My coworkers start hating me out of the blue for seemingly no reason.

43 comments

1. Time to find another job?

2. Go for broke and just ask someone upfront. Whoever you were friendliest with perhaps. ‘hey is everything alright?’ Just ask why hes being funny with you. If you want any chance of fixing this at all you need to know what their deal is.

3. I think you might be misjudging your jokes. It really sounds like the first guy took what you said seriously. All the other examples, you point out constantly laughing and joking with people before it turns. It might be a tone of voice thing where people don’t realise you’re not being serious, or something? Whatever it is I’d wager its stuff you are saying that pisses people off. Take that all with a grain of salt though. I’m going off very little information here.

4. Your description of the first interaction paints you in a bad light. Joking or not, nobody wants to be monitored by their coworker, and it sounded like an accusation of them not being where they are supposed to be or doing what they should be doing. My general guess here is interactions like this seem like nbd to you but are very off-putting to those around you. Ask some questions, make amends, see if it improves.

5. you probably pissed off the guy coworker who may have been screwing off in the break room all day and took your question as you policing his behavior or being a jerk about it thinking you’re going to go behind their back to management, he may have talked about it behind your back with other coworkers, either at the store or text chat or whatever, and they collectively don’t like you now

6. What kind of jokes are you making? Sometimes jokes with coworkers are taken differently then your friends would…

7. It sounds like you’re talking a lot at work and they’re annoyed because they actually have work to do. How much work do you get done vs how much talking do you do?

8. Come on. Out with it 😛

   The last person with a similar question was making Andrew Tate posts on FB. What have you been posting?

9. I would try to keep it casual and hold off on the jokes. You never know that your sense of humour might come off the wrong way to other people. I would also pull back on being overly enthusiastic and peppy (for the lack of a better word). People are stressed, and that kind of attitude can come off as obnoxious and annoying to people. I disagree with the advice others have given, and I would not confront them and ask them “what’s wrong?” That puts people on the spot. It would make things more awkward and get you even more disliked. Just try to remember, these are your co-workers. They are not your friends. Mirror their behaviour. Pull back on the jokes, but be polite without getting overly chummy and see what happens.

10. Do they all happen to be friends by chance? Or interact with each other? This actually happens to me a lot at jobs and it’s usually that one of them started gossiping to the others.

11. Working and joking all the time is not productive. Stay professional at work. It’s not high school anymore.

12. It sounds to me like someone at your job is talking shit about you. At my worst possible interpretation of the way you describe your behavior, nothing here would make me feel like I would need to be rude to you, or behave that negatively around you, even if I found you kind of annoying. These people have gone beyond mundane “work relationship” with you and are treating you with active contempt as long as what you’re saying is accurate.

13. > Me and this female coworker spend the day conversating and joking. Fast forward to today and as I come into work I try to greet her and she just refuses to look at me or acknowledge that I just said hello to her, then later on in the day I attempt to ask her a question that was related to work and she immediately goes, “No, no, no.” with a serious tone and tries to brush me off and won’t even look at me for the rest of the day.

    How did you not ASK her what’s going on yet, instead of asking here if we’re mind readers?

14. Sometimes it’s worth being emotionally vulnerable and asking “hey we were joking around the other day but since then I feel like the vibes are off, I’m worried a joke I made didn’t land well, is that correct?”

15. I am the first guy you’re talking about, not sure why i’m like that but one day I’ll have an amazing day with coworkers and then the next I feel like i’m in jail 4 life.

16. How often are you initiating conversations? The only thing I can think is that maybe you are trying to initiate conversations so much that it bothers people.

17. I dealt with this, with my neighbors. I accidentally caught one neighbor cheating on his wife, and didn’t know it. I never told the wife, never got involved. None of my business, and she was a shoot the messenger type.

    suddenly one by one the wife, the neighbors all hated me and I didn’t know why. Some went to the point of doing terrible things to our home, garden, garage, vehicles, the whole bit.

    turned out this guy told everyone all sorts of lies to discredit me just in case I ever told anyone(or his wife) about his cheating. Meanwhile, he had multiple women parking in front of the house all the time.

    my neighbors still hate and avoid me over whatever lies they believe. It really ruined buying our first home. I went into a deep depression, afraid to leave the house because I never knew what was coming next.

    I recommend just changing jobs, because it sounds like things there are only going to get worse unless you actually confront people and ask what the issue is.

18. If anyone tried to talk to me for an hour while I had work to do, I’d probably roll my eyes and avoid them as well. I don’t go to work to socialize.

19. >I know that in the workplace alot of drama/gossip happens and I’ve also noticed that if one particular person doesn’t like you, but doesn’t have an actual valid reason to dislike you they’d go as far as making shit up and spreading lies about your character. I genuinely feel like this is the problem. Maybe one person who genuinely doesn’t like me is painting me in a bad light when I’m not around, and certain people will believe it without question, which leads them to subconsciously not liking me either now.

