Dawn sat on the window seat in her bedroom. She had a glass of wine in one hand and a bottle of high-powered pain relievers in the other. As she looked out the window at the grey murky weather, she tried to recall where it all started, inside the pressure cooker. She had a comfortable home, a good husband and was happy with both. She enjoyed her life and had a few good friends to support her when things were either good or bad. Nevertheless she sat in disgrace. Inside she could feel the press building and wished she could just get a good night’s sleep. Her eyes were swollen from crying and her hand shook as she tipped the glass for a swallow of wine.
Dawn had college degrees and had learned in five years, what her colleagues had learned in ten. She hardly ever took a day off and was seldom, if ever, late to work. She handled most of her clients with professionalism and loved her job, even though it was very stressful. Her evaluations were usually graded as above average and/or “meet or exceed expectations.” Still her supervisor treated her like she was incompetent. Her teammates treated her much like her supervisor did. No matter what she said or how kind she treated them, they isolated her. She was never accepted by the clique. All her friends worked in other departments, so at social events for her department, she sat alone.
As she looked out her window, she began to see that standing up for her rights and for the rights of a friend at work were the first wrong steps she had taken. Her friend had filed a sexual harrassment compliant against a male employee. Every day her friend had to walked past the man to get to her desk, because the company refused to discipline the perpetrator. The next wrong move was alienating her lead. The lead that had trained Dawn had brought a friend into the company. But what had she done? She got the woman fired for having hard-core pornography of a racial nature on her computer. Her lead had asked her why she couldn’t take a joke and stated women their age need some comic relief, when she first reported it to the lead. Obviously, she could not; because she had reported the incident to her supervisor and the department chair. Twenty two people had seen the pornography; but she was the only one that had reported it in her customer service department.
A few months after the incident, on Valentine’s Day, every cubicle was decorated with balloons and a small packet of candy…except hers. So much for doing the right thing! Her heart sank as she saw what they had done. When she reported the incident to her supervisor, she was watched silently by her fellow workers. She could see and hear their whispers when she came near their cubicles. But the final incident occurred when a new department chair was hired, a few months later.
She was called into the company’s conference room. Her supervisor was there with the new department chair and the new head of the human resource department. They told her, she obviously was having mental health problems. They felt her marriage was probably part of the problem. Finally, they told her she must seek counseling through their program and sign a document ending her rights to privacy, so they could monitor her progress. She had twenty-four hours to make an appointment or she could be fired. She was lead back to her cubicle and had to grab the few things she could reach and carry, as she was escorted out of the building in front of her peers.
From the parking lot, Dawn called her husband to come pick her up. She told him what had happened. Her car-pool buddy was still at work and she hated having to call him. By this time, she was crying and on the verge of sobbing. Her mind could not grasp what had just happened to her. She had nothing negative in her workplace file and had never given anyone cause to give her a bad report on performance and/or behavior. Dawn rode in silence beside her husband. She was broken and afraid of what they might do next. She was told she could not contact or speak to anyone in the company…ever!
After that incident, Dawn could not get good paying jobs or other customer service jobs without references from her supervisor or key work peers. She went through a series of meaningless temporary jobs. She was far to paranoid to accept full-time work with any of the companies she worked for. Her self-confidence had been seriously eroded. Actually it had been shattered. She felt like temporary work was the only safe environment because she did not have to get involved in the office politics of these workplaces.No matter how hard she tried, she could not bring herself to accept full-time permanent work and finally just stopped trying.
Although it had been some time since she left the company, she had a hard time sleeping at night. She was unable to connect with the people she worked with on her temporary jobs. Her relationship with her husband was still supportive; but Dawn had problems communicating her feelings with him. She would avoid intimacy with her husband and preferred her own company much of the time. Her friends could not understand why she did not call them or do girl things with them. Eventually, they stopped calling her. All of this brought Dawn to the window seat in her bedroom…
Silently crying Dawn took the handful of pills and popped them into her mouth. Washing them down with the wine, she continued to sit on the window seat, until her husband found her lifeless body when he came home from work. He held her in his arms and gently rocked her, as he dialed 911. He could not understand why all of this had happened without anyone coming to her aid. He could hear the sirens coming in the distance.
Dawn had been the victim of workplace bullying. It had begun five years earlier. The subtle problems continued to build until the day Dawn decided to stop the pain. If you are asking why she did not call an attorney and fight the action against her, it was most probably because no attorney would handle the case. In the week before she had made her decision, she had tried to hire one for the third time. Her first attempts were made in the first month following the decision she made to quit her job rather than sign the waiver. No one wanted to touch the case and told Dawn to just let it go. It would have been a long fight and Dawn was suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and was not psychologically ready for a long protracted fight in court. Dawn’s case is an example of the cost of workplace bullying and retaliation. There are more potential Dawns in the workforce, world-wide.
JOYSTECHTOOL 