★ Overview ★ General Strategies ★ Specific Tactics ★ Tools Against Bullying
I hope to share what has happened to me and around me, so that other’s can identify it and protect themselves from negative behavior. I need to vent a little bit because rumination is unhealthy. I hope to get this off my chest and never need to think about it again. I’m serious. The situations I’ve gone through are downright poisonous. I am still suffering.
Some “tactics” I describe didn’t happen to me personally. Some of these are situations that I’ve experienced, but some of them I’ve seen friends go through. Half of what I’m talking about didn’t occur to me in the workplace. It happened in Jamskating, where things were incredibly competitive, as that’s the nature of the entertainment industry.
I’m not trying to bring retaliation against a former colleague or business. If there are identifying details in here, I’m sorry. That’s not my intention. Any details I provide I will attempt to keep vague. However, because it is vague, I’m at risk of seeming passive-aggressive myself – or worse, possibly making someone who is not at fault feel responsible for something that happened. If you find yourself wondering whether you were involved in an example in one of the following sections, that means you probably weren’t.
Also, this is my experience from my perspective. One of the worst aspects of passive aggressive behavior – and one reason that it is so effective – is that positive behavior becomes easy to confuse with negative behavior, since the goal is to confuse cause and effect, to encourage inaction and to prevent interference.
Specific Tactics of Workplace Bullies
The worst part about these tactics is their indirectness.
♞ Hall of Mirrors
♞ Spread Rumors
♞ Abuse Confirmation Bias when Speading Rumors
♞ Construct a Lie with Elements of the Truth
♞ Pick a Weak Target
♞ Identify the Target’s Strongest Connections and Sever Them
♞ Blocking Moves, Like Those in Chess
♞ Attach Labels to You
♞ Disarm You with Kindness
♞ Have You Ever Tried Suggestion?
♞ Playing Dumb
♞ Fool’s Errands
♞ Distorting Your Social Model
♞ Bad Advice
♞ Setting the Frame
♞ Pavlov’s Cute Puppy
♞ You’ve Been Rorshocked!
♞ Create Juicy Soundbytes to Misquote You
♞ Use Your Religion & Politics Against You
♞ Souring and Exhausting Your Relationships
♞ Good Cop, Bad Cop
♞ Attaching Psychological Labels to You
♞ Setting up a Fall Guy
♞ Create Lose-Lose Situations
♞ Labelling You as Paranoid – Extremely Effective
♞ Identify Your Vices and Use Them Against You
♞ Misrepresent Your Works/Actions to Others
♞ A Bully Will Choose Their Audience Wisely
♞ Channels of Communication are Exploited
♞ Limiting Your Tools
♞ Setting You Up For Failure
♞ Profile Their Victims
♞ Install Malware on Your Computer
♞ Hall of Mirrors
The bully may utilize suggestion and rhetoric to make “copies” of himself and his beliefs. They may bring in new people and poison them against you.
This is really an advanced tactic, only possible once someone has plenty of control in an environment. Additionally, the environment needs to be large enough to support this. You’re not going to see this happen in a small or medium size business. If someone has the power required to attain this, you’ve already lost. There’s basically nothing you can do. In order to fight it, you’re going to need untold training in metaphysical jujitsu.
You practice Qi Gong and Toungue Fu, my homies?
♞ Spread Rumors
The bully may acquire information about you in order to spread believeable rumors. You may spend years fighting these rumors. You may not even know that people believe these things about you – in fact, you probably won’t. The bullies will spend considerable effort crafting rumors in such a way that no one will verify the truth.
They will work through catspaws to spread these rumors and you will not know who started them, if you ever hear about them. Sometimes, a bully will pick out the worst possible things, a rumor so nasty that no one will verify it for themselves.
♞ Abuse Confirmation Bias when Speading Rumors
When the bully spreads a rumor, they may couple this by suggesting a method to test you with. “Oh.. just ask him this or mention that. See how he responds and you’ll see its true.” By doing this and constructing the rumors in just the right way, people will form concrete beliefs about you that are not true. And once enough people form these beliefs, they are nearly impossible to shake. These ideas will acquire an egregore, a will of their own. Most people won’t ask you things directly, so it becomes difficult to dispel them.
