To want to vindicate myself?

[Lovesocks]

My company have taken on a new client and, without going into too much detail to preserve anonymity, my role requires me to spend 8 days per month (days vary, 1 day one week, may be three the next, sometimes an even 2 days) at their office.

The first week was really nice, staff were warm, friendly and the manager who I directly liaise with was very accommodating. The next week it began falling apart. It started with my reserved parking spot (agreed in contract) not being available, my having to find a public car park, thus making me late and just about the whole floor stopping to look at their watches tutting. The prior welcoming atmosphere was nonexistent and I was pretty much ignored apart from being given the necessary files and sitting down with various managers to discuss business. I soon learned that the company is owned by my ex’s in-laws and until just over a year ago he was a senior manager there.

Being a family owned business, they’re a close-knit workforce with high staff retention and 95% female. They hold family event days for all staff like summer picnics and Christmas parties. Through one of the few male managers I found out that my ex talked shit about me through the years he worked there and “xxxx’s ex” was the target of snipes on nights out, at picnics etc. So, my reputation was trashed way before I’ve even had an opportunity to prove myself. Apparently, I’m a self-absorbed, alcoholic bitch, a gold digger, and negligent mum who bankrupted him and sabotaged his relationship with our daughter 🤣

I appreciate I’m asking internet strangers to believe me, but I assure you I wasn’t and neither am I any of those things. The women in the office apparently had a field day of gossip when they discovered I am the ex and they’ve unanimously decided their opinion of me based on their bias of my ex’s untruths.

I explained the situation to my manager and showed him a letter my daughter, now an adult herself, wrote to her dad to tell him why she was not interested in having him in her life, to basically capsulate how everything my ex shared with his colleagues is BS. The gist of the letter was pretty much his appalling attitude towards me after we separated and during divorce, his unreliable/sporadic attitude to being a very part-time parent to her (7 times out of ten he’d cancel/rearrange his one weekend a month with her to prioritise himself), and his refusal to accept/support her autism diagnosis being the fundamental reasons that they have no relationship. My manager discussed the matter with the CEO of the new client, my reserved parking has been maintained and cursory apologies were made.

There’s still hostility and side eyes from the women. I get on with the male staff in the office on a professional and friendly basis, but of course that just makes the women see me as some kind of flirty tart. The men just laugh it off as they see the women as nothing more than cliquey, gossipy hellions who don’t like change or male management interference. One of the women blatantly-not-accidentally spilled a drink on me last week and made a huge deal of faux apology in front of the CEO, even buying me a coffee from downstairs (I didn’t drink it, just in case).

My daughter has suggested I scan a copy of her letter and send it in company wide email with a short message to the effect of “Despite what you may believe to be true from xxxx, this is the actual truth. Can a line please be drawn under the catty attitudes, glares and hostility towards me, and allow yourselves to actually get to know me?”

WIBU to do this?

Good Christ.

How on earth did you not know the company was owned by your daughter's grandparents????

As above, you should just have queried the parking place.

Whatever they thought of you because of your ex, they now think you're completely insane.

And your daughter being autistic and seeing things in black and white is not a get out clause for you deciding to wash your family's dirty linen in the office.

Whoever gave you the gossip about the gossip should be mentioned to the boss as a shit stirrer.

Then you should all get on with your work.

I'm very surprised your manager didn't pull you from this project.

There's a professional relationship here, impacted by a former private one, which causes problems.

Surely if ex discovers you are there, it willbe raised by the company themselves.

I think people are being slightly harsh to the op. Whilst I don’t think using the letter was or is appropriate, this is the OPs job. She’s being put in a pretty shit position with no way out of it, and when someone has years of second hand information about you it can certainly feel like you’ve entered the situation like Judas at a disciple reunion I’m sure…

All you can do op is show them who you really are and allow them to make a judgement on that rather than what your ex said. Quite honestly many women these days are used to ‘the script about the ex wife’, I’d bet not all of them think you’re the big bad that’s made out. As for the rest, sod them. They’re not worth the time bar a couple of days in the office.

