Didn’t expect this at a workplace like woolies
Here’s my first ever attempt at sharing an experience I will never forget and remember as a life lesson in Australia as an immigrant and I hope this helps a lot of other immigrants in my position to keep their guards up around such people. It took me 3 years to finally see through all the subtle racism, manipulative behaviour and REAL LIFE ACTING SKILLS some locals here possess all thanks to me recently going through waves of psychological and emotional manipulations. Unfortunately as a matter of fact, they tend to behave in this manner with immigrants the most for obvious reasons. However I have to say there are a lot of good ones too who will genuinely try to help us immigrants out. This post is about the racist ones I got to know at work but honestly they exist everywhere and you will keep meeting them during your time being in a country where they have deep hatred towards immigrants. And trust me these behaviours and gestures were so subtle that there are a thousand ways to make excuses for such behaviours and make it look like nothing actually happened, it was all in my mind while it was all real in subtle manners.
Let me first explain their way of communicating. I am and may be most south asians are used to confrontational behaviour due to lack of strict work place policies against verbal and physical abuse. When you tell someone to “Fuck off” you mean it and there’s no excuse to neutralise these sort of interactions. Meanwhile here the presence of such policies restrict them from often having confrontational behaviour. To bypass this, they have come up with Non-confrontational behaviour where they will lie to you with a smile on their face, slide in racism or insults in the most subtle ways through conversations or gestures, change their act and dialogues towards you based on how much they like or hate you while still having that friendly smile on their face and attempt to manipulate to cause harm. Unless you give a thought to the conversations between you and them, it’s hard to realise some of the subtle negativity it may contain which can be very deceiving and also build up a lot of wrong assumptions. They won’t directly tell you how they feel about you but will have a tone in their speech that will at least make you think about it.
Examples tend to make it easier to understand so here’s an easy one;
*”You don’t need to come to work here anymore.” (confrontational way of telling you that they don’t want you here)
*”Why don’t you start looking for other jobs and work there?” (non-confrontational way of telling you that they don’t want you here)
Now it’s up to you on how you want to act on it depending on your ego, self esteem and what you think is best for you. And I am saying this again just to be clear that not everyone is like this but there are those who are.
Now the story. I won’t jump into too much details about how I figured things out because a lot of it will sound like I was overthinking. Well that’s what you have to do to understand their manipulative behaviours, understand when they are lying to gain something from you and protect yourself from harm.
Back in October 2024, I was hired at a Woolies metro store as a part-time team member. I used to think it was going great with them constantly making me feel like I am their center of attention coming from my nature of being a perfectionist at work until things started to get crazy downhill after December 2025. Within this 1 year, my co-workers who were locals would engage in friendly conversations, talk about personal life and make me talk about mine by slowly gaining trust and affection by pretending that its the same from their side. Until I realised that was my biggest mistake. Now if I try to justify my mistake I would say that “If they are acting friendly, how can I not act the same?” Around the end of December 2025, one coworker wants to hang out with me which I was more than open to. Gets some personal information out of me including who I had a crush on at work by constantly asking and sharing some of his own stories which were probably fake.
January 2026, I started feeling like he leaked those personal information about me after noticing some unexpected changes in gestures of some coworkers and now the girl I said I had a crush on tries to manipulate me into thinking that she likes me hoping that I will behave in any inappropriate manner which can get me fired from work and probably a false allegation of sexual harassment. Though I never had any intentions to do such a thing, the attempt of such manipulations started making me anxious. When I talked about these with other coworkers, they would say made up stuffs in an attempt to change your whole perception of the situation so that you stop thinking much about it or divert your thoughts while you are actually thinking in the right direction. I can give enough logical explanations with valid proofs on how she was trying to manipulate me and how I figured out those were manipulations but it will just make this post longer and contain too much unnecessary information. 3 attempts later, when she couldn’t get me fired, a lot of coworkers got involved in it and attempted to GASLIGHT me. For example, not being reported about my performance charts for the past 6 weeks to allow room for improvements instead straight away asking me to change my contract with no proper explanation beforehand and a few other Gaslighting 101 techniques. However me being somewhat immune to psychological manipulation made them change their tactics and started emotionally manipulating me. Some examples are, randomly bringing up conversations of topics that I am sensitive to intentionally while knowing that I am able to listen and it would have a negative impact on my mental health. Constantly trying to make me feel like I am getting judged or making me feel less, isolating me and what not just to cause me emotional distress. All these because they got enough personal information out of me to know my mental strengths, weaknesses and emotions. Unfortunately, I did get emotionally manipulated and it came with a cost. Not caring any of this and just focusing on my job could have saved me from all these. And its not like I would just fuck around the store not completing any of my shift duties. They were just not happy with the fact that I was meeting their expectations and not exceeding it which is outside of my pay grade honestly.
I know it sounds crazy like “How the fuck is almost an entire store against me? Are you on weed or something?” This is exactly what they want everyone else to think while they make someone feel like that they are getting paranoid at work by acting that way. This is something heavy exposure to weed can do to your psychology even if no one is acting but in my case they were doing it intentionally. And now the question is “Why are they doing this and why me?” So the main reason is having multiple wrong assumptions about me because the guy from work who hung out with me also spread a wide variety of negative gossips about me. Besides that, there were other minor wrong assumptions for which I myself was responsible but never got confronted which would have helped me clear those up.
Here’s a list of mistakes I made at work:
- I took attempts to befriend coworkers as that’s how they acted with me
- Inspired from coworkers who would not strictly follow workplace policies, I started being the same.
- Because of their acts, I started growing emotionally weak and personally attached to that job.
- I myself may have unintentionally acted in ways that would piss them off but they weren’t ready to openly talk about it.
- I was trying to be on everyone’s good side.
Through all these manipulative behaviour they were trying to show me my mistakes though there are other work friendly ways to address these issues. And yes for some reason they do have time for all these bullshit. They kept trying to change my perception of the store environment by having variable attitudes and gestures each time I went to work and that would cause psychological and emotional distress to me in a lot of ways. In the end I realised all my mistakes, how I have been acting myself and how these manipulations eventually started having an influence on my behaviours. I really should have just done my work and went home instead of getting emotionally attached to this job.
This went on for 3 months until I decided to finally resign from this job and that is what they wanted me to do after going through all these. Even my resignation didn’t go as smoothly it should. The assistant manager was not happy that I wanted an immediate resignation and he lied to me saying that resigning immediately will result in me not getting my annual leave hours paid in full. Good thing I had a screenshot of my recent payslip which I had to send to the store manager to get my annual hours paid in full as they deactivated my work account before my resignation could take effect so that I lose access to my payslips, keeping me in the dark regarding my final payments. The final email that I received from Woolies about my resignation had some payslips attached which proved my intuition about them trying to hold full payment of my annual hours initially but couldn’t do so as I had the screenshot. Within these 3 months, I fought off manipulations, learned how to read people, see through their acts and catch their lies while making sure I don’t make the wrong decisions. The end result? I started being strictly professional at work which is what they wanted but didn’t bother about actually speaking about it or take other friendