I'm gonna have to learn to live with unpleasant colleagues

In My Humble Opinion
1

Context: I live in Québec, in Canada. The recent right-wing trucker protests and border blockades are well-documented everywhere, I won’t rehash them here.

This is something that doesn’t happen in Canada. I find it very unnerving. Somebody in my family is in law enforcement and may be involved in the effort to clear out the border, starting tomorrow.

This morning, I was in a video conversation on some technical aspect with a colleague who I’m pretty friendly with, and I think we jokingly referred to microchips in vaccines, and I mentioned that I was getting scared of a situation where foreign-financed alt-right types were starting to set up blockades. He started saying these protests are normal and peaceful, about restoring freedom, that it’s amazing the contrast between the truth and what the media tell us and that the stories of MAGA hats and confederate flags are inventions of the media – the media that’s paid off by the government. The “truth”, I found out, is what you can find on YouTube. Vaccines supposedly have no effect in limiting the spread of COVID-19. He’s doubly vaccinated but doesn’t want a third dose, and doesn’t like his in-laws pressuring him to get his 5-year-old kid vaccinated. Freedom, etc.

I don’t do debates and confrontations. I tried to engage in reasonable discourse, agreeing on some aspects where our political leaders have abused their power or been downright clumsy, asking where he got this statistic on the effectiveness of such and such measure, but I could see I was getting nowhere.

He’s not an extreme conspiracy nut, this is not Pizzagate-level, but he is swallowing the covidiot and alt-right narrative to some extent. It doesn’t help that, since March 2020, there are only 3 guys who work physically in the office: himself, another guy who doesn’t chat much, and our chief accountant who’s proudly alt-right and loudly antivax – and has apparently found (fermented?) a kindred soul.

It’s left me pretty depressed all day.

I don’t do debates and confrontations. Especially in the area I live in, and in my circle of friends and family, I haven’t had to deal with alt-right types or with covidiots. There are a few ex-colleagues on Facebook who became climate deniers and COVID deniers, I solved that by unfriending them and visiting Facebook as little as possible. (I know, it doesn’t really solve anything; but I feel better if I don’t have to see them.)

My previous job became unbearable when some colleagues decided to take advantage of a change in company leadership to create a second development group in the company and we ended up in a competitive “us or them” situation, may the best brown-noser win. I had to confront people who I (perhaps naïvely) had considered quasi-friends. It was the unhappiest 15 months of my life. The way I resolved the situation was to change jobs.

Now here I am 5 years later, and I don’t want to start hating my job again. I’d rather not work with this guy anymore, but we’re both (in different ways) important parts of our small team. I can’t just change jobs to resolve this : there are mild-to-extreme conspiracy theorists everywhere now. Changing jobs would also be difficult for me for other reasons.

Can anybody relate ? How have you dealt with / adapted to coworkers who are alt-right types and/or conspiracy theorists ?

2

I’ve worked with people i disagreed with politically. Not quite like that, but stuff i didn’t want to talk about. I dealt with it by avoiding politics at work.

It’s more fun when you don’t need to be so guarded, though. :slightly_frowning_face:

Best wishes.

3

Agree with this. It’s best to avoid talking about politics at work, the same as with religion, sex, off-color humor, etc. You are paid to work with these people - you are not paid to like them, or be buds with them. If the political talk starts to invade your work and becomes distracting (and bullying), then it’s time to raise the issue to management.

4

In companies I’ve worked at over the years politics was never discussed at work. Never. Not even in a casual context having nothing to do with work. It wasn’t appropriate, and most people feel uncomfortable talking about it with co-workers. Once you leave work and head to a bar or restaurant you can talk about anything you want, and that’s when I usually learn about someone’s political leanings. If I were you I would shut down that kind of discussion as soon as it starts, or just walk away. You’re not being paid to listen to someone else talking about subjects that are completely unrelated to work.

5

Most of my career has been w/ the US government, where talking politics could be a fireable offense.

You don’t say what sort of job you have, but there are plenty of topics to discuss other than potentially hot topic political/social ones. And while you’re at it, no reason to tell anything other than the cleanest of jokes you’d tell a grade schooler. No need to compliment anyone of either gender on their appearance, Etc.

How about this weather? The local sports teams? is pretty much sufficient between 9-5.

My personal preference has been just to strive for professional pleasantness towards my cow-orkers. With minuscule exceptions, even my most pleasant coworkers were not my friends. Any interaction with them was NO WHERE NEAR the importance of me getting the next paycheck.

6

When I look back over my 50+ years in the workforce, it occurs to me that I never knew the political, social or religious beliefs of the people I worked with. (The exception being a stint at a “Christian” TV station, where I just kept my mouth shut and did my job). Now, through Facebook mostly, I’m often surprised at what their beliefs are, and some of them are not anywhere close to my own. Your best bet is to ignore them as best you can and not engage with them on anything more than a friendly but professional basis. Political, social and religious issues are not acceptable talk for the workplace, and you needn’t feel pressure to respond to it.

7

I work with some alt-right nutjobs, anti-vaxxers, and conspiracy theorists. They know I’m a conservative, so they (wrongly) assume I’m in the same boat as them. As a result they will occasionally sit in my office and spout their nonsense. What I don’t do is argue with them or challenge them, since nothing good will come from that. I simply feign interest, nod my head, and say, “Hmm, that’s interesting,” a few times. I humor them, in other words. They will eventually get bored, leave, and go to someone else’s office to repeat their spiel.

