I have to admit right off the bat that I am known for being passive-aggressive. I do consider myself to be multifaceted and I do try everything else before going down that road and I only do it when the other person is a "my way or the highway" type of person. My husband is that way a lot of times where he's very critical and issues orders to me rather than asking. Recently, I was eating a fish burger and he said, "Look at you, you're going to get fat! Why are you eating that?" So, I threw the whole thing away after one bite.

While it ebbs and flows, my work can be filled with sociopaths and tyrants. I once had to do a summary of a project that had already been done by another organization. I told the requester at HQ that it had already been done and that doing a redundant report that might contradict parts of the original report would be bad. I was lectured on how it was a still a requirement and that I had to do it. So, I generated a concise, 12 page summary and then got chewed out for not including "everything." I then put in everything: emails, replies to emails, notes, thoughts about notes, took out paragraph headers and made three page runon sentences for a total of 174 pages of drivel. I would then call and email, asking what the person thought of page 128, line 47, etc. I never heard back from them.

I had to deal with a woman we called The Alabama Tick and The Eye of Sauron. She dug herself into a position where you had to go through her to get paperwork through and she demanded that you kiss her ring every time you wanted to get anything done. If you didn't bend the knee she would berate you publicly and make sure your paperwork was never completed and then throw you under the bus to management. She had this behavior where if you didn't bow down she would walk into the area, wave her hand dismissively and say that there was a problem with someone before walking into the manager's office and shutting the door. Someone would then be summoned to be chewed out over something inconsequential. I fell afoul of her when she demanded that I be her gopher and do her admin work and I rebuffed her because I was being paid to fly and she wasn't my boss. That, and she was stalking myself and a friend in the locker room. Funny, how she would always show up in the shower when we were there. After that I was subjected to never being able to get my paper through and the mandatory humiliation that she would throw around publicly at people who failed to meet her standards. I took it on the cheek for two years before I told her, "You want to play that game, let's play that game." She told me threateningly that she was going to read everything that I wrote. I thanked her...and then would save up all of my paper for Friday at 3:30pm where I would pile the paper on her desk and tell her that the boss needed it Monday morning. Fate intervened when she was assigned to work part time for me and it was mandatory for her to keep her job. I would walk into the area, wave my hand dismissively and say that there was a problem with someone. She was so odious that about thirty of us mounted a covert campaign to convince her to retire and we finally did it.

I am usually wonderfully direct, but when I encounter someone who is determined to mess with me and won't take no for an answer I do go hard passive-aggressive. It's something I'm working on, but it's a survival mechanism.