We’ve all met one, whose the worst you’ve met?
We had this older woman in our office who used to decide to subtly target everything anyone did wrong who was younger than her, she’d pick a person and just begin to pick away at them in an innocent way. Nobody could identify what she did all day long, and she was obviously very insecure because she was the oldest person in the department. She would decide to pick at you for months, until you finally fought back somehow, and then she’d pick a new target, ever so subtly. I was not good at handling myself in those situations back then so I just was miserable for months until I finally burst into tears at her for whatever she did that day, and that was a crude but effective method. She turned her guns on someone else who tried to handle it for a while, but then eventually went to HR and she got nailed to the wall and decided to retire.
Also had a manager I’m pretty sure was borderline sociopathic. I’ve never meant someone so dishonest, manipulative, and greedy in my life. She got told to quit or be fired after some major upper management changes, so she quit, got a new job, and apparently got walked out of it a bit later on, and now she actually works at my current job site with basically the McDonald’s shift supervisor of jobs in this organization. I had to deal with her once over the phone a couple of years ago and she still sounds like a dog with its tongue hanging greedily out of its mouth.
Giordan Benavides.
Fuck you, you lying, scheming, friendless piece of shit
Fuck Giordan, all my homies hate Giordan 😤
A story that tells you everything you need to know about Giordan:
Giordan sometimes attended a low-stakes house poker game with a group of longtimer expats in Korea. He always lost. So, one week he brought a friend and they got caught passing cards to each other. If it was any other country they’d have beat his ass
Giordan is such a self-aggrandizing narcissist that he couldn’t cope with losing.
He’s been booted from two Seoul Toastmasters chapters (maybe more?). Imagine what an insufferable narcissist it takes to annoy Toastmasters, a group designed to create and elevate insufferable narcissists.
I worked with Giordan and he was nuts. When I started, there were two employees and he called himself “the head teacher”. Students regularly complained that Giordan would reach over and pinch their arms real hard as punishment. Giordan would lie to the boss about coworkers and lie to coworkers about the boss. He wanted to have control over everyone. He got people fired if he didn’t like them.
Later I learned that everyone in Itaewon knows Giordan is a snake. I heard he can’t work in Seoul anymore but I don’t know why
Oh, I had someone try to be a Giordan in one school here in China. He was the incumbent foreign teacher and when three new foreign teachers were hired he tried to ingratiate himself with us (badly: more on that later) on the one side, offering to act as the conduit between management and the foreign teachers.
Unfortunately for Leslie (for that was his name), I had enough experience in tech firms and the social service to recognize his type. So while to his face I agreed, I opened my own conduit to the foreign affairs office as well. (Being able to speak the language somewhat helped.) And sure enough, the FA would say something reasonable and our wannabe “conduit” would transmit it with a twist that made it sound horrible and unjust and abusive and such, then he would reassure us that he would “straighten things out”. To the FA he would say the foreigners are very angry and very unreasonable, but he calmed us down and blah blah blah.
Only of course it didn’t work because the FA dean was talking to me, so I played back what he’d told us about the FA’s statement. So he wasn’t the conduit very quickly, and wasn’t really welcome in the FA’s office either.
The guy was a real piece of work. He claimed to be Australian. He had an American passport. He spoke with an American accent. He expressed American ideals. But he was Australian. And he kept that up until a couple of Aussies joined the crowd and one of them, after hearing enough of his “Australian” bullshit, tore a major strip out of him in front of all the other expats. After that he kept to himself.
Oh wow that sounds EXACTLY like Giordan. Fucking unhinged behavior.
Giordan is even cagey about his nationality! Is he Canadian? Is he American? Who knows?
An ex-boss. After many run-ins with HR, she still works there somehow. I don’t.
Had one boss who disclosed a new employee’s diagnosis to the rest of the team in order to discredit that employee’s ability to do their job. Among many many other things. The tipping point for me was her sending out an email (after the employee had already moved on to another department) which was just titled “EVIDENCE OF BAD [WORK]” trying list a bunch of shit that in her eyes had been done badly. This would be whatever if she was emailing it to her own boss or whatever - no, she cc’d the ENTIRE team and it was very clearly done to try to embarrass the employee, who as I mentioned had already left and couldn’t even defend themselves against the bullshit this person was saying.
Also worked at another place where the bullies (who were mental health specialists) bullied a 60-year-old team member so hard that she went home crying. They’d also regularly make ‘team plans’ in office and have ‘team lunches’ where they’d very purposefully exclude one or two people but then very loudly chat and comment about all of it in front of those people. Place was toxic as fuck.
Mate that’s awful. It’s one of the worst I’ve ever heard of. Using someone’s minority group status to discredit them is awful. Disability awareness is often poor, (eg we know we can’t assume black people don’t speak English but make negative assumptions re Disability) but this is deliberate malice. How did you cope working there?
