You know it is there but don’t know how to make it? Are you sure you’re qualified to be here? You admit you’re lame? Boy, I tell ya…you are not the sharpest knife in the drawer eh?
Parden me while I go tell everyone else in the office so we can laugh at your lame rear end.
Back when I was a cubical drone I worked in an accounts payable department and most of us clocked in for work. It was pretty common for one group of women to clock in for one another if they happened to be late that day. Well, that came to and end one day when another woman who didn’t belong to that clique “ratted” them out. This resulted in disciplinary action against the clocking in club. A few days later someone stuffed a dead rat into the desk of the whistle blower. I have no idea who did it but we all got a big talk about it during a meeting.
Now that’s what I’m talkin’ about!
In all seriousness…
I had to deal with bullying up through 8th grade before I stopped it in a very visible, impossible to ignore manner 
This set me up for the business world. I am, even to this day many years later, have very good radar for the first wisp of disrespect/bullying and am not shy about confronting this first wisp head on. It seems to have worked because I have not been bullied in a very long time.
That doesn’t mean you won’t be excluded from a ‘clique’…but, frankly, who gives a shit. Work is work…I have friends outside of work.
These dames are not fucking around! :eek:
I’ve heard of it but have never seen it. I’m pretty easy to get along with but at the same time I can shred people verbally so I’m like the office Labrador Retriever.
Regarding my own experiences with workplace bullying- it’s happened to me three times. One was a guy who had a personality conflict with me and chose to resolve it by falsely accusing me of sexually harassing him. It backfired on him when he had no evidence against me, but in the investigation evidence turned up against him, and he quit in the end. The other two were very similar circumstances- they were both the second in command. The first in command are usually secure in their jobs and not threatened by others- with me it’s the seconds that are afraid I’ll take their place and that try to bully me.
My definition of bullying is an attempt by a person, or group of people, to influence your position in the heirarchy and movement up within by methods not related to job performance.
My daughter suffered bullying. What helped her, she said later, was this definition. Bullies are trying to limit your growth/potential to the bottom of the pecking order by making others see you negatively and you seeing yourself negatively. It is simply dominance. If the bully is high up, they relish keeping some people down. If the bully is your level or lower they just want more people beneath them. Don’t let them do this to you.
Bullying should be met with decisive, unrelenting action. It is an action of an enemy and the person/group should be treated as an enemy. You must defeat this enemy, not ignore them.
Sorry if I sound extreme…but being bullied when younger makes you have absolutley no patience/acceptance of this behavior.
That is one hell of a hostile work environment. :eek:
(And I mean the clocking-in clique, too - everyone knows that’s wrong, but no one wants to be the one to blow the whistle when you see shit like that.)
you got lucky. I had a similar situation, where i wound up actually getting fired, because my incompetent boss did a slipshod investigation. He then got himself fired a couple months later for reasons unknown to me.
In my office we had a boss the guys were trying to get rid of and someone poured hydrochloric acid on his desk plant and it dissolved. Someone pissed in his knee drawer, gross. Someone left him a a heart shaped box of chocolates for Valentines day with every single chocolate in the box smashed. They would rearrange his desk at night which drove him crazy. He transfered out after a year.
The thing about this type of bullying is that it is easy to prove. You can directly show the evidence to HR or whoever is in charge, and prove that you are being bullied. Any workplace that does not do anything about this immediately is opening themselves up to a lawsuit. Of course if the boss and higher ups are in on it, it’s much more difficult. Nevertheless, you can collect proof and get a lawyer.
I would much rather have had to deal with that stuff, than to deal with the manipulative tampering and slander that I had to deal with. I had to learn to be on my toes and check every possible interpretation of absolutely anything that I was associated with. Once your reputation is solidly established, even completely innocuous things get interpreted as evidence of how bad you are.
I got a supervisor reprimanded for bullying me once. I was working at a plant through a temp agency and my job was to walk around checking on the work on the rollers and getting clerical stuff done, which involved a lot of walking around. The company kept track of your work (it was an audition position) and I saved more money than the other people combined. I had gone to the office to get some stickers to properly label some work and she started SCREAMING at me in front of everyone, “What are you doing? Why are you walking around? Your job is to STAND RIGHT THERE and not to move!”
Thankfully I worked through that temp agency. I called them first thing in the morning and they called my boss’s boss, furious at them. I got called in to talk to her bosses and they apologized profusely, explained how good of a job I was doing, how wrong she was, how ignorant she was, that it shouldn’t have happened, etc etc, and asked me not to quit.
