Our parents were right when they told us that there would be people we’d have to work with that we didn’t like. They were also right when they said we would just have to “deal with it.”

Going out into the world, we have to meet a lot of different people. While we may get close to, or even become friends with the people we work with, there are some people we aren’t going to
get along with.

We may just not connect. We might disagree. We may outright despise someone we work with.

And that’s okay. That’s life, and we have to deal with it.

I learned that lesson the hard way over the summer. I had a coworker who was the definition of “bad.” Low work-ethic, endless complaints and excuse after excuse to get out of less appealing aspects of our job.

I spent half the summer being hateful.

I glared daggers at her, I asked her to do the work that no one else wanted to do and I stopped trying to be nice to her and find common ground.

I did anything I could to make life at work difficult for her because she did it to me and my crew.

Was it immature?

Definitely.

But if she couldn’t even pluck up the decency to do her job, why should I care?

And then I realized that hating her was not worth the energy.

I knew how to do my job, and she clearly didn’t. So that’s what I did: my job.

Instead of expecting her to pick up the slack and do her part, I left her behind.

Where before, I would ask her to pitch in so that our crew could finish our work by deadline, I simply chose to ignore her the rest of the summer. Relying on her to do her job just wasn’t working.

It became almost a game to my crew. How much more work could we do before she complained again and stopped working and threw a middle-aged tantrum? How much could we do before she stormed off to management for yet another mundane problem? What could we accomplish without paying attention to how little she actually did?

It pushed us to be better.

We got more work done than we did when our efforts were divided by our dislike. Instead of rolling our eyes at the ridiculousness of her latest complaint, we kept our heads down and plowed through. Instead of asking her to help out, the rest of us worked together and had each other’s backs.

I realized that my coworker wasn’t the only one slacking in her job. I had my own personal slack to work out.

By being so hateful, I was missing the point.

It wasn’t my job to make sure she did hers. It was my job to make sure that our work was done efficiently and on time. As long as I avoided her and the disasters that she often caused, I would be just fine.

And I was.

I learned my lesson and picked up my personal slack and am now a better person for it.

My parents were right. I just had to deal with it.