Sars,

I have a co-worker with a superior attitude and jealousy streak who cannot separate her personal life from her professional life. She will yell at someone for misusing the copier because her husband lost his job, and she will be an enormous passive-aggressive bitch if you get pregnant because she is infertile.

We work in different offices, have to see each other once weekly, correspond several times a day re: work related topics via email, and are on the same professional level: middle management. However, while my direct supervisor is a director of the company, her direct supervisor is the CEO. She’s privy to things like everyone’s salary history, so, if you catch her on a friendly day, she will disclose how much everyone makes and has been known to give out private information about employee bonuses. Without being asked, BTW.

She’s been quite unprofessional, petty, and immature to me on certain occasions, and I don’t really allow people to mistreat me, so I’ve confronted her a couple of times about the way she is speaking/treating me, and now relations are strained between us.

She has this tendency to override my decisions, despite them not having anything to do with her or the fact that she’s not my supervisor. She’s sneaky, though. We work for a small company and just about everyone gets cc-ed on emails. When she doesn’t agree with how I am handing a situation, she will go to our CEO get his “take” on the situation. Then I get an email from her relaying our boss’ decision on how to proceed, despite the fact that it has nothing to do with her and it was something that our boss shouldn’t have been bothered with in the first place.

It’s annoying, but I deal. Surprisingly, this isn’t even my main issue with her and why I’m writing you.

At our holiday party a couple of weeks ago, she had a few tequila shots and proceeded to tell some people at our table, me included, that she is so good at making me look bad to our CEO and twisting situations around so that she gets her way. Neither the CEO nor my direct supervisor were at our table. I was shocked and asked her if she had in fact just said what I thought, and she said yes.

Now, I have yearly reviews coming up. I normally have one with my direct supervisor and one with our CEO. Do I mention what she admitted to at that party? Do I let it slide? Do I confront her instead?

I don’t necessarily want her to get into trouble, because I don’t want to deal with the aftermath.But I want the CEO to be aware that the things she’s telling him that I am doing are not necessarily what I am doing! Who knows what she’s been feeding him. There are times when I feel that he already believes that I’ve done the wrong thing in a situation and starts a conversation off with how I need to fix it — despite the fact that I haven’t done what he thinks. I’ve always just chalked that up to him being an arrogant micro-manager and me being paranoid. But now I’m beginning to think that he’s been fed BS by this co-worker about me, and maybe it’s time to clear the air.

Please help.

Confused

Dear Confused,

Take it to your direct supervisor first; do it before your formal review, so it doesn’t come off like excuse-making in the event that Co-Worker’s toxins have seeped into the well of your perceived performance.

Tell DS what you just told me, resisting the urge to take an offended tone or drag in every little obnoxion Co-Worker has committed; keep it short.Review what Co-Worker said at the party, mention that you’ve gotten the feeling on several occasions that CEO was misinformed as to your actions, admit that there’s some tension between you and Co-Worker because you set boundaries with her, and ask DS what, if anything, s/he thinks you should do.

And start documenting all contact with Co-Worker, if you haven’t already.Sabotage of this sort is hard to prove and even harder to get superiors to care about if everyone’s work is more or less getting done — but if you say something to DS and Co-Worker decides to make problems for you as a result, you’ll need proof that she’s doing so.

Even that may not do much, though; you should definitely tell DS, but you should understand that it’s likely the CEO already knows Co-Worker is an Eddie Haskell…and doesn’t give a shit.Signaling to her that you know what she’s up to and you don’t plan to let it slide is worth doing — it may scare her into backing off — but you should be prepared for the possibility that the higher-ups won’t intercede in a meaningful way.

Almighty Sars,

I’m in desperate need of assistance, and I think your brand of no-bullshit advice will be particularly helpful.

I have a best friend of 6 years. She and I are extremely close — our families are great friends, we have plans to be roomies upon graduating from college, and — given the amount of time we spend together/on the phone — we joke frequently about being in a relationship.

