To want to confront my ex-colleague?

[Cactus999]

Hello,
Sorry for a long post, but in order to make myself clear, I must provide as many details as possible.

This happened in May 2020 but I still haven’t forgotten what my ex-colleague (let’s call her Lily) had done. I’m an Eastern European female, in my 20’s, and Lily is a British female in her early 50’s. We both worked in a warehouse which I now left a while ago. Lily was very afraid to catch Covid, and that possibly caused her crazy behaviour during the incident I’ll describe below.

That day I nipped into one of workplace toilets. The toilet was tiny, with 3 cubicles, the middle cubicle locked and marked as per Covid requirements, those on my left and on my right were not, and max 2 people allowed to be in the toilet at once. When I came in, Lily was washing her hands in the sink and clearly saw me in the mirror but said nothing. The door of the cubicle on my left was open, so I somehow ‘automatically’ got in. After I was done, I went to the sink; Lily was still standing there, with a very angry facial expression… and suddenly lashed out at me. First she pointed to the cubicle on my right and said there was someone sitting there! I had a quick look at the door lock; its indicator was red, which meant the cubicle was engaged (if green, then not engaged), so yeah, there was someone there. Lily then started yelling and slagging me off for ‘breaking the rules, as there are now 3 people in the toilet’, ‘how dare you be so irresponsible and put your colleagues at risk’ and so on. I asked her why the hell she hadn’t told me she wasn’t alone in the toilet when I was entering it, I would have waited in the corridor then, I couldn’t see through the cubicle door whether there was someone inside, I couldn’t see the red indicator as well because it’s very tiny and my vision is not the best. Lily absolutely refused to listen, she just talked over me, threw loads of insults and then left.

I was so ‘inflamed’ that I grabbed the toilet door harshly, stuck my head out to the corridor and shouted to Lily’s back in a very mocking tone: ‘OH MY GOOOOOOD, WHAT A BIG DEAL!!!’ Nearly all the people that happened to be around burst into laughter, Lily got even angrier and rushed to the managers’ room. The manager I’d been reported to took Lily’s side and warned me that if I did anything like that again, I’d face disciplinary for breaking Covid rules… She also took a massive dislike to me, and I never regained her favour.

Now that I’ve accidentally found out where Lily lives, I’m tempted to send her a letter in which I’d tell her what a nasty person she is and that it was her fault I’d lost any chance to be promoted at work… and I want to write something like ‘You clown, if you had been so afraid of Covid, then you should have quit the warehouse and found a job doable at home!’

Would this kind of action be reasonable? Also, who was right and who was wrong?

Okay, I will not send anything to Lily, but I must add yet another thing. In my native country, things work like this: you get to a place, any place, and if there is any important/relevant/urgent info that must be known, people just tell you without you asking; if there is none, everyone keeps quiet. So if this ‘toilet incident’ had happened in my country, Lily would’ve been expected to speak up first, like, ‘Hey, there is one other person here, could you please wait in the corridor?’ I mean, I was not a cow, I had simply acted according to my deeply ingrained mentality I grew up with. That's what I explained to the manager during our 'one-to-one', but she rejected these explanations and said that Lily was in the right. So my question is this: why didn't the manager consider any cultural differences? Or did she just lie to me because she liked Lily more? I think if she is blatantly imposing her own understanding and rules to those from abroad, then she is not a very nice person. The manager's stance actually annoys me more than the incident with Lily.
And if I meet such people in my new workplace, will they have any moral right to demand that I 'reformed my brain' and accepted local behavioural models obediently?

You've found out where someone lives and now you're thinking of harassing them. In the UK, that's what we call a criminal offence.

I don’t think it’s the Lily incident that stopped you progressing at work.

Even now 5 years later you come across as extremely emotionally immature. That is not a good trait in someone who wants promoted

We may look back now to the “rules of covid” and think they were ridiculous but at the time that’s what was in place and you should have clarified if someone else was in especially as you couldn’t see the engaged indicator because of your eyesight. The shouting down the corridor to her was embarrassing and now this letter nonsense. There is no cultural issue here, it is your level of maturity that’s the issue

Super nuts 😂

It won't help at all and could get you in trouble for harassment.

I had a colleague who bullied me for years. She made my life a misery and literally despised me. I did find out her address and really wished I could write to her and tell her what I thought. But I realised it would only make things worse and give her ammunition to retaliate.

If she was bullying you at work you should've complained at the time. But it would be the employer who would need to act on it via HR.

Now it's best to move on. If she's that highly strung I'm sure she's not very happy and karma will take effect.

