Hi, my name is Jennis.

I got a job at a new company 3 months ago and since it’s a big company, I’m still learning the way that things are being done around here. So far, I’ve gotten along well with most people, except for this one person. Honestly I didn’t even know that he disliked me until recently. Although we don’t interact enough with each other for either of us to have any sort of strong emotion towards one another, I thought that he was a cool guy.

I recently was assigned to a new department to do training and so this guy and I have been running into each other’s path a lot lately. I’m still learning so I’ve done a couple of things that got into the way of his work, which I apologized and changed, but apparently he still holds a grudge. I always greet him when I see him and he just pretends like I don’t exist. Yesterday, I made an honest mistake, I thought that he was done with using the paper cutting machine since I saw him walked off with a stack of cut papers, so I went to use the machine. He then came back and got angry with me saying that he was still in the middle of using it. I smiled at him and apologize which made him angrier and he said “why are you always smiling and acting dumb? don’t do that it’s so annoying”. I was shocked because up until that point, I wasn’t aware that he thought I was annoying. I wasn’t acting dumb either, I smiled because he was angry and I wanted to lighten up the mood.

I know that not everyone can like me, but it still makes me sad when someone openly dislike me. What should I do? Should I continue smile and greet him when I see him, or should I just act like he doesn’t exist like how he’s treating me right now? To be frank, I also get this sort of anger inside me like “I’ve always been nice to you, why are you treating me like this?”. I know that he threw clear signs that he doesn’t want to talk to me, but for some reason I’ve just always thought that he was in a bad mood about something else. I feel really down right now. This reminds me of when I was in school and someone would call me annoying and it would really hurt my feelings. I’ve never encountered such behavior again since I left school until now. What should I do?