Many articles have been written about love at work. Should you date a co-worker? Openly or clandestinely? How are you supposed to meet anyone who isn’t a colleague when you spend all your time at work?

This will not be one of those articles. Because judging by my mail, the people mixing love and work are a fairly happy lot. It’s easy to work with someone you love. The real challenge is working with someone you hate.

“Hate is a strong word,” one female reader, a few years out of school and working as an executive assistant at a big consumer products company, said of a co-worker whom “I strongly, strongly, strongly dislike.”

The pair once were work friends. They had lunch together regularly and made Starbucks trips for each other. They even joined forces when the work piled up. But then, about a year ago, there was a tussle over vacation dates, and the colleague, who had a bit less seniority, lost. Since then there have been no shared lattes.

Instead, the colleague “leaves her trash from lunch in my trash can, smelly things like blue cheese or cauliflower or tuna,” said the reader, who prefers not to use her name for fear she will escalate hostilities. “She blows her nose and just misses my trash, so that my choice is to pick up her used tissue or leave it lying on my floor.” The reader fantasises about retaliation. “So far I haven’t had the guts,” she said. “But I’m working up to it.”

Susan Storey was working at a small magazine when she (the associate editor) ended things with the editor in chief after a two-year relationship. Their desks were 3 meters apart, she said, and he spent a lot of time on the phone “sweet-talking other women” after the split. In the middle of this monologue, Storey was called by the president of the company, who told her “he was glad we had broken up because he had been wanting to fire my ex.”

Storey took the high road; she used her contacts to help find a new job for him. “In another state,” she said slyly. There are more duelling people in offices than you might guess. An online survey in 2006, by VitalSmarts, a company in Provo, Utah, that teaches communications skills to employees, found that 93 per cent of the 967 respondents say they work with “nasty, unreliable or eccentric employees.” And only one in four confront the hated one, the survey found.

That really isn’t surprising, particularly since the offender is so often the boss. “He’s like Michael Scott, but stripped of any endearing qualities,” an employee at a Boston ad agency said of her boss, comparing him to the incompetent, bumbling middle manager on the television show “The Office.” Her real-life supervisor, she said, “thinks he’s funny but his jokes are terrible, he swears like a sailor, he’s rude and sarcastic.”

“All I have learned from him is how to work with someone you hate,” she added. She has thought about quitting but thinks she needs to stay longer so that she does not have the resume of a job jumper.

Battle at work

Meanwhile, she is handling the situation by getting in her digs where she can. Before a recent meeting with her boss and the company’s chief executive, she sent her boss an update of the accounts to be discussed, assuming he would not get around to reading it.

As she had guessed, he turned to her at the meeting, and she sweetly said, “Oh, we haven’t moved forward on that in a week because we were waiting for your comments on my e-mail.” Quitting is one way to deal with office hatred, and sabotage is another. But there are better ways, suggests Marsha Petrie Sue, the author of “Toxic People: Decontaminate Difficult People at Work Without Using Weapons or Duct Tape”. Sue divides hateful co-workers into categories, including the Steamroller (a bully who is not necessarily right but is determined) and the Backstabber. Sue knows so much about this, she said, because she used to be one of them.

As a manager on Wall Street, Sue was on the losing end of two wrongful-termination suits. Both times she had fired subordinates in a way that was, in her words, “totally wrong on so many levels.”

The first suit was brought because she criticised an employee’s frequent absences saying: “Are you sure you’re really sick? Come in here and we’ll decide how sick you are and whether you should go home.” The second was a result of her critique of another employee with child care problems: “You should have thought about that before you took this job.”

What turned her around, Sue said, was an intervention. Her bosses insisted that she attend “charm school.” But if management isn’t willing to step forward at your workplace, Sue said, the trick is to “call out the behaviour in a public way, don’t just take it.”

So the worker with the smelly trash might pick it up and carry it into her tormentor’s cubicle when others are watching. And the manager who fails to answer e-mail messages should be asked in front of the chief executive, “Shall I leave a note on your desk whenever I send you an urgent e-mail since I know you get so many messages every day?”

Dealing with relationships

If all these working relationships sound beyond repair, consider the case of Anne DeMarzo and Howard Greenberg, who met at work selling real estate in 1985, were engaged and broke things off. She accused him of loving the dog more than her. He worried that she would get old and let herself go. A few years later they became partners in DeMarzo Realty, a Manhattan brokerage. “Just because we weren’t meant for each other doesn’t mean we don’t work great together,” Greenberg said.

Source: New York Times