As every year goes by, I become more and more convinced that everything revolves around politics at my workplace, and the work is incidental…

8

I’ve made friends with several people at work. Some I’m friends with years later, when we no longer work together. But I’ve also worked with lots of people I’m not friends with. We are collegial, and share pleasant conversations, but that’s the limit. I rarely talk politics with those people. I don’t know the political leanings of most of them.

9

Cool. I long ago stopped being surprised at folk I worked with whom I thought were friends. But then when they or I left, we NEVER saw each other again.

The one exception was my best buddy - but then he died! :frowning:

10

I think you might be a tad mistaken here. From what you say, he didn’t use to be one, but he’s there now–or close enough to not make a difference.

11

Is the effectiveness of vaccines a political opinion? The reality of climate change?

It’s not clear to me how one could avoid talking politics at work when everything is political.

I don’t have a solution for the OP. The issue isn’t really politics; it’s an inability to have civilized discourse. I used to talk politics all the time at work, but no one was completely off the rails.

12

Yes, vaccines and climate change are political, and wouldn’t have been discussed at work. I worked in high tech in Silicon Valley and everyone was mostly on the same page politically, but it was just taboo to talk about political subjects at work. As I said, once you left work you could talk about anything you wanted. I guess the difference is at work it’s harder to just walk away when you’re sitting at your desk trying to get work done. This unwritten rule kept people from talking about controversial subjects that might escalate into an argument. Abortion isn’t necessarily political, but you wouldn’t hear anybody talking about it at work, which made life much easier.

13

I’ve always said I declare my office* to be a No Religion/No Politics Area.

Had a sign for a while, that I’d point to with a shrug, as if to say “I’m sure what you’re starting to rant about is fascinating, but them’s the rules…”

*or classroom, or department. Once we got everyone on our whole floor to get on board. And we threw flags like in a football game.

14

Weird. Not my experience at all (in SV). That climate change is real went without saying among virtually everyone I knew. Nevertheless, we had some political differences in how to best address that, such as whether to use carbon taxes or a carbon market, or if the government should act as insurer for nuclear plants. We were able to talk about those things, too, without incident.

We kept that kind of thing to the cafeteria, but then, we mostly didn’t talk about anything but work while working. Nothing to do with politics; it would be just as rude to talk about the weather when someone is trying to work.

15

We don’t talk politics at all. But the department I’m in all pretty much agrees on stuff. I’m in IS (Information Systems). The nickname for us is “The Herd of Nerds”.

16

I don’t know what “SV” stands for, but that’s pretty much been my experience. In the cafeteria at work, we used to compare our electric cars, and laugh at Trump because everybody we knew laughed at Trump (remember, we’re in Canada). I’m not sure we’ll be able to do that once we get back to the office and re-enter the cafeteria. We, too, are a bunch of nerds working in electrical engineering and software development; but that may no longer be an indicator of political leaning.

The far right in Canada (and in Québec) is on the rise, still a small minority but they’re co-opting the recipe of being louder than the silent majority, and managing to be in the news much of the time while complaining that the media are ignoring them. And, paradoxically, some of the pandemic measures (encouraging use of online tools for everything, replacing real social interactions with online entertainment and social media (*), schooling from home) are helping it to happen. The conservative party of Canada just ousted their leader for not being radical enough. We all used to tell ourselves that this couldn’t happen in Canada, now I’m pretty sure it’s happening, and I don’t know what can be done to prevent it.

(* It’s well-known that Facebook and YouTube will show you content that is related to things you’ve already seen and liked, just to keep your eyeballs on their sites, which also means you’re just finding more and more proof of your own opinions. But so does Netflix, if you think about it. And, well, I’m on the SDMB and I’m not in the F**kTrudeau group on Telegram; for some, it’s the reverse.)

Thank you to everyone for your responses, I’ll try to actively avoid discussing politics at work in the future.

17

The problem is that conservatives and religious people do not think talking about politics and religion is talking about Politics and Religion. Banging on about praising God, how their faith informs their life, how the government is strangling us, etc. is just life.

Literally my first day at work, the guy sitting next to me started off on gas prices being driven up by the global warming HOAX (it was actually Hurricane Katrina, so ironically it might have been global warming reality), minimum wage laws killing jobs, welfare making people lazy and useless. No matter how many times I told him to knock off the political talk, he insisted he is not talking about politics just general current issues that impact our business. Our boss backed him up.

Now 17 years later I can see on Facebook and LinkedIn that both are full-on fascists who think they are libertarians. To them their kooky right wing beliefs are just facts.

18

A more recent problem has been COVID-hoaxers, anti-mask, anti-vax, anti-BLM and anti-gay employees going on LinkedIn and attacking our own company’s or executives’ messages around health & safety and diversity & inclusion.

They think our corporate POLICIES are political statements and their right to oppose them publicly is being infringed, if for example they want to go on LinkedIn and say that one of our executives gay or transgendered children will burn in hell and our company will be destroyed if we don’t stop promoting this perversion.

19

Yikes. I have clearly been lucky with my co-workers.

I’ve worked with several devoutly religious people, but while they were public about espousing a faith, they never proselytized at the office, and in fact, pretty much never talked about it except in “social” ways. (“I ran into a friend at church this weekend…”)

I’ve also worked with people who I believe are on a different part of the political spectrum from me, but no right-wing nuts. At least, no right-wing nuts who were public about that at work.

20

From context, Silicon Valley.