    Honestly, you’ve hit the nail on the head here.

    In my toxic workplace experience, what happens is that one person singles out someone for something they find annoying about them, and starts spreading it to everyone. That person starts getting ignored/isolated and usually quits or else spends the rest of their time there completely miserable.

    It’s not necessarily that you did something terribly wrong, but also, it’s usually not possible to go back to the way things were. The ones who are being cold are signaling that they want you to stay away from them, so it’s in your best interest to simply remain professional with them and don’t interact further than that.

    As others have mentioned, there might be something about your joking that they may not like, and since this is a workplace, I’d err on the side of not hugging your coworkers as a greeting. If you’re planning to stay there longer, I would tone these behaviors down and as always, just be professional.

    I saw some of the other responses suggesting you confront them, and this will 100% blow up in your face. Nobody likes being put on the spot like this, especially at work, and it’s likely that you will be further isolated from your coworkers after they talk about it amongst themselves. It’s not about being brave and direct – a lot of “good” social skills in adulthood is about gracefully navigating things without making people feel super awkward. You can do it if you wish, but I do not suggest it.

    Since you do mention the gossip culture of the place you’re currently working, I would actually recommend looking for a new job, and doing your best there until you can leave. Toxic workplaces have a way of changing the people who work there for the worse and very very rarely ever become healthy workplaces.

20. I have a strong suspicion that you have an idea what’s going on. This sort of stuff doesn’t usually just happen. Looking at your profile it seems like you have some kinks. Is your personal and professional life bleeding together? I’ve met some truly annoying people in the workplace and others have shared the same sentiment, but I’ve never seen this behavior towards them unless something is really wrong.

21. So do you do any work at your job?

    I never worked in retail. Is it normal to talk with ppl for hours while on the job?

    Sometimes when coworkers are swamped with work and they see a slacker not pulling their weight they get mad.

22. I generally always ask hi how are you or what’s up how’s your shift first before joking because if they’ve had a bad day they might not be in the mood or they might need to vent quickly first before joking around.

23. Keep your distance from people at work. They arnt your friends. Always be polite and respectful but don’t talk about your personal life or ask about theirs. Get good at the job and talk about the job mostly. Don’t get personal. Aim to be respected and taken seriously.

24. I mean this all in the nicest possible way, but I think you need to hear it. I think you may be too much of a jokester and your joke pissed off the first guy. You’re also probably suffering from confirmation bias with everyone else, thinking there’s a problem when there isn’t just because you made the first guy upset. I used to be too jokey too but realized it’s annoying for others to when another jokester joined the team and when I thought back to class clowns in school. I also realized it’s a sign of insecurity so I worked through those issues. I’d say go talk to the first guy, apologize if needed, and lay off the jokes a little. We’re not comedians, we’re employees. Save the jokes for your buddies

25. I think you are missing a lot of information and need to know more to determine if the problem is you or them. Everybody has blind spots they don’t know about and finding them is difficult.

    I have a suspicion you are not aware of how you come off to people and they got sick of you for reasons you do not understand.

    It is common for people in your position to believe a collective effort to keep you out happens because of one mistake, but people would not be willing to treat you like this over a thing like that someone could easily explain away with your good intentions if they assumed them about you. Sometimes your “normal” is someone else’s “Oh my god”

    It is common for people to not outwardly show they are feeling red flags or that they feel like a hostage in a conversation and will willingly display excitement to participate in a conversation with someone they don’t like at first, especially if they feel bad for someone they are talking to or think they are the only one that feels the way they do.

    People are not assuming good faith about you and there is likely a reason for that besides their lack of faith in humanity or something. Sure, maybe if it was one person but this is a pattern. Sometimes people pass stories and decide they hate someone over a small incident where they assume a lot about someone instead of asking questions. That happens too. Very middle school/high school.

    I once worked at a Kohl’s in the receiving dept unloading trucks as a seasonal temp worker. They found me to work either too fast or too slow, I wanted to carry on conversation while working, and they disliked how direct I could be about things, they found me really annoying.

    It got time for them to get rid of seasonal people and management decided they wanted me to quit, so they enlisted a few people into making an effort to make me miserable as possible till I eventually did quit after trying to involve management in conflict resolution and getting nowhere. In the end when I quit my manager literally smirked at me.

26. Something happened here that isnt being mentioned. Contrary to what people are posting in this thread, this wouldn’t just happen from “joking too much” and asking someone where they’ve been all day.

    I’ve seen this happen in the past at workplaces, but when it did, it’s because someone threw someone else under the bus and got them fired or severely disciplined, somebody fucked someone else’s SO who they weren’t supposed to fuck and word got out, or they all went out after work and someone got too drunk one night and did something very bad.

