I have written in several previous blog posts about the work slow-down in Dickinson, North Dakota, beginning in 2015.  Because my job had reduced work hours, I went back to my home in Idaho in the Spring of 2015 and got a trailer full of equipment so that I could do some self-employment work in Dickinson.  The self-employment work helped some, but in December of 2015, I was not working many hours at my job, or at self-employment work.  In February 2016, I was able to get a third job, just when I really needed it.

I was enjoying my third job, and making pretty good money at it, when a long-time employee at my first job unexpectedly gave his two-weeks notice.  I was the only person at the company qualified to take his place, so I agreed to take over for him.  With my two employers agreeing, I work 40 hours at my first employer, and 48 hours at my second employer.  Which means working every day, of every week, of every month.  I am happy to do it.  This is what I have wanted to do since I first came to North Dakota in 2011.  I came here to make money.  I want to pay off every bill.  It’s not that I need or want a new car, or motorcycle, or boat, I just want to pay off every bill.

I had filled-in for the long-time employee who unexpectedly gave his two-weeks notice in the past when he needed time off.  I was very suspicious about why he was quitting.  There were some very mean women at this work site, and I wondered if something had happened.  He gave personal reasons for wanting to retire, however, he had a new full-time job in the same field, before his last day of work.  I talked to my employer about letting this “retiring” employee fill-in for me if I got sick or injured, and my employer agreed.  I asked this retiring employee if he would be willing to fill-in for me in an emergency and he said, “I will never, ever, ever work at that place, ever again.”

On my first day back at this job location where I had filled-in for several weeks in the past, there was a manager woman who was glaring and scowling at me, and I didn’t like it.  I thought to myself, “I have got to get a tape recorder or body camera like the police wear, because it looks like I am going to have problems, and I don’t want to get into a he-said/she-said, accusatory work-place dispute.”

I have my own work to do, which I am the manager of, which I am responsible for, and nothing has gone wrong with my area of responsibility.  However, there are two mean older women, that have several times attempted to interfere with me, and my area of responsibility.  For the last month, on my daily work reports, 1/2 page is about the work, the bottom 1/2 page is documentation of personnel behavior.  Most of the personnel are friendly and cooperative.  Unfortunately, these two mean older women are managers and have been there a long time, so their hostility towards me gets followed by their subordinates.

Besides documenting interference with me, and interference with my work in my daily reports, I try to stay away from most personnel, and I try to say very little.  I believe that it is possible that other personnel would/could say that I was “bothering them” for even speaking to them, or that anything I might say would/could be repeated out of context and used against me.

Outside of work I have tried to look up on the internet why the mean women, might be mean, is there something about their work that makes them mean, is this common?  I did find a very long, detailed, specific article about why these women are mean, and the mean things that they do.  This article said that these women are the highest source of “hostile work environment complaints” by far.  The reason that I was documenting their behavior on a daily basis, was because I felt that their subtle daily treachery was just part of a broader scheme to cause me big problems.  The article said that this was correct, subtle signs of hatred like “raised eyebrows, glares, stares, and scowls” are followed up with “failure to provide necessary information, failure to provide assistance when needed, setting up situations that would lead to a failure”.

There were many horrendous examples of what women in this field do to their coworkers, especially young women, new hires, and pregnant women.  Reasons given why young women coworkers and newly hired women coworkers were mistreated were:  “wanting to see if they were tough enough”, “wanting to see if they could handle pressure”, “disliking the new hire because she did too good a job in comparison to her coworkers”.  One of the reasons why there was so much research done about “hostile work environment” in this field, was because so many people leave this field, and there is always a staffing shortage in this field.  By the way, there is a big staffing shortage at this location in Dickinson, and I see why.

But why are these mean women, mean to me?  Why are they like this?  I looked them up on Facebook.  The first thing I saw on their Facebook pages, was what good devout Catholics they are.  Once again, here we go again, what perverted teaching and understanding of Jesus Christ, God, and Christianity, makes Catholics here in Dickinson be hostile, unfriendly, and uncooperative to other people?  These mean women at this job location are good devout Catholics, and I’m not Catholic, and I’m not from here, is this what this is about?

I talked to a few other employees at this job location that I have known since before I started working here again.  They each said they had wondered and suspected that the mean older women were unfriendly and uncooperative to them because they were not Catholic, and they were not from here.

It is too bad that the overall corporate management is not aware of what is going on.  They have had a staffing shortage at this location for years.  It took me only a few hours to find a long, detailed, specific article based on a great deal of research conducted at universities and job locations to determine why this field has by far the greatest amount of complaints of “hostile work environment”.  The longer that the corporate management allows these women who are notorious for bullying new hires to remain, the more personnel they will lose and the harder it will be to find personnel willing to work at this location.