There are always inevitably some people in the office who's favorite phrase is " I'm busy". They seldom wear a smile on their faces, and even if they do, it's always to the bosses. When u talk to them, their voice always sound gloomy and monotonous but once the boss steps in, you can almost mistake the "good morning!" as a chirp from a cheery yellow bird. And I have one such bird, or you can call a peahen in my office... and worst of all, we work for the same boss - my mentor =(
Initially when we started, the peahen was actually very friendly towards me, to a certain point that I even announced that we could become official lunch Ka-kees. Oh boy was I wrong! Still, I think I haven't master the art of treating colleagues as pure colleagues and not friends which I can confide into. The day my boss announce that we should work together is the day things started to take a different direction. It becomes apparent that she's quite a domineering person and often or not, she will "instruct" me to do certain tasks, when in the 1st place, "where's the working together part???". If it's not her commanding tone (as I'm a person who's quite particular about courtesy) - Peahen:" Huini, can you go and photocopy this and after that deliver the doc to the recep coz I missed the cutoff time" - then it must be the task which she "needs" my help - photocopying, fetching doc, distributing letters, diaries, corporate gifts to my team mate, fetching airline tickets - hey, does she thinks that I'm a temp girl or something?!
According to the law of physics, too much force exerted will eventually leads to increased tension (ha-ha.. I'm not so good with physics) but whatever. The day came when Volcano Winnie finally erupted - and this time was because miss Peahen requested help to distribute corp. gifts to each individual CAs. okie, as usual, I find it hard to say no to people - so with a nice black pencil skirt and 2 inch heels, I found myself cutting up 12 big carton boxes, counting the "stocks" and packing them into individual portions according to what each CA ordered. Boy, I regretted not training my biceps for this! And to make matters worse, I cut my palm with the pen knife and my freshly painted manicure all ruined. So, I decided that it's time we work together, and I ask miss Peahen if she could just distribute the boxes herself. "ok, coming" then she stride towards me, pulled 2 boxes away and after which went back to her seat and worked as if nothing has happened - so, I stood there in a moment of shock with the remaining 8 carton boxes. Eager to get it over and done with, I distributed them then I went up to Peahen but before I can speak, she requested for another admin help again! Another male colleague who just happened to pass mistook that she was instructing him, then he clarified and to my horror miss Peahen actually said " Oh John, how can I be bullying you by asking you to do this, I can only bully the xiao mei (little girl in mandarin) and as you have guessed, my nick in the office is non other than "Xiao Mei".
Sitting at my seat, I felt so bullied. And yet I have came across any tactics to counter attacks from a bitchy Peahen. However, there's a voice on my head that say if you swallow this, she will triumph coz she knows she can ride over you like this in the future and you'll never breathe a word. So, after battling with myself for 30 minutes, I decided to tell her nicely over the phone. I dialed her extension, and the greeting I heard was "Yes, what is it? I'm busy." Disgusting@! "No, S*a***, I need to talk to you, very briefly but it's important." "Now?!, ok ." "About the thing just now, I felt that it's not very appropriate of you to say that you can bully the Xiao mei and I'm not very please about this. I can help you, but it's out of consideration and not obligation." "Ok, I know now and I will not ask that of you in the future". .......................... Did i did the right thing? I don't know, but I'm certain that I'm not someone to be bullied by a Peahen!. A sense of rightness overcame me as I matched across the walkway of Suntec Boulevard.
As expected, relationship turned downhill. A naive me thought that all she needs is some cooling time and things will be fine... urmm wrong again. It has been confirmed that flower of friendship has withered , or maybe it doesn't exist in the first place. I smiled at her, no response, no look at me in the eye anymore and minimal small talk - reduced to none now ... Gone are the good old days when we chatted over lunch about family, career, unhappiness etc... reflecting upon this, maybe i did most of the talking, realized that I actually don't really know her that well at all.
Till date, our relationship hasn't improve at all, and the future doesn't seem bright. I dun understand why it still affects me to see her attitude towards me like that, maybe coz I labeled her as a friend too early.
Gotta go, coz miss Peahen requested me to help to fetch an urgent mail from the receptionist now...
Come enlightening comments might help this poor dolphin here =)
2 comments:
Seems like a real sticky situation there...Not sure what we can do for peahen here...maybe try make frens all over again since she's in the same team.... but going forward and for future peahens, maybe can try siam the tasks with grace [etc "I'm busy at the moment", "Would love to help but very busy so maybe can ask "whichever temp" to help first" ... ]?
Its not that sticky a situation. You just got to be thick-skinned and continue being friendly. Some like to call it professionalism, others like to call if perseverence. Whatever it is, its a win-win situation. She will either warm up to you eventually and the friendship will be restored, or your other colleagues will notice your generousity and treat you with more respect, or you can simply walk away from an idiot like her and know that you tried your best to accomodate her. And the bottomline is, we are all here for you, so dont let a weirdo colleague bring you down. Chin up!!! =)
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