I’ve been friends with this person at work for about 4 years. I felt like we were real friends, not just work friends, and on multiple occasions he also said I was his friend.

There is also this person at work who I have tumultuous relationship with. He’s widely known to be rude and explosive. This person is very fond of my friend for some reason.

Last year they were assigned to the same project and the rude person joined the lunch group. I told my friend that I cannot go with this guy because of how he treats me and I asked him to go to lunch with me sometimes.

My friend sees the rude guy’s behavior and he admits that he’s not a nice person. He says that he doesn’t like him on a personal level, but is trying to maintain a professional relationship with him, which is of course understandable.

However, he keeps going to lunch with him (in a group) almost every time. Sometimes I see them joking around with each other, but when I come and join them they suddenly go quiet (the other guy knows I don’t deal with his bad behavior so most of the time he avoids me or gives me the cold shoulder, except when he’s too angry to stop himself from being a dick).

Last week I was looking at a work issue with my friend at his desk and the rude guy really wanted to help him out instead of me. He started getting really angry and swearing because he wasn’t getting the attention and had to leave to the kitchen to calm down because he was getting so heated. My friend did not react at all. This is also not an isolated incident.

Am I overreacting for feeling bad about it? It feels like a betrayal but my friend says I’m oversensitive.

To be clear, I do not expect him to cut the rude guy off or anything like that - just some support when I’m being mistreated and going to lunch with me at least some of the time.

I cannot really hang out with this friend after work because he’s busy with his family.