I think that horse might already have bolted, explained by the fact the colleagues were OK with her the first week and then not.

I'm surprised the company owners didn't ask for her to be removed.

The whole thing is nuts tbh.

The OP doesn't know her ex in-laws owned the company she's been seconded to.
The owners of the company don't know the person they've seconded is the mother of their grandchild
The OP's ex husband and new partner also worked there until recently.

Sounds like a Kay Mellor gritty drama.

I think you’re coming across quite badly on here, to be honest, OP, entirely separately to anything your ex may have said about you. You seem to have some entrenched and unpleasant ideas about women, and to regard the male colleagues who are feeding you this information about the women as ‘cliquey, gossipy hellions’ as automatic allies, without questioning the veracity of their information, or why they might be telling you all this. After all, they got the same narrative from your ex — is it their testicles that prevents them believing him?

Showing your manager your daughter’s letter to her father was incredibly unprofessional, and the fact that you are even considering sending this, as an email with an inflammatory note, to the entire client company, suggests you are given to escalating drama and have very poor judgement.

So what if you spend eight days a month in an unfriendly environment among people who believe your ex’s version of your divorce? Your parking is sorted, just put your head down and do your job, if you really can’t pass this client to a colleague. We’ve all worked somewhere where we were disliked. Behaving like a decent human being in the face of hostility will make people reconsider more than circulating your daughter’s letter to her, which I can’t believe you’re even considering.

One of the women blatantly-not-accidentally spilled a drink on me last week and made a huge deal of faux apology in front of the CEO, even buying me a coffee from downstairs (I didn’t drink it, just in case).

This is classic mean girl bullying. I think you just have to rise above it unfortunately.

My manager discussed the matter with the CEO of the new client, my reserved parking has been maintained and cursory apologies were made.
I would say this is a pretty good response.

This does sounds like a TV show plot.

I don't know why you haven't just risen above it and got on with your work in a professional manner. Actions speak louder than words. You've somewhat played into their hands by creating drama around it.

No, don’t send the letter!
If it’s not an option not to work there then you’ll have to just get your head down and do a good job. Be pleasant to the women there even when it’s difficult, they may eventually come to their own conclusions that you seem like a nice person and maybe they only heard one biased side of a story.

It's not OP's ex-inlaws (her ex's parents) that own the company. It's her ex's new inlaws (his new wife's parents) so it makes sense OP wouldn't have known about it beforehand - especially as she has had no contact with ex and the family name isn't on the business.

Agree that sharing the letter with the company would be the wrong move on a number of levels. I assume that the manager OP showed the letter to was at her own company - not the client company so that makes a lot more sense. It will help OPs employers understand the issue and preempt potential problems with the client.

All OP can do now is keep her head down at the clients office. Do a good job and stay professional. They don't employ her directly so it's unpleasant but ultimately not a threat to her. Dealing with this professionally could also show her actual employer skills in relationship management.

I didn’t strut into my office armed with the letter 🤣 I suppose a bit of background would help. My daughter and I have known my manager and his family for over ten years, since we were colleagues at my previous job. We’re not best buddies, but we have a good professional and social relationship. He’s never been privy to the finer details of my failed marriage, beyond the divorce being acrimonious and my ex’s obviously sparse involvement in my daughter’s life. Once I got the decree absolute, I drew a line under it all and until now I’ve not dished the dirt between me and my ex to anyone who didn’t need to know. I don’t even refer to him as ever being my husband, he’s just my ex.

After the second week of my role with the new client, my manager came over so we could review the project. That’s when I informed him of what had been happening, and the murky details of how my marriage/divorce turned ugly came out. My daughter was home, she dug out the letter and handed it to me, saying something like “show him that mum, that’ll give him an idea of the kind of w**ker my dad is” and I just went with it. My manager read it, muttered “bloody hell, I’m sorry you and xxxx had to deal with that” folded it and handed it back to me. I didn’t see a need to include all of this in my original post.