Oddly, since I moved about 100 miles away for college, our friendship has only gotten stronger, and I visit her frequently (once or twice a month) in our hometown, where she stayed to go to school. The problem we have (as almost always seems to be the case when it comes to female friends) has to do with boys.

I don’t date a whole lot. I rarely meet guys I’m really interested in, but for whatever reason, when I do, it’s almost always when I’m back home. I have a few theories: Hometown is bigger than College Town, I’m more comfortable in Hometown than I am in College Town, I’m with my best friend in Hometown and am therefore my happiest self, etc.

Trouble is, if I meet a guy on one of these trips back home, it becomes a problem very quickly. My best friend will initially be extremely supportive, but that support will be withdrawn immediately if she feels that I am neglecting her in favor of seeing a boy.

Take last year for example: I was sort of seeing a guy who was a friend of a friend. Best Friend did a lot of the early grunt work setting us up, and was super-supportive. As I grew to like this guy more, though, and wanted to spend more time with him when I was at home, Best Friend would become extremely upset and want to talk to me about how I was “abandoning” her.

At the time she had just ended a budding relationship and was feeling not-so-great about it, and I could understand if I was blowing her off constantly to hang out with this dude, but my schedule while I was home was literally this: Spend all day (9 AM to 9 PM, for instance) with Best Friend; finally beg off, amid lots of judgment and passive-aggression, to meet up with the dude at like 9 or 10 PM; stay over at Dude’s house and wake up to a text message from her wanting to “talk”; leave Dude’s house around noon and spend the afternoon with her, at which point I’d have to drive back to College Town.

Sars, it’s exhausting. It’s as though, in her mind, when I come home from college, my time — all of it — automatically belongs to her, and any plans I make that don’t involve her are selfish and inconsiderate. Additionally, it seems like she’s incapable of being supportive of me if there’s a guy in my life if she doesn’t also have one in hers — whether that’s due to jealousy or an abandonment thing, I’m not sure. I do know that we have issues on a regular basis if we, say, go out to a bar and more guys talk to me than talk to her. I KNOW, IT’S RIDICULOUS.

I think I feed into it by returning to Hometown way more often than she comes to College Town, and the trouble is that we’ve established a pattern where she does get most of my time when I’m there. But I don’t understand why, just by virtue of being in her city, I must be there to see her ALL THE TIME. My family lives there too, and I’ve felt pressure to see them less and hang out with her more in addition to all this boy stuff. It’s tough because I don’t think she understands how many different people make demands on my time when I go home…and I’m probably endorsing her belief that all my time at home is hers by spending so much of it with her in the first place.

My point is this: I met a guy a few weeks ago in Hometown. He’s extremely sweet and I’m excited about him in a way I haven’t been excited about a guy in a long time. I went on a single date with him when I was home for the holidays, a date I felt extremely guilty about because I was leaving my best friend on “my last night in town” despite having spent (LITERALLY) 4 straight days with her. He’s coming to see me in College Town, which I appreciate and makes things easier for the time being.

However, when I told best friend about this, her reaction was lukewarm at best, and when I mentioned that I might come back to Hometown in a few weeks to support my roommate, who’s running a half marathon there, she made a comment along the lines of “and by support her you mean see New Guy, right? HAHAHA” which just rubbed me the wrong way.

How do I navigate this? How can I broach this subject — needing her to be supportive of me, allow me to do things that don’t involve her, and pursue a romantic life? Basically, I want to be able to go on a date or two in Hometown without feeling like a total asshole; I know that the way to deal with that is probably to just live my life and damn the consequences, but I don’t want to rock the boat with my best friend (who has quite the temper) and I also can’t help but feel like she might be right. After all, when all my previous visits have just been about hanging out with her, how can she NOT think she’s less of a priority when all of a sudden I want to see someone else?

Argh, things would be so much easier if we just lived in the same damn place!

Totally At A Loss

Dear Loss,

This isn’t about living in the same place.This is about letting your best friend manipulate and control you (and turning around and blaming yourself for giving her the idea that that’s okay).That’s how stalkers work.Not a coincidence.

