I just need to say it to someone; this is absolutely batty because she worked there for decades and we are unionized, and it would take a serious pattern of behaviour or something that would result in instant dismissal. She was really crazy in kind of a dangerous underground fashion, she broke every rule about treatment of others imaginable. She expected me to do her job whenever she felt too busy and would give me a death stare if I resisted. I finally grieved it and won, because I have a full time role that eats every moment of my day, and she could at any time file workload grievances herself to get herself more help. She would say and do really nasty manipulative things to you, but then turn around and buy you a gift. She got in fights with others fairly often, and told everyone what to do. She was a martyr about her workload, and just the nastiest, gossipy, two faced person. I refused to eat lunch with her and would go later.

Anyway, one day she was called to a meeting with the very good and fair and capable manager in the middle of the day and simply never returned. Several weeks went by, and she had apparently insinuated to other staff that it was a leave of absence due to family issues, and then one day texted one of us to tell us she had retired. A very strange “we wish her the best in her future endeavors” email went out, which was not in any way a retirement email, so we scraped together a goodbye dinner, where she stated she had just wanted to go out the door and be done. We got through the dinner and wished her well and said the things you should say, and that was the end.

All of this is obviously a lie; I found out later that we were told the party could not be held at work, she came after hours to get her stuff she left behind, and that was that. It felt bizarre. Some time later I heard that she had really sniped at the manager one day, and I think it was part of a long list of complaints. The time she was “on leave” would have amounted to all of her remaining vacation time when I count it up.

But what’s most remarkable is how the staff didn’t talk to each other about the problem really. Now that the tension has ebbed, we started talking to each other about it, and the depth of how much we were all pretending to get along with her, and how much each one of us actually did not. The coworker I thought was really her friend told me how much she hated her and how she felt she couldn’t be herself for one moment around her. Little by little it’s all emerging, the way we all tiptoed around her.

The moral of my story is, if someone is being manipulative to you, confront it. We’ve spent YEARS pretending to get along just to get along. I did speak up to her a couple of times over the years, but I always ended up paying for it eventually. Don’t do this; if someone is doing this confront them. It sucks to walk on eggshells around someone you spend a good chunk of your life with.