I worked with a woman who took this one step further. She once OPENED my take-out box to see what I was having. I still don’t know why she should have cared. Some people’s kids…
It’s just a lunch “thing”.
I often eat at my desk and pretty much daily, someone will walk over and comment.
Them: Eating lunch, huh?
Me: Nope
This usually freaks them out. I then stare at them until they are too uncomfortable to stay. I can be evil.
Sometimes I’ll be eating something I brought from home.
Them: Leftover Macaroni, huh?
Me: Nope. BBQ Ribs.
This also freaks them out. Again, I stare at them until they are too uncomfortable to stay.
It’s effective, and the “languishing around the admin’s cube while she’s eating” or “let’s bug M2U while she’s eating - YEAH what a GREAT IDEA!!! She wouldn’t want that HOT!” seems to have dropped off considerably.
I’m so glad to know that it’s not just me who experiences this stuff at the office.
My tastes do not run to the mainstream. I like Cecil Adams! I like to travel, I like opera, I like to do gourmet cooking at home, and I read books which are not on this month’s bestseller list and do not have purple or pink covers. What a jerk I was for years for not knowing why I tended to get ostracized at the office! I don’t discuss any of these tastes before other people nowadays because now I know that people get weird on me if I do. Although I try to be communicative and friendly at the office, I avoid the gossip mill, so of course this, together with my “weird” tastes, is misconstrued as “snobbiness.”
In addition, I don’t have any children, and while my husband and I are not rich, lately we have become a bit more well off than we were when we were younger. Let me tell you, nothing will get you excluded from the office sisterhood faster than these two things. Even though I never discuss money at the office, it’s probable that I’ve been seen dining alone at a French restaurant by the office women (this is a taste I try fervently to conceal from my office acquaintance). This seems to shock them more than if I had an affair with the office boy on the lunchroom floor. And lately I’ve overheard some hints to the effect that the office women are not shocked by the fact that I don’t have kids; they’re jealous of me because of it (women my age tend to have teenaged kids, so I can see their point).
You’re right; these folks have petty lives that they could expand if they wanted/dared to, but they don’t, and expend all their energy and bitterness persecuting those of us who do. As you said, it doesn’t take much money to study, read, explore, and expand your mind. It just takes guts.
Thanks for letting me rant within your rant, yosemitebabe. I didn’t know other people experienced the same kind of exclusion.
puglvr, man - this is a problem everywhere! Thanks for sharing your experiences with us. This is why I started this thread!
Yes, I have weird tastes too - I’m a vegetarian, and I listen to Classical music. Both these things have caused “problems” in the past. Fortunately, not with everyone.
Another thing that’ll do it - being from somewhere else. It can be unforgivable, I tell you! I am a Los Angeles native, who recently moved out of state, to a smaller town. I take the blame for some of the problems caused - at first, I was too homesick, and talked too much. But I didn’t trash the new town I was in, I just didn’t embrace it whole-heartedly. Apparently, that’s unacceptable. To some people (thankfully not all) the only acceptable response to the question, “So, how do you like our town?” is “Oh, it is heaven. I am so glad I left the beaches and mountains of California and came here instead. EVERYTHING is perfect here.” If you offer anything less than adoring praise, it’s going to offend them.
Another potential problem from being for somewhere else can just come up in normal conversation. For instance, if the conversation is about amusement parks, I will talk about Disneyland. Because that’s the amusement park I know, and grew up with. But to mention Disneyland sounds “snobby” - because to my co-workers, it’s a far away and expensive vacation spot. To me, it’s the local amusement park I grew up with. What the hell am I supposed to say? It is hard to have many conversations when the topic strays to certain things. If I want to contribute to the conversation (or if I am asked “Have you ever done or seen this?”) my answer will probably involve something in an interesting and “far away” place. So there are times I just keep my mouth shut, and basically act as if I have never had a certain experience that other people are talking about. Better than mentioning that I have experienced something - just in L.A. (To be honest - I usually don’t keep my mouth shut. It’s just screwed up, to have to deny where I’m from, so I don’t often do it.)
