Rose thought she’d made a new friend – instead, she found herself stalked by a co-worker.
Welcome to our series The Work Diaries – a space for you to share your experiences, advice, stories about bad bosses, crazy colleagues and wild workplaces. We’ll be hearing from industry experts giving practical advice about how to navigate tricky waters in the workplace, alongside Capsule readers (You!) sharing your firsthand experiences of failures, successes and difficult situations you’ll still trying to get your head around.
Whether it’s a woman discovering her male co-worker was being paid significantly more than her; a toxic boss nightmare or the story of a woman who became friends with the boss’ girlfriend – and lost her job because of it, we’re talking about all of the workplace’s unfair and unjust situations.
If you have a topic you’d like to discuss, share your thoughts, experience or advice about, drop a line to alice@capsulenz.com.
Rose loved her job.
She’d been working for two years in the marketing team for a mid-sized company that she’d long been a fan of. It was as close to her dream job as she could imagine.
It felt particularly sweet because she’d spent the two previous years in a toxic work environment.
“The culture was terrible,” she says. “My boss was a clock-watcher – we had to be at our desks by 8.30 and until 5.30. It didn’t matter if you had to work late for a pitch or event and had been working until 11.30pm, you had to be in at 8.30. She had a short fuse and was a master manipulator – she was always trying to play us all off against each other. It was so stressful, my health was starting to take a hit.”
But now things were going well – so well that Rose had already been promoted.
At home, life was going well too. She’d been with her partner, Matt, for five years and they’d recently started looking into buying a house together. And, she had a group of great friends.
There were a couple of people at her work who she got along with – sometimes they’d get a wine together after work, but otherwise their friendship was really just confined to the workplace.
Then, a new girl, Rachel, started in the accounts department – very close to where Rose’s desk was. Rachel struck up a conversation at the vending machine one day and then they’d often cross paths – getting a coffee, using the lifts or in the kitchen.
“Rachel was very close to my age and it was crazy how many similarities we shared,” says Rose. “She had recently got a puppy that was the same breed as my dog – she’d even got it from the same breeder. She’d had a very similar experience to my last bad workplace, which we bonded over. She had a boyfriend of two years and they were talking about buying a house, so she was saving for a deposit. She liked the same music, movies and books as me – to the point that I’d feel like it was too weird to say something when I saw her with one of my favourite books in her hand.”
Rose started occasionally getting a happy hour wine with Rachel after work, or going to the nearby park to eat lunch together (they were trying to encourage each other to bring a packed lunch to save money).
But, within a few months, Rose started to feel like she wanted to back off from their friendship. Something didn’t feel quite right. If she could pinpoint it, there was one specific conversation they had where things started to change.
“Matt and I had a fight,” says Rose. “It was about money, because we’d been sticking to a tight budget, but he bought some expensive stuff and then we both said some pretty horrible things to each other because we were a bit stressed and tired. It was silly.”
But the next day, when Rose explained to Rachel that she wasn’t quite feeling herself because they’d had a silly fight, her reaction wasn’t quite what she expected.
“She said she was really worried about Matt’s reaction, that it sounded like there was more to it and he was hiding things from me – maybe he was cheating – and I should break up with him,” says Rose.
Over the next week Rachel kept bringing it up and that she was worried.
“She’d say stuff like, that if she were me, she’d be really questioning things if we’d been together five years and weren’t engaged or didn’t have a house together – particularly being in our early thirties – and that clearly he had reservations and I should get out of there,” says Rose.
Rose began distancing herself a bit more – she’d say she had something to finish for work, or was meeting a friend for lunch and tried to get a bit more space.
One night at home she got a long text from Rachel saying she was sorry if she over-stepped but it had come from a good place – she just cared about Rose and didn’t want to see her be treated unfairly. She said something about Rose’s old work situation – that she didn’t want to see her “be taken advantage of again”.
Her text message only made Rose feel more uneasy about Rachel. Matt was sitting next to her on the couch and asked what was wrong. So, Rose said about how the new girl at work had sensed she’d been upset the day after the big fight, and she’d said it was all better now, but she’d had a disagreement with her boyfriend the night before and hadn’t slept well.
“I didn’t want to make it seem to Matt like I’d been bitching about him, and I didn’t want to lie,” she says. “I did want to talk to him about how his girl was making me feel a bit weird and whether I was being rational about it or not.”
They talked about it for a while, watched some more telly and went to bed. While Matt was brushing his teeth, Rose had a look for Rachel on Instagram – she found her account, but it was private. She decided not to request to follow her, but when Matt walked in she showed him Rachel and told him this was the girl she’d been talking about.
Matt’s reaction was bizarre. He grabbed the phone and brought it closer to his face to get a good look at the little thumbnail picture.
“THIS is Rachel!?!” he asked.
It turned out Rachel was not quite who she seemed.
Matt – who seemed extremely stressed to see her picture – explained that Rachel was his ex girlfriend.
It took a while for him to get it all out, but he said they’d broken up eight years earlier, after being together for around two years.
“He said he’d never mentioned Rachel before because he didn’t want to be ‘the kind of guy who talks about having a crazy ex-girlfriend,’” says Rose.
