learning - Academic Conferences Limited

David Mathew
negative, to the point that not a single thing that Rob completed remained unscathed from the
manager’s weak editing skills; and the shift in his manager’s attitudes towards him were confusing.
Although the two parties shared an office of twenty employees, and sat no more than five metres from
one another, the manager stopped talking to Rob directly, even in team meetings, unless she
specifically had to. If Rob asked a question of the manager while in company, the manager either
brushed it away or immediately asked Rob a question in return, sometimes the very same question.
The manager made fun of Rob when the chance arose, for example referring to his childless status
with the comment: ‘He hasn’t even started yet’ when she was discussing children with another
manager… Rob became nervous of approaching the manager’s desk: the manager would sometimes
make him wait a minute while finishing off an email or a piece of work, pretending that it was
inconceivable that she could be interuupted at this crucial moment, even though others had
interrupted her in the previous minute. Rob was the only member of the team not to be invited to the
pub for occasional drinks after work, or to the Christmas dinner; the only member of the team not to
be invited to share an infrequent lunch together in the canteen.
When the manager stopped addressing Rob directly and started using email for every
communication, Rob was baffled and started to feel anxious. At this point it did not occur to him that
this constituted cyberbullying, but he was aware that it was peculiar behaviour (by anyone’s
standards) and that it was behaviour that had been reserved for him alone. Before long, every
message that the manager sent to Rob was also copied to most of the senior management team;
what was worse than the feeling that this action created that he was being ‘watched’ for reasons that
he did not understand was the sensation that he experienced that the contents of the messages were
becoming increasingly (and deliberately) unclear. Rob believes that the emails were written in such a
vague way that he would have no choice but to ask for clarification of the task that he had been given,
or even of the topic in question. The clarification would then be seen in any subsequent emails by the
same people that were observing the proceedings.
After months of this sort of intensive scrutiny, interspersed by entire weeks in which the manager
refused to communicate with Rob in any fashion at all, leaving several of his projects in the air, the
resultant effect on Rob’s nerves and emotional condition was severe. In the meantime, Rob’s
applications for the same training that other members had been accepted for were turned down;
although other team members were allowed flexible working conditions, Rob was told that he must
report in at 9 a.m. and finish at 5 p.m. – even though the department had long since had a guideline of
‘early in, early home’ or ‘late in, late to leave’ for people with external responsibilities. Up to this point,
Rob had always favoured an arrival at work an hour earlier than his colleagues as he had a long
commute home. With this new ‘rule’ that was imposed only on him, his working day stretched by an
extra three hours as he was no longer able to catch his usual train home and had to wait some time
for the next one. After ten months of bullying, Rob went off sick.
The treatment drove him to a recourse to medication and a prolonged spell away from work (during
which the subject saw more than one message that confirmed that he would not be returning to work,
even though he had stated nothing for the kind). He admits to feeling anxious that the department was
discussing him; unbeknownst to Rob, his colleagues had been told by his manager not to ‘bother’ him
with any messages of goodwill or any Get Well Soon cards. A regular appointment with a counselling
service was swiftly arranged via Rob’s G.P. The counsellor, who had worked for this particular NHS
Trust, later stated that Rob’s was one of the worst examples of bullying that she had ever seen. And
yet, throughout all of this, Rob clung to the vanishing hope that things would eventually get better
without any form of legal intervention.
It was around this time that Rob started getting texts on his mobile phone from a number that he did
not recognise. The messages were unambiguous but nevertheless perplexing: ‘Failure’, ‘Lonely?’,
‘What did you want NOT to talk to me about?’ At first he deleted them, still attempting to convince
himself that he was looking at the whole matter incorrectly, and that things would get better soon. He
put the texts down to a simple coincidence, and his manager’s former and current silence down to her
own pressures in the workplace. (Not once did the manager call Rob to ask after his welfare. He was
off sick for nearly a third of a year.) As the texts kept coming, sometimes after midnight, Rob began to
suspect that not all was well psychologically and mentally with his manager, and though he knew that
steps can be taken to trace a mobile owner’s details, he also knew that the mobile operator can only
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