By coming up with clever ways of abusing confirmation bias, it increases the likelihood that these rumors will stick. It’s magical – people will test these rumors and then feel confident they just outed you on something, when you really have no idea what’s going on. Or eventually, you wonder way sooo many people that you just met keep asking about X, Y, or Z, which are not topics which normally come up in conversation! But it’s like always the third topic someone pursues in their first conversation with you. At this point, your anxiety becomes the confirmation bias – your anxiety and nervousness about the subject confirms it in this persons mind! …. $#@!’ed up, ain’t it?
sex addict. racist. crackhead. neonazi. bipolar. schizo. HIV. antisocial. heroin addict. terrorist. wife beater. homewrecker. stalker.
Watches porn? Make sure everyone thinks they’re a “creeper” whatever that means. Whats the wierdest fetish you can think of? They’re into it. Paint sex as the primary motivation behind this person’s interactions with people. Again, no one will actually verify it – no one will even get close to this person. This is how lives are ruined, folks.
♞ Construct a Lie with Elements of the Truth
This is another particularly useful tool in creating rumors and suggesting methods of confirmation bias. This involves Category Theory, by the way. Beware people who are especially proficient at this. If it concerns a lie that’s in the form of rearranged truth, then people will try to verify pieces of the truth that compose the lie. When they verify enough pieces of truth, they will assume that it is true in its entireity.
This technique is similar to the method used by some rock artists to write songs. They basically pick lyrics, words and concepts that resonate with people then chop them up and rearrange them. People will spend decades trying to decide what they mean, when they never really meant anything at all, in and of themselves anyways. The songs and lyrics will begin to acquire meaning though. Incredibly useful tool for artists.
♞ Pick a Weak Target
A bully doesn’t want to pick a fight they’re going to lose do they?
♞ Identify the Target’s Strongest Connections and Sever Them
The bully will find someone who is socially isolated to begin with. And the bully will attack that person by attacking their strong social connections in that environment. By doing this, the people who would stand up for that person no longer will. This is especially effective if that person has a developmental disorder making it hard for them to establish relationships in the first place!!
♞ Blocking Moves, Like Those in Chess
The bully may attempt to prevent you from acquiring new relationships by blocking you. This can be physical, like blocking you from entering a conversation by forming a tighter circle or turning their back.
The Chess Companion, Forever Alone Edition
They can also identify the people you are trying to acquaint yourself with to try to preemptively establish a stronger relationship with them. Then, a manipulative person is capable of poisoning them against you before you have a chance.
♞ Attach Labels to You
Already discussed this at length, but this bully will try to attach labels to you. They may feel out their social environment to determine which labels are the most effective to apply to you.
♞ Disarm You with Kindness
Awww, isn’t that sweet. They’re being nice to you. How can you even be mad at them! This is a particularly effective tool in the bully’s arsenal: reversal of blame to the victim. It also happens to be something good people try to do in order to reconcile differences. Ahhh, plausible deniability. There it is again. Be careful! Definitely don’t react negatively to someone being nice to you.
♞ Have You Ever Tried Suggestion?
This is another tool. You should try it sometime. Just mention it to someone. You don’t even have to mention it directly. Just bring it up in conversation a few times. And then be amazed when something relevant to the topic of suggestion happens to the person.
Oh, and anyone that attacks a bully for using suggestion is dumb. I’ve never made that mistake, but I’m pretty sure you’ll be labelled as paranoid. This is why it’s particularly effective: you can’t even be blamed for doing it.
♞ Playing Dumb
What? I don’t even know what that means? How could I even use suggestion? I don’t even know what that is. Yes, I studied psychology in college. What do you mean it’s impossible that I don’t know what that is. You’re paranoid.
Playing dumb is particularly effective. And I’ve been burned badly for it in the past. When i was in my early twenties, I just assumed that everyone tried as hard as they could at everything. I was completely unaware of the snake in the grass that is “playing dumb.” That snake will !@#$’ing bite you. Don’t pick it up.
Of course, there are different kinds of “playing dumb.” There is the person who plays dumb from the get-go in order to lull you into a sense of security from which they can take advantage of you. Carnies do this and some street kids do this. Homeless people also do this .. homeless people aren’t actually that dumb. Regardless, if you fall for this, you may find yourself quickly in a sticky situation. It’s best to just look past it when you notice it.
