23rd Aug 2009
Please don’t talk to me anymore or you might get me fired
I thought I should share this story to enlighten some of you who may be doing this where you work. This is a story about a girl named Virginia. You probably know someone like her.
Virginia is not a bad person. She just doesn’t handle stress very well. She is quick to blame other people for any problem that arises. She has a big heart but she just doesn’t realize how her actions change everyone’s perception about her.
One day in 2008 I was visiting a client of mine. Ironically, Virginia worked in human resources for this client. She had only been working there for a matter of three or four months. I got along well with her. She liked to chit chat whenever I was there to do some work at the office.
I guess maybe she confided in me a little too much for my own good. She began this habit of telling me things in confidence whenever I was around the office doing some work. The things she would tell me were always work related. basically she was complaining about how things were being run there. She was unhappy with her workload. She felt that management was abusing her skills and experience and didn’t really care about her personally.
I told her that the management (who I happened to know pretty well) did in fact care about her work as well as her as a person. She was insistent that they of course had no idea how to run a company. I guess the four million dollars they did in business each year and the many people that happily worked there weren’t proof enough for her that they did know what they were doing.
Being the diplomat that I am, I just listened to her when she would complain and I kind of played along nodding my head saying “Yeah, I guess I kind of see your point”. I was basically just trying to keep everyone happy so that I wouldn’t jeopardize my contract with her organization. Her complaining began to grow and grow. Every time I would have work to do at that company, she would be there whining about this or that.
It basically got to a point where if an outsider had seen us, it would look like we were both complaining about something to do with her company. I knew this was a bad road to go down. It was no longer wise of me to allow this to continue. I was forced to ask her to please keep her thoughts about her employers to herself. I reminded her that her boss is the one who made sure my company got paid for the services we provided.
That pretty much ended her complaining to me. However, I started noticing that whenever she wasn’t around, her coworkers would make jokes about her complaining. Now, I don’t think she was a bad person. She cared for her coworkers. Yet, because of her incessant whining, she painted herself as this bitchy office girl who was just always going to be miserable no matter what.
It didn’t take long before everyone in that organization knew exactly where she stood. Everybody from the part time help right up to the CEO learned through the grapevine about how this girl was creating all this negativity in the organization. Successful people know that negativity is like a cancer in the worklplace.
As you may have guessed, her days there were numbered. Don’t be like Virginia. Save your complaining for when you are home. When you are at work, just do your damn job and otherwise keep your mouth shut. She lost a really nice paying position with a lot of prestige and power that went along with it just because she couldn’t stop whining at the office.
Don’t be like Virginia. Instead of putting yourself in a position where you could be asking your boss for a pay raise, you’ll be asking some other company if they will please hire you.
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