Another thing - has anyone been treated like there is something “wrong” with them because they don’t gossip? I have been told that some of my co-workers bitch about me because I won’t contribute to the rumor mill, and don’t like to listen to gossip. That is utterly screwed up.
“Every once in a while, I’ll get a boss/superior at work who feels they just have to be “better” than everyone around them.”
You appear to be suffering from projection. It is you that feels that you are better than everyone else. Others sense this and dislike you for it. It is probable that you exhibit signs of reaction formation, hostility and other mechanisms of affective rigidity. You need therapy. I hope you get help.
Byz, remember this guy? Remember a few months ago, Techchick had a thread about her neighbor’s noisy dogs, and this genius posted suggestions that she poison the dogs? Thus causing lots of fervor and upset among many of the other dopers? (Oh, he says he was just “kidding”, but he sure enjoyed how upset many dopers were with him over such a repellant suggestion.) Well, he’s back. Enchanting us once again. Showing his trollish tendencies, once again.
I am going to sit back and wait and see what you will come up with next, Chrono. What will it be this time? Are you going to make fun of our usernames? (That’s part of his M.O.) Make weird, bizarre and unflattering speculations about our appearance? Make fat jokes? (That’s another fave of his.) Hey - my sister has only one leg - wanna make some cracks about that? Or are you just gonna flip out and rant and rave? I am all curiosity.
Sigh. He’s a troll. DNFTT.
And another thing - when are you going to finally break down and learn how to use the quote function?
I can’t believe you are talking about me in the third person when I am standing right in front of you. Is this what I get? Is this what it comes to after all we have shared? The intimate dinners? The long walks? All those damned foot rubs you made me do? All this means nothing now? You were just using me for sex. All you mountain chicks are the same. If I had known that you were just out for a good time, I wouldn’t have ever given up my manhood. Damn You! Damn You Yosemitebabe!
Hmmm…
I’ll give you a 6.5. For creativity, and bizarreness.
Go ahead, just stamp a number on my pain. Variable human worth is your game. How will I love again? How am I to ever feel the touch of another woman after what we shared? I relive your gentle caress a thousand times a day but now it is infused with the bitter knowledge that I will never, never feel anything again. Your past is littered with a thousand broken men’s hearts and I am just a sobbing miniscule notch in your trocar. I want my 400$ back. Now there is only one thing I can do. Ding a ding dang my danga long ling long.
Boy, I never knew how lucky I was. I had some really crappy jobs to get me through college, but nothing as bad as other posters have described. Here’s a thought: is it possible that I have fewer problems with people because I am a large, grim-looking guy? (The pic of me on the People page is atypical. That kitten was just too damn cute to resist!) I mean, I even got fired a few times, but the people doing it put it pretty gently. I know I have a long fuse and tend to live and let live…maybe things were just worse than I imagine? There’s another strange factor at work. People tend to like me. I may be big and mean-looking at first glance, but after people know me they get to really liking me about 70% of the time. I know this because they tell me so.
Either way, the worst parts of all the jobs I’ve had was usually the work itself, never the people. In that respect I was always okay.
I have written training, manufacturing process, and quality documentation for years and for different companies. I have also had several technical articles published in trade magazines.
At one company, I had a boss whose ego was unbelievable and whose writing skills were grossly underdeveloped. Nevertheless, he would spend a lot of time trying to find errors in my documentation. I thought it especially strange in that I had been hired for the sole purpose of preparing that documentation.
After I left that company, I was informed by my ex-coworkers that the guy began telling everyone that he had written the documentation, including people who obviously knew better. I suppose by now that he probably believes he really did.
Many years ago, during a spell of excruciating financial woe, I worked for a glamorous, upscale, trendy magazine in NYC as a temporary secretary. The publisher, who had made his money running a discotheque during the eighties, looked EXACTLY like the actor who played the Wizard in the Wizard of OZ. But he was actually the exact opposite…
The offices of this extremely trendy magazine were a bizarre mixture of lovely furnishings in a famous midtown office building, on which had been dumped or strewn the usual items of office use: for instance, a French provincial reproduction desk with yellow-lined paper pads literally stacked twenty high and falling off the sides was typical. In the main reception area just outside of the publisher’s office, there was a 30X40 Oriental Rug on which, it appeared, at least five boxes of office supplies had simply been dumped out. Although our leader walked past this amazing sight about fifteen times,he never said one word about it, until shortly past noon, when he found an intern trying to sort the stuff into useful piles, and proceeded to shriek at her, using language that would have been over the top in a fight between junkie hookers, for five minutes. He then threatened to fire her immediately if she didn’t stop crying. During the next two hours, he emerged from his lavishly furnished office twice, both times to abuse his secretary at the top of his lungs over total trivia. I called my temp agency that evening and told 'em I wasn’t going back.
