I've noticed something the past few weeks while I've been working at my job, and after discussing it with my other female coworkers, I realized we are all suffering from the same thing. We all have problems with some of our coworkers constantly overstepping their boundaries.
I first noticed it when our new seasonal male worker decided that he wanted to play with the hair buns of my other female coworkers (including myself). We usually always wear our hair up in a bun because it is always hot outside and I don't want to deal with my hair sticking to the back of my neck. Well, this particular coworker decided that if he sees one of our buns, he immediately has to grab it and play with it.
Now, I'm not a person that is going to get annoyed about my personal space, and I don't really mind people touching me. But when you want to play with all of our hair without asking, then I just feel like you are way overstepping your boundary. Plus, I don't even know you that well.
Another thing that we have noticed is that most of our male coworkers love to butt into conversations when they think they have the right answer - and they usually have no idea what we are talking about. It happens basically every day, and at this point, I have just resorted to telling them that they need to stop, because they have no idea what we are talking about and they are not adding to the conversation in any way.
One of the other things that has been noticed is that most of my male coworkers (see most - not all) love to interrupt the females when they are talking. We were in a meeting the other day with some managers and one of my other coworkers and the female manager was discussing our plan for the upcoming fall season. My male manager would interrupt her every 30 seconds to say, "I think that is a good idea, but what about this..." The meeting took an extra 15 minutes to get through because he would not be able to keep his mouth closed for over a minute. At one point, I told him he needed to be quiet and let my female manager finish speaking and then we could all discuss the plans, but he did not listen to me.
Another issue we have encountered is with an older coworker who doesn't feel that we have the same skill level as her because she has been in the field for much longer than us (less than 10 years). She will constantly undermine me and my other coworkers because we do things the "wrong" way, and she usually ends up speaking to us like we are five years old. She has continued this behavior for too long now, and I'm almost at my breaking point with it, because it really is one of my biggest pet peeves when it happens all too often.
I love my job and I love a couple of my coworkers, but in order for me to really feel happy at my current position, the people that I work with really need to learn some boundaries - and I don't mean it in a mean way. I'm just trying to say that I don't want to be constantly interrupted when I'm trying to speak or have people talk to me like I am a five-year-old. It does not make for a great work environment at all.
