Hell is Other People - Passive Aggressive Bitch
Sunday, May 15, 2011 at 12:00PM 
I am currently working with a new colleague who - and this is a euphemism - is a fucking stupid bollocking bitch.
She is so passive aggressive she needs to be medicated for it.
I was asked to lead a project because I have the skills and the experience to do it.
But she wanted to run it and they didn't ask her to because - shocker! - she does not have the skills and the experience.
That's not to say she's dumb. Trust me, she isn't. She has skills that I don't have. But she's very young. She's two years out of college. Just two years! She just isn't at the stage where she can lead this thing. Not yet.
But she doesn't seem to get it.
She thinks that she's the shit, that she can take this thing and run with it, and that I am in her way.
Ah, the arrogance of youth.
I knew she'd be a problem immediately. I could feel it in the first meeting we had as a team. So I decided to reach out to her, to get to know her a little, to bond.
So I invited her to go out for coffee.
I have never in my life - I am not exaggerating - had to spend so long eating so much shit and smiling so hard as I did it.
The San, a nomadic tribe from the Kalahari desert in South Africa, hunt with poison darts. The sneak up to the buck, hiding in the long grass, till they get close enough. Then, slowly and silenty, raise a little tube to their lips and blow. The arrow hits the buck in the rump, and it thinks it's been stung. Never mind. Shrug it off. But then they start to feel a little woozy and, before they know it, they're dead on the ground.
I felt like I was that prey. Every now and then, in the middle of conversation about our previous jobs or whatever, she'd shoot a little poisonous dart at me.
At first, I wondered if I was crazy. She seemed to be prepared for us to get to know each other. Her smile was a little cold but, still, did I just hear that right?
But they kept coming.
When we were discussing our education...
"You must get so irritated with people who haven't worked in different countries like you have..."
When I was describing a local political issue that I felt strongly about:
"You are like that in meetings! [Fake laugh]. You have such passion that we can't convince you!"
When she was telling me about her gap year helping a charity in South America and I expressed admiration, because she'd done something I'd always wanted to, but I hadn't had the guts to fly so far from home when I was fresh out of high school:
"Oh, come on!" she said. "You have guts. You're lying."
By the end of the half hour coffee, I needed a stiff drink. It was 5pm and I immediately called my friend Barbara and met her for Happy Hour.
Even as I told Barbara what had happened, I was still debating with myself... was I being paranoid?
But the examples above are less than half of the poisonous things Lil Miss Passive Aggressive said to me. I don't remember all of them, but I did keep count. There were at least 7 of them.
Within a half hour period.
So, what to do?
Well, she clearly felt pushed aside by me, so I suggested that she would be the best person to manage a specific element of the project, giving her clear responsibility for this area, and making clear to her that this was because she had the expertise and knowledge of that element, and I did not. And it wasn't a small thing. This was a major chunk of the work we had to do.
Perhaps, I thought, making it clear what we each had to do would fix the problem.
Nope.
A few days later, we were in a meeting. We were all discussing her part of the project. I asked her if she'd like to go up to the whiteboard to lay out what we were all thinking.
"No, no," Lil Miss Passive Aggressive said. "You should. You're leading the meeting!"
By this stage, I was starting to get pissed off.
But, again, I ate shit and smiled. And smiled, and smiled, and smiled, all through the two hour meeting. I made eye contact with her, I asked her opinion, I made sure that I dared not interrupt her when she spoke.
Perhaps... just maybe, I thought, it would be OK now.
Nope.
I created a document, I sent it to her for review. The document was stored on a shared drive. I basically told her to go into it and change it if she wanted to.
She emailed me a separate version of the document.
Her email was cringeworthy. It included:
"I hope you don't mind this feedback... :-)"
"I know that I haven't created a [type of document] before, but I think that..."
"IMHO..."
Then, even though I'd sent her the document I'd created immediately, she created two documents and sent them directly to the project Sponsor, without having the courtsey to let me review them first.
Remember, I'm the one leading this project. Anything that goes to the Sponsor reflects on me. And the stuff Lil Miss Passive Aggressive sent to her - a very senior person in our department - wasn't ready to be sent to anyone.
And it still goes on. And on and on and on.
If you have any ideas to help me deal with her, let me know.
In the meantime, all I can think is...
Hell is other people.
To read more in the Hell is Other People series, click here.
You might like:
Reader Comments (2)
Send a note of apology to the sponsor to say he'd been sent a couple of documents that hadn't been authorised and that it won't happen again. Copy everyone in, her included.
That is a very good idea, Steve! I like it!