So… this can just happen…

I complain about my job a lot on this blog.  My job is very stressful, mostly because I work with so many stupid people.  And please don’t think I’m trying to get laughs, I want to say right now this isn’t a funny post.  I’m serious when I say this.  I work with some of the dumbest people I have ever met.

I can not fathom how so many stupid people have gotten concentrated at one organization – let alone an organization that continues to function.  Sometimes it blows my mind.

But I’m digressing.  I want to use the remaining functioning brain cells tonight to relay a story of what happened to me at work today.  This can happen to anyone, and had I not handled it as I did, and if things had gone a little differently, I might have been fired for doing absolutely no wrong.

Background: My boss got fired three weeks ago.  This is a very good decision, because he was actively trying to get fired for the last two years.  We called him “Obstruktor” and I hated working with him for those two years.  Oddly, he went from being one of my best bosses to one of my worst.

I was telling this to a friend at work as I was cleaning out my coffee mug and getting a refill.  I was telling him how my boss was not doing his job, and how he was actively trying to get fired, and how he deserved to be fired.

In walked another coworker.  She looked upset.  I said Hi to her but she didn’t even look at me.  I thought nothing of it, because I know that she is under a lot of stress and pressure right now too.

However, she thought I was talking about her.  I don’t know why or how she thought she heard her name… it sounds nothing like my former boss’s name.

She (as I found out later) was extremely upset and started to cry at her desk over the things I had said.  She sent me an email asking me for an explanation and telling me that she was making a formal complaint to her boss and her boss’s boss.

Enter another complicating factor: the Head Office IT people are also colossal fucking idiots and I have not been able to receive email for 2 days.   By the time this had gotten fixed, two hours had past, and the mistaken coworker had created QUITE an issue over her mistake in hearing.

I read her email and didn’t understand it at first.  So I replied and asked her to explain.  Then after I thought about it, I realized what she had overheard, and what she had thought I had been saying about her.  So I sent an email to her boss and her boss’s boss explaining my side of things.

In the end, it was recognized as a “misunderstanding”.  But this has worried me deeply.  What if those fucking colossal idiots at Head Office IT didn’t get my email working for me at all?  What if I hadn’t been allowed to cool things down with my carefully chosen words in time?

And it worries me that this can happen at all.  And I didn’t even get an apology.

Fuck I hate my job.