Tag: work

Promising starts

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The official job search is off to a strong start.

I’ve had I don’t know how many messages from recruiters on LinkedIn. Probably about 12. I replied to two first thing, one hasn’t been acknowledged but the other turned into a phone call this afternoon and he’s put me forward for five different roles.

I have a call scheduled with another recruiter tomorrow, whose introductory message said he has three roles that may fit.

I felt quite jittery about it this morning and I was questioning why I’m doing this to myself when I could just stay in my nice easy job (that I hate), but happier this afternoon after speaking to the recruiter. I think I’m remembering too much about my last job search, 7 years ago. I think I expect it to go the same way even though nothing is the same. Back then I had no self confidence and the job market was terrible.

I still don’t feel I have self confidence, even though I have tonnes more than I did back then. I think something that has really helped me with that over the past year was seeing my counsellor. When I started seeing her I had to plan out everything I was going to say in advance. Sometimes I would practice it. Now I just turn up and start blabbering impromptu. I think just the experience of opening myself up to someone I really don’t actually know at all has been helpful for my social anxiety. I think, if I’m honest, my last job search was hard because I was scared of dealing with recruiters, scared of interviews, scared of employment, and I self-sabotaged it a bit.

Here is my watch’s estimation of my stress levels over the past 7 days:

stress

 

Worries

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So I think I concluded in the last two posts that work is really not a good environment for me. I mean, obviously I had already decided that since I’m looking to move, but this just solidifies it. When I had the big news a few weeks ago that everything outside work was going to be OK, I expected to take a few months and see how things go at work, but it’s just not going to happen. I have too many bad experiences and memories here and I effectively spend all day being anxious because of things that I’m probably overreacting to, but not necessarily. I don’t think I’ll heal until I move, and if I stay here, eventually I’ll be having a bad day and something small will tip me into having a meltdown.

I am still worrying about the message I sent to my ‘friend’ saying I find Becky threatening. I am worried that he’ll blab it and I’ll get in trouble for it. It’s unlikely, but it’s hard to shut off the worry.

I realised I am sitting on an excuse though, if I need it. I have a recent prescription for an SSRI, which “I’ve just started taking” and it’s well publicised SSRIs can make you feel more anxious and panicky before you feel better. There we go. Add in Becky’s recent rudeness and the fact I recently mailed HR asking for a meeting and/or advice and got rebuffed and it all fits together neatly. That makes me feel a bit better.

(In reality I’m not taking them because I think the idea that I need to be medicated in order to go to work is not a concept that I should be entertaining when I probably wouldn’t need them in any other workplace)

…And today’s not great either

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Hmm. My terrible mood from yesterday flowed into today, but I realised I what I was actually most annoyed about was my friend at work and the way he spoke to me yesterday. He told me I was being ridiculous getting upset by rudeness from Becky, he said I do the same to her (???) and said if it was anyone else I wouldn’t care. This was in a slightly heated conversation in WhatsApp. I got pissed off with him and I told him that I feel threatened by her because of things said and done in the past and being around her all day is actually really difficult.

Proving him entirely wrong in as much as I really can get upset with other people too, I was still so annoyed with him today that I just deleted WhatsApp without checking if he’d replied. I felt a lot better after that. I only used it to speak to him and I’m not going to reinstall it.

So I felt a lot better until the anxious part of my mind starting whirring and piped up with “what if he shows other people the messages and you get in trouble?” and now I feel very unsettled again. Why would he do that…

Not every day can be a good day

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So today was my last ‘normal’ day at work. I have next week off and then it’s serious job-seeking mode. I’m fully expecting to hand in my notice in a matter of weeks rather than months and to be honest I can’t wait.

I made a LinkedIn profile which might passively yield some results before I start being more active in a week’s time and I’m pleased with it. I even put a photo on there. I don’t know if my employer will notice this, but if they do, it’ll be pretty obvious to them I’m intending to leave. That could lead to an interesting chat with my boss.

But to be honest, today was dreadful. I don’t really know what was wrong, I just felt terrible all day. I was very easily irritated by Becky and I had to go and stand outside a few times to calm myself down. My friend at work was completely unsympathetic and basically told me I was insane, which is pretty rich coming from him. I felt unsettled all day.

