To feel so lost?

[chatenoire]

I'm open to being told that I need to get a grip, because maybe I do.

Ever since August life at work has gone downhill. Not everything, but overall something doesn't feel right.

My DH thinks it's a manager problem, I'm still unsure.

The summary is that I've been doing this job for almost 2 years, and everything was perfect. There are two of us with the same role and we got hired more or less at the same time. I genuinely have never complained about her even though I find some of her attitudes a bit off.

Our workload is dependent on sales people, so if the sales people don't give us something to work on, our workload can be light. The salespeople assigned to me barely give me any (which I have mentioned before to my boss) and to keep myself busy I've tried to diversify (sometimes with more success than others). Something that just clicked on me is that because I'm not as busy with my day job, then that translates to lack of repetition that really helps with admin side if things as you keep remembering to do them.

So then my boss decided that I was "bored", and that I really needed to focus on my day job. We had two separate meetings around it.

Then yesterday my boss decided to tell my colleague that I was bored and that we needed to share the workload (not a pleasant conversation). On the same day, I got copied by my boss to solve something even though last week was told to take a few steps back.

I have been left with an identity crisis. I don't like conflict but also the relationship (or lack of it with my colleague) is weighing me down.

I honestly do not understand what the issue is with this scenario. You have said you don’t have enough to do, your manager has taken steps to fix it. I don’t see a manager issue or a colleague issue or even a you issue, other than you seem to be inventing a problem.

You posted about this yesterday too? I don't see any of this as an issue, all I can see is that your manager is managing. I mean apart from them telling your colleague that you're bored, that was unprofessional. But it's right to share the workload. While your colleague has been busy for a while and you haven't your colleague has probably been getting resentful. You should have been offering to help them when you had nothing to do. But now that your manager has stepped in to share the workload this should all level out.

I did offer to help, but ultimately she got annoyed because she didn't want to share the workload, because she's used to handling it.

There's always been a level of rivalry between us, and there were redundancies a year ago. I had a chat early this year and told her that I was trying to diversify so there was always something for us to do, so we could both keep our jobs if the time came.

The rivalry has never necessarily gone away. My DH thinks I should just try to have a chat with her and explain how did we end up having that conversation yesterday

It sounds like there's not enough work for you both to do, at the moment, but and most of the work is weighted towards her because of the salespeople assigned to her?

Will this change over time?

This sometimes happens in my job -- when there's not enough work to do, I use any free time to upskill myself (e.g, I started learning how to use Excel recently even though I don't really need it in this job).

Yes, this is accurate. In theory this should change now, as a few have been reassigned. - My colleague claimed that she had no idea that one of the salespeople only involved her-. I told her that surprisingly this person comes to me for sales material, and overall product knowledge but that surprisingly she still doesn't involve me with a prospect.

And yes, with my "spare time" I've ended up diversifying or involved in things that involve my language skills (I speak a few).

But ultimately my boss concluded that maybe I spent too much doing "side hustles" but I was just trying to keep myself busy.

When I told her that these people involve me very little, my colleague just said "I find that hard to believe".