I, (32F) have a job as a receptionist at a clinic, and have been working there for a little over a year now. I work with two other people in the front, we’ll call them Kate (26F) and Nancy (50 something F). In general, I love my job. I have a great manager, my coworkers, nurses, and docs are team players and we work hard together. However, there has been one issue that’s been escalating lately.

Nancy is generally a nice person. She’s been working reception at the same clinic for years now, so she knows her stuff and works hard. I respect her and appreciate all of her hard work. However, since the beginning, she’s been kind of a lot. She likes to over explain and turn every question, joke, side comment, anything I say into a big teaching moment about how to do our jobs as if I don’t know anything about this job.

At first, I didn’t mind, as I was brand new so obviously I’m a no nothing so please correct me before I mess something up, you know? But after I got a handle on the job, her attitude continued.

Examples: - If I forget if an appt is 15 or 30 mins for something I rarely schedule or am blanking on something, instead of just answering the question, she goes on a long tangent on WHY we schedule a certain way, HOW it effects everyone in the back (i.e. the nurses and doctors), and that “oh that doctor won’t like that”. When the answer that was needed was just a simple sentence. Sometimes even just a word.

• I’ll make a joke about a policy that’s crazy that couldn’t be taken as anything other than a joke, and Nancy will explain in VIVID detail why everything is the way it is and just take over the conversation.

• I will be sitting for maybe 10 mins doing nothing on a slow day and she’ll ask me if I did all my work. All. The. Time.

Here’s the thing. I’ve let this go for over a year because it wasn’t that big of a deal, I didn’t want to kill the work vibe we had, and having someone so gung-ho for work can be motivating, so I just let it be.

However, recently, she’s been escalating her behavior.

On random days she’ll be on me for working on a project that has no deadline the entire day around everything else we do. (This project is basically a ln excel sheet with patients for all of our doctors that need to get in for physicals that are either overdue or coming up. It was originally assigned to her but she asked me to help and I agreed. I don’t know if the manager asked her to pull me on but regardless I was more than happy to help.). She was telling me CONSTANTLY about it, as in, if I sit for more than five minutes not calling people off the list, she will make a comment about it needing to be done and how if I don’t do it that minute it “reflects poorly on the company.”. Mind you, we have other things we need to get done, this project doesn’t have a deadline, and I WAS working on it. Just not every single second. Plus, during slower times it is not uncommon for people to be on their phones or doing something else for a bit to fill the time, and I do this sometimes when there’s not much to do. Nancy and Kate also do this.

Again, I wouldn’t say anything but she’s not consistent with this behavior, and when our other coworker, Kate, decided she didn’t really want to do it after a day, Nancy said “oh well, she’s not comfortable with it, it takes some getting used to.” and fully never said anything to Kate about it. Meanwhile, she expected me to get to it right away. (Keep in mind, Kate is not lazy at all. She just figured that while Nancy and I worked on the sheet, she could work on other things on the back end that needed to get done). Not to mention the sheet is not hard to read and figure out, so idk where Nancy got that logic from but okay, fine. I let it go.

Then, when I come back from being sick she pulls me aside and says how she’s concerned about my work ethic, saying she has to get on me all the time to work on ins and calls, which is not true. She specifically mentions my difficulty focusing, and that she wants to make sure I know what I’m doing essentially (I’m paraphrasing, but you get the gist). This kind of pissed me of because I am open about my mental health, and she knows I have ADHD that I couldn’t take medication for due to shortages and prices, so it felt like she was using that against me. Keep in mind, the one time my manager expressed concern about it, citing “things that were brought up to them from others” or whatever. I explained my mental health, and told him my treatment plan, what I’m doing to try to negate the symptoms while I can’t afford medication, and he hasn’t brought it up again to me. She KNOWS this, and it felt like she was using that to say I wasn’t doing my part. Meanwhile, I get all of the work I need to get done for the day done, and yes, sometimes I space out and get lost in my head or have to have someone repeat themselves, but I’m doing my best with what tools I have. I was especially pissed off because she’s not a manager. She’s the lead for our ins checker, which basically means the only thing she can get on us for is if we aren’t doing our ins by the end of the day, so idk why she came at me so strongly like that.

Still, I let it go to try and keep the peace.

However, my last straw was today.

Same situation as usual, I made a joke about a docs schedule, saying something like I’m paranoid that we forgot something since she keeps changing it on us, and Nancy jumps in, calling out a mistake from a week ago that I barely remember off the top of my head, but if I actually saw it I could remember and learn from it. She goes off on how a procedure works, and I asked some clarifying questions and she kept flip flopping on details so I just said if I saw it I would be able to remember. Then she comes over and says I should have put a full block on the day so that things would go to the Que. Then she comes over and walks me through the Que, even though I already know about it (I rarely use it, because Nancy always claims to be working on it and when I offer to help she declines). A few minutes later, during a lull, she asks if I wanted to get started on the calls, and I said I could if she wanted me to (the calls in the Que are appts that need to be rescheduled from the end of June, so not necessarily a rush), and she confirms that it would help, and then proceeds to go on a random website looking up dog stuff.

I was pissed, because I wasn’t the only one that had little to do, and Kate was literally reading a book right next to us, but somehow I’m the one not working hard enough? I wasn’t done.

I went into my managers office and told him everything. How while I respected Nancy and didn’t want to start drama, the over analyzing my work is too much. He agreed, and said the micromanaging was not okay, which I hadn’t even labeled what she was doing that but I agree. He said he would talk to her.

Well, he must have talked to her because now she’s giving me the cold shoulder and barely talking to me. I’m upset now because I really like this job and I think I might have just ruined the good vibes we had, but at the same time I can’t keep taking this behavior lying down.

AITA for standing up for myself here? Was there a better way to do this? Can I salvage this?