Although people love to complain about the evil attorneys they know or are assigned to, its not just attorneys who mistreat their staff.  Fellow staff members can truly make our lives hell. No idea why.  We spend so much of our lives at work, why go out of your way to make everyone around you miserable?  Why spread your nastiness?  And why do these people tend to prey on those that are some of the nicest people in the office?  Do they think being nice makes a person weak and, therefore, deserving in some way? 

There’s a legal assistant in our office who seems to go out of her way to be nasty to people.  Has since she came to work with us.  She’s a good match for her main attorney, who I was assigned to for several years, as they are both nasty people who lash out at others for no particular reason – assistant, associate, partner, support staff, doesn’t matter what their position is. They’re all fair game. 

For the past couple of weeks, the assistant has made it her mission to make one of the other assistant’s life miserable, who happens to be a very nice lady.  We recently had an office move where lots of people got their locations in the office shifted around, and that put these two next to each other.  Its been hell for the nice lady since then.  Today, it exploded into an argument and, once HR got involved, the nasty one got even nastier.  Then her bitchy attorney got into the act.

I won’t pull out the cliche “can’t we all just get along,” because I’m a grown up and know that’s not always possible. But why go out of your way to be nasty? Why not just ignore others if you don’t like them?  Doesn’t make much sense to me to create such hostility around one’s self.

I told my main attorney this afternoon that I really like working for him, I’m glad that working for him doesn’t involve any drama, and glad that I don’t feel like stabbing him in the head at least once a day. Its the little things like lack of drama which make work life simple and pleasant.

BTW, many thanks to A Paralegal’s Blog for the linkage!