I worked in a small law firm for a few months in the States. The main guy was ok and nice enough, but he had an associate there with him and she was the strangest, meanest bitch. She didn’t know me from a bar of soap, but she would say the meanest things and I had never done anything to her, or even spoken to her other than to say hello as she passed the front desk. It was a small town and I asked around about her. Apparently she had been working at the local prosecutors office and had some sort of break down or bust-up over something. Damaged beyond repair, I’d say.
Another person was a work colleague in New Zealand. I was a new hire from outside and she had been there for a while. I became her manager. What I didn’t know right away was that she had applied for the job I got and felt mightily slighted. Problem was, she was meant to ‘show me the ropes’ and she did show me some ropes; the type she would try to hang me with. She sabotaged me every chance she got, feeding me misinformation. In the end, I stopped asking her things, and she complained to the boss about it, saying that I wasn’t ‘letting her do her job.’ She stoled my keys and I had finally had enough. She wrote a letter to the boss making a formal complaint about me, I wrote one about her based on actual facts (her biggest complaint was how she ‘felt’ and she accused me having slammed a door in anger at the office.??) I found the keys in a locked drawer in her office. It was a drawer I had asked her to open in front of witnesses earlier in the day and she refused. I cleared it with HR to open it in her absence, with witnesses, and so I did, and there were my keys. All this while, she thinks that she is going to force me to leave and get my job… hmmmm…. I did end up leaving to take a much better paying position somewhere else, but she got the sack.