Name changed for this.
Sorry, this will be long, but I don’t want to drip-feed. I have an issue with an ex-colleague from years ago going around slagging me off, and I want to know if I should just leave it, or WIBU to try to make him stop.
I’ve always worked in the same industry in similar roles.
I’m now 3.5 years into my current role, and it’s going well.
The problem I’m having is with a guy from my previous company who has been regaling my current colleague(s) with colourful assassinations of my character.
The company where I worked with him was a start-up. I ran a specific department and I assumed that I had been brought in for my previous experience – there’s a general ‘model’ for how this sort of company is run and I am very familiar with it
Part of the role is being responsible for quality control. Everything that came out of my department had to reach a certain standard and if it didn’t I would be the one to blame. This meant that I needed to put certain processes in place and sometimes those processes needed to be followed by other people in the company whose input my dept depended on.
This is all fairly standard industry-wide stuff. If you think of it like a restaurant, I was a chef and relied on others to order the ingredients and communicate with the clientele or I couldn’t do my job and we’d all get bad reviews.
There was one person in particular who had never worked in a ’restaurant’ before. He was junior (first job) but very popular in the company and has since climbed the ranks. He loved to do things his own way, including coming into the ‘kitchen’ when I wasn’t around and getting the staff to cook stuff along the lines of his own vision. His ‘cooking’ wasn’t great – he’d had no training for it and it wasn’t part of his role – and it reflected badly on me as it came out of my department and ultimately would damage the ‘restaurant’s’ rep. I repeatedly tried to stop it. However this went down like a sack of the proverbial and I eventually got fired.
He had a lot of people on his side. They were almost all recruited as grads and none of them had any previous ‘restaurant’ experience. From their POV I must have just seemed grumpy / like a killjoy or worse. They wouldn’t have realised that in any other restaurant I’d be expected to do this stuff as it was my literal job – they had no outside experience and no way of knowing. Looking back I realise there would have been a general air of ‘who the hell does she think she is’. No doubt this festered for a few years (I was there for three) as I carried on in not very blissful ignorance.
Anyway. I was long-term freelance there so my sacking didn’t amount to much more than a “Don’t come in tomorrow, thanks.” No conversations or anything other than to say I was damaging to the culture. However, I do think that the owners of the company probably felt they ‘had’ to do it to avoid a mutiny, rather than objectively thinking I was a) wrong and b) an awful person. I get the impression they feel quite bad about what happened to me and did it for political reasons / a quiet life.
Now to my AIBU. Five years have gone by, so I was shocked to find out this this guy took one of my colleagues aside at a networking event last week (when he was drunk) and described in detail what a horrific human being he considers me to be. She is a new colleague too, which makes it even worse. She was brave to tell me about it and I feel sick thinking about how many others he may have said it all to before. Several of my colleagues were at the event, including my direct boss and the owner of the company. Losing my job and realising I was seen as a 'bad apple' was traumatic at the time and I’ve tried to put it behind me. But I feel like if he’s doing this five years on, it’s not over. Where will it end? It’s a small industry. I can’t run the risk of just ignoring it. He can just keep doing this to me, job after job.
WWYD? Email him? Contact his employers? Hardly a great ambassador for them after all now that he’s in a more senior role, so I’m wondering if they might help. Not that they did last time, but they might feel bad I suppose.