Rude Coworker Quotes

Hundreds of experiments show that encounters with rude, insulting, and demeaning people undermine others’ performance—including their decision-making skills, productivity, creativity, and willingness to work a little harder and stay a little later to finish projects and to help coworkers who need their advice, skills, or emotional support.

Most of us struggle throughout our lives by giving too many fucks in situations where fucks do not deserve to be given. We give too many fucks about the rude gas station attendant who gave us our change in nickels. We give too many fucks when a show we liked was canceled on TV. We give too many fucks when our coworkers don’t bother asking us about our awesome weekend. Meanwhile, our credit cards are maxed out, our dog hates us, and Junior is snorting meth in the bathroom, yet we’re getting pissed off about nickels and Everybody Loves Raymond.

Every day we have plenty of opportunities to be upset, to be frustrated, and to be offended. Maybe the day’s plans didn’t work out, or somebody was rude at the office, or a job that should have taken one hour took three. Life is full of inconveniences. There will always be interruptions and difficult people. We can’t control all our circumstances, but we can control our reactions. I’ve heard it said that life is 10 percent what happens to you and 90 percent how you respond. Go into each day positive, hopeful, and expecting God’s favor. But at the same time be realistic, knowing that most days will not go exactly as you planned. If you become stressed because you are off schedule, frustrated because someone offended you, or upset because your child wouldn’t eat breakfast, you are giving away your power. It’s good to have plans, but at the first part of every day submit those plans to God and just say, “God, this is what I would like to accomplish today. But I know You’re in control, so I submit my plans to You. And I’ve decided in advance that no matter what comes my way, I will stay in peace, knowing You are directing my steps and that all things will work together for my good.” But too many people these days have the wrong approach to life. They think they can’t be happy unless they control all their circumstances and everything goes their way. But that’s not realistic. You have to come to the place where you can say, “I don’t have to have my way to have a good day. My plans don’t have to work out for me to be happy. Everybody doesn’t have to treat me right for life to be enjoyable. I have already made up my mind: No matter what does or doesn’t happen, I will stay in peace and enjoy this day.” The Scripture says that “no one will take away your joy” (John 16:22 NIV). No circumstance can take your peace. No interruption can take your enthusiasm. You have to give it away. The next time you’re tempted to be upset and frustrated, ask yourself, Is this worth giving my power away? Or, This man is rude to me on the phone. I don’t even know him. Is it worth giving him my joy? Or, This coworker left me out of a meeting; is it worth giving away my peace? You may not have the victory, not because you can’t, but because you keep giving it away. Life is too short to be upset and offended. If you allow your circumstances to control your joy, there will always be some reason to be discouraged.

Don’t focus on the weeds. You may be spending all your time, so to speak, trying to pull up the weeds. In other words, trying to fix everything in your life, trying to make people do what’s right, trying to straighten out all your co-workers. You can’t change people. Only God can. If somebody wants to be a weed, no matter what you do, they will be a weed. Spending all your time and energy trying to change them will keep you from blooming. One of the best things you can do is just bloom bigger than ever right in the middle of those weeds. Right in the middle of those negative and critical co-workers, put a big smile on your face. Be kind. Be friendly. When they complain, don’t preach a sermon to them. Don’t try to stop them. Your job is not to pull the weeds. Your job is to bloom. Just have a good report. The more they complain, the more grateful you should be. The more they talk defeat, the more you should talk victory. If your co-workers come in one morning being sour and rude to you, don’t be offended and think, Well, I’m never speaking to them again. That’s the time more than ever to bloom. Put a smile on your face anyway. Have a good attitude in spite of that.

Zettler and Hilbig (2010) examined counterproductive behaviors—such as stealing from work, showing up late, being rude to coworkers, and other acts—in a sample of employees. The researchers wanted to understand how personality characteristics would be related to counterproductive behavior. To find out, they asked the employees to give anonymous self-reports about their personality, about their workplace, and about their counterproductive behavior at work. The findings of Zettler and Hilbig showed, not surprisingly, that employees who were high in Honesty–Humility generally engaged in little counterproductive behavior. In contrast, employees who were low in Honesty–Humility did a lot more counterproductive behavior. But Zettler and Hilbig noted that this finding only applied to some of the low-Honesty–Humility employees. It depended on whether the employee worked in a place where there was a lot of “organizational politics”—for example, where employees could get ahead simply by agreeing with the boss or by having the right network of allies. Employees who were low in Honesty–Humility did a lot of counterproductive behavior if they worked in places that were very “political,” but not if they worked in places that were not so political. Presumably, workplaces with more organizational politics tend to make employees feel that self-serving behaviors (including some counterproductive acts) are normal and that punishment for those behaviors is less likely. In such a workplace, employees low in Honesty–Humility are therefore likely to act on the temptation to commit counterproductive behaviors, but employees high in Honesty–Humility remain untempted. The researchers noted that these findings were an example of a person-by-situation interaction: In one situation, the personality characteristic of low Honesty–Humility was expressed through counterproductive behavior, but in another situation, it was not.