And then after I got home I learnt that my great auntie passed away this morning, which wasn’t altogether unexpected and she’s been in a pretty bad state for a while now, but… it’s still a shock.

Work

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There’s been yet more Becky drama over the last few days…

Yesterday she was handling introductions for a new starter, as she does. She got to me and described me as “assisting” my manager. This is one of those things… yes, technically, I assist him, but my job title is software developer, and you could argue that he assists me in achieving the development of software. I let it go, but anyone else would have just referred to me as a developer and I do think there was a certain amount of passive-aggression in there. This is a big improvement though, she used to just skip over me during rounds of introductions! If this happens again I’ll stop her and say “Becky, if you aren’t sure what my job title is, perhaps you should ask”.

Today we passed each other on the stairs and I said hello to her. She ignored me. Then without thinking I said “Aren’t we speaking to each other then?”, and she ignored me. I was really annoyed by this and after going back to my desk for a few minutes I decided I needed to go back outside and have a 5 minute walk, which did help. Later on we passed each other in the corridor and she tried very hard not to make eye contact, until she did, then quickly looked away. She is so outwardly self confident around everyone else, yet with me she’s a strange mix of extremely rude and extremely timid. I wouldn’t have the self confidence to be as rude to anyone else as she is to me, and yet, a total lack of self confidence is also not an unreasonable interpretation of her behaviour. I find this very confusing.

I’m a bit worried I’m going to have an awkward chat with HR … “Becky says you were rude to her on the stairs….”, but I’m proud of myself for saying it. It shows I’m getting some self confidence back.

I’m a little bit wary of HR’s involvement here. The HR lady and Becky went out for lunch together a few weeks ago which seems like  glaring conflict of interest since she’s supposed to be ‘mediating’ between us. The email I sent last week didn’t go anywhere. I asked for a meeting but didn’t get one (phew), but HR offered to ‘relay my concerns’ to Becky. I agreed to that, but I didn’t get any confirmation or acknowledgement either from Becky or HR. It was obviously important enough to me that I sent an email about it – why don’t I get an acknowledgement? I’m left feeling that Becky and/or HR thinks my concerns are unimportant.

I’ve put my CV together and I’ll be proceeding with a very serious job hunt as soon as my week off (next week) is over. I have no idea how long it’ll take. It’s the kind of thing where I could have another offer in two weeks, or maybe it’ll take three months.

I have a good friend at work who knows a lot of the ins and outs of the Becky saga. I’m in two minds whether to tell him about my job search. He has been quite leaky in the past, but there is some value in starting a rumour I’m leaving. Becky and I used to be good friends and I’d like to not leave on bad terms with her… I’d like to think that if she thought I was leaving she might put things behind us… but I’m probably being naive.

 

Work drama

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So, the mediation session was about six weeks ago now and I don’t feel it helped at all.

We were supposed to have a follow up meeting after 4 weeks but I asked to postpone it because I had other stresses in my life. I then asked to postpone it again because of various reasons and it’s going to be delayed until the end of June now.

Becky has in my opinion still been quite passive-aggressive towards me, but at a much lower level. She has talked about me to a friend at work and said she thought everything would go back to normal with me. She’s done this a few times now and it’s starting to grate because I end up having to justify myself to the friend, as she gives him the impression it’s just me refusing to get along with her. In reality, if I try to be polite to her she’ll respond with rudeness. I know this because we’ve been here twice before, and that’s exactly what happens, and I end up feeling hurt and confused. This is now the third time since January I’ve had to justify myself to the friend. I didn’t take the bait this time, I just sent her a softly worded but firm email suggesting she that speaks to me directly if she wants to improve our relationship. She replied with “noted”.

The day after I sent her that email, we had a disaster at work where somebody tried to defrost some milk in the microwave and cooked it instead, causing the carton to explode and the milk apparently got into the circuitry so the microwave stopped working. Becky discovered this and said to somebody else “some idiot has cooked the milk” in a very loud whisper within earshot of me. I am one of very few people who defrost milk in the microwave, so I’m pretty sure that was aimed at me (note: it wasn’t me, but I do know who it was). Even if it wasn’t, it’s not OK to call your colleagues idiots. Not inside the office, anyway.

