main office, I found the schedule of flights on the conference table where she’d left it. She was astonished when I gave notice, thinking that we’d worked everything out. To the day I left she never understood why I was leaving.
