How would you deal with someone behaving like this towards you at work?

[gymbunny123]

I took a new job recently after being out of the workplace for a while. It's an admin job that pays the bills while I train to be an accountant, which is where I'm ultimately headed.

I'm really happy to do admin work and enjoy the office environment.

However, there's a chap in the office who has been there a while. He's nice to chat with, friendly etc, but he has a funny way of looking for other people's 'errors' and then seizing on them.

He only does it to me and the other person who is junior to him. I was off sick for a week and I've come back to a series of strange emails from him where he's alleging I have done some of my admin tasks incorrectly.

He is correct in that one of them I hadn't finished before I went sick, the other two I had completed correctly but he has emailed me to tell me I've done it wrong and we need 'to discuss this'.

He isn't my line manager, I'm new and I'm learning and I don't know the job off by heart so I'm finding it very strange that he's, for e.g. opened a sealed envelope that I've put in the outgoing post to check up on me and then written a stern email about it.

I don't need this job financially so my plan is to resign and walk away from it because the fact that someone has spent a week while I'm off sick hunting for 'mistakes' and emailing me about them I find strange and intrusive.

But I'm interested as to how others would deal with this? Would you confront head on? Discuss with line manager? Or just walk?

Another story, when I joined a company about 10 years ago as a junior accountant I had to deal with a staff member from a different department. She had to approve a number of invoices and then giving them back to me. She was the one that had been with the company the longest, 20+ years. Every single day she’d come and bully me about something. I kept my cool and tried my best to avoid conflict until 2 months later when she emailed my boss, without informing me first, that she still hadn’t received a bunch of invoices and month end was coming up and that it was a regular occurrence. I was absolutely furious and went to her desk only to find them on her horribly messy desk, under another pile of paperwork. I then emailed her manager (cc my boss) and asked her to make sure she doesn’t lose important documents anymore (a few days before she lost one in the kitchen whilst having a cuppa). She was called in a meeting with her boss and 20 mins later came out crying, no one had ever seen that before. Needless to say, she never bullied me ever since. I worked for the company for 7 years.

So yeah, sort him out if you can.

Please say something before you go.

I used to have a peer who did this.(DL)
Me and another person (Jay) had responsibility for training. I was going overseas for a month long holiday. Other team member (Jay) was fully able to step up, but being a lazy arse, he did not bother.

So bitch colleague went through ALL of my work (on shared files) and reported back every spelling mistake/mislabelled file while I was away and did not point the finger at lazy arse. (DL rarely attacked males). Baring in mind, this was work to just get ahead, to allow Jay an easier ride, while I was on holiday.

My boss asked why DL liked undermining me. We realised she was a sociopath as she loved to see people at each other's throats.
Hope wherever she is now, she is having a crap time.

Thanks all. Some genuinely good advice I’m going to speak to my line manager this morning.

Please speak up. I've had no issue with throwing bad behaviour back at my colleagues, calling them out on it. If you have a legitimate reason to raise this (ie, he is not your manager, although tbh going through your mail is pretty extreme and not the way to effectively manage people) I wouldn't think twice.

How did you get on speaking to your boss @gymbunny

I know this was two months ago but an update on this...about 20 minutes before I was going to go and discuss this with my line manager I was told the member of staff had lost a close relative and was now on bereavement leave :(

So I left it partly obviously because of their circumstances and also as they were having a few weeks off so I didn't think I'd see much of them.

It took a while to get my contract arranged at the new place and I ended up resigning a week before my probation period finished.

There was no one to exit me as my boss was on leave so I just worked there awkardly for the last week. On my last day when I said goodbye to everyone this staff member announced "bye, thanks for leaving us in the shit".

I spoke to a few people about what it had been like there and thought about this thread and then decided I'd put everything I'd have said in an exit interview in an email.

I'm told the staff member was pulled up on that last day comment but no response to the other stuff. I really, really hope the next person who takes that job is not treated in the same way.

Oh and I LOVE my new job and also have some private freelance work which is amazing.