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The other day a friend asked me who was worse, Creepy Guy or the Hateful Harpy? That got me to thinking…

I guess I’m pretty lucky that in my entire career history, I’ve really only been forced to work with or near two really useless, annoying people. Almost everyone else I’ve ever worked with had some redeeming quality, or managed to be somehow useful to someone. Creepy Guy and Hateful Harpy are really exceptions to the rule, the kind of co-workers that you usually only hear about in laughing anecdotes: “Remember when that creepy guy worked here? Oh man was he something else!” Guess I’m just extra lucky.

Creepy and Hateful actually have a lot of things in common. Here’s a quick list:

- Both fat and completely in denial about their weight and their health problems as a result of it.

- Both ugly, though in completely different ways.
- Both useless when it comes to work (interestingly, their supposed “fields” were eerily similar; their lack of knowledge and expertise are discouragingly similar).
- Both fugly dressers.
- Both loud, disgusting eaters/drinkers: loud chewing, open mouthed eating, slurping of liquids, etc.
- Both completely in denial about their own professional failings and regularly shocked to receive negative performance reviews.
- Both go off on vacation, leaving co-workers to clean up their messes/finish (or just do) their work for them.
- Both exhibit strong characteristics of Asperger syndrome — in particular,  lack of social skills; restricted/repetitive interests and behavior (almost like OCD); and difficulty with communication.
- Both exhibit high self-interest and a sense of entitlement inappropriate to their respective work performance (for example, expecting to be sent to expensive training even though previous training has never been put to any productive use and performance reviews are lackluster).

There are differences though. I’d say that while Creepy Guy is annoying and gross, Hateful Harpy was pure evil. Although I firmly believe Hateful Harpy was mentally ill, there was definitely a maliciousness and intent to every awful thing that she did, whereas Creepy Guy does things more out of cluelessness and ineptitude.

To sum up: Harpy was a demonic bitch, but Creepy is just stupid. Who would you rather work with?

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.)

Just for fun, every now and then I’m going to let loose here with a juicy story about a horrible, no-good, spiteful, evil person I used to be forced to deal with on a regular basis. Luckily for me, that time in my life is over and I no longer have any contact with the Hateful Harpy, but I can’t lie – I feel like some of my interactions with her left me scarred for life! Just kidding. Mostly.

Today’s story is about adoption. I have never made a secret of the fact that I was adopted. In fact, my sister and I were both adopted, from different families at different times, so we’re not actually biologically related (does this explain why we didn’t get along growing up? I think that probably has more to do with how close we were in age and different in personality and interests). It being the late 60s when this all went down, “open adoption,” as it were, didn’t exist yet (or at least wasn’t very prevalent). So I was adopted through an agency, and my birth mother was, for all intents and purposes, anonymous to not only me, but to my parents as well.

Required aside: yes. I did in fact find my birth mother eventually. It was a long and convoluted search and involved looking at some records and getting some favors done. I’m not saying it was all legal. But I found her, and had some limited contact with her. Since we don’t have a relationship at this point, I’m not going to say any more about it. I hope that some day I’ll be able to write the whole story here. I digress.

So my adopted parents never made a secret of the fact I was adopted. They started telling me about it long before I understood what it meant. My baby book was designed especially for adopted kids. By the time I was six years old I knew I was adopted and often told people that I was. To me, it meant I was special – that my parents had chosen ME, out of all the babies they could have had, and that made me really lucky and special. I think it was this positive attitude towards my own adoption that helped me get through the difficult and hormonal teen years, and a not-so-easy relationship with my adopted mother, and all kinds of issues. It’s certainly why, for years and years, I never had any desire to search for my birth parents (and in fact didn’t search until after the woman I always thought of as my real mother, my adopted mother, died of breast cancer).

So far, this is a happy story about me, the adopted kid, and how I was OK with it. “So where does the Hateful Harpy come in?” I hear you asking. Ah-hah! Here it, I mean she, is now.

One day I was speaking to someone else about something (I honestly can’t remember the topic or the context), and the fact I was adopted somehow came up. I mentioned it casually, thinking nothing of it. Hateful Harpy, who was listening to our conversation, was aghast. “You’re ADOPTED?!!” she practically screamed, a look of pure horror on her face. This was followed by several trite, stereotypical, and vaguely insensitive questions about my adoption, which I politely answered. But my God – I’ll never forget the whithering look she gave me. If someone has ever looked at you like you’re made out of a sickening combination of garbage, excrement, and moldy food, then you know the feeling. It was a look that made clear she felt adoptees were sub-human, or at least that there was something seriously wrong with anyone who had been adopted.

Clearly, the Harpy was not a very sensitive person. This was made doubly clear to me a few years later, when I was talking to someone else about her, who casually observed that Harpy’s own sibling was adopted.

Her. Own. Sibling… ADOPTED!

Wow…wonder what it was like for that poor adoptee growing up?