There’s another kind of playing dumb, which is more of a brief response to other behavior. Sometimes it’s better off to not broadcast everything you know, especially to those who are trying to take advantage of you.
♞ Fool’s Errands
“‘ello good sir. ‘ave you ever heard of the key to the midway? Me and the ole’ manager ‘ave been looking for it all day and can’t find it anywhere. You wouldn’t happen to know where it is, would you? You’d be practically declared a hero if you did. Well, off ya’ go then. Find that key to the midway, ya bloody sucka!”
This is a trick that’s easy to fall for. I once literally had a coworker ask me if I knew what the Key to the Midway was, when I had been working there for less than a week! I was promptly sent on a fool’s errand – or so he thought! Turns out, it was a task that this guy couldn’t figure out and thought it’d be impossible for me. It quickly proved my worth to him, but I was lucky. This guy ended up being pretty cool though.
Always verify your tasks with your manager. Listen to and trust your coworkers, but be aware of what your manager asked you to do and you’ll be less likely to fall for this. And if it’s your manager that’s sending you on fool’s errands, *well that’s Mismanagement! * Not much you can do. You’re probably about to get fired. Good luck with that. Oh, and if you circle around to your manager’s manager, you’re just going to piss your manager off. * GLHF! *
This guy wants you to find the Key to the Midway, so he can keep sitting on his ass.
The best fool’s errand a workplace bully will employs involve a considerable redirection of your time and energy. Don’t go startin’ new projects by yourself and don’t go chasing waterfalls either.
♞ Bad Advice
Bullies in the workplace will give you bad advice and frame it as words of wisdom. They’re just trying to put you down the wrong path. Don’t get me wrong, I love good advice. But, there is such a thing as bad advice. Take what others have to say with a grain of salt, to say the least.
“Just.Be.Yourself.” – David Conner … oh shit, that shoudn’t be in the ‘Bad Advice’ section.
♞ Distorting Your Social Model
This is a particularly effective form of bad advice. Everyone has a social model, but the problem is that some of these social models just plain suck. If you don’t have a great social model and you know you need to improve, you may seek out help in the friends around you. Turns out, some of these “friends” aren’t friends at all. WATCH OUT! If they determine what you use to functionally optimize your behavior, they can offer you advice that deeply changes how you interact with people.
Some people are particularly effective at this – somehow; I don’t get it – beware these people. If someone offers you advice that (1) you know to be false and (2) you know they should know to be false, then you’re allowed to play dumb here. This is not a good person – in fact, this is a very bad person. Play dumb and discover what else they’d like you to know =]
Be careful though. Most people aren’t manipulative. You may be making a mistake in misjudging this person. Always keep that in mind, as well. But also watch for people who seem to try to make you self-conscious.
♞ Setting the Frame
“NEVER frame art! Do NOT frame this piece!” – Said every good artist I have ever bought art from.
Though I didn’t understand at the time, now I do. Setting the frame of something – a piece of art or a person’s reputation & statements – limits the possibilities! This is the subject of another post that I’m going to write.
I hate this. I fucking hate this. I’m not the most articulate, eloquent speaker. And sometimes, the things I say can be misinterpreted. However, each workplace bully that I’ve worked with has sought to misinterpret what I’ve said in group settings. *Manipulative people are very, very good at discovering double meanings – they have to be, to discover situations where plausible deniability can be applied!! *
In some cases, I would try to explain something: an idea, a well-meaning critique on something. In nearly every case, it was something that should have been interpreted properly, but may have needed more explaining. The workplace bully would discover ways he could intentionally misinterpret what I had to say and then twist it around. What usually results is that everyone else becomes confused – did he really mean that? After this happens like 15 times, can you really say it’s a coincidence?!?
In my case, as I’m a fairly quiet person, I would have to stand up for myself and correct this person. But you’re lucky if someone sets the frame of conversation around you. They may set the frame before you’re introduced to the conversation. The frame of conversation is difficult to describe, but it basically describes everyone’s shared context behind a conversation.
Moral of the story: watch your !#@$’ing back around these people.
♞ You’ve Been Rorshocked!
Pavlog’s Dog is an old experiment, where the dogs were conditioned to expect food at the chime of a bell. The association with the chime of the bell became so strong, it caused the dogs to salivate without the presence of food.
