victims

victims

was watching a piece on television the other night. it was about bullying in the work place. there was a woman who had suffered at the hands of the work place bullies and who had her dream job turned into a nightmare by what they had done to her.

i am a little ashamed to admit that at school i was both bullied and sometimes i was a bully (though never very good at it), and it was something i soon grew out of. bullying still goes on in schools, and it is probably a fair assumption (based on the kids i see around the place) that it is probably a worse problem than it was when i was in school, and it seems that through mobiles, email and the internet bullying has gotten to be more persistent and taking on a 24/7 aspect, at least back in my day once you got home that was it, now they can text you!


being bullied at school is harsh because you can’t easily escape it. you are more than likely going to be going to that school for years to come, which makes the suffering worse as you know it is going to go on for sometime.

i have witnessed bullying at work; i don’t think i did much to stop it so in the end i was as bad as the people who did it. i remember one kid who came to us as work experience bod, he was nervous and shy and probably not the sharpest knife in the box, but all he wanted to do was work and enjoy it. not sure he had as much fun as he should have done as he suffered as the butt of the joke on a few occasions too many. i am sure we all look back on that with a certain amount of pride…not. (a quick digression – bloke in question has done ok for himself and he still asks about the people who worked with back then. so a happy ending.)

the person on the tv (see i did remember where this started…) was bullied at work, but she had turned her life around and overcome being bullied and had moved on to bigger and better things.
so just how was she bullied?
her work was returned to her because she had made minor mistakes. apparently this kept happening. she saw that as her being bullied.
as with everything that appears on the tv you do have to take it with a pinch of salt and you do hope that there was more to it than: “my work wasn’t good enough so i felt i was being bullied”.
perhaps one of the (many) reasons why i am not working as a daytime tv or radio chat show host is that i would have asked “why didn’t you improve your work?” or “why didn’t you look for a new job?” instead what you have to do is be all sympathetic and congratulate the person on seeking professional help in order to help them deal with being bullied.
while the studio audience got a story of achievement i just thought here was another person who doesn’t want to take responsibility for their own life and was happier to be able to blame other people for the things that they felt were wrong. too many people are quick to grab any excuse they can rather than accept some responsibility in their life. this might be symptomatic of the growing feeling of powerlessness we feel about the world around us. as change comes at ever increasing pace and is not always for the good, leaving us in its wake.