Because Matt then explained that for a year after they broke up, Rachel stalked him – to the point where he felt he had to move, and ended up changing his phone number.
“I’d always thought it was a bit weird – almost a red flag – that Matt was so difficult to find online,” says Rose. “When we started dating I couldn’t find him anywhere on social media. He has his accounts set to private. The pic is this random art-work and the name is his two middle names. Now that made sense.”
Matt and Rose ended up having an extremely late night, staying up late talking through everything – both quite in shock.
Rose went back through her Instagram – which was set to public – and felt increasingly uneasy as she looked at all the info that was on there. There was lots of her and Matt. There were pics of them picking up their beloved dog from the breeder. There were pics of what books she was reading, the movie she just saw and loved. The International Women’s Day post the year before where she talked briefly about an unnamed place she worked where women were pitted against each other and how she was so glad to be in a workplace where women supported one another. There were posts about where she worked. A post of her and Matt eating noodles – saving for that house deposit.
“Rachel obviously knew who I was,” says Rose. “Everything that I thought was such a crazy coincidence we had in common, was information up on my Instagram. The book on her desk was the one I’d recently posted about loving. I’d tagged who our dog breeder was.”
Rose felt absolutely ill about it – and Matt felt so terrible. She’d mentioned Rachel to him a few times, but he’d never seen a picture or enough information to connect the dots. It hadn’t even occurred to him that it could be the Rachel he knew.
“I kept thinking about all those things she’d said, obviously trying to encourage me to break up with Matt,” says Rose. “I felt sick.”
Rose called in sick the next day and she and Matt talked through all the different options they had.
“Matt thought I should go to my boss in the first instance,” says Rose. “But, I didn’t feel we had enough information. I thought about sending her an email, but I didn’t want to give her time to think through a plan.”
So, instead, the next day when she was in the kitchen and Rachel walked in, Rose told her she knew who she was, she knew what happened with her and Matt and now she would appreciate her keeping her distance from her.
“She acted like she had no idea what I was talking about,” says Rose. “She acted like she was shocked that I was with Matt now. I said to her that she obviously knew that already because she’d been looking at my Instagram – which is why she’d got her dog from the same breeder.”
But Rachel tried to put it back on Rose. She said she and Matt had always talked about getting that breed of dog and from that exact breeder, so it was hardly surprising they both ended up doing it. And obviously Matt had a type, because they were so similar.
“But, I was the one who found the breeder and suggested that type of dog,” says Rose. “When I said that, she said ‘see, we really are similar’.”
Then, she said, knowing who Matt was, she should really be careful.
Flustered, Rose tried to stay as far away from Rachel as possible.
“I was also so pissed off that she was making me feel so weird about my job – the place I loved until she turned up,” says Rose.
Then, a few days later, she was working on an event with her colleague and her boss and they got a glass of wine afterwards. Rose had been tossing up whether to say anything about Rachel, but she didn’t want to create drama or a situation.
But then, her colleague brought it up after she’d had a second wine – she said she’d heard that Rachel was telling people that she “wasn’t coping well” because she found out that her ex (Matt) who “stalked her” was probably keeping tabs on her again because now she was working with his new girlfriend.
“I was horrified,” says Rose.
She told them what had happened – and told her boss she wasn’t sure what to do and that Matt’s advice had been to talk to her in the first instance. She pulled up her phone where Matt had created a little folder of evidence – he had some emails from eight years ago. There was an email to Rachel to ask her to please leave him alone. There were threatening emails she had sent him and his mother. There was an email he had sent his phone company about changing his phone number and correspondence with the police.
Rose’s boss said she would organize a meeting with HR and Rachel’s boss.
On Monday morning when she got to work, Rachel was on stress leave, and then resigned a week later.
Rose felt relieved. She felt shaken up and horrified by everything that happened, but ultimately, she felt so relieved that she didn’t have to see Rachel every day.
She’d already changed her Instagram to private – but she’d stopped posting on it. She now didn’t feel right about sharing anything. She worried that one of the accounts already following her was secretly Rachel. She spent hours going through and checking every account and removing anyone she wasn’t 100% sure of.
But then, things took a turn.
Rose kept getting emails from random accounts that she knew were Rachel, telling her that Matt had been cheating on her.
“One Monday morning I came to work and had an email that said, ‘Do you know where your boyfriend was all weekend? Because I know. I was f***ing him.’” Says Rose.
She was getting text messages that were very similar. And she started getting deliveries to work – flowers with threatening messages.
Rose sent the messages to her boss, who looped in IT and HR. They all came to the same conclusion that this was likely Rachel. Rose was offered EAP support and the harassment was reported to the Police.
Rose says she was told that the police warned Rachel about her behaviour.
“That was six months ago now,” says Rose. “We found out that she’d moved to the UK about three months ago and we haven’t heard anything from her since.”
Rose says she lived on eggshells for a while, coming to work wondering what might happen next.
But, her workplace has been incredibly supportive, she says, and – she’d like Rachel to know that it’s only made her appreciate her workplace and bring her closer to the others on her team. She’s continued to perform well at work, and she and Matt are closer than ever.