My point is: in each instance, a workplace bully has almost seemed trained in psychology! And they abused it, which is really, really fucked up! One or two of these people knew it because they either directly mentioned it or they had studied psychology in college. And you don’t study psychology in college without running into Pavlov’s dog. It’s a bit sick to imagine someone thinking like this though. Also, if you’re completely unaware of psychology, you’ll be caught off guard when it’s used against you.
Pavlov’s dog is useful to someone who wants to create signals used to indicate threats or other messages. It’s hard to understand how someone could use this against someone, but trust me – it happens. Don’t be surprised when this and other tools of psychology are used against you.
Here’s some cute puppies.
This article is a bit depressing. It doesn’t get any better. You deserve a break. Watch this cute puppy compilation.
♞ You’ve Been Rorshocked!
This is another one related to psychology. I’ve noticed that these people will do something I call “rorshocking.” That’s intentionally misspelled by the way. This means that they show you something or make a statement, in an attempt to make a judgement from your reaction. Lots of people do this, by the way – sometimes it really is a good way to elicit someone’s beliefs. However, in my case, a lot of people have made grievous misjudgements based on my reactions. Usually, you’ll find people do this when they don’t want to overtly ask you something.
And you’ll find that workplace bullies will create certain scenerio’s in an attempt to elicit a certain reaction to them. And then publicly misconstrue your reaction in an attempt to whittle away at your reputation. It doesn’t matter whether you give them the reaction that they want, sociopathic people excel in contorting other’s words and actions.
♞ Create Juicy Soundbytes to Misquote You
Often, they will create contrived situations to get you to say something they’ll misuse to
“Oh yeh and she said wants us to run a train on her. Are you down for that?” - My ‘friend’ says, on the way to the hotel. We’re alone in his car and halfway there.
“….. . . yeh… . . ???” - I reply, feigning agreement, unsure of what to say in such an awkward situation. I would never want to do something like that, of course.
Later, at the hotel, while I’m not around:
“Yeh and on the ride over to the hotel, he said he wanted to run a train on her.” - My ‘friend’ misquoting an awkward statement where I never used those words.
Classy, right? Gotta love jamskaters.
Of course, this is one scenario that no one will ever actually ask you directly to verify. No one’s going to want to ask anyone about that. In this particular example, I’m unsure whether I was actually misquoted here. But why did my ‘friend’ who I had known for ten years, ask me this in the first place? Shouldn’t a friend know me well enough to not ask me that? Or could it be that he wanted to neutralize me because he wanted the girl?
However, I can say with certainty that I have been misquoted behind my back in other situations. This includes a few situations that happened at work, where if someone didn’t ask to verify with me, they would have been left with a completely invalid impression. If your “friends” create situations where they coerce you to make statements like this, just to misquote you around your back, can you really say that they’re your friends? Like if you’re going to misquote someone like that, JUST FUCKING LIE. Just make some shit up. Pull it out of your own ass because I don’t want you pulling it out of mine.
♞ Use Your Religion & Politics Against You
This has already been covered, but you need to be aware – there are really good reasons to leave politics and religion at home. You may be well meaning. You may not even intentionally reveal this information. But don’t be surprised when it gets used against you. You may find that a bully will identify people on the opposite side of politics/religion and pit you against them.
And IMO, this is really sad. Why should it be a problem to talk about who we are?
♞ Fear Mongering
This person will spread anxieties around the office about certain aspects of your performance. Whatever is negative and can be used, they will spread. They will seek to hide your victories and triumphs, but will spread whatever fears can be used.
♞ Souring and Exhausting Your Relationships
These people may seek to make you unnecessarily overuse your relationships with other people, until they are exhausted. They might try to keep you busy, so you are unable to perform favors with those around you. You may find yourself incredibly busy and required to ask for favors from other people.
There is a give & take to life. If for some reason, you’re required to overtake from those around you or if you just ask for help all the time, people are going to be less likely to help you when you need it.
♞ Good Cop, Bad Cop
This is a particularly effective strategy and it requires a certain level of complicity. Basically, one person acts like your friend and the other puts a lot of pressure on you. The Good Cop is acquiring information about how you feel about the Bad Cop.
Wow, that looks horrendously effective.
This is actually a tactic that’s used in business fairly often and so, it really doesn’t indicate a bully.