My manager doesn’t know I was contemplating sharing that letter, but if I was going to do it I’d have checked with him first. Going by the majority opinion here I now think he’d ask me WTF I was thinking.

You are right that I’m caring way too much about the opinion the women in the new office have of me though 😫

I'm confused why you have, presumably, a copy of a letter written so many years ago.

This is what I would do.

Not sure how your company could pull them up on their bad behaviour but surely you could approach your manager and say that while you were open to working with Company X, based on their conduct on the second and subsequent visits you no longer feel able to work with them and that your company needs to select a different colleague to take over this account/work with them going forwards.

I would then ask your manager to send a stern letter to Company X saying that due to how you were treated, you had requested that someone else work on the account and that they will only be working with Bill Smith (whoever replaces you on the account) going forwards. No further communication is to issue to you.

You will have made your point to your company that Company X is not a mature company, that they should get one of the team, whoever is free to work on their account rather than a named individual and you can move on with your head held high.

Keep your dignity. Your personal life has nothing whatsoever to do with them. Why are you inclined to justify your private behaviour to total strangers?

Don't internalise others' issues. It's a 'them' problem and their responsibility: yours is to do the work you're contracted to do.

What other people think of you is none of your business.

You are basically airing your personal business among your clients? Because you heard your ex slagged you off?
Wouldn't it be more mature to ignore everything except the work in hand. They aren't your friends. Just be professional.
Surely your own bosses would find it bizarre you were sharing personal letters to clients about an ex employee from your/their daughter?
If you can't rise above it then ask to switch to another client and swap with a colleague.

I'm finding all of this very hard to believe 🤔

It does sound a bit as if the daughter is going to show up at the unfriendly client workplace shouting ‘E ain’t worth it, Mum!’ just as the OP is having her coffee poisoned by a posse of female employees loyal to her ex.

Frankly, in several workplaces I’ve been in, all staff were mystified that anyone, however awful, had gone on a second date with a senior manager, let alone married them, so I’m puzzled as to why all female employees apparently believe the ‘crazy ex’ narrative, but the 5% of the workforce that is male doesn’t?

A few things.

I’ve updated the circumstances in which I showed my manager my daughter’s letter above.

Re the client that my company have been contracted to, the owners are the parents of my ex’s new wife, they are not my daughter’s grandparents. My daughter has never met them, and until I started this project I didn’t know anything about them or the company. The owners are long retired and the business is managed by a CEO they hired, they have no input in the running of the business and since my ex moved on none of the family members are staff. Some of the existing staff however have been there for decades. As of present I do not know if my ex and his wife know I’m there or if they care.

I accept the criticism for contemplating sharing my daughter’s letter in a poorly thought plan to vindicate myself, but I have not created any drama. Beyond having to complain about my parking space and the snarking towards me from the women in the office in my second week (which I raised with my direct manager not the client) I have not said anything to the women in the office that wasn’t business talk or polite greetings.

I have been invited and gone to Starbucks with four of the male staff, two of who are senior managers. I’ve been careful and not talked about what goes on in the office to avoid backlash. “Cliquey, gossipy hellions” was a direct quote from one of the managers when referring to the women on the admin floor. They’ve worked together for a long time and were previously managed by the same lady for a long time. When a male manager was brought in to streamline the operations they apparently didn’t take kindly to the change and created a lot of unfounded trouble. I’m told that’s where the senior managerial opinion of the office women stemmed from, and from their catty behaviour towards me I’d be inclined to believe it until they demonstrate otherwise.

All of that said, I now realise I’ve let this whole experience eat me up and I’ve lost my ability to be cool. I should’ve risen above it after the second week. I’ve never talked shit about my ex to anyone except those who were there and saw how loathsome he could be, and there I was prepared to publish my daughters private letter to the whole office, 90% of who I don’t trust for sh*t. You’ve opened my eyes MN, thank you.