SO HOW IS THAT A BULLY? Excerpt
Monica stopped what she was doing, saved her work, and opened her supervisor's instant message.
“What are you doing?” was the important message.
“I am still working on the Garner project,” she responded, feeling anger inside her begin to burn.
He knew what she was doing! He had asked her that twice within the last twenty minutes! She needed to get back to work. She was about to close his message when he sent her another one.
“Why you working on that now?” he asked. Why was he asking? He knew why she was working on it. He had assigned it to her. They had just had this same discussion a few minutes ago!
“Because it’s due in 50 minutes,” she responded.
“I thought you finished that,” he said.
“You told me this morning to make changes to the second half,” she typed, irritated that he was wasting her time. “What changes are you talking about?” he asked.
Instead of typing the entire list, Monica opened her email and copied and pasted the list of 66 changes he had insisted she make, and she sent the message to Richard.
“I’m not sure if all these necessary,” he immediately responded. He didn’t have time to read them just now! What was he talking about? He had been so adamant about these changes being of utmost importance this morning, when he had sent her the list three times.
“Which changes aren’t necessary?” she typed.
“I would have to go over all them all and let you no,” he replied.
“This is due in less than an hour,” she typed.
“You don’t have to tell me when it is do,” he responded. “That is not OK.”
“I’ve already made some of the changes,” she said. She took a deep breath and slowly turned her head to the left and right to stretch her neck.
“You shoul no of done that,” he told her. She was used to his misspellings and poor grammar. “Not OK!”
“You told me this morning to make the changes,” she argued. She hated arguing with him. She could never win.
“What changes you made? I need list out of all chnanges you of made so far in the doc,” he insisted.
Oh, great, now she had to go into the document and report to him all the changes she had made! Finding them again would take longer than it took to make the changes.
“I started at the beginning of the list you sent me and I am about 3/4 through it,” she typed, hoping he would be satisfied with that answer.
“OK I need a list of the changes you make before you make them,” he typed.
She copied and pasted the list again and sent it to him.
“OK you always need to check with me befor you start on somthing lik this,” he said.
“You sent me the list and told me to get it done,” she said.
“You won’t have time to get it dome on tome,” he mis-typed.
Not if you don’t let me get back to work, she thought angrily. She was tempted to go back to the project and ignore this conversation.
“You have a lot of other urgent projects you need to be done,” he warned. “You need to learn how to set up you priorties.”
“Yes,” she responded. She had found it was often better to just agree with him, even when she didn’t agree with him.
