A Personal Situation Essay, Research Paper

A PERSONAL SITUATION

The situation I would like to explain happened approximately over a year ago. I accepted a position with a company as one of their e-mail server. An acquaintance of mine (John) told me about the job and took my resume to his supervisor. I did not refer to him as a friend because at the time we did not do any activities together outside of work, nor did our spouses.

The first week was fine, just trying to learn where the bathroom and cafeteria were was hard enough. Nothing was obviously strange with John at first or really had the appearance of being amiss until the second week. Our interactions began to get a little strange. John began making comments like ?you would have had to pay an employment agency several hundred dollars for a job like this.? I briefly thought to myself that was strange. I soon forgot about the incident till the next day when he made another comment ?in a joking matter.? Right then I started to really pay attention to what he was meaning. He acted as if I owed him money for helping me get the job.

He began to get very short with me and I had only been there for two weeks. He was supposed to train me on how to build our e-mail servers and instruct me on how to install the entire standard monitoring software. This was not done. Instead he went through the process faster than even an experienced administer could possibly keep up. He would not slow down or wait for me or check with me to see if I was with him or not. We would have an issue with a server and rather than take this downtime as an opportunity to show and train me. He would just buzz through the resolution and not stop and say anything to the affect of ?you might want to remember this.? I began to get very frustrated and felt very alienated.

By the third week I began to get tired of his condescending and abusive tone. So I began to challenge him in a way that was only one on one and so no one else was around. He would respond to a question of mine with a question or just make me repeat it then, interrupt me. I grew hateful and sarcastic with him. I tried to avoid John as much as I could, even took a different lunch hour so I wouldn?t run into him.

He stopped me one day and asked me ?What?s the matter?? I told him he was very condescending in his tone and demeanor. I was tired of it and when he speaks to me like that it feels very manipulative and that I did not want him to target me with those traits of his personality. He asked me, ?What can I do so I no longer feel like this way in the future?? I simply asked him to treat with the same respect he would like to be treated with. Ever since we have gotten along better and he even slowed down and took some time to explain some of the policies. I believed there was hope and eventually we could be friends and now we are.