working title

Cranky Sue, Take Two

Never did I think I’d have two Cranky Sue’s in my life. The first one was bad enough, working with a woman with chronic migraines (who then got pregnant, don’t forget), but now I found myself in another situation working with someone with a chronic pain disorder. It wasn’t explained to me immediately, but then it made total sense when it was revealed to me later by her supervisor (which, in retrospect, seems like a HIPPA violation).

This woman was stubborn as Hell. She had her particular way to do things and if I did anything differently, I did it wrong and needed to be correctly.

In one instance, she didn’t like the way I opened a folder on my own desktop. She snapped, “Don’t open it that way! I don’t like when you open it that way!”

She constantly told me that she had to check my work because if something was wrong, she would be the one who would be screamed at for it being wrong. (Though I wasn’t at this place very long, I had never seen someone even sternly spoken to, but maybe I was missing these screaming matches she spoke about)

I missed highlighting a line on a piece of paperwork, and she called to me, “Maybe YOU don’t care about these things, but they’re important to me!”

She was miserable, a terror to work with, and she was one of the most judgmental people I had ever met, too. She spent her lunch time reading magazines about celebrities, judging them and criticizing them. The whole office staff was like that, really. They’d ask my opinion on a celebrity or the latest movie, and I never had one. I had lost a member of my family just a few months before, which put some things in perspective. What celebrities chose to do with their personal lives was of very little concern to me when I was dealing with a tragic loss. Regardless, they kept asking my opinion and made me feel like an outsider constantly.