I’m sorry if this doesn’t fit but I don’t know where else to talk about this.
For context, I work for an unnamed global pizza chain restaurant as a delivery driver (there, I narrowed it down to like three options lol). At our store delivery drivers usually do basic inside tasks like dishes, boxing pizzas, taking orders on the phone, window washing, etc. when we aren’t out on the road.
I’ve been working there for a little under 6 months part-time and overall I’ve been enjoying it but lately I’ve been hating it more and more because of just one person. Usually she works nights and I work mornings, but because our shifts got switched around, we’ve been working the same shift more often than not, so I get to interact with her more. Basically, whenever she’s around me she is literally not positive. Has nothing nice to say. She’s always either overly critical of me or just generally has a terrible mood whenever I’m around.
I know I’ve been working 6 months but I’m still a part-time worker so it’s taken me a little bit to catch up on a few minor aspects of the job, and I’m still learning a lot of things (we have a lot of responsibilities), in part because the manager who trained me did a really bad job of it. I feel like it’s natural to make mistakes but every time I make a mistake around her it gets exacerbated to an extreme amount. For example just today I was doing the dishes the way I’ve been taught and the way everybody else I know does it, yet she said I missed a spot on 2 of the like 20 tubs that just dried and gave them back to me. Instead of just going “you missed a spot” or saying “here’s the way I do them,” it was “you’re doing them wrong and you’re the reason we keep getting complaints from the pizzamakers about dirty dishes.” I was baffled because I’d never heard a complaint from them about it, and I didn’t hear one from my 6 managers or from the general manager.
I’m fine with criticism but it’s just that none of it ever seems to be constructive. For another example, a few weeks ago we were having a conversation about how we handle the hotbags when we’re delivering. Me and another driver said we like to have the pizza in the bag until the customer opens the door, while she and another driver like to pull it out of the bag before knocking. It’s all personal preference and not really specified in the employee handbook, but she still made it out like me and my coworker were wrong and the way we did it was stupid. There was one time I had a brain fart and forgot to cut pizzas like 4 times in a row, and my actual manager came out and said “it’s cool I’ve done that before” and made sure I cut them right while I was all embarrassed. I felt so much better after that one than a multitude of what this coworker does. And before anybody asks, she’s a coworker. Same level as me, about 1 year more experienced. Not a manager. It’s so crazy to me that she’s such a perfectionist too because whenever she closes we usually end up with food fights at 2 am or a bunch of dishes stacked into a pyramid. Usual teenager shenanigans. But when I’m working around her, she pushes me harder than the damn general manager pushes me, and its his wage on the line when we aren’t working the best we can.
And it sucks too because I don’t see her do this to anybody else. She’s got seniority over like 5 of my other coworkers but she gets along fine with them. We’ve even got a new guy who’s only been working for 2 weeks and I see her and him laughing and joking around a bunch. I have a feeling that she just wants really hard to be a manager, because she posts “PSAs” in our group chat just like the managers do when she sees something done wrong, and always complains about some of my slower coworkers behind our back. Apparently the slowest coworker by metrics is moving to another store soon and she told me and said it was “good” and that “maybe we’ll get somebody faster.” I personally don’t really give a shit who we get as a driver as long as it’s somebody nice to talk to. If we’re overloaded as a store that seems to me more like a problem with management than it is with individual drivers.
I know I’m not at work to make friends, just get paid, but it would be nice not to have such a mentally draining experience at work. It’s not only mentally draining to be constantly critiqued by somebody who appears to be trying really hard to be promoted, but to hear her talk shit about people in the workplace like a middle schooler. She even called a customer “a fucking dumb idiot” for ordering ranch packets (which come with salads) instead of ranch dip cups (which come with pizza), which to me just seems so overblown. I don’t want to be friends with everybody but I’d at least like to be positive, you know? I’ve got coworkers who come back from being stiffed on a delivery or come back from a delivery of 20 pizzas and 10 sides who aren’t nearly as pissed off about it as she is.
We have a shift together tomorrow. Me for 6 hours and her closing the store. I just want to call in sick because I just don’t look forward to whatever mean thing she has to say.
sorry for the really long post, I just had a lot to get off my chest.
TL;DR: my coworker is overbearing and always on my ass about stuff even though she’s not a manager. She’s not like this with other coworkers and she pushes me to be a perfectionist despite regular mistakes on her end when she closes the store. I can’t just ignore her because even when ignoring her, her negativity seeps in.
Oh, man, This is so hard. I feel for you. She could be testing you. She’s waiting for you to say something back. This type of testing could be good or bad. She could be testing you to see if you have the courage to complain about what she’s doing. She could be testing you to see if you get impatient and explode so she has a reason to complain about you. She might like you, she might not like you. You are mature in your attitude because you don’t feel like you need to be friends with or like the people you work with to work with them in a productive way. Maybe she is totally immature and just has it out for you because she doesn’t like your hair or whatever random reason. Her behavior is most definitely immature, because this is what children do with teachers. I’m a teacher, this is what some children do with new teachers. They press the buttons, push the envelope, read and interpret the rules and try to test them out. I have had so many co-workers like this. Six months is a long time to be working with her and never have a dead moment in the work day when she actually tries to engage you in casual conversation, so it might happen soon. With co-workers like this, when there is a dead moment in the shift and for whatever reason this type of person wants to make casual conversation, I just make like they aren’t talking to me, like I never even heard them. It really makes them angry to the point of almost hostility. After that, these types of petty nonsense interactions while working disappear for me because they realize they are not getting anywhere and have no power over me. This is what, in the end, she is testing. Her power. At some point, she will realize that she has none, just like you. I really hope there is a dead moment when she tries to make casual conversation, because it really is pivotal for people like her when you ignore them. I’ve even done the lovely thing of saying, when they get in my face because I’m ignoring them, “sorry, not here for chit-chat. if it’s work-related I might be all ears for you, not that it really matters, you’re the same as me.” After that, I have been left alone to do my job and, sometimes, I’ve even made a friend, actually. The first person I did this to like 20 years ago is actually a good friend of mine now, so many years later, when we have our careers yadda yadda and don’t work together anymore.