I’m a 34M working in tech. The past few years haven’t been the easiest, I’ve been laid off twice in about three years. Still, most people I know in my field tend to bounce back pretty fast since it’s a space where skills are in demand and people are generally solid at what they do.
At the first company where I was laid off, there was a coworker (I’ll call her “Emily”). She’d been there close to 7 years and never made it to a senior role. She used to complain a lot about being overlooked and claimed she wasn’t being given the kind of high visibility work that would help her move up. According to her, others were holding her back or shutting her out of opportunities.
From what I saw, that wasn’t really accurate. She had trouble with fairly basic tasks, often needed more support than others at her level, and would sometimes push back on established plans as if she had better ideas, even when she didn’t fully understand them. When things went wrong, she had a tendency to shift blame or escalate issues to HR. It left a pretty negative impression on me, and honestly a lot of the team felt the same.
Anyway, fast forward to recently. I was at Loblaws picking up groceries and ended up at a checkout where the cashier turned out to be her. We both recognized each other right away.
This is where things went sideways. Something about the situation just caught me off guard. It wasn’t that I found her job funny, it was more the contrast in my head between how she used to talk about being unfairly held back and then randomly running into her like this and also that these days in my country it is quite rare to find locals working these jobs and we need migrants for them. For whatever reason, I just lost it and started laughing.
I did try to stop, but it only made it worse. It was one of those situations where the more you try to hold it in, the less you can.
After a moment I managed to get myself under control. She was clearly upset and asked if I was laughing because she was working there. I said no, that I had something else on my mind, which is technically true, even if it sounded bad.
She didn’t believe me and got more irritated, telling me that if I needed to laugh I should step outside instead of doing it in front of her. I didn’t leave though, I just completed my purchase and went on my way. In my head, walking off and leaving my groceries behind didn’t seem reasonable either.
Now I’m second guessing it. I didn’t intend to insult her, but I can see how it came across that way. At the same time, being told to leave mid checkout felt a bit much.