CRINGE: A true account of workplace Bullying and Harassment. In a word, TORTURE

by M. Alexander, Janie Alexander, Anonymous

At least I’m not in a Nazi prison camp. Those are the words I used to comfort myself, to bring myself back from the edge. Those are the words I used to settle my nerves whenever I was about ready to lose it and jump on the person who was tormenting me on a daily basis. I wanted to snap his neck, and would have absolutely no qualms about it. I would have no qualms or hesitations at all about taking his life. None! But there would be consequences for me if I did such a thing. I would have lost. And so, my second thought, once I had stepped back from the ledge, and was thinking about how much worse a Nazi prison camp would be. Well, that thought was Why was I having to compare my workplace environment to a Nazi prison, or concentration camp at all? It was totally absurd. Didn’t everyone have the right to work in an environment that was hassle-free? It was a simple thing to ask for. Wasn’t it? Doesn’t everyone deserve the right to come in to a job and expect not to be harassed by a fellow employee? Isn’t that the employer’s responsibility, to provide a safe working environment? Is that really too much to ask? I understand that things happen, people are people, they get into arguments, have problems; that’s all part of life. But to allow some asshole to continually harass anybody in the workplace, isn’t that wrong? Shouldn’t it be stopped, for the good of everyone, for everyone’s safety? Then I thought about the Viktor Frankl book, Man’s Search for Meaning. And I thought of what people had to endure in the prison camp. Yep, maybe I could hold out, but for how long? In any case, I began to look for that tiny bird that would give me hope. I remembered something about a tiny bird landing on a shovel, and how that inspired Dr. Frankl to keep enduring the punishment, the torture . . . I began to be on the lookout for a tiny bird to appear, for some sort of inspiration, for some reason to hope. It was a lost cause.

40 pages, Kindle Edition

Published February 28, 2020