Understand: it is not reasonable for her to expect that you will spend every waking minute together. Even in a romantic relationship, this is not reasonable.People have other friends, jobs, family, and commitments; the sun does not rise and set on a single bond. Women your age should get that, but Best Friend clearly doesn’t, and now she’s bullied you into forgetting it.I mean, seriously: 12 hours together, you practically have to call Jack Bauer to send an extraction team, and then she’s all over your shit first thing in the morning?This is not what best friendship looks like between two adults.This is an abusive relationship, right down to the part where you say she’s got a temper. What, she’s going to hit you?

Fuck that.Start setting boundaries. Draw a line; tell her to get behind it; do not move it. Again, this is not a friendship right now.This is you bending over backwards not to piss her off; this is you making 99 percent of the effort and getting very little in return, except the privilege of walking on yet another mile of eggshells.This is how people handle parents with drinking problems.Do you see what I’m saying?You can in fact handle the consequences of setting these limits, and so can she, so when she’s behaving unreasonably, point it out, and go elsewhere.

The next time she makes a New Guy crack, tell her you don’t appreciate the attitude, period.Don’t apologize; the apology that’s owed is to you, and if it’s not forthcoming, end the conversation.The next time she’s giving you shit for leaving to see someone else, explain kindly that you have other commitments, thank her for understanding, and leave — and if she freaks out, point out that she’s acting like a possessive boyfriend, you feel like you can’t breathe, and you have no motivation to hang out with her at all if she’s going to get that territorial every time you have a family thing to attend.And then: leave.The next time she’s all stroppy because four dudes talked to you and three dudes talked to her, tell her it’s not a competition and you don’t enjoy going out with her when it turns into an insecurity-management seminar every time.Sending her calls to voicemail now and then; practice vague phrases like “I had something to do” and “I won’t be able to stay the whole day,” and practice refusing to elaborate, or compromise, or feel guilty because she turns everything into a rejection and handles it like a four-year-old.Yes, you kind of trained her to think that’s okay — but it isn’t, and you aren’t doing her any favors by continuing to act like it is.

No doubt she has lovely, supportive qualities, but I haven’t heard a single one; she sounds like an immature Klingon to me, and if she really can’t handle you having a life that doesn’t put her first every minute you’re awake, you’re better off without her.But if you want an actual friendship to come out of all of this, and if you care about her enough not to want her to make a stalky ass of herself, you’ll have to start saying some shit she doesn’t want to hear regardless.This friendship is fucked up, and the only way to unfuck it is for you to grow a backbone.

She’s being a crazy baby.Stop enabling it, right now.

Does one have “another think coming” or “another thing coming”? Are both correct? I have always been under the impression that the former is right, but have seen the latter in some publications that presumably have editors on staff, and am questioning my long-held idiomatic beliefs. Maybe “to have another thing coming” has become accepted due to its common usage?

I can usually let these kinds of things go, but for some reason this one REALLY bothers me. Guidance, please!

Idiom Idiot

Dear Id,

From the most recent edition of Garner’s Modern American Usage:

The tradition idiom is “If you think X, you’ve got another think coming.”The OED records this usage from 1937 (s.v. think).It may not be funny anymore, but it makes sense: X is wrong, so eventually you’re going to think Y instead.But a surprising number of writers substituted thing for think, which is grammatical but not even vaguely clever. … The heavy metal band Judas Priest may share some blame for the widespread acceptance of the variant wording; its most commercially successful song was “You’ve Got Another Thing Coming,” first recorded in 1982.

I can understand the confusion when you hear the phrase — the way “think” rolls into “coming,” it can sound like “thing,” and I heard it thus as a kid.But the “if you think X” phrasing should answer the question.”Another thing coming” isn’t incorrect usage on its own, but it’s not the received idiom.Use “another think coming.”

Better yet, use “think again.”Clearer and less folksy!

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