Recently, I experienced one of the most difficult situations of my life. At my workplace, there has been a lot of conflict in the past few months. It has been very hard to deal with due to the fact that it is my dads business, and we all act like family there. We usually get along great and have no problems, mainly because everyone has been friends with another prior to working there. I have a lot of prior friends who now work there and sometimes I wonder if that is good or bad. I have a friend with whom I’ve attended middle school and high school.
I got him a job at my dads restaurant because he was in need and he was one of my best friends, and he has been working there for about three years, where I have been for five or six years. Everything started out great, he fit in with everyone right away, he was working hard and well with others, it was perfect. We would get into little arguments, but with us the next day everything would be just fine. As months when on I started to notice some huge changes in the way he was acting.
He had come out to me that he was interested in men, which is something I supported and still support him in, and he also started to seem very concerned with the power currencies I had against him, such as resource currency, social network currency, personal currency, and intimacy currency, things he also contains as well, but in different ways than I do. He was struggling with things at home, and I always made sure that he had a place to stay, or if he needed money I would help him out.
He knew this but one day something happened and he just completely changed. I had a friend who was my brothers’ best friend, and we were into each other. We talked all the time and everyone at work knew that there was something kind of going on between us. One day this girl, who also works with us, had just broken up with her boyfriend and decided that she wanted to date my brothers’ best friend, the guy I was kind of seeing. This really upset me because I was lied to about it and I looked like a fool trying to talk to him because he was keeping dirty secrets.
I tried to just ignore it and go on like nothing was even bothering me, but things became worse at work. They would purposely do things in front of me to make me mad, and the girl eventually formed a little posse against me, which contained my brothers’ best friend, her, and my friend who I knew for so long. Things became very awkward for everyone else, including me; because we all knew what was happening and that it was not right.
I would hear things from other co-workers about what these three people were saying about me and it really was frustrating because I didn’t do anything to deserve it. Suppressing the issue was the best thing I could do at the time because I didn’t want to make this situation affect my dad or his business. This was a personal matter outside of work, and it didn’t need to be there during work hours, so I moved on and did my job. While I was trying to just focus on working, they were egging it on.
There was one night where I couldn’t hold any of it in anymore. My “friend” was doing his side work but didn’t finish and I was upset that I had to finish it because he didn’t. A co-worker of ours told him I was mad and he made a very rude, sexually harassing, comment about me. I heard about it and went and told my manager that I was going to confront my “friend” about it. When I confronted him he told me I needed to apologize to him for what I did, which was nothing, and that I was the one being rude.
My manager took us outside and I couldn’t contain it anymore, all of the cumulative annoyance just busted out. I told him how unfair all of this was, and that he was taking sides of people who hurt me even after everything I had done for him. He told me I was the one who was crazy and that he wasn’t involved in the situation, when he knew full well that he was. I was so upset that I could not even look at him, he later stated that he was there to protect the girl and my brothers friend, and that’s when I let lose the sudden death statement “We are done being friends! After that we had to agree to work together civilly and keep this situation outside of work, and so far it is working well. It is one of those things that you know you needed to go through but you didn’t want to. I have changed the way that I handle situations like this and dealing with conflict like this is something that I know I will see more in the future. Things have changed a lot at work and everything seems to be settled for the time being, but I still feel that tension that was there before.
The guy who I once called my friend got involved in something he didn’t need to get involved in, and in my opinion he is the one who blew it up so huge. Things would have been different had he just stayed neutral to everything like everyone else and keep his opinion to himself, but he is one of those people who has to get involved, and has to control people, to be in power. I hope someday that he figures it out, but I don’t see us ever being friends again. Now I know I am a better person for walking away and letting it go.