The magazine failed about three months later, by the way, and about three years after THAT I saw inn the papers that this disgusting bully had been convicted for insider trading and would be doing federal penitentiary time. Gee. Too Bad.
I took my first and only job in the private sector in high school. Without boring you with details, I manned a booth at a mall and tried to talk people into filling out cards with their name and phone number requesting more information. I got a commision of something like a buck per card. The other woman who worked in the booth was a grown woman who seemed to resent the hell out of the fact that she was stuck in a minimum wage job that a high school kid was doing–and doing better, I might add, since we compared card counts a few times and I always had more. Trying to be nice, I always told her that it was probably because I had the better schedule, working after school and evenings most of the time.
I’d just wear to work whatever I wore to school, usually jeans and a flannel. The other woman always dressed nicely, though clearly on a K-mart budget. One day she took it upon herself to lecture me on the fact that I was representing the company and I should dress more professionally. Professionally, I thought, for minimum wage? Uh, sure. The boss frequently dropped by the booth, and he never had any complaints about my clothes. And the customers didn’t seem to care. Heck, maybe they felt more comfortable talking to a high school kid in sneakers than some woman with the weird idea that she could get ahead in the world by working a degrading job in a mall in polyester skirts and pumps.
I hate my old carpool partner.
She is selfish and predatory as well as weird and jealous. Just a brief recap of some past conversations:
When discussing genealogy, I mentioned that, while none of my relatives are particularly rich or famous, my dad’s parent’s families were early settlers of Tillamook County and are honored in the Tillamook Pioneer Museum and at the Tillamook Creamery. Small potatoes, perhaps, but she has to prove it’s small potatoes by telling me that she is descended from the great William Wallace. She also thinks Diamond Dallas Page is her ex-husband’s illegitamate son.
Last summer I was invited to a co-worker’s neighborhood watch block party (our community wasn’t participating). When I mentioned it to the carpool partner, she acted shocked that no one had invited her to a party, too. Then she sniffed about how they need that sort of thing in the poorer neighborhoods, where the kids’ parents can’t afford nice things like swim club. I mentioned that they did it in Chari’s (another co-worker) neighborhood, too (probably rubbed salt in the wound; that’s two co-workers who didn’t think of her), and she sniffed that, while Chari’s street was nice enough, just a couple blocks over were more poor streets. She asserted that they never did anything like this in Debra’s neighborhood last year. Debra is the attorney carpool partner mooched off for 10 weeks last year and who hates carpool partner’s guts, too, as a result.
Carpool partner went on job rotation for 6 months in another department, but she’s still in the same agency and same building so we could still carpool. When “Boss’s Day” rolled around, I suggested to my immediate co-workers that we should take our boss out. I didn’t include carpool partner because she was no longer in our area and had a new supervisor to worry about. Still, the day before the lunch was scheduled, carpool partner asked if we were doing anything for boss. I said we girls were taking him to La Hacienda Real. She got upset that no one had invited her. She fussed that, since she was on rotation, she must be “dead” to us. I asked if she was doing anything for her supervisor and she said no. Then she added that, at least, if her current co-workers were planning anything, they hadn’t let her in on it because, since she was on rotation, she wasn’t really part of their world, either. Then I got to listen to a rant about how much nicer and more open people are on the east coast than the west, that people don’t hide things from you and you know who your friends are. Poor thing. I still didn’t invite her.
Oh, there have been many more slights and examples of her thoughtlessness and weirdness, but those are the ones that will be emblazened indelibly on my mind. That and the fact that getting gas money out of her is like pulling hen’s teeth. Still haven’t seen a dime for December.