♞ Attaching Psychological Labels to You
The bully may try to apply psychological labels to you. This can be particularly effective, as oftentimes with mental disorders, the way people react to the label can be more devastating than the disease itself. For example, if someone repeatedly calls you paranoid, people around you may mistake this for paranoid schizophrenic. Or they may not label you with anything specific: they might just insinuate that you’re crazy in one way or another. But if you’re labelled as paranoid, you’re probably not going to be taken seriously anytime soon. Sometimes, people just throw labels out there to see what sticks. It’s incredibly unsettling.
To me, these people seemed trained in psychology. So it’s no surprise that they would recognize the symptoms. And yes, this happened to me before, several times. I heard the guy who has the psychology degree (who wasn’t a very good programmer) mention specific psychological and neurological symptoms/signs in an offhand conversation to someone else. And the nature of the conversation was such that he was trying to indicate to that person that they were going to have a hard time with me… Or something to that effect.
♞ Labelling You as Paranoid – Extremely Effective
Because intentions are concealed and sociopaths thrive on plausible deniability & duplicity – then, when dealing with passive aggressive behavior, one can easily become paranoid. And that’s often one goal: make your opponent seem paranoid. And once others concur, well then, now you have carte blanche to do pretty much anything – and your opponent is never able to publicly second-guess your motivations. If they do, you can easily bust out the “paranoid” card.
By the way, interpreting motivations behind behavior and determining correlated reactions & behaviors are two of the most powerful things you can do in life. This is an example of having your social model distorted. If you are not allowed to do these things, you will never succeed in any significant way.
You Must Determine Correlated Behavior!!
What do I mean by that? You need to not only identify when someone’s behavior is functionally coupled to your own, but how their behavior and reactions are related to your own. There are many ways of doing this, but you can only learn to do this from experience. You have to experiment and test to see how someone reacts to you, but beware of confirmation bias.
Any “test” you give them can be manipulated. Or worse, you could misconstrue the results. The best way to “test” someone is not to test them at all – let life itself show you their true intentions. When something crazy happens, where you and this person have chips in the game, only then you’ll see their true colors.
The CIA has the D.E.C. method – Determine, Evade, Coerce. At least, they do according to the TV show, Covert Affairs. Pretty awesome TV show though.
#### Agent Annie Walker on Covert Affairs. I’d put a ring on it LOL
Of course, your approach to discovering someone’s motivations needs to be balanced. If you drive yourself to paranoia, then you will prematurely end positive opportunities out of fear, which will drive you to isolation.
Not everyone has sinister motivations – in fact, most people are truly good at heart. They’re innocent and they want to help those around them. This makes them useful to sociopathic people. One problem is that they can be poisoned against you, before you ever get the chance to meet them. They will act with behavior suggested to them by your enemies.
♞ Create Lose-Lose Situations
This person may consistently think ahead to place you into lose-lose situations. They’ll put you in between a rock and a hard place, so to speak. Avoid being set up in this positions. And when you find yourself here, think quickly and creatively to find yourself a way out of that box. Don’t rely on the choices presented to you. Be creative.
♞ Setting up a Fall Guy
This is more likely to occur in private life, which actually happened to me once. I found I was being accused of stealing a PS4 in a legally airtight situation, where of course I was not guilty. I had 3 minutes to put together a defense for myself between the time that my roommate in Raleigh notified me of the situation – via text message – and the time that he arrived at home. Very very fucked up, IMO.
At this point, if you’re an attorney, you may be asking yourself “But, you live together. If you two were alone at the apartment when it happened (discovered at 7:30am) then why would this person leave the apartment, ‘go to class,’ then notify you via text message at 8:30am, five minutes before they return… If they discovered it before they left for class, then wouldn’t they have mentioned it before they left for class?”
I’m not sure who did it and I hope it was not some conspired event. All I know is that I literally woke up in a scary legally airtight situation of which I had NO KNOWLEDGE – the only people in my apartment during that time were me and my roommate…. As my roommate came home, I thought ahead and had an audio recording app ready and my first words were “this conversation is being recorded.” I was immediately accused of having stolen the PS4 – with $2000 in the bank at the time. I believed that anyone who would steal a PS4 would not want the situation public, so I immediately posted the audio recording on Youtube & Facebook, publicly. A really shitty legal defense, by the way. If a lawyer ever tells you do do something like this, fire that lawyer. And demand your retainer returned.
