What grade are you in? or Grow the hell up and act like a professional!

The BBQ Pit
1

To the whiny, bitchy backbiters at work:

You know, I don’t give a flying fuck whether or not you like someone else we work with. I don’t want to hear a litany of their transgressions. I don’t want to see your imitations of how they sit around doing nothing, especially when there’s work to be done before I can go home. I don’t want to hear about how they act on shifts I don’t work.

Let me see how many ways I can explain this. I ain’t got a dog in that fight. Whatever problems you two have, it ain’t none of my nevermind. This doesn’t affect me at all, and it’s really none of my business. Sorry, I don’t take sides in issues that don’t involve me. You guys are France and Germany, and I am SWITZERLAND.

If you have a problem with another technician, you need to tell her. You don’t need to tell all the rest of us, and at this point you don’t need to go running to the doctors to tattle. You need to tell her, preferably in private, “Hey, this is a problem for me, so what can we do about it?” You need to make an effort to resolve this like a reasonable adult, not like a fourth-grader. Spreading gossip in the hopes someone else will tell her, “Soandso is saying xyz about you” is neither a reasonable nor an adult way of dealing with interpersonal conflict. It’s an insult to you, an insult to the coworker you won’t do the courtesy of talking to directly, and it’s really an insult to the coworkers you assume will spread your ugly comments. I don’t know about you, but I outgrew that kind of bullshit a long fucking time ago. Likewise, going directly to the management before you even mention the problem to the other person and getting them blindsided is stupid, petty, and disrespectful, and it’s sooo fourth-grade.

Oh, and if you do finally talk to the person you have an issue with, leave me the fuck out of it. Don’t bring me up directly or by implication, don’t in any way make the impression that I have a problem with this person, or that I agree with you or am on your side. My name is Paul, and this is between y’all. If I have a problem with someone, you can guaran-goddam-tee that they’ll know about it a long time before you will. So don’t try to drag me into the middle of your problems. Like I said before, I am Switzerland.

So either start acting like we’re all grownups here, or go the fuck back to elementary school.

2

Sorry, it’s just that Mary is just such a coooooooooooooooooooooooooow - Don’t you hate it when she…
What?

3

Man, I hate that. When I started at this job I worked with two women, one of whom I got along with okay and the other of whom I couldn’t stand. They professed to be friends with each other but every chance they got they bitched to me about the other. And continued to call each other ‘friends.’ Switzerland, I tried to tell them. I’m Neutral.

This continues to this day although I work with neither of them any more. They still call me and end up bitching about the other, and talking shit about the other (with which I can do nothing but take with a large grain of salt), what makes them think I care? They are the ones who are supposed to be friends ! Problem is, both of them know that I can’t stand the one of them, yet I can’t commiserate with the other about how much of a beee-yotch she is because, well, I’m SWITZERLAND !

I know just how you feel, CCL. At least we can feel smug about all the dirt you’re collecting about everyone. They can never be certain we will never use it to their disadvantage …

4

CrazyCatLady, I also have a strong feeling that these are people of the female persuasion. I don’t understand it either, that’s why I generally steer clear of friendships with women. I just don’t trust them. (Oh, what a thing to say about your own sex, but I don’t!)
Funny how we all get along fine in cyberspace.

5

But there’s not even any real dirt, just a bunch of stupid, petty bullshit. One tech who spends at least half an hour per shift making or taking personal phone calls, is pissed because the new kid who’s just now learning to be more than kennel help can’t yet automatically realize when something needs to be done. She’s also pissed because the night receptionist, who consistently stays late if we need her, left on time once when we were kind of busy so she could get to her other job on time.

Someone else is pissed because she had to come in when it was snowy and slick, and the boss’s wife didn’t. I admit, this sounds bad on the face of it, but the boss’s wife is a just a fill-in person who works a shift every other week, and when it’s really slow, they tell her to stay home. After all, there’s no point in paying her an hourly wage to stand around, when the salaried employees have it under control. The day in question, the late morning and afternoon had been really crazy, and we needed everyone to come in. But by the mid-evening, it was dead. We saw a whopping two animals in seven hours and had a total of seven patients in the hospital, so the boss called her wife and told her not to come in, that the full-time overnight tech could handle it. This was a purely economic managerial decision, and there have been a dozen times they’ve made that same decision in perfectly clear weather. Hell, we made the same decision about the kennel girl.