The rules were the rules for everyone though, they weren't just "the rules for people who are afraid of covid". You didn't check how many people were in the toilet, no one else was responsible for doing that for you. If I pull my car out at a junction without looking and crash I can't blame the passenger for not checking for me if anything is coming (even if they have a terrible fear of car accidents and I am very blasé about it).

That said, she over reacted and shouldn't have been yelling at anyone. You shouldn't have mocked / yelled back - you're not at primary school, you're at work.

Your manager may well have been a dick and that might or might not have been related to this incident but it's not Lily's fault. She was entitled to raise you shouting at her with the manager. (You could have not done that, and gone and spoke to the manager yourself to say you'd accidentally ended up with 3 in the loo and Lily's shouted at you - then that's what they would have had to deal with.)

Sending her anything would be unhinged.

Just let the past go and find something positive to do.

That would boil my piss too but don't do anything. You can't change the past.

"I mean, I was not a cow, I had simply acted according to my deeply ingrained mentality I grew up with"

"I grabbed the toilet door harshly, stuck my head out to the corridor and shouted to Lily’s back in a very mocking tone: ‘OH MY GOOOOOOD, WHAT A BIG DEAL!!!"

Your deeply ingrained mentality that you grew up with makes you sound like a cow to me! You do not come out of this looking like a victim. This is you defending yourself, making you look as good as possible. But your coming across as petty and childish.

FWIW, I’m also an immigrant and have also done warehouse work in the past. I understand how it can really get under your skin but YABVU. Let it go.

Plus, considering nationalities and ages at play, you’d never win anyway back when that happened. The manager probably just wanted an excuse to openly dislike you.

Your colleague was in the wrong, as was the manager. But no, you shouldn't write to your ex-colleague about it now. Consider her a spiteful lunatic and leave it at that.

As to whether the manager should consider cultural differences...in an ideal world, yes, but my advice would be - never expect that in England.

Because the manager probably thought it was all bloody ridiculous at the time, too!!

But you’re not in your country.

And generally speaking yes, I think you have to adapt to wherever you’re moving to. I find it silly that people wait until I put the “next customer” diving thing in the supermarket before they put their shopping down on the mat, but I still do it because… I’m here. Just like I miss being able to just be direct without having to dance around subjects.

There’s also the option of packing up and going home. Carrying this with you for 5 years is too much.

'Just like I miss being able to just be direct without having to dance around subjects.'

Yes, that's the thing that I miss too. I've read one thread here about a lady who had been publicly accused of lying by a colleague during a team meeting and didn't know what to do, how to react... In my country, it would be absolutely normal to say to the accuser: 'Nobody has asked for your opinion, so you can well keep your mouth shut' or 'If she doesn't leave the room, I refuse to continue my speech.' That would be normal as long as you weren't using swearwords/name calling etc. Even members of our parliament are often throwing phrases like that and it's no problem.

Storm in a toilet more like 😂

All you would be doing is showing her that you're completely batshit

@Cactus999 you just need to accept there’s a different way of doing things and cope with it as best as you can.

I’m now incredibly polite on situations that could easily be done with a “stop being lazy and do you job, none of us like having to constantly correct your cokehead mistakes” but I just can’t. It is what it is.

Although I have to say, carrying a 5 year old grudge is exceptionally long. It’s not worth the mental effort.

Lockdown was a strange time. People behaved in strange ways. Realistically for the sane members of the community we just accept it was a unique time and people were on edge and don't give it any thought now

For you to be so fixated on this minor and quite ridiculous conversation 5 years later is just crazy. I bet Lily bearly remembers it

Get over it act like an adult and move on ffs

Seriously though...how would you feel if you recieved a mocking letter from someone you had a brief spat with at work five years ago?

I think I'd be very unnerved that anyone had been harbouring fuck all about fuck all for years.

So would you be.

It's creepy. Stop it.

To paraphrise L.P. Hartley:

"The UK is a foreign country; they do things differently there"

You can't change an entire culture to suit you personally. No one country has a perfect culture, it's just different.

Of course it's not reasonable. She would think you were crazy.
You both behaved badly at the time and you can't blame your lack of success now on one small incident 5 years ago that everyone but you has forgotten.

If someone wrote to me in this scenario, I'd be taking it to the police. It would class as harassment because it was something that had happened 5 years ago and this would indicate that you were holding on to it irrationally and a sign of escalation.

For most people, this would be a distant memory that held no emotional power anymore.

My actual problem is that the manager had put all the responsibility on me and disregarded what I had to say.

In which case, you should have dealt with it through work at the time. If your 'actual problem' is with the manager, why are you planning on intimidating your ex colleague?

You sound rather vile.