salukigirl,

In my opinion you are neither neurotic or a jerk! It sounds like you are working with a bunch of kids that never learned any manners and they’d “hate” anyone in your position, man or woman.

I must compliment you on following the golden rule of being a supervisor, praise in public and discipline in private. You did not lower yourself to their level responding to him in public, but took the situation in private. This tells me that you are very good at your job.

Long ago I accepted the fact that not everyone had the same work ethics as I do. You don’t go to work to make friends; if you happen to that’s great. Not that the people that you’re dealing with would be on my buddy list. Although I have to say, I have worked with people that used drugs recreationally (NOT my thing) that have been perfectly good workers and I’ve gotten along fine with them. I’ve also had the misfortune of getting my best friend a job where I was employed and discovered that she was NOT a good worker, and spent more time and energy avoiding work than completing it. That friendship suffered greatly.

I have been told that I come off…gruff… I had one co-worker give me the Berenstain Bears “Please and Thank You” Book for my birthday. My response was that they are adults, I should not have to ASK them to do their job, I certainly wasn’t going to say please!

In my experience I get along very well with people that work well. Even though I am not a patient person, apparently I am able to hide it well enough because new people, that had a desire to learn their job well, requested me to train them. I HATED it, but I did it because if one of those people bid on my line to work for me, I knew they were trained well, and they knew what I expected.

Keep up the good work!