update: I took a job with less responsibility — and my coworkers treat me like I have no experience

It’s “where are you now?” month at Ask a Manager, and all December I’m running updates from people who had their letters here answered in the past.

Remember the letter-writer who took a job with less responsibility and her coworkers were treating her like she had no experience? Here’s the update.

It turns out the part where you asked why it mattered was the crux of the issue. At the time I wrote, we had just hired the woman who told me she had a degree in marketing and “actually knew about this stuff.” She was older than me and a little odd, but I thought she was cool and admired her amazing work ethic. She had a habit of giving me unsolicited advice, like “when you are a salaried employee you will sometimes have to work more than 40 hours a week if that’s what it takes to get the job done,” and she questioned a lot of what I told her, but I look younger than my age. At the time I didn’t realize how much she was doing it, and it often happened in meetings where other people would follow her lead, so that’s what inspired the letter. She also had other quirks, like trying to follow me into the bathroom to continue discussing work and insisting she had an innate knowledge of our local area because her father had lived here before she was born, despite the fact that she was from the South and we were a Mid-Atlantic state. This became an issue because we have many foundations and institutions named after a 19th-century robber baron, and no one could convince her they weren’t all the same organization.

Then we had a reorg and lost 75% of our staff and we became a department of two who were shoved into a basement office together. That’s when she became abusive. She started by taking any opportunity to throw my mistakes in my face. My “mistakes” were things like not covering her incidentals during a hotel stay so she had to provide her own credit card or putting the data into a spreadsheet before making it look pretty, or not ordering dry erase board cleaner while we had a spending freeze. I think she wanted me to buy it with my own money. I also stopped giving input on anything at all because she would angrily insist I knew nothing and also throw it in my face for months afterwards. We had an event and the venue gave us a list of preferred caterers. I recommended one because it fit with our mission and from then on, every time we talked about the event, she would look me dead in the face and say, “WE WILL NOT BE USING THAT CATERER.” This continued after the event, whenever catering was discussed. I had only mentioned it once.

At that point, I still thought she was just quirky (I had really liked her a lot at first), but one day I told her “no.” I refused to come in at the last minute on a day we had scheduled to work from home. She argued with me, but I stood my ground. That day she kept me on Zoom for five hours of meetings. After that she became insanely controlling. She wouldn’t let me walk around the office alone, she’d always come with me. She would be obviously unhappy if I did anything she didn’t specifically tell me to do, but she was my coworker, not my supervisor, so there wasn’t much she could do about it, and again, I wasn’t doing anything wrong, just on my own.

One day, she asked me to help another department with a task, and they wanted to have a meeting about it. When giving me the task, she said, “Don’t let this take up too much of your time.” The other department asked me to have a meeting about it, which I had on Zoom in the office with her. During the meeting, I offered to drop off some equipment for them since it was on my way. As soon as I got off the phone, she was screaming in my face that I had “broken her trust,” since she told me not to put much time into it, and demanding I tell her “what I was trying to get out of doing this,” and questioning my integrity. She then emailed the other department and told them that they had asked too much of me and that I would not help them again.

Now that I had “broken her trust,” it got really bad. Now if I was in the bathroom longer than she wanted, she’d knock on the door and ask what I was doing. On a rare day when I was at work when she wasn’t (we were both part-time), I managed to get away from her and talk to my supervisor. Remember, we had lost 75% of our staff and my supervisor was in name only. He asked if I was okay and when I asked him why he would ask that, he said, “I also work with her.” I found out that she had been lying to me about the scope of our project and that it would be ending in November despite all the plans she would talk about during our five-hour meetings.

I started looking for other jobs, but one day it was all too much. She asked me to make her a list (in a table in Word, not Excel) with one column of whose hotel rooms we would pay for and a column of whose hotel rooms we wouldn’t be paying for. For a conference with an expected attendance of hundreds of people. I explained that I wouldn’t know if someone was booking a hotel room if we weren’t paying for it. Next thing I know, she’s screaming at me that I was refusing to do a new procedure and that the (company approved) method I had been using to pay for hotel rooms was something I just made up and I was to find out if any of our conference speakers was bringing a spouse and that the spouse would have to pay for their own room (!?) and “the free ride was over.” Then she threw a barrage of insults at me until I left the room. When I returned, I told her that she couldn’t talk to me like that and I hadn’t done anything wrong. She refused to talk to me and went home.

I immediately went to HR and my supervisor and begged them to fire me. In an amazing twist, a job I had turned down a year earlier had opened again and I could move right in. During the transition, I was told to wrap up my old job and any communication I had with my coworker could go through my supervisor. But she didn’t talk to me. She did, however, have a meeting with the finance department to learn how to do my job and then emailed me to let me know that from now on I had no reason to speak to anyone else and I could take all of my direction from her. I didn’t respond, and a week after that she went to my supervisor and told him I was useless and hadn’t spoken to her in weeks and demanded I be fired. That’s how she found out I was starting my new job the next week!

My new job is amazing. I love my boss, and her boss. My days are so busy and fun that I find myself struggling to leave on time. I’m still in the learning curve stage, but I recently made a suggestion and my boss gushed over how happy she was that someone else wanted to help plan things. I am, however, in charge of the newsletter.

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