I did finally grow a pair and dissolved the carpool, though. Since her “job rotation” became permanent and she’s no longer part of our department, I hope I never have to put up with any of her bullshit ever again. <insert smiley sighing in relief>
Now I’ll have to find someone new to bitch about 
The final (I hope) bit of weirdness:
She always uses the word “we” when, I feel, she’s talking about herself. Example: When we would get into the car, invariably if I was hot and turned up the AC, she would turn it down and say “We don’t want to get too cold.” Vice versa, if I turned up the heat, she’d say “We don’t want to get too hot.” I was tempted to ask if this was a “Royal we.” Here’s the weird part: Last night I called her to say I didn’t want to ride with her any more and I got her answering machine. Her message says simply, “We are not able to answer the phone right now, so leave a message and we will call you right back.” She lives alone. I guess it is a Royal we.
I work the midnight shift at a nursing home, i have only worked there two months. I worked with Ruthann during my orientation as well.
Ruthann talks to me as if I did not have two brain cells to rub together! She will give me a list and then read it to me You can hear my eyes roll when she does this!
here is a list of the tasks i get for one night.
check and clean refrigerator
tidy linen closet
wash utensils on south
pass ice water
chart activities of daily living (ADLs)
The people i get up in the morning:
Anne, Stacy, Eunice, Marina, Elena
Now on that morning, I started at 5:30 am, after answering a couple of call lights and finishing the utensils.
All I have to do for Stacy is get her a towel and washcloth, and make her bed.
Eunice let me dress her, and I was going to assist her roomate Marina, but that was the morning she felt awful, and she went to the hospital early in the morning, for vomiting blood. I helped Marina into another nightgown, then waited with her until the ambulance came.
And while i waited with Marina, she kept giving me static
about finishing my people, I kept telling her that only had Anne and Elena left. Elena was having a hard time finding a slip that fit, and had a headache.
Anne had a hard time finding a slip as well, and she was not finding a bra either, but she only took a half hour to dress, and i was done by 8 am. This was not good enough for Ruthann, who kept on telling me i had to be out by 7:30!
She will whine aboutbreaks when i am trying to finsh my rounds. She will moan when i cannot get a cart of water cups with enough lids, at 1 am. She treats me like a moron for having the temerity to ask for help! Then she wonders why i do not want to talk to her.
Micro-micro-managing will not do anything for me, dumbass!
[Homer Simpson voice]
Hmmmmm…Tillamook cheese…
[/Homer Simpson voice]
Gr8Kat,
I am SO glad you don’t carpool with that bitch anymore. Everytime you posted about her, I wanted to come there and bitch-slap her one myself!!
As far as jealous co-workers go, I’ve written before about the ones who envy my “schedule”. I’m disabled due to chronic back pain and spasms (from a near total spinal fusion) so I only work around 25 hours a week. I constantly get the “must be nice” comments, to which I now answer “Actually, it kicks ass. I think I’ll spend the day reading/swimming/shopping/going to the zoo.”
I’ve also had co-workers jealous of my skills. I’m a computer geek by trade, and am the most inclusive person I know. I don’t just fix things, I gladly show others how, and in the nicest way possible. Still, some co-workers are jealous of the “atta girls” I get for fixing network problems, printers etc. Hey, if you want the allocades so bad YOU fix it. It’s not as easy as it looks.
Zette
[Homer Simpson voice]
Hmmmmm…Tillamook cheese…
[/Homer Simpson voice]
I have Tillamook cheese in my blood, literally! I expect to require a quadruple bypass by the time I’m 35 and when they open me up, they’ll find my arteries are lined with cheddar.
Zette, thanks. My camel can hold a lot of straws, but she finally managed to break its back. I think it was not the straws so much but the old growth timber she was piling on that did it. (Side note, I just found out this morning she once stole someone’s pin number and relieved the account of $2,000. I was warned that I’d better change mine; we made way too many stops at the ATM together. Maybe this tale was just office gossip, but I already know she has absolutely no conscience.)
Re: the woman who referred to herself as ‘we’. If she lived in a cube i would say she was a Borg (I know i just proved i am a geek, but someone had to say it!).