hello, i hope you guys strap in because this is gonna be a doozy of a post that i didn’t think i’d be writing honestly. for context, i am trans and use he/him pronouns. i will be not giving fake names for these coworkers ill just call them coworker a, coworker b, and coworker c.

so, last april i began working at a major department store chain and grew close with coworker a (f21) and coworker b (f18) because all three of us like kpop and we shared many of the same shifts so we worked together a lot. we also have a lot of the same political views. i am in a supervisor position, and this is important to the story. enter coworker c (m21) who coworker a and b don’t like because he voted differently than they did in the election last year. i didn’t think anything would really come of it because we weren’t scheduled with coworker c a lot.

then, in january all three of us had a shift with coworker c wherein coworker a kept repeated likening him to chicken little and calling him that to his face, even when he asked her to stop. at one point it came to a head when i was on the cash register assisting a customer and coworker c was next to me talking while coworkers a and b were just talking behind us. suddenly coworker a refers to coworker c as chicken little again and he responds “stop calling me chicken little or we’re going to have beef.” and coworker a responds with “you don’t want to have beef with me, i’ll follow you to your house.”

again, i am a supervisor position and she is actively harassing him and threatened to follow him home, and said all of this in front of a customer- in a heavily recorded area. so, coworker c gets irritated and walks away. coworkers a and b are laughing behind the register about coworker c and making fun of him.

later on in the night, as i’m ringing up a customer, coworker a calls coworker c chicken little again and coworker c gets really irritated but says “i don’t want beef, can you please stop” to which she responds by pulling pepper spray out of her pocket and putting it in his face. she says “do you want to be pepper sprayed, i’ll do it right now” and he tries to back away while saying “no, please stop”. she laughs again and walks away. later on in the night she tells me “i wasn’t actually going to pepper spray him, i just wanted to threaten him. i think it’s because im on my period.”

at the end of the night, after the store closed, i had stepped to the side to talk with the manager on duty to report everything that had happened because 1. it’s the right thing to do 2. i’ve been bullied my whole life and i will stand up for people when i see wrong has happened and 3. it’s literally my job. i’m a supervisor, if the customers who had witnessed her actions while i was ringing them up had reported her and the store manager looked back on tape and saw me, i could lose my job for not reporting it.

the next day i informed the store manager of my report, but she had left quickly after stating she was going on vacation and we could deal with it when she came back, so i went to the assistant manager of the store and made my report as well, explaining that the store manager knows but is on vacation, so i wanted to make sure my report was taken (my store manager forgets easily, and would have not remembered the conversation we had).

coworker a was reprimanded by the assistant manager and the next time we worked together she came up to me in the break room and asked me “hey, did you report me to the managers? because if you did i just wanted to apologize. i was only joking about pepper spraying him, i wouldn’t actually do it”

for a few weeks nothing really happened that was noteworthy, but last month coworker b, who was there but refused to report her best friend, stopped talking to me and would start giving me attitude every time i asked her to do something, and when i tried to ask if i had done something to upset her she just rolled her eyes and walked away. so i brought this up to my manager, explaining the situation again, as she had forgotten, and saying that i don’t know where to go from here because i can’t fix something if i don’t know what’s wrong. she told me she would see what’s up, but dropped it for a while.

on tuesday my manager comes up to me and says “hey, coworker b just wants to have a talk with you and explain her side of the story” so she pulls me into her office and clocks me in just for coworker b to berate me for nearly 20 minutes. telling me “next time you need to talk to me instead of telling on me to my manager” and every time i tried to speak up to explain myself she would put her finger up and say “shut up, im not done talking” or “no, let me speak this isn’t your time” and when she was done she would say “now what do you have to say” or “whatever, you can talk now” so when i finally got to explain “hey, how can i talk to you when you won’t respond?” she answered by saying “oh, i was having a bad day those days” and would deflect any blame back on to me like it was my fault. she also kept bringing back up coworker a and saying that everyone assumes i was the one that reported her and that i was weird for reporting it and then for “telling my manager instead of being adults about it”

the retaliation has gotten so bad that every time i am scheduled to work with coworker a or b they both call out or switch so they don’t have to work with me, actively showing that they are talking to everyone except me. i feel like im being bullied again, like im the person at fault for threatening to pepper spray someone and follow them home. its gotten so bad that i am actively in the middle of transferring to a different building in this company just to get away from the side eyes or the nasty offhanded comments.

so aita for reporting my friend for threatening to pepper spray someone just because she didn’t like him?