My teammate came to blows with our volatile young intern yesterday. I had to mediate and respond to a situation that literally exploded when I left the office.
like all office blowups — this one had been building for a long time. The two individuals had completely polar personalities. One person was very detail oriented and old fashioned in her approach to life and work. Another was young, free-spirited, and joined our office in order to “have fun” (we are known as the ‘fun’ office in the organization.)
Jade, as I’ll call the older one, pushed the younger individual about her sloppy work product. Solar, as I’ll call the younger one, resisted and often got defensive about mistakes she had made, especially in her writing.
Solar had already thrown a tantrum and threatened to quit earlier when we let another unit borrow her for emergency work surge purposes. I should have known then…
Yesterday, Jade decided to give Solar a hard time about her request to take a day off. Solar, using pent up rage, blew up at Jade saying “why are you doing this; you’re confusing me” — their conversation escalated to the point where Solar wanted to leave her job on the spot. Jade even emailed me (while I was happily eating with a girlfriend) an email with the subject “I AM DONE WITH SOLAR”
I heard Jade’s side of the story. I called Solar into my office. Solar was, at that point, very contrite. She had apologized. But, the damage had been done. My team wanted me to deny her a letter of recommendation and let her go from her internship.
With her head bowed, Solar listened to my lecture, “Solar, I’m worried about you. You will have many difficulties if you cannot take feedback and be patient with your peers. I used to be like you when I was young, hotheaded and quick to flare up and assume the worst of my bosses. you can’t do that these days. The workplace is a hard place”.
I proceeded to tell her about the time I quit my federal job out of a spate of anger at my micromanaging boss… who I generally credit with my more precise writing abilities.
She nodded slowly, “So you’ve been through all the suffering already”….
lol. That made me feel so ancient. Like a withered crone. It had been almost 16 years since I started in the workplace at her age. And, now here I was, lecturing a young neophyte about how life is hard.
Funny how life does really come in full circle.