I'm a Horrible Human Being, Aren't I?

OK. Here's the story.

I've written about Annoying Co-Worker many times. AC and I are like oil and water in terms of personality. Add to that the weird dynamic that we are on the same level now and that she used to supervise me (well, watch me do all the work that she was supposed to be doing), and the fact that she has a naturally very condescending tone, and well, I just don't get along with her.

I spent the weekend fretting about this huge project our department has to do and that I have to work with her on. She is slower than kingdom come in her work, and what she produces is never first-quality. I very frequently have to go back over her work and fix it before it can make it into the hands of the person it was intended for. Yet she gets all the privledges in the world, such as going to training classes, a laptop, a Treo, etc. And she makes about $20K more a year than I do.

Well, on Friday morning, after we were assigned this project on Thursday (actually the other three of us in the office stayed up until the wee hours on Wednesday night/Thursday morning starting it), she comes in and looks at what I had been working on and says in a terribly condescending manner, "I looked at what you've been doing, and it's...good...really. But I'm not going to be able to use it to do my analysis." That was the wrong thing to say to me at that point in time. I asked her what she meant, and she said that she needed to have all the monthly information in one table in order to do the correlation analysis. I replied that our manager wanted a month-by-month comparison, and asked her why they all had to be in one table. She replied that I couldn't possibly understand and neither could our manager because we aren't statisticians. At that point I yelled at her that I was gathering the data and putting it in the format our manager asked for, and that she could do whatever she needed to do. She yelled back and said, "God, Sheryl, I'm just trying to communicate with you!"

I replied, "I'm sorry if I'm snippy, but J and T and I all were up until 2 a.m. or later pulling together the preliminary analysis on this Wednesday night and I'm just plain tired, so you do what you need to do, and I'll do what I need to do, and we'll just go from there." Yeah, it wasn't the most professional thing I could have done.

Well, T (the manager) is at a corporate leadership conference this week. I've looked at what AC has produced, and all she had done is to combine the files and to save them in three different databases. That's it. J and I were really worried that she wasn't going to produce what needed to be done, which isn't fair to T because she already has enough on her plate. So we decided while AC was out of the office at a doctor's appointment that we would our parts of the project as well as AC's part, so that T wouldn't be stressed when AC didn't give her what she wanted next week.

Then, the CIO's (T's boss) secretary called and the CFO was looking for a report that AC was supposed to have done weeks ago, and apparently never finished. I had to scramble to get it done ASAP. Things aren't looking good for AC, considering she was skating on thin ice as it was.

Well, she comes back from the doctor's office and is sniffling. She says that she'll be in late tomorrow, and when I ask her what's wrong, she says she has to have a biopsy.

Now here is why I'm a horrible person. I'm frustrated enough with her that I can't even be sympathetic. Not that I wish her any ill, in fact I stopped what I was doing and prayed for her on the spot. But I just can't bring myself to say anything to her, and in fact I didn't say anything but, "I see." I just don't want to try to be nice and sympathetic outloud while I have some resentment still harbored within me. I'm afraid I'll say something I'll regret, and I'm afraid I won't sound sincere.

And, subconsciously, I'm afraid I wouldn't be sincere. All this weekend, I kept saying that if it came down to her and me, and the company kept her, I'd be looking for another job. She had me in tears on Friday, and feeling physically ill with stress this weekend.

But if she isn't going to be here anymore, I don't want it to be like this. I don't want it to be because of tragedy. I feel horribly guilty, and I don't know what to do.

{SIGH} Now I feel ill because I feel guilty. I just want to cry...