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By popular request, another hateful harpy story.

The Hateful Harpy was a frenemy, long before that particular term entered the vernacular. She really was the definition of frenemy in my opinion – someone who acts like she’s friends with you solely for the purpose of all the ways that she can use you, mostly psychologically. I remember when I had some trouble at my new job, a problem with some weird gossip that was circulating about me and turned out to be a total misunderstanding on one person’s part, which turned into an exagerration via a poisonous game of office telephone. Hateful Harpy (who worked for the same company) had the power to quash this innuendo when she first heard it – after all, she was supposedly my “friend” at the time. But she didn’t. In fact, she encouraged it and repeated it and when I went to her, miserable about the untrue and far-out things that I’d heard were being said about me, she said, “You mean that wasn’t true?!” Then she proceeded to tell me with much glee some of the even more horrible things that SHE had heard – and hadn’t bothered to correct or question, either.

I got it all straightened out in the end, no thanks to HH. Up to that point I considered her sort of a casual acquaintance (I really only barely knew her, but at my new job she was the only person I’d known before starting), certainly not a close friend. While I had assumed we might grow close as time went by, the gossip experience was a wake-up call for me. It was one of the first inklings I had that maybe HH’s goal in friendship wasn’t to be actual friends, but to make HH feel better about herself – whatever it took. As it turns out, it took quite a lot! Certainly she’d exhibited other frenemy behaviors before this (making unnecessarily cruel, sarcastic remarks about everything from my clothes to my husband to my home, and passing them off as “jokes” was her specialty), but at the time I figured she was just socially awkward. Actually, she was socially awkward – VERY socially awkward. I think she had, at minimum, Asperger’s Syndrome, and lots of other issues as well. But that’s a Hateful Harpy story for another day…

Sweet dreams, y’all. And watch out for those frenemies!

(Updated to add the link to the hilarious frenemy article on Wikipedia.)