10th Mar 2008
Ms. Theologian comments on rudeness
Dear Ms. Theologian,
What do you do when a secretary is consistently rude to you?
She doesn’t support me, and I know her boss is fond of her. I’ve tried the “Claire, are you ok? You sound like you’re stressed out” approach and she doesn’t get it. She’s rude-ish to everybody, but seems to save special contempt for me.
I don’t want to go to her boss, and I don’t especially want to confront her myself as she’s already mean to me and would probably regard that as pulling rank. So maybe I should just put up with it. But it’s really irritating. She sits near me and makes everyday office interactions much more annoying.
-Irritated
Dear Irritated,
We truly have no idea what goes on in the inner lives of most of our coworkers. Some share a lot; some share a little; some share nothing. So we do not know if consistent rudeness is the result of any number of dead spouses, dead dogs, or dead plants, or any number of other situations. Let’s assume it’s the absolute worst and that she’s suffering with a type of painful incurable cancer, her spouse and friends abandonned her, her dog died, her plants are spindly, and chocolate no longer tastes good.
One day this summer, Ms. Theologian’s housemate at Squaw told her a story about how she managed to free herself of a stalker with a totally unjustified apology. Now Ms. Theologian is of the frame of mind that an apology is part of a social contract: I apologize to you, then you can choose to forgive me. Without the apology, there is no forgiveness according to Ms. Theologian (though you can let go, get over it, move on, whatever). Ms. Theologian thinks there’s the possibility that you can have an absolutely private conversation with her that says something like, “I really like and respect you, and sense that I may have deeply offended you, and I’d like to apologize for whatever I said or did.” Reword as you see fit, but make it an apology, and not a confrontation.
Other than that, Ms. Theologian thinks you have three options:
1. To continue with the current strategy, which appears to be to cope with the rudeness and become irritated, but sort of suffer through;
2. To fill your heart with loving kindness and be absolutely perfectly kind, respectful, considerate no matter how this person behaves to you. This allows you to sleep at night.
3. To simply mirror her behavior back to her, which will no doubt catch on until everyone in the office is some kind of rude.
Ms. Theologian votes for #2 or the unjustified apology.
-Ms. Theologian
P.S. If you have a work related question, send the question in an email to ms dot theologial at gmail dot com. It will be posted here with some sort of answer.
I probably will go with the unjustified apology. Thanks.
It was startling effective with the stalker. Sometimes all people want to know is that you know you hurt them and regret it. Even if you don’t really know what you did.
I find that in time, most people will do themselves in and often trying to interject yourself in the situation only makes matters worse.
Don’t kick them when they’re down, either.