I don't know what it is, but I seem to attract bullies. That is why I hope and pray that being a farmer and selling at the farmer's market and raising and showing Angora Goats will be my perfect job! My blood pressure is already down and I have lost a fair amount of weight. I no longer get dizzy spells or feel like I might pass out (happened almost daily when I worked at Cerner - I can't tell you how many times I thought I would black out between the car and my cubicle - this never happened when I was traveling and working with clients - it was just some of the people I worked with and/or for at Cerner).

I no longer get panic attacks when I'm driving. I am not on edge all the time. This is good.

The first time I ran into bullying on the job was when I first graduated from college way back in 1975. I worked for the Missouri Division of Family Services, and my supervisor and her boss did not care for me. The other people in the small group I worked with went to lunch with Karen and her boss pretty regularly. They all sat around together and if I tried to join them, they would all leave.

And then, there was the day when my boss, Karen, called me in and told me that she didn't care for my wardrobe. I only had 5 outfits for work, which involved going to the awful parts of the County and helping out people who needed food, shelter, etc - I went to a lot of not so nice places. One of the other women I worked with lived at home with her parents in Leawood, Kansas. A very pricey suburb of Kansas City. She looked like a model and dressed like one, too.

I was a newlywed with a crappy, low paying job as a caseworker (started at $550 a month) and I have never looked like a model or dressed like one - LOL).

Anyway, I was terribly embarrassed that Karen didn't think I dressed well enough to venture out and go to the projects, etc. They started shunning me - I transferred to a different group as quickly as I could, and things were much better there.

I never ran into any bullying at QuikTrip - that was a very good company to work for, even if I was the only woman working in any of their stores at the time. The guys were good to work for, the supervisors were good, but the 64 hour work weeks got old after a few years.

In fact, I didn't run into any bullying again until I worked for Sprint. The worst bullying occurred when I worked in a billing group with a bunch of other women. It involved getting billing out using a software program called CASS. It also involved provisioning special lines for businesses.

Anyway, I picked up how to do the billing pretty easily, and I was pretty fast and didn't make mistakes. I was usually finished a couple of hours before the day was over, so I'd ask for more work. Big mistake.

It seems that the women I worked with resented my competence. One day, I was told there was a special meeting. I walked to the meeting room, and my supervisor, Cindy, was there with the entire department. She said that they had brought me into the meeting to tell me that I was a problem in the group. All of my co-workers spoke one-by-one about how I made them feel bad about themselves because I did so much work. They all hated me and wanted to let me know that.

I was stunned and heartbroken. I was crying, they kept on telling me that I was upsetting them because they could not keep up with me.

Holy Shit! I was being berated for being too good. I stood up to leave, and Cindy, my idiot supervisor, shoved me back down in my chair. I stood up again, and told her she cannot touch me and I left the room, in tears. It was much worse than I can describe.

Our manager was out of town, so I went to our acting director. He was rather stunned at what I told him, and told me that I could just stay home and they would pay me until I found another job at Sprint to move to. Well, I told him that I wanted to work, that it would not be right for Sprint to pay me to do nothing.

When my manager (not supervisor), got back into town, she called me into her office and said it was all my fault because I was too smart.She suggested that I play dumb, because the other women would feel better then. She said I did my job too well.

I got into the IT department at Sprint and did well for several years there, until I got another rotten supervisor. A man who was so inept that he sent me his emails to edit before he would send them out. The guy could not write a complete sentence. Ever.
Another guy I worked with, Bob, got pissed off at me one day because I made a mistake with our internal web. Bob chased me through the department, yelling at me. I cryed. The damn boss, whose name I have hidden away deep into my subconscious, got all pissed off at me for crying. After getting excellent reviews for several years previously, in the same job, this asshole gave me a needs improvement rating because I cried.

So, I left Sprint and went to Birch Telecom, which was an awful mistake. That company had purchased all kinds of software and really didn't need all they had.

Naturally, there was another supervisor who was awful. He would stand behind me and yell at me that he wanted a new report written and run right now! He would tell me I was incompetent and worse. He humiliated me in front of contractors. He lied about me. He was not even my boss. He was director in the department. Eventually, he was fired. I went to HR and complained, and they went straight to Rob and told him that I had complained - gee, thanks, HR! Until he was fired, I was subjected to an incredibly abusive tirade coming out of his mouth for hours each day. Ulcer anyone?

I thought I was saved when Cerner hired me. They called me after seeing my resume on Monster. I loved what I did. I loved the job. At that time, there were very few women in the group of 100 + people I was in - 4 or 5, I think. In the particular sub-group I was in, there was one other woman, who screamed at me a lot - because I had not been there as long as she had and I should not be able to understand the software better than she did. Once again, I was bullied because I was smart. She left the company, two of the guys I worked with started on me.

Once, when I was talking to a client - a paying customer, I turned around and asked Brian to please keep his voice down as I could not hear the client on the phone - he was talking to another guy in our little cubicle farm from hell. He yelled at me - honestly, called me honey, said I would be better off listening to him so I could learn something.

And then, there was Kurt - brilliant kid, brilliant, but he should never be allowed to train any employee, because he was just plain mean.

Eventually, I got to be the best person in the group who did what I did. I got Outstanding ratings from two different bosses. The clients loved me. I trained new people coming into our group, and watched as these guys went out to lunch regularly with the bosses, and I was rarely invited. Then I watched as the guys I trained and continued to help get promoted to positions above me.

There was another bully - a short guy - Napoleon Complex, maybe? Who needed a lot of help. I suspect Michael had ADD or something, as he would ask the same questions day after day after day.

One day, I wrote out an outline of how to find out from the clients what the problem was and the steps to fix the issues. I gave it to him, and he took one look at it, walked over to our boss, threw the several pages to the ground and yelled - you call these instructions? I suspect he didn't understand all the words I used. Several of the guys I worked with would swear I was making words up because they had a crappy vocabulary.

Anyway, I told him to never ask for help from me again, and of course, I got in trouble for not being nice to the little jerk after he insulted me.

Sigh. I should have realized that I was not going to fit in at Cerner. I'm older than the great majority of the employees, and I'm not a pretty, skinny, little girl wearing high heels every day and sleeping around. What a soap opera that place is.

After 6 years there, I was laid off. Why? Because I complained to my boss and manager about how my new manager, a pregnant blond woman, treated me. She was almost the worst of the bunch. She completely ignored me, refused to help me, and really set me up to fail.

I'm so glad that I have this opportunity to be self-employed. I can decide which project to work on, and I get to spend a lot of time outdoors with the horses and chickens and guineas, and soon, the angora goats.

I am able to garden all I want. It's heaven. I just hope I can actually make some money doing this, because I'm putting in a lot of hours.

So if you find that you have co-workers or bosses bullying you, get a different job just as fast as you can and do not go through the 100 pound weight gain and high blood pressure that I did at Cerner. The first time some one tells you that they make you feel bad because you are too smart, get the hell out of that company, or at least the group you are working in. Because no matter what you do, how hard you try, the bullies do not change. Ever.

I used to lay awake at night worried about my job because of the incredible stress of being mocked, ignored, shunned and otherwise treated like a leper.

My performance has always been very good. I won awards for my performance. But it doesn't matter if people are so mean that you get dizzy walking from the car to the cubicle farm.

I freely admit that I am the cause of the bullying. There is something about my personality that seems to encourage that behaviour. And being smart makes it worse, I guess.

I was taught to work hard, and that working hard would be rewarded.

How I wish this was true in the corporate world. But it isn't.