Our story begins when I decided to go for a factory job. I wanted out of retail — the global health crisis and people’s ever-growing sense of entitlement was the last straw — so I thought, “Factory work! No customers, no stress, just an easy job.”
Wrong-o.
The factory itself was a very bad atmosphere. To put it into context, four of us were hired on the same day. In two weeks, I was the only one left. One quit before the end of the first shift. It wasn’t a nice place, and [Coworker] made darn sure of it.
[Coworker] — who is our bad colleague in this story — was horrific. It started when I was happily munching my lunch. Ten minutes into my break, they came in and told me:
Coworker: “You’re in my seat. You need to move.”
I didn’t want confrontation, so I moved my stuff. Bear in mind that the staff room was empty; they could have easily sat anywhere. Nope.
From that moment on, they were just a horrible person. They would stand with their sidekick and watch everyone else clean up at the end of the day and complain about how everyone was doing it wrong. They even told me I was using a squeegee wrong, and even though at one point I was in the middle of using it, they ordered me to go around, collect all the squeegees, and put them back where they should be. Okay. No one’s finished with them yet, but sure.
On another occasion, I was standing talking to a colleague for perhaps thirty seconds when [Coworker] stormed over and told us to stop talking and start working. They then went back to their little sidekick to have a moan about how we were slacking. A boss told me what to do. [Coworker] told me to do something else, and when I told [Coworker] that I’d already been given orders, they stormed up to the boss to demand why I was already being given jobs.
The worst part for me was by far my quiet nature. I’m not a shouter, and I quickly found out on my first day that I was expected to watch a reel of discarded plastic on one of the machines and yell across the factory to get someone to come and replace it. Every time it started getting full, [Coworker] would come and give me an absolute earful about how I should be doing my job properly, watching the reel, and yelling for someone. I couldn’t. I couldn’t yell.
So, it got to the point where I’d be a massive ball of stress and anxiety staring at this reel, desperately trying to get anyone’s attention to come to replace it. And when it did get too full, again [Coworker] would come and tell me off for it, despite the fact that I was just trying so hard to get someone’s attention. I couldn’t pause the machine, either, to get someone, or else, once again, [Coworker] would flay me alive for it.
[Coworker]’s constant berating, gossiping behind my back to their friend, and ordering me around got too much. Already dealing with mental health problems, I ended up signing off work for several weeks, and when I did go back, I was terrified.
Enough was enough when, one day, we were working in the absolute sweltering heat. A young lad who was working with us was sweating buckets, which was understandable; he was moving heavy trays around. At one point, he said he was off to get some water. And [Coworker] yelled after him:
Coworker: “Get some deodorant while you’re at it!”
I ended up going to the boss about [Coworker], and it turned out that they had pretty much belittled every single person in that factory. They were a bully, simple as. After a meeting with the boss, they were suspended from work and eventually put on another shift away from all of us who they loved to target.
I left that place for a different factory, eventually. The atmosphere is entirely different. Bullies are stamped down on hard, and everyone is so friendly. Given the choice, I would not set foot in that place ever again. I wish [Coworker] realised that bullying and talking down to people really does do more harm than they might have thought.
