Harrassed by co-worker

I'm so glad, I didn't want to come across as unsupportive but I'm a realist. I know how frustrating it is to hear the company complain about the increasing cost of doing business and ask you for your input, then just ignore it. The last place I worked our bonuses depended entirely on company profits. One department was holding up the rest of the plant because they were unable to deliver the necessary equipment from storage on time. There were meetings galore, brainstorming, Kaizoning etc. The solution was very simple and EVERYONE knew it. These people all went to break at the same time. They did not follow our company's standard 15/30/15 minute breaks either. We worked from 2 - 10 pm. They went into the breakroom from 4-5, from 7-8 and from 9-10. Deliveries for that department arrived at 4:30. They were supposed to inspect and accept or reject shipments. Since they could not be bothered, the driver came into the breakroom, they signed the manifest and we had no idea what was delivered.

No one from the Plant Manager down to their immediate supervisor had the balls to stand up and say anything about it. My boss did throw a fit one time. He had two machines (to the tune of 1k a minute each our cost fine not included) down waiting for them to deliver patterns. There was a ship in the harbor literally waiting for these parts, the company was being fined by the hour for late delivery. The ship was only going to wait for so long, if we didn't get them finished on time the company would have been forced to pay to FLY I don't know how many tons of parts to the ships next port of call.

In the breakroom was the Plant Manager, Production Superintendent, and all the rest of upper management. Boss came into the breakroom at 4:30 and and asked where his patterns were, they stated that they were on break and would deliver them once their break was over. He went to get them himself but it turned out that one of the patterns that was delivered was damaged and in required them to do their job to repair it. He came back into the breakroom 15 minutes later, broken part in hand and slammed it on their table and said "fix it NOW you've been on break for 45 minutes I needed these patterns an hour ago."

I was walking into the breakroom for the first episode, and was getting ready to leave when he came for the second. Inside I was screaming with joy, FINALLY someone stood up to them and in front of all of upper management. Well my boss was written up, they did not appreciate the way he dealt with the situation. They gave the department in question more man power, but still they all went to break at the same time and stayed in the break room 3 of the 8 hour shift.

This situation just goes to show one thing, when commenting on postings in a forum often you need to gather more information before you reach a conclusion.

AAAAA, oh I wish I could've been a fly on the wall to see this! I'm sorry he got written up. I love his spunk!

Well today was fun (or not). I had a meeting with HR and my immediate manager to discuss some "issues" raised by some co-workers. They had a written warning for me to sign, and wanted my side of the story.

I explained the constantly changing requirements, the micromanagement by people who understood nothing about the work I do, the hostile and abusive behavior by some of them, the confusion and inefficiency of their processes, their complete obliviousness to industry best practices for things like project management and supervision, and then pointed out that the manager's lack of interest in supervising his staff was creating an "anything goes" scenario where people did a lot of paper shuffling but got very little real work done -- missed deadlines, poor quality no matter how many iterations of proofing and review they added to their "process", and the general feeling of "anything I don't know ain't worth knowing".

I explained some of the past history of that group's interactions with me before the latest manager came on board -- the lack of cooperation with requests for information on projects I was working on, even though they were the go-to people for that information, the way they turned my information requests into accusations of plagiarism (because I had copied some information out of a specification, cited it, and asked for product specific information related to that specification), their refusal to review material that was directly relevant to what they were working on because they didn't want to disclose any of the "secret" stuff they were working on with the same projects, the personal attacks and harassment by one of the key members of that department (who gossiped and complained about me behind my back, and made up ridiculous excuses and attacked my character when I asked for a meeting with him and with my old manager to try and resolve the problems), and on and on it goes.

I said I took full responsibility for my statements and actions and signed the letter. They were probably hoping for a personal meltdown and craziness and scary threats so they'd have an excuse to fire me on the spot. I kept my cool all the way through, so they're probably more pissed off with me now than before. I gotta stay cool because SO works in the same company, so if/when I do leave, it will have to be on my own terms without burning any bridges, or he's screwed too.

I am thinking that around tax refund time SO and I will have a financial buffer that will make the two of us less dependent on my salary as well as his to make ends meet. The real estate market's doing a little better lately too, so it may be a good opportunity to sell one of the rentals and get the other rental and our own home paid off.

I'm sorry that your work environment is so difficult right now. Try not to let your co-workers frustrate you so much, it's wasted energy.

Good luck with this. I was in a workplace where I was harassed and ended up in a very poor state by the end of it.

I would recommend that you speak to the HR Manager and they can speak to these people about what is not acceptable. Get them to set some boundaries.

Well I now have a bodyguard, sort of.

They promoted someone from another department to work with me and handle more of the "technical" product stuff. This is someone SO and I actually like (J) and socialize with after hours, we get along well and he's not a bad pick for the job. Of course they sprung all this on me last week in a department meeting without any warning, so of course I never got to offer my own thoughts on the matter. I wouldn't have vetoed their choice if they'd actually asked me, but they didn't bother.

Anyway, the three of us had dinner last night (J and SO had already worked out what they were going to tell me). J really really wants me to stay, is excited about working with me in this new role, and proposed acting as a buffer between me and the rest of the department. He's big and very male, so the women (mostly) who have been picking on me middle-school-style will undoubtedly behave quite differently with him than they do with me.

That could work. The bosses will undoubtedly go for it and make him the "team lead", which may also satisfy one of the guys who has always had problems working with "sentient females" and is always looking for reasons to get rid of me. I'm not a "girly girl" with dresses and makeup and heels, I'm kinda more soft butch/artsy, which causes the smart guys to get a giant crush on me, and completely weirds out the not so smart ones, not to mention the "normal females".

So, I'll give this a try.