The Colleague Who Kept Checking Their Watch

On noticing patterns of behaviour before they have a name; and what it costs to ignore them

![“As Time Goes By”, a painting by Sebastien Shahmiri, 2017]](https://miro.medium.com/v2/resize:fit:770/0*BO66SpOc3y5FHDbT.jpg)

“As Time Goes By”, a painting by Sebastien Shahmiri, 2017]

There are certain workplace behaviours that you notice before you understand them, and the watch checking was one of those.

She would appear in the corridor within minutes of me arriving, always with the same bright greeting, always with the same casual observation that we had somehow managed to get in at exactly the same time again.

The first few times I took it at face value because that is what you do with a new colleague who seems friendly and eager and full of the kind of energy that makes a good first impression. If I’m honest, I actually enjoyed the moments we got in the same time together, “great minds think alike” and all of that.

You give people the benefit of the doubt because that is the reasonable thing to do and because you have work to get on with and no particular reason to be suspicious.

But then she would check her watch.

Not in the way that people check their watch when they are running late or waiting for something. In the way that people check their watch when they are logging something. A quick glance down, a small mental note, and then back to the conversation as though it never happened. I noticed it the third time. By the fifth time I had stopped telling myself it was nothing.

What I did not fully understand yet was the architecture of what was happening around me. I knew something was not right. I could feel it without being able to name it. The corridor appearances were too consistent to be coincidence and actually I do not believe in coincidences, I believe that everything happens for a divine purpose.

When I was going for lunch, she would always want to tag along, and me thinking that it must be my magnetic charm for the ladies, I of course obliged. But I became subject to a barrage of questions, too many to even ingest my meal. The questions over lunch were slightly too pointed to be small talk.

“Do you have a mortgage.”

“Does anyone here annoy you?”

The watch checking happened every single time without fail.

It was only later, when I walked into the manager’s office for an unrelated reason and found her already inside mid sentence, that the full picture assembled itself. She was not a colleague who had taken a liking to me. She was a colleague who had been assigned to me, whether formally or informally, and the friendliness was the cover that made the whole operation invisible.

This is how it works in certain workplace environments. The monitoring does not come from someone cold or obviously hostile, because cold and obviously hostile is too easy to identify and too easy to report.

It comes from someone warm, someone who wants to have lunch. Someone who asks how your weekend was and remembers the answer. Someone whose watch checking you almost talked yourself out of noticing because everything else about them seemed so genuinely friendly.

The tell, when it finally came, was not the watch. It was the defensiveness. I mentioned the corridor coincidences once, lightly, as a passing joke, giving them every opportunity to laugh it off and move on. Instead they became immediately and disproportionately defensive, in the way that people become defensive when you have accidentally stepped too close to something true.

That reaction told me everything the watch had only suggested.

Looking back, the signs were there from the beginning. The excessive friendliness that attached itself to me specifically rather than to the team generally. The questions that were just slightly more personal than the situation called for. The physical proximity that never quite felt natural. The trips in and out of the manager’s office that happened more frequently than any workload could reasonably explain.

None of these things, taken individually, would survive a formal complaint. Each one is explainable; colleagues get in at similar times, people ask questions out of curiosity all of the time and managers have conversations with staff. But taken together, over time, the pattern is unmistakable to anyone who has been on the receiving end of it.

The friendliest person in the room is not always the safest person in the room. Sometimes the warmth they use is a method employed to disarm you. The sooner you learn to notice the difference between someone who is interested in you and someone who is interested in what you can give them, the less time you spend being surprised when the picture finally reveals itself.

Trust their watch checking and their defensiveness. Trust the feeling you have and don’t talk yourself out of it.

You were right the first time.

Work Is War. But You Will Win.