Self-Hatred In The Workplace

I work for a microphone manufacturer that actually manufactures microphones…in the United States, which is a very unusual thing for my industry. Most products like these are made in developing world countries for tiny amounts of money and come in containers. Right now, those containers sit in traffic jams on the world’s oceans that make the port of LA one backlogged ocean eyesore of eyesores. We have a great supply chain manager, who I’ll call R, who does the best with what she can do and a few of us wanted to do something nice for her.

So I started polling my coworkers in the front office to see who if anyone would chip in. And I got to one person whom I figured would decline but I got an answer that on one hand doesn’t shock or surprise me but on the other hand that she actually said it to my face without batting an eyelash inspired me to write this article. 25 year-old me would have gotten the analysis of this entirely wrong. I would have simply thought, “Wow, why is she so upset with R?” instead of what I know today as “Wow, she really hates herself.”

I went through my little spiel on what we wanted to do for R, and my coworker said “I’m not interested.” Followed right afterward by “R’s not my favorite person.” There’s nobody at my work that deserves to be described as “not my favorite person”. It kind of reminds me of this girl in college I had a thing for and when I had the guts to ask her out I was basically told “I-have-a-boyfriend-but-if-I-didn’t-eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeewwwwww” except you can make an excuse for stuck-up pubescent college kids. Supposed adults over 50 who need to piss on someone else for no reason? Not so much.

This person is just a piece of the toxic culture that does exist in my workplace, and it doesn’t take much in such a small company for it to make an impact. The good news is that we were just bought by a large UK outfit that is going to fix a lot of things, including this ass-backwards culture we have (operations taking credit for products that sell while not keeping up with demand, and blaming sales for products that don’t sell because sorry-you-can’t-sell-turd-products-no-matter-how-good-the-turd-sounds, for example) and hopefully this person leaves like she’s been threatening to do for years.

Don’t let the door hit your ass on the way out.