So somebody complained, said that it looked like she was showing favoritism, and that we were all pissed about the possibility of having to stay late, yadda yadda yadda. So then last night I got blindsided by the boss asking if I’d had to stay late, was there a problem, etc. Frankly, I don’t appreciate being drug into the middle of somebody else’s bullshit, especially out of the blue.

Yes, these people are women, but that’s mainly because we’ve only got three men on a staff of 20. Out of those three, one is part-time, one works midnights and hardly ever sees most of the rest of the staff, and one is a doctor’s tech (which means he deals strictly with emergencies, paperwork, and administrative stuff). They don’t have as much contact with the rest of the staff, so they have fewer opportunities to get pissed off, and they also have fewer opportunities to bitch to everyone else about it when they do.

There’s always a few tensions here and there, but the last couple of weeks it’s just been ridiculous. Maybe it’s the weather.

6

passes note

Do you think Kathy Newperson is a stuck-up witch-with-a-b? Circle yes or no.

                               Yes                         No
7

jayjay, you just gave me images of Family Guy when the middle school teacher gives a student a note saying, “Do you like me? yes no maybe”

8

Don’t you hate how CrazyCatLady won’t gossip with us? And she always acts like she’s got all this important work to do? And how she won’t take sides in our arguments? I really hate that. :smiley:

9

We have a gaggle of gossipers and bitchers in my lab. I admit, sometimes it’s fun to chime in and add something to the fest. I suppose it makes me feel like I belong. Maybe I feel like if I don’t say anything, they’ll start talking about me next (and they probably already do).

But good for you for not sinking that low. You serve as a good role model at your workplace.

(I used to work at a god-awful animal hospital where all the kennel attendants hated the techs, who in turn hated the doctors, who in turn hated the management, who in turn hated the customers. Personally, I hated everyone except for the dogs and cats (well…maybe some of the dogs and cats). I would run to them for comfort whenever the hateration got to be too much.)

10

I was the victim of one of those bitchy women this week. Our office has been reorganizing the work flow, and one job I’ve been responsible for is now the responsibility of the diva of the office. During the time that I’ve been training her, she keeps tsk-ing at the amount of work involved, told me she was going to have to talk to the big boss about it, yadda yadda. So then on Wednesday when the almost-big-boss was out of the office, the diva sent me an e-mail and cc’d the almost-big-boss to complain about how I only spent 15 minutes training her and I can’t expect her to learn all that in 15 minutes and with my job procedures manual. bitch bitch bitch

Fortunately the almost-big-boss is no fool, so it ended up going okay.

I hate working with women!!! (Yes, I am a woman. So what?)

11

Oh, don’t get me wrong, I bitch plenty at work. I bitch about the more obnoxious owners and animals, I bitch about the fact that somebody on dayshift has the heat turned up so high you could roast chickens in ICU, I bitch about the fact that the 140# dog I’m walking has perfectly good use of three legs and won’t support any of his own weight. I join in the general bitching about the fact that although we massively overshot all projections and did a million bucks worth of business (just the emergency department, mind you, not the hospital overall), we’ve been told that they probably can’t afford to give us raises. (The ER director had a suggestion for where the money could come from, and the clinic owner didn’t care for it at all.) On Thanksgiving, I was leading the bitching about somebody stealing the ham.

There’s plenty of legitimate stuff to bitch about, without ripping into the other techs over stupid petty shit. Besides, it just doesn’t make any sense to go around alienating your coworkers. A lot of the time, we’re each other’s only line of defense from bad situations. How well we’ve got each other’s backs is usually what makes the difference between a decent shift where we all get out reasonably close to on time, and never-ending hell. It’s not just the people on your shift, either. The previous shift can make your life hell by not making time to restock, or to keep the laundry moving, or a million other things. The next shift can make your life hell by riding your ass the entire overlap over fairly minor stuff, or by telling the vet, “Oh, we can’t send x home early, we’ve got a lot of treatments to do in two hours, and we’ve got a cut toenail on the way, and we’ll need her then.” The receptionists can make your life hell by asking you to take every single phone call, including the stuff you know perfectly well they can handle, or by leaving without putting together sets of new client paperwork.

Aside from the fact that I just don’t really care to hear people badmouthing folks I for the most part really like, this kind of stuff just seems really counterproductive.

12

That’s okay. I don’t trust other women either. I’ve been burned too many times by so-called friendships with women. Even the casual work relationships are a nightmare.

