if you, as a man, send me a winky face after a passive aggressive slack message, I should be entitled to five hundred dollars in compensation for emotional damages, and also property damage because if this happens one more time I'm putting my head through the wall
when asking for a link to an internal resource I was given a link to the docs and told "you'll find a broken link due to a typo. Fix when you find it! ;)"
the broken link was the link I was looking for, and the text of the link was correct but the embedded location of the link had two characters swapped. Am I going insane. Am I in a clown house. Is this how the adult world operates.
the second time this happened I was asking if this guy found a dockerfile that he said he was going to send me, and then said "I don't have it, also there's nothing special in that dockerfile so IDK what you were hoping to find there anyway" and I was like "it's cool, I was just looking for a working example because I've never built a windows dockerfile before, but if you don't have it that's no problem" and then he linked me to the top level "dockerfile on windows" docs with a "RTM 😉 "
Unsolicited advice
@wgahnagl like, IMO, the wink is meant to mean "I'm not doing my job well enough, but I'm winking to let you know that you are new and I am not, so if I ask you to do extra work, it's OK".
I think it's probably meant as, like, a wry smile thing. Which is also a shitty vibe, but it's probably not a sexual harassment vibe. This seems a bit like a case of folks from one generation using emoji slightly differently than another, but idk if that's your case.
Additionally, folks in HR often don't have any training for sorting out this kind of thing, so be a bit cautious when asking them for help. Usually, hr is mostly there so employees talk to them before they would contact, say, law enforcement.
In my experience, talking with a manager (not even necessarily the one I report to, just one I like) for advice can be more helpful. Or another worker around your same level that's been there a couple years longer. I also found the workplace stack exchange really helpful for navigating stuff like this, too, especially when I was just starting out.
The good news here is that if you directly ask "wait, what's with the winky face?" they'll probably stop. And if they get extra weird, it's likely they'll escalate to a point where it's less of a gray area.
Unsolicited advice
@starless it's not a "hey girl 😉 " type of wink it's a "the fact that you're asking for help is proof you don't know 😉 " type of wink
Unsolicited advice, mild passive aggressive workplace horror story
@wgahnagl yeah, that's rough.
If it's helpful, you could try interpreting it as a worker solidary in laziness wink. It's not like your coworker is likely to become less of an ass, but it might make your days more palatable.
And again, consider asking what that emoji means next time. It's the gentlest power move on the menu, IMO. Your coworker probably won't recommend you for promotion on the basis of emoji knowledge, so don't worry about that bit.
It's always wild to me just how different, culturally, my straight, politically-moderate colleagues can be sometimes. Making room for interpretation error is helpful, particularly in maintaining sanity.
Horror story wise, I've dealt with awful things from colleagues attributing my recommendations for tool design to my "discomfort with the command line" (not true) to them insisting on three architectural re-designs after a project is already code complete. When I would try to refute their slights, my boss would tell me to stop being disruptive and to focus on the agenda of the meeting. Often, the agenda that I wrote.
Anyways, in my exit interview, I mentioned this to HR, and they said, basically, that that's the kind of thing that a manager should resolve, not HR. Not helpful. But from the company's perspective, three senior colleagues treating me poorly was my problem, since they had Vast Technical Knowledge. (if you haven't read Aurynn Shaw's Contempt Culture/The That Guy Effect, I highly recommend them)
There's a certain level of bullshit in every job. Decide what will make you quit, and what won't. Sometimes you need to work a shitty job for a few years. At least, I did.
To deal with it, I would write down the bullshit that wasn't enough to make me quit (or take a phone video of me explaining it in a private space), and then let go of it. I'd take a little break, go for a walk, maybe get a shower or something to eat... Basically enough to give myself some time to re-set, and then do what I could to continue with my work. Otherwise, I was finding myself unable to work due to being incessantly full of rage.
I would usually review my notes a few times a year and decide if I wanted to quit afterwards.
I did eventually leave that job, but it was a planned thing, and the transition went smoothly.
Unsolicited advice
@starless yeah it's not a sexual harassment vibe for sure but it's a very "If you were smarter you would've known how to read the docs" type vibe, and it's Very aggravating because it's the constant questioning of my intelligence that is making me want to eat car tires