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I have a similiar situation only there is no place to go in a small worksite and we share a very small office space.
This person is a mean, rude, deceitful, manipulating co-worker who gossips, lies, and back stabs everyone around her.
I have reported many of her destructive behaviors to management but they do nothing to stop her. She has them all snowed.
I try to avoid her as much as possible while I am looking for another job. It is the most uncomfortable situation I've ever had to work in and it is all I can do to stand to go in to work.
As Iv'e mentioned in other posts, I have a coworker that I have to share a very small space with. She is a whiner, brings her outside issues to work (comes in at times with puffy red eyes, indicating that she's been crying), writes letters to management if she feels she is being picked on...which is all the time. She is also very condescending, and is going to school. She has a horrible habit of correcting you for everything, especially in the presence of other co workers and customers. Just an all around ball of joy.
I am leaving this job soon, so I have gotten to the point of not caring, and just do my 8 hours and leave.
My strategy for dealing with difficult coworkers is to work hard, make myself indispensable, always smile and help everyone who asks for help. Supervisors who had the annoying task of investigating the coworker's complaints about me would discover that everyone loves me, everyone gets along with me, and the coworker winds up looking like a liar.
The other strategy, which I don't do as often as I should, is to document everything, every interaction I have with this person, everything they say, every email, every phone call. If management is asking, you can hand them an inch thick dossier with names and dates. Supervisors love this. It's the ammunition they need to go to higher management and get someone fired or transferred to another department.
Generally if I don't like someone there's a legitimate reason. It's been my experience that such people tend to weed themselves out pretty quick so it's a non-issue, except where I work now, where everybody acts like a bunch of oversized preteens.
I have a coworker that I don't get along with. It's not just a case of "bad vibes". We're very similar personality wise, so in other words, we're both extremely stubborn. Almost anytime we'd talk, an argument would happen. When I first met him, I accepted a job in his department, more to get on the shift I wanted than for the actual job itself. He had been doing the job with this company for several years, but had been doing similar jobs with other companies for about 30 years so he was very good at his job. I was good enough to make rate in that department, but that was about it, while this guy was the most productive person in that department for 5 or 6 straight years.
I think a lot of the issues happened because the supervisor in that department was my supervisor in another department prior to that and liked my work so she probably talked me up a little, and I'll be the first to admit that it was done unfairly. So when I came to this guy's shift and department and was only barely making rate, I can understand why he'd be upset about that.
We would sometimes find things to talk about that we wouldn't argue over. My sister and his son went to the same school and both played sports so we could usually talk about that without arguing, but pretty much anything else resulted in an argument. The worst argument we ever had resulted in us both ending up in the office. This one job, everybody would do somewhat differently. This was a 2 person job, with 1 person doing the picking and the other person doing the putaways in the new location. The first time I did the picking, the person doing the putaways told me how he liked the job done to make the putaways easier on him. The next time I did the picking, the guy doing the putaways was this coworker that I didn't get along with. I did my job the same way the previous guy told me he liked it done, but this guy didn't like it done that way. So he jumped down my throat because he claimed I was trying to make his job harder than it needed to be and that was just going to slow him down from getting to the next job that he had to do after that job was finished there. Me, being stubborn, yelled right back. Luckily, neither of us got in trouble, just got talked to about toning down our differences.
After a year in that department, a new department decided to start up on our shift and I put in a bid and actually beat this guy out of the job because he had some disciplinary problems on his record. It was nice then because we only saw each other maybe 5 times a day for about a minute each time. After about 6 months, the guy I was working with in my new department found a job with a different company so there was an opening in my department again. This guy put in for it and got it because the disciplinary things were no longer on his record. When he came to my department, he learned what it was like to not be the best at a job. He came to my department because it was a lot less physical than the other department and since he was getting older, he wanted something a little easier. He could still do the physical stuff very well, but he said he would feel it more and more each day. In my department, there was some physical work, but most of what we did was on the computer. This guy didn't grow up with computers like I did so I was a lot better than him in this department. It took him awhile, maybe 2-3 months, to realize that, but once he did, he figured out that he probably wouldn't catch up to me in this particular department. After that, we got along somewhat better. We would still argue at times, but not like we used to. We developed a respect for each other's different abilities. He would generally take the harder job when there was something physical to do while I would do pretty much every I could on the computer to make his job easier.
I think the main thing for us was for him to realize that he was great in the one department, he was just average at best in the new department. That's not putting all the blame on him, even though it sounds like it. I was guilty of things as well.
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