I used to work in a 17-person accounting department that had two cliques, both of which I was part of. And by part of I mean I got along with everyone, not that I was a gossipy bitch. So I had to listen to double the gossip. Sometimes I would stick up for the person, but I never went to the other clique and told them what was said.

Boys used to scare me in high school because I was really shy, but in the real world, I love working with men. I’m married, so there’s no attraction on my end, but men are so easy to get along with.

13

Let me tell you a little story about myself: I am currently working at an institute for electroceramics at a university. Most of my work is done in a cleanroom environment. I hold the lowest rank at the institute as I am still a student and only working part time for 8 hours / week. One time there was a guy from a different institute, who was working on his PHD, and he was chewing gum inside the cleanroom!

Now, eating and drinking is forbidden inside the cleanroom and for good reason. I was fuming, but I didn’t say anything. Instead, I went to my superiors bitched, moaned, whined and complained about the guy. They looked at me dumbfounded and said “Well, if you’ve got a problem, why don’t you just tell him?”

I was glad that somebody pointed out the obvious to me, so I challenged the guy and told him that it wasn’t allowed to chew gum inside of the cleanroom. He asked “Oh, why the hell not???”.
I didn’t really anticipate a debate, so I just said “I don’t know… I didn’t make the rules. But I am working with a cover in front of my mouth, so I assume that always opening and closing your mouth when chewing gum will distribute water vapor on the wafers I am working on. This defeats the purpose of working in a cleanroom.”

An hour later he came back, still chewing the gum. Since I am - as I said - not really in a position to give orders, I let it slide. But telling him in the first place felt good.

Perhaps you need to tell your gossiping coworkers, that challenging people is more healthy and useful than being annoyed about them and talking behind their backs.

14

DID you ever find out exactly what happened to that ham, BTW? i vaguely remember the thread.

15

Telling the gossips off will, sadly, probably not help at all. They are so beyond hope, so deluded, that any comments made, any constructive criticism, will be more grist for their gossip mill. Not only will they not learn from any confrontations, they will use these confrontations to make everyone even more miserable.

I just left a workplace that was like this. Only it was really, REALLY toxic. Gossip and bitching are bad enough, but when you work in a healthcare environment where people are trying to imply that a coworker is being neglectful or abusive to a client—well, it’s downright chilling. Accusations of abuse or neglect can ruin a healthcare worker’s career, get them in horrible legal hotwater—oh, let me tell you, it’s horrible.

I had these psycho coworkers who would make up tales about each other, some of these tales bordering on accusations of abuse or neglect, simply out of boredom. Or because they needed to have something to say. I once had a woman imply that I had “abused” a patient because (get this) I took a long time to rinse her hair. This patient’s hair was coarse and porous. No way was I going to under-rinse it and leave shampoo and conditioner in it. And for that I was accused of abuse. (Not officially, though. Even though the bosses would have known such an accusation was bullshit, their policy was to do a formal investigation of every accusation, no matter how hair-brained.) This is the kind of shit that people would do all the damned time.

There were several ladies (and yes, you’re right—it’s always the ladies—the men never did this) who were especially horrible. The level of “disconnect” with them boggled the mind. One lady helped, through her lies and gossip, to get a coworker removed from taking care of a certain patient. (She told the guardian of the patient a bunch of tales and the guardian insisted that the coworker not be allowed to take care of the patient anymore.) So, when things got really hairy with that particular patient, and they were really understaffed and needed more help? What does this woman say? She bitches because the coworker that she helped get removed can’t work with that patient anymore! She says, “Well, it looks like she (coworker she had kicked out) left us to take care of this mess!”

Huh? What in the hell? How can someone be so fricking deluded?

But this was how it was all the time. Bitching when there wasn’t enough overtime. Bitching when they got overtime. If I, for instance, got sick and couldn’t come in, this one coworker would bitch about me because she voluntarily took on the overtime. But when someone else got overtime, this same woman bitched about how unfair that was: “Well, some people get all the overtime!”

I could go on. And on. I am so glad I am out of that situation.

16

We’re fairly sure the receptionist took it, but she professes utter ignorance. After all, she’s a vegetarian (who eats chicken soup, apparently), so why in the world would she even want the ham? That’s okay, though; the one they got us at Christmas stuck around till it was all eaten.

17

Heh. I guess the thief, WHOEVER it was, knew that people were probably watching the Christmas ham. I really hate workplace thieves. Too bad you couldn’t pin it on someone conclusively.