Honestly it was a really rough few months, I think I mostly got through it by trauma bonding with the person who was being bullied, were actually good friends now. After that email, I ended up reaching out to HR because that was the tipping point for me. I left shortly after to another department and there was a full investigation where (for various reasons) the person wasn’t fired but quietly moved along to a different department. The investigation opened up a lot of gates though and that department has gone through some pretty drastic changes to address the toxic culture.
I’ll bet it was rough, it’s no exaggeration to say toxic workplaces can be traumatic. I’m really glad you got a bond with someone you needed it. It’s outrageous that the dickhead was just moved, hopefully the investigation did change things.
There was this woman that worked in my department named Rachel who was the absolute worst. She was condescending, rude and just overall bad at her job. I actually had worked with her previously and she was just as bad at the previous job too. When she put in her notice a few of us actually threw a party in the break room.
A woman who emailed people about little mistakes they made and sent them to the entire department, instead of just discussing it in private
I haven’t, actually. Have you tried being a 6’ male?
It’s pretty swell, would recommend.
Ha, maybe you’re the bully
Idk I think workplace bullies only exist in already toxic environments. It requires a lot of people looking away or not standing up for others to really become a problem.
You might be right. Tbh even in outright toxic companies, I’ve never had a toxic team, nor a “work bully”. Only toxic upper management and that was mostly about compensation and perks, or lack thereof. Not personal stuff. Closest thing is one guy who often made mean or uncomfortable jokes at people but I think he legitimately didn’t realize that some people didn’t like them. He was very social and yet never seemed to grasp boundaries.
I worked with someone who mercilessly victimised an innocent guy who was autistic to the point where the poor bastard was talking about killing himself
Management knew. There were no consequences.
There are few people who I genuinely hate, but he’s one of them.
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Too many to count. I used to do office work and there was a pair of women who were just fucking nasty, would mimic how people spoke, openly blank people and give people catty looks up and downs. They only did it to women. Loads of people complained but the company didn’t care.
A fucking real estate agent
By far
All the people who “accidentally” said things like “they (Chinese) just don’t value life like we do” within earshot of me kind of merge together in my memory as one enormous workplace bully.
The ones who would then pretend to spot me and wide-eyed add, “Oh, not you Dianne. You’re one of the good ones” form the second enormous workplace bully.
There’s a reason I moved here “for a year or two” … almost 25 years ago.
People really are vile sometimes. Usually you have to just tell from people’s behaviour to you but they actually fucking verbalised it.
😬😬😬 thats a yikes. Thats several yikes even 😅
This is why I laugh bitterly at the notion that Canada is somehow a “nice” society that “celebrates” diversity.
I’m sure it looks this way if you’re white. It doesn’t look this way if you’re “Asian” (between people who call us “their fetish” and people who do what I reported above), if you’re Native, if you’re Middle Eastern of any stripe, if you’re Indian, if you’re Somali, if you’re … You get the drift.
It only looks that way if you’re dumb. There are only two types of society in this world: racist, and racist but trying to deal with it.
It’s why I have a lot of schadenfreude for Sweden/Scandinavia as well. Enlightened multicultural social democracy for everyone… Until migrants show up with the wrong race/religion then suddenly a fascist contingent of your population materializes and there’s a “security crisis”
Yeah. It does feel like some places have never had to confront racism and work through it in the same way America has (not that we’re doing a great job 😬😬😬🥲). America has a LOOONG history of acute racism, but it’s also been a cultural conversation here more than I think it has been in a lot of other places.
It seems to me like it kinda manifests differently here and some people assume the outwards, acute image of racism they imagine in America is the only way it can look, and there’s no need to reflect on how they themselves relate to race. Or maybe that racism is mostly about mistreatment of black folks, and they never make the connection to their gross assumptions and internalized “othering” of other demographics. Racism comes in a lot of different flavors and intensities, whether it’s acute hatred, or gross subtext that shows you the assumptions someone has made about people who look differently than themselves.
I’m sorry to hear you’ve dealt with so much gross behavior in Canada, that’s always a sadening thing. Sending love from one of your neighbors down south, take care!
Thanks. I’m sorry you’re going through all that shit you’re going through right now Down South™. 😥
Thank you, it sure is a time to be an American 🙃 lol
Take care my friend :)
Fucking Kevin. Told me to my face that he hated me. Of course he was “just kidding.”
What constitutes a workplace bully?
A person who bullies. In the workplace.
Bullies how? What are they doing to you?
Why even respond to this post if you don’t know what a bully is?
This sure feels like bullying
Yes, it does. Which leads me to wonder why you’re doing it.
Are there no other messages showing for you?
I was intern at a discount store and we had one manager and she was so far the worst.
She started out all cool and chill. However when there were stressful moments, she would blame anyone else but herself.
I remember, she told a colleague to put all the materials “on the left side”, I saw the colleague being really busy with multiple costumers. So I told the colleague, I would do it for her. So I did and then the manager starts to yell, that she didn’t want it at the left side and wanted to speak to the one who did it.
I just said, I did and took the blame. Colleague kept thanking me. But these situations were basically an everyday thing. She bullied people this way into quitting, even if this wasn’t her intention.
Glad I left after my internship ended there.