Be kind to one another, tender-hearted, forgiving each other, just as God in Christ also has forgiven you.” You have that verse on your mind and in your heart as you encounter a coworker who is in a foul mood and very rude to you. Wanting to honor the Lord, you extend kindness to that person and discover his or her terrible attitude is due to difficulties he or she is carrying by him- or herself.

Josh Miller, 22 years old. He is co-founder of Branch, a “platform for chatting online as if you were sitting around the table after dinner.” Miller works at Betaworks, a hybrid company encapsulating a co-working space, an incubator and a venture capital fund, headquartered on 13th Street in the heart of the Meatpacking District. This kid in T-shirt and Bermuda shorts, and a potential star of the 2.0 version of Sex and the City, is super-excited by his new life as a digital neo-entrepreneur. He dropped out of Princeton in the summer of 2011 a year before getting his degree—heresy for the almost 30,000 students who annually apply to the prestigious Ivy League school in the hope of being among the 9% of applicants accepted. What made him decide to take such a big step? An internship in the summer of 2011 at Meetup, the community site for those who organize meetings in the flesh for like-minded people. His leader, Scott Heiferman, took him to one of the monthly meetings of New York Tech Meetup and it was there that Miller saw the light. “It was the coolest thing that ever happened to me,” he remembers. “All those people with such incredible energy. It was nothing like the sheltered atmosphere of Princeton.” The next step was to take part in a seminar on startups where the idea for Branch came to him. He found two partners –students at NYU who could design a website. Heartened by having won a contest for Internet projects, Miller dropped out of Princeton. “My parents told me I was crazy but I think they understood because they had also made unconventional choices when they were kids,” says Miller. “My father, who is now a lawyer, played drums when he was at college, and he and my mother, who left home at 16, traveled around Europe for a year. I want to be a part of the new creative class that is pushing the boundaries farther. I want to contribute to making online discussion important again. Today there is nothing but the soliloquy of bloggers or rude anonymous comments.” The idea, something like a public group email exchange where one can contribute by invitation only, interested Twitter cofounder Biz Stone and other California investors who invited Miller and his team to move to San Francisco, financing them with a two million dollar investment. After only four months in California, Branch returned to New York, where it now employs a dozen or so people. “San Francisco was beautiful and I learned a lot from Biz and my other mentors, but there’s much more adrenaline here,” explains Miller, who is from California, born and raised in Santa Monica. “Life is more varied here and creating a technological startup is something new, unlike in San Francisco or Silicon Valley where everyone’s doing it: it grabs you like a drug. Besides New York is the media capital and we’re an online publishing organization so it’s only right to be here.”[52]

Most of us struggle throughout our lives by giving too many fucks in situations where fucks do not deserve to be given. We give too many fucks about the rude gas station attendant who gave us our change in nickels. We give too many fucks when a show we liked was canceled on TV. We give too many fucks when our coworkers don’t bother asking us about our awesome weekend.

When I see “mediocre motherhood” memes about surviving kids by day drinking or by hiding in the closet eating a pack of Oreos while your offspring run wild, I can’t help but wonder if this is the same way this person approaches her “real” job. And I ask myself, “What if I showed up late for work all the time? Dressed inappropriately for the position? Paid lax attention when my coworkers are speaking? Responded rudely when addressed? Complained constantly? Indulged in frequent sarcasm? Belittled my boss?

Here’s a common scenario. You’re working with a frustrating coworker or a difficult boss. They ask you to do something and, because you dislike the messenger, you immediately object. There’s this problem or that one, or their request is obnoxious and rude. So you tell them, “No, I’m not going to do it.” Then they retaliate by not doing something that you had previously asked of them. And so the conflict escalates. Meanwhile, if you could step back and see it objectively, you’d probably see that not everything they’re asking for is unreasonable. In fact, some of it is pretty easy to do or is, at least, agreeable. And if you did it, it might make the rest of the tasks a bit more tolerable too. Pretty soon, you’ve done the entire thing. Life (and our job) is difficult enough. Let’s not make it harder by getting emotional about insignificant matters or digging in for battles we don’t actually care about. Let’s not let emotion get in the way of kathêkon, the simple, appropriate actions on the path to virtue.