I did quit though. I knew that that woman was going to focus on me and she wasn’t done. Just because someone was watching doesn’t mean it was going to stop. I figured that even if she got in trouble after the fact, I’d still have to live through whatever it was she did next.
It wasn’t the first time either. She had throw many fits on me and everyone thought she was horrible, but she was fixated on me since my first day.
So in some ways, she “won” and I feel bad sometimes like I was a coward. But after that I had some really bad jobs and other things and they made her look like positively nice and I put up with it. So sometimes I think I did the right thing because when I didn’t do the same at later jobs, I would make myself sick.
I actually spend a lot of time thinking about bullying. There is something about me that makes me a target, which I don’t understand. I fight back, I will tattle, I will yell, I will scream, I’ll defend myself, I’ll go on the offensive. I wouldn’t pick a fight with me. But not sounding “oh poor me”, I’ve seen people treat me different than others. There is something I put out there that says to bullies “Hey, pick on her!”
It’s very weird. I saw or read a story in the last couple years (can’t remember where) that hypothesized that the people bullies target (assuming it’s not a general bully like the kid in A Christmas Story) are people who follow the rules, that they can sense it and they chose us who aren’t going to fight dirty back.
I have a huge problem with bullies. Even after all the things I’ve read, I still don’t quite know to react. I try to behave how I see others behave and it doesn’t work. I don’t feel I act like a victim, but I don’t know how to make it stop, how to prevent it. I need to put out a “don’t fuck with me” vibe and even when i do, people like to test that. 
I’ve been bullied a couple of times at work too, Ruby, and I don’t know what vibe I’m putting out, either. I have zero interest in fighting at work; all I want to do is do my work and go home - I barely care at all if I socialize or make any friends. Somehow this translates into, “Make this woman’s life difficult at work.” I do realize I’m a chronic conflict-avoider, though; maybe that’s what the bullies sense, that I’d rather not fight with anyone.
Should have used “tongue” and “groove”
In my experience (as a lesbian who hangs out with other lesbians) there is a certain generation of fairly militant, feminist lesbians who make it a habit of being touchy and easily offended by anything that might seem the least, tiniest bit sexist or misogynistic. No sense of humor, whatsoever. I understand the history of lesbians having to struggle to find an identity and new mindset within the dominant culture, but nevertheless I find them exhausting and generally avoid them. I don’t find that as prevalent among younger lesbians, who haven’t had to fight so hard. Lipstick is OK, as is flannel.
Anyway, back to bullying, I found a definite streak of bullying among a certain group of anarchist lesbians that we tried to work with on some volunteer stuff. If you weren’t as PC as them, you got alternatively shouted down or pointedly ignored until you left the group. Fun times!
Well, that was the early 90s, and I think that the most militant phase of feminism was right around that time. I just happened to be right in the center of it, in that particular neighborhood.
At first I thought, “I haven’t been bullied since I was an adult,” but then I remembered my experience as a camp counselor when I was eighteen. As counselors, we all had to rotate shifts in the kitchen. The older lady who ran the kitchen was the camp ranger’s wife, and she was an evil, evil bitch. She specifically chose me as a target and would bully me and belittle me every time I stepped into the kitchen.
One day, when I stopped to get oven mitts before picking up a hot pan, she said something like, “Oh, poor widdle Pyper, doesn’t want to hurt her poor widdle fingers.” I put down the pan and walked out of the kitchen. I went straight to the camp director and said I would no longer be working in the kitchens. And I didn’t for the rest of the summer. What were they going to do, fire me? They would be short a counselor in the height of camping season. Also, everybody could clearly see what was going on, I think they were just embarrassed to speak up because of the evil bitch’s position as wife of the ranger.
That’s what I wonder too. But what throws me off is I WILL fight back. So why try the 2nd time? Why try when you get busted the first time, get in trouble? Like is making me unhappy worth making yourself even MORE unhappy?
I forgot to add yesterday I do know how to deal with individual bullies. I have one passive aggressive relative who likes to call me the c-word when he thinks I can’t hear him. So I always yell loudly “What? Did you say something?” He never says “yeah, I you’re annoying me so I called you a name under my breath,” or “just talking to myself.” He gets this “busted!” look on his face and doesn’t say word. I don’t think he breathes. Then I usually say “Yeah, I thought so.” I don’t get so mad that you have the satisfaction of pushing my buttons and seeing me react. I don’t get angry. I don’t get sad. I don’t ignore. Why do that over and over again? It’s so dysfunctional.
I think that is a great way to handle it. The C word is a fighting word and he is trying to get a rise out of you and by asking him to repeat what he said you take the power back!