Unfriendly desk neighbor

Don’t you just hate it when people seem to have bad vibes for no reason? Well… this is the case of my former desk neighbor at work.

There I am, starting at the job, happily smiling to everybody that I am meeting. You know, those first days are always crucial. So I talk to people, ask them about themselves, genuinely interested in their lives, trying to get to know them.

And then I talk to this woman that ends up being my desk neighbor. Apparently I could not say anything right. She starts talking about how terrible it is for her and new men because she is so freakishly tall for Mérida. Ok, she is tall, but not thaaaat tall (I did not say that to her though). So I try to console her, tell her to just ignore the small minded men that think that her tallness is terrible, that there is hope for a good looking, smart, tall woman in this city; that I don’t really understand (because I am seriously vertically challenged), but that I know she is not alone in this sort of pain because my cousins are also tall and also like to wear high heels, and that they also suffer. Terrible they are, these short meridian men… not a good comment.

She talks about how much she likes shoes, and that nobody understands her love for them. So when I got these beautiful new smurf-blue shoes and showed her, tell her where I found them, she looks me up and down and tells me: I hate blue shoes.

Beautiful right?

She talks about how terrible it was for her as a woman to study mechanical engineering; that she had to get tough because the men were mean to her. When she asked me what I studied I said: industrial engineering.  She just spats (like… with spit flowing from her mouth) out at me: “well... that is not real engineering, there are more women there”. Let it be known that I never said otherwise, I believe us, industrial engineers, are turbo management. Then she starts to say how low that engineering is and all this crap about me. I got very mad now, so I turned and said: “well yeah, I know what you mean, tooootally right, because when I arrived to my masters, material science, I really learnt what it meant to study”. She turns around and says with this condescending look: “where did you study that? There is no such master in Mexico?” so I answered: “well… of course there isn’t in Mexico, I studied in Germany”. She actually Pfffed at me and said: “oh please, yeah right, like you did”. I looked her right in the eye and said: “yes I did, a European master in Germany, with labs, crazy experiments… the whole thing”.  And the list goes on and on.

I guess she just didn’t like me at all from the get go. So there is nothing better than to be obviously ignored and be the target of rudeness 5 days a week, 10 hours a day; to arrive on a Monday morning, settle in front of my computer, and when she comes in (late), she says hi to everybody by name and skips me like a puddle.

After that, well… I started taking pleasure in the little things. Yes, I started doing things just to piss her off jijijiji. Like when she comes in, I say hello directly to her, so she has to answer. When she goes by me in the hall and (deliberately) bumps into me, I say: oh sorry, she ignores me, so I repeat (in front of everybody): (name) I’m sorry I bumped into you. Then her cellphone rings aaaaaaaaaaaaaaall the time to: oh, I just died in your arms tonight, like... 27 times a day and this is no joke; so I started singing it every single time and saying: man! I love that song. She finally put it in silence. Then she skypes with people, like… socially skiping with men that are in Iraq, during work hours; needless to say, when the boss is not there. But not everybody at work speaks English, but I do. So when she says a joke, obviously, I hear it, because I am next to her, so I laugh too and I don’t hide it. She stopped doing that too. She talks bad about me to the secretary and now she also hates me and doesn’t hide it.

They moved me to a different area with more space, and now I have to girls that report to me in a new project… oooohhh she hated that jijijiji.

Now she hates me more than ever, so I laugh, I make jokes with her boss whom she hates and hates it even more when he laughs back.

I really do not understand what I did to earn her dislike from the first hello, but now, I have a never-ending source of fun at the office. The very sad thing is everybody at work hates her. Oh well… those are the stories of the bad-vibe desk neighbor