    Is there anything else you can think of? Have you ever hung out with these people out of work, or had any meetings with management lately?

27. People could be saying it’s the tone of your jokes or anything like that, but honestly just listen to your intuition on everything with this situation. For all you know you could be experiencing a smear campaign and any reason that another person could give you outside of that could be the twisted truth. So go with your gut. Source: was on the receiving end of one myself.

28. This happened to me at work, too. It turns out I had a stalker! It was a friend I hadn’t seen for years who had some narcissistic/mental problems who was spreading lies to everyone at my work and all my neighbors. It’s a huge problem when someone gets fixated and obsessively defames you to everyone you know and the worst part? People believe it and will never tell you that it happened!

29. This might help you:

    I knew this one person that would make jokes all the time, and people would laugh cause they eventually felt pressured into it. It sounds like a genuine laugh, and they will relate to him,

    but eventually, they felt guilty for laughing at those jokes. No more funnies. They weren’t that funny anyway. They were a bit unsettling or would jab at people or identities. Or it would look bad if they laughed in front of people with more integrity. Those types of jokes.

30. Sounds like you are spending a lot of time not working and distracting other employees. I’d say your boss has told them to steer clear of you. Do you have adhd btw?

31. If you are at work and having regular hour long conversations with a coworker, you aren’t getting much work done and neither is your coworker. They are probably tired of not getting promoted.

32. Are you joking/talking more than you’re working? My team is usually very friendly but people get ostracized when they don’t pull their weight.

33. Anyone check out OP’s profile? XD

34. You are not going to like this.
    If you talk to the point where you distract your other coworkers from there work,
    That is the problem they have with you.
    The reason they might refuse to say hello to you is because that is how a long and distracting conversation starts in the first place. Do this enough times and eventually no one will want to be friendly to you. Focus on your work and being cooperative with them in the context of work for a couple of weeks, then come back to just greeting them(no long conversation that follows that).

    Its not that they don’t enjoy talking with you, its that when they do talk with you they lose sight of why they came there in the first place, which is to work.

35. There is something else happening. But I would suggest it likely isn’t another person spreading a nasty rumor about you. Most people don’t just believe any trash talk they hear and thing worse of someone they already like because of rumors. Typically the one spreading the rumors looks worse. Agree that you should ask.

36. There is always a reason. Ask them.

37. Maybe they found your reddit account and saw all the asses lmao.

38. alright well for starters your post history is fucking wild but that’s besides the point (maybe). this sounds like it could’ve been written by one of my coworkers. he’s a nice guy that i have respect for but holy fuck does he not know when to stop talking. i was able to politely entertain conversation for a couple weeks but now i just try to avoid him because i can’t take it anymore. it wouldn’t have been that big of a deal if the conversation was genuinely interesting, but this guy would ramble about such mundane details about his life. it sounds like your coworkers may do the same thing, that being initially entertaining your rambling out of politeness but then growing exhausted

39. Can you do an update if you end up asking one of your coworkers what the problem is? Sounds like maybe someone has made a rumor and caused people to dislike you like you mentioned

40. Be upfront an straight forward with it: “ Hey, are we okay? You’ve been acting different lately.” If you want to salvage that relationship. If not, give them the same freaking energy. Don’t say hello, don’t look there way and keep it professional. Cut the BS out.

41. One of my first thoughts was that someone is gossiping about you behind your back. That’s usually been the case when people I normally get along with have a problem with me out of nowhere.

42. From personal experience I always try to avoid overly chatty coworkers. I work in healthcare now, but have experience working retail in the past as a student. At my current job, it will be stupid busy at work with high patient volumes, or we have a lot of tasks to accomplish and the chatty coworker will just will not understand that and, talk for much too long. Some people are very rude about how they avoid these types but others find it difficult to be a bit more straightforward with them. I myself just find it easier to get work done by avoiding these kinds of coworkers altogether unless its really slow.

    I’m not sure if you are overly chatty, but maybe you are the type to ramble and not really engage in a conversation once spoken to? That’s the vibe I’m getting from the responses some of your coworkers have given you thus far.

    I have very little information on how your conversations actually go with your coworkers so this is my best guess of course.

43. It sounds like you spend a lot of time socializing at work. The first guy was probably busy for 8 hours and it’s annoying for someone else to point out that they haven’t taken a break if they haven’t had time to do so. Also, if you’re spending over an hour at a time “laughing and conversing” with people, maybe it’s ruining their productivity. It may not be that they dislike you as a person, but their job performance could be suffering and they don’t want to look like they aren’t taking their jobs seriously. I’d probably be the “no, no, no” girl and just shut the conversation down with someone who’s overly social before it even starts. It might be worthwhile to not feel like every social interaction with your coworkers needs to be a long drawn out jokefest.