I’ve got one. Have no idea what I ever did to her, but damn she hates me. She’s always spreading some tale about me. Several years ago, she told everyone I was sleeping with my boss. Which is hilarious because he looks like Alan Jackson and only dates women who are dumb, blond, petite, and have big tits. (Note: I look like Jabba the Hut with long hair.)
Now she’s telling everyone that I am single-handedly stopping her from being able to transfer to any other job in the building. I have no idea how I could possibly do that, what with me being a peon and all. Wow. I’m so drunk with power. Next I’ll have to make her hair frizzy. Bwa ha ha ha.
Nope. I’m one of those people that others seem to either really like, or really dislike. I’m usually not really surprised if someone hates me, 'cause usually I don’t like them either.
Jeez, I haven’t had a lifestyle for damn near twenty years . . .
I know what you mean, though, and that did occur to me, too, but it doesn’t pan out: that would be too good a secret to keep, and no one at work seems to know (I asked a couple of openly gay people here if they knew why she hated me, and they were clueless). So I guess she just hates me for my own sake.
Well, in my case I was fully justified but young and naive. She was incompetent, lazy, blocking my upward progression, and was generally believed to be sleeping with the boss. She married him sometime after I left. I coud not stand her. The others were older and wiser and had seen it all before.
That occured to me to, but I didn’t know how to phrase it delicately. Thanks!
I would just start documenting her insanities and keeping HR in the loop. That way if she accuses you of embezzlement and cannibalism HR will know she’s got it in for you.
There is a woman in my office who appears to have taken a disliking to me from the moment I began working here. She won’t make eye contact with me when we pass each other – it’s as if I am the invisible woman – and she definitely won’t say “Hi.” She’ll answer me if I have a work-related question, but otherwise she has not said a word to me in the past 9 months. I tried at first to engage her in passing, but gave up when faced with a complete lack of acknowledgement.
Shortly after I took this job, I graduated with my Ph.D. and my manager threw a small party. Everyone in the office gathered around to eat some cake and munchies, except her. She sat at her desk in plain sight of the revelries but kept working as if nothing was going on. I hardly expect her to talk to me, but who turns down free cake, for Og’s sake???
She’s not super chatty, but she will have a conversations with other people in the office, so it’s clearly me she has a problem with.
Is she jealous for some reason? Her job is at a higher level than mine, so I can’t imagine that has anything to do with it. Is she rampantly homophobic? I don’t have the time or energy to be closeted just to spare other’s delicate sensibilities, but I don’t exactly decorate my cube with rainbows or gossip loudly about my adventures at the lesbian bar. (Heh. As if I could stay awake late enough to have adventures!) I really have no idea what is up with her.
That is such a cool moniker. I hate to be a turncoat, but I’m taking Katrinka’s side on the grounds that she sounds like a villain from a cold war era Bond movie. Sorry.
Who knows why people get bees in their crazy bonnets? It’s happened to me twice that I can think of, and both times, I don’t think I did anything to deserve it other than being my normal self, but apparently my normal self drives about 1% of the population crazy. Eh. I can live with that.
If she won’t let you be nice to her, Eve, maybe you can out-bitch her.
Yeah, I had one of those once. I joined a small law firm as a secretary, and one of the other three secretaries already working there took an instant dislike to me. The phrase “looked daggers at her” was probably invented to describe how she glared at me almost from square one.
As the years went by, her problem was slowly revealed to me. Some of the attorneys told me that she had “queen bitch syndrome”, and when the firm was small, she could lord it over the other secretaries. I don’t take well to being bossed around by a peer, and made that clear my first day. I was moderately well-informed about word processing applications and she was clueless about computers (this was in 1990), so this was another burr in her bra. Also, I discovered much later that she was on diet pills, which I know can make you extremely snappy and defensive.
Eventually she moved to another county with her harassed and whipped husband, and no one mourned her passing.
When I’ve been in these situations (rarely) I tell myself that there is a very thin line between love and hate.
Put it this way - she has *strong feelings * about you. (See how that statement works? It doesn’t really matter whether it is love or hate.) You probably didn’t do anything specific to her. You are just being your charming self.
She doesn’t know what to do about these strong feelings, so she has decided to freeze you out, as a defense. She’s hoping the feelings will go away, but in actuality she is creating a pressure cooker inside herself.
I’m only offering this perspective so you might find sympathy in your heart for this poor deluded soul.
Anywho, that’s how I work it out in my mind and it seems to help.
In my case it was exactly the contrary. In my last job I substituted somebody that was being transfered to another office of the same company. She got along really bad with EVERYBODY, including her own boss. Funny enough I was the only person in the company with whom she never had an argument. I am sure it wasn’t because I am lovable, or witty (and doggone it, I am!), but that she didn’t have time to build a dislike for me.
I don’t know if this could apply in your case, but I once worked with a woman who was both hypersensitive to criticism of any sort, and extraordinarily good at interpreting things like chance facial expressions and the absence of direct praise as criticism. (She was also perfectly sweet and friendly to me until the day she blew up and made it clear that she’d been bitterly resenting my presence for weeks, but maybe yours isn’t so good at hiding it.)
I had a situation where a co-worker, although remaining polite to my face, suddenly became hyper-critical of my work. Since she was in a position to affect my performance review, I tried to reason with her, but her criticism only got worse.
Then, she abruptly quit. I found out later that because of budget cuts, she was on the verge of being let go. I decided she had tried to undermine me so I’d get the axe and she could keep her job. I guess it didn’t work, and she decided to quit before she got fired.
Eve: Could it be that she found out you are a well-respected published writer? I’m not rembering your current job, but, can see , if it’s in pubs, that that fact might drive an insecure idiot to the lower realms of decent behavior, in a pique of jealousy. Yep, an idiot, sure.