There have been some discussions between her and a manager about getting some real or artificial plants in the office. I don’t know exactly what was said because I have heard all of this second hand (via the friend, so she has continued to talk about me to him), but my understanding is that a couple of days after the microwave issue, she suggested I could look after real plants. Maybe it would have been polite to ask me first?!

About a week later she actually asked me about this, but it was a bizarre conversation and she was obviously extremely uncomfortable speaking to me and didn’t mention she’d already suggested it. I think the manager must have told her to get a clear answer out of me. I just said I’d think about it (I won’t) and no more has been said yet.

To me this all seems passive-aggressive and a bit weird.

I was in two minds as to whether there was even any point in having the meeting. My counsellor advised me to postpone it and think about it rather than just cancel it, so I did. But I’m pretty sure we’re now past the point of trying to talk things out.

Mediation

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The next part of the work story is that HR arranged a mediation session between Becky and me. I didn’t know how to approach it, so I discussed a lot with my counsellor and she advised me to adopt a position of explaining that I found her behaviour confusing.

My personal belief is that Becky has or had romantic feelings for me and in the run up to her marriage decided she needed to put a stop to it. It would explain why she has been rude to me when I’ve tried to be polite to her, and why when I simply stopped speaking to her she became very offended and started arguments and passive-aggressive sniping. i.e. there is a lot of inconsistency coming from her because she has confused feelings she can’t manage. It would also explain why she accused me of coming on to her – projection! She definitely does a lot of that. But I can’t just come out with “well, I think you’re in love with me, let’s talk about that”, so we went with the confusion angle.

It worked about as well as you might expect: I came out even more confused. She was quite disrespectful throughout the whole session. She was annoyed with me but didn’t clearly articulate why. The only clear point she made was that I don’t say hello to her when I come into the office, which seems a bit odd because I don’t pass close enough to her for it to be natural. Afterwards I was sceptical this was a genuine point. I tried very hard not to make her defensive and I had discussed a lot with my counsellor what to focus on and how to phrase things neutrally, but it was all effectively wasted effort because Becky opened by saying everything was my fault as she puts in lots of effort to improve our relationship and I don’t return it. It was easy to rebut, I just said “can you give an example of that?” and she couldn’t. But for me, the idea wasn’t to prove her wrong, it was to try to improve things, and she went in with an attitude not conducive to that goal.

I pressed her on the fact she’d twice accused me of coming on to her and the accusation magically disappeared. She claimed she didn’t remember saying it the second time, which didn’t make me trust her any more.

I actually came out with a lot less respect for her than I had going in. I felt she handled the meeting unprofessionally while I was quite pleased with the way I handled it. We didn’t make much progress, but at the time it seemed OK because I felt like I’d done what I could.

The main outcome was that we agreed that we’d give each other space, which is all well and good, but we spend 8 hours a day in the same room. I started taking it literally and worked from home a lot, in part because I feel completely uncomfortable being anywhere near her. I don’t find her behaviour towards me predictable or professional, it causes me a lot of anxiety, and I just don’t want to deal with it.

Work

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So the biggest issue in my life right now is work. I’ve had a lot of issues with a woman I’ll call Becky. We used to get along really well, but shortly before my life imploded in other ways, she started being weird towards me. I was really patient with her for a long time, but after 3 months she’d become ruder and ruder and had started belittling me in front of people and enough was enough. I complained to my boss, who couldn’t have cared less, and I ended up moving to the other side of the office to get away from her.

I always resented having to move, because it isolated me, and shortly afterwards my anaemia got a lot worse. I was feeling dreadful, she was still being rude to me and accused me of coming on to her(!!!). I had a meltdown and called her a bully. I have mixed feelings about that in retrospect. It wasn’t tactful but it also wasn’t unjustified. I ended up taking mid-November through to the end of December off sick.

I went back in January and avoided her as much as possible. We ended up having a completely unprofessional and loud argument in the kitchen one morning at the end of January because she was upset I was avoiding her and not speaking to her. During this argument she accused me of “still” coming on to her, which was a bit silly at this point, as I had not initiated any contact with her for about 3 months.

She started making an effort to be polite to me after that, but she suddenly stopped for reasons only she understands, and started being strange and rude again. At that point I went to HR, who arranged a mediation session. I’ll post more about that next time.