There's no greater sign of a toxic workplace than having a coworker looking over your shoulder at all times, waiting to see you mess up. Oftentimes, these are the folks who are threatened by someone else's presence, especially someone they think is the competition. However, just as it was in this situation, the employee did virtually nothing wrong and the coworker was just seeing what they wanted to see.
To me, this phenomenon feels reminiscent of high school behavior. I remember when a classmate of mine suddenly decided in their mind that we were competing for the same spot at the same school for college, and all of a sudden, I was an enemy. I remember having a friend tell me that people just need a physical embodiment of the stress that they feel, someone to blame everything on to make it all make sense to them. Of course, that didn't directly solve the issue, but it let me feel a little bit more at peace, knowing this had nothing to do with anything I was doing in class.
This applies to our daycare worker, who shared their story via this thread on Reddit's r/WorkAdvice subreddit. For more stories like this, check out this post about a supervisor who told an employee to slow down on the job only to receive some clever malicious compliance.
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