“And that, children, is why I bought a PS4! Spite … *I bought it out of *SPITE! ** The very next week! That’s when they released the white PS4. I bought it because the PS4 which was stolen was black! :) :) I didn’t even want it yet. LMAO”
Most of the time, when someone commits petty theft, they already have a plan in their mind as to who is going to be blamed. Remember, they have thought about how this is going to play out – the victim in this kind of situation has not. In business, this can be a more serious trap. It can be used for more than assailing your reputation. Watch out for being set up as a fall guy for someone else’s legal problems.
♞ Identify Your Vices and Use Them Against You
“Recovering alcoholic? Ten years sober? Not any more!” – Anonymous Sociopath
This can be possibly just distracting and possibly detrimental to your life and reputation. For example, you may find yourself in the precarious situation of driving home drunk from a work outing. Or perhaps narcotics officers were tipped off that you have drugs on you. Your walking home drunk from the bar. You’re alone and then you’re nabbed. Not going to get much done at work when you have mounting legal debts and not to mention all that “therapy” that the government is nice enough to make you pay for, in time and money.
If someone have a drug problem, the bully will make sure everyone knows. The harder the drug, the better. You’ll lose so many opportunities, you’ll probably never recover. Or maybe you’ll never make it anywhere in the first place and you won’t have anything to regain.
“Perfect.” – Anonymous Sociopath
♞ A Bully Will Choose Their Audience Wisely
The bully won’t want to seem cruel in front of others. But, when you are 1-on-1, they will likely let you know how they feel.
♞ Misrepresent Your Works/Actions to Others
This is similar to some of the content in “Setting the Frame.” But, it’s worth saying again: bullies and sociopaths are excellent at being duplicitous and identifying similar situations that can be exploited. You will find yourself surrounded and you won’t get the chance to see how your words and actions were misrepresented. After all, this person has carefully controlled visibility and chosen their audiences wisely. Politics.
♞ Channels of Communication are Exploited
The bully will take advantage of how information is disseminated. This is similar to controlling visibility and audience, but altogether different. This person will reveal information in confidence to you privately on 1-on-1 chat. Then, simultaneously, on the group Google Hangout, they will paint a different picture altogether, in front of your coworkers.
And if you have High Functioning Autism, it may be extremely difficult to identify that this is happening, while you have a chance to stop it! For example, at one company I worked for, there was a person who offered to help me out. He was giving me real advice in Flowdock, one on one – in private. That’s where he was giving me the real advice. Everyone was on a Google Hangout at the same time.
In this Google Hangout, he was painting me as being completely incompetent by making statements to lead others to think I had no idea what certain standard tools were. In the Google Hangout, I played dumb for a second when he asked me whether or not I knew what Chrome Developer Tools were … If you’re a Web Developer and you don’t know what those are, you should be fired. By playing dumb, I identified that, yes, he was in fact trying to paint me as being incompetent.
The problem about catching a liar or sociopath in the act is that, while they may truly be plotting against you, if you don’t have the smoking gun, they will simply deny knowledge of it. They’re extremely good at compartmentalizing their behavior. Like I said, they are only motivated by what others see. The problem with my situation above is that it’s really vague and hard to explain to others without sounding paranoid.
PLAUSIBLE DENIABILITY .. ‘But, i was just trying to help him fdsamkofppaefnoapwnfoepwa’
♞ They’ll Keep You Busy Until You Experience Problems in Your Personal Life
A workplace bully may identify aspects of your personal life to use against you. They may stack you up for work or make you work in such a way – especially if it’s your manager – that makes it impossible for you to deal with personal issues. They may make you feel as though you aren’t accomplishing enough, so that you’ll be hesitant to take time off to deal with personal issues.
♞ Limiting Your Tools
“Build me a goddamn bridge, David. But, don’t use a goddamn hammer or any fucking nails, David. Or so help me God, I’ll fire your lazy ass. You’re going to build me that goddamn bridge and you’re going to use rope! Dammit David, do exactly what I tell you. Your goddamn bridge fell apart. What the fuck did I tell you about rope?”
“But … I spent 200 hours on that rope bridge. I took me twenty times as long because I couldn’t use a hammer.”
“Shut up, David. SEE EVERYONE, watch what happens when you build shitty rope bridges. YOUR FIRED!”
♞ Setting You Up For Failure
See quote above ^^^^
“Death by micromanagement.” - David Conner
♞ Profile Their Victims
If someone is going to bully you and if they are good at it, they WILL profile you. They will ask you leading questions. And they WILL ask you about your age. You can count on that. Your age (if you are young) reveals which pop culture references you do and do not know, what technologies you know, etc, etc. Sounds subtle, but trust me, it’s useful.
♞ Install Malware on Your Computer
A workplace bully is going to want to keep an eye on you. There are many examples of voice-to-text exploits online. Another software-specific example of shitty shit that shitty developers do, but be aware of your words and actions around that laptop they gave you. It’s impossible to say for sure, but there’s a chance that there’s malware on it.
By listening in to your conversations, a workplace bully can identify scenario’s they are likely to get away with and they can gain invaluable understanding behind your own actions as well.
This almost implies that someone has other people networked in on this, by the way. Installing malware is the kind of move where it’s going to leave a trace. They could get caught. If they got caught, that’d be a big fucking deal. But guess what! It’s not them. It’s someone else that you don’t know that does this. Then they’re not at risk to take the fault, even though they are receiving information and advice about how to handle you from someone else.
The Smoking Gun
THIS IS THE DEAD GIVEAWAY THAT SOMEONE FUCKED WITH MY LIFE, BY THE WAY! No, not that someone installed malware, but that there were people who could not possibly coordinating their actions was perfectly incidentally as they were and as part of a coordinated strategy with regard to my psychology and sociology!!! That’s what makes me so goddamn angry about all this. KNOWING that someone fucked with my life for the better part of a decade and RUINED it. And knowing that no one will ever display the accountability for this. NEVER! What the fuck is that?
How the fuck am I supposed to move on after CAREER ASSASSINATION?! When no one will ever say “Yeh, something along those lines happened. You should probably give him a fucking break.”
GET THE FUCK OUTTA HERE WITH THAT SHIT. And you want to know what pisses me off?
And NO, this was not just random behavior from malicious people. That on it’s own is bad enough. But you know how I can tell? Look for the equilibrium these people seek. That’s the subject of an article I’ll write soon. But these people, the handful I’ve had a problem with, it’s their objective to seek to push me out. It’s like linear regression, for human behavior. They are completely fine when things are getting worse, for me. Usually, if you have problems with someone, you can sort that shit out. But not if they really, really are out to get you. Then they are going to get you. And they are not going to tell you and they are going to throw everything they have at you AND THEY ARE FUCKING GOOD AT IT.
America? WHAT THE FUCK!!
And I think I have perfectly displayed just how intelligent I am. If someone had worked with me in a positive way – or rather, if someone had not outright sabotaged my life and destroyed my family relationships, yada yada, then I would have been completely fine. I would have excelled actually. I would have been so much further than I am now.
So yeh. Go ahead and say “we wanted the best for you.” That shit right there? That’s laughable. Because if I was laying in a gutter right now, these assholes would sleep sound at night knowing their job had been done. Their objective to discredit me and destroy my life had been completed. They never, ever wanted what was best for me. They wanted me to get the fuck out of the way. That’s all.
And what if I hadn’t been so intelligent? What if I couldn’t recognize what was going on. That something was wrong. They threw their entire weight against someone who has asberger’s and neurological problems. And someone whom they specificly isolated to solitude. AND I FUCKING HANDED THEIR ASSES TO THEM. And you know what? They’re mad. They’re mad that they didn’t win. They’re fucking sore losers. And they got their asses handed to them by an “autist.”
My favorite part though is watching these people squirm between a system of ethics that restricts them, though they clearly have no ethical restraints themselves. Or at least, that’s true of the people doing the dirty work. It’s hilarious how they artificially restrain themselves? Why stop there? Why not just go all out stazi? What’s stopping them?
So that’s it for Part Three
I split out this part from Part Two since it was getting too long. I’m in the process of writing Part Four, the section containing tools you can use to prevent this behavior from occuring in front of you. This is definitely the most important part. I wanted to include it first, but it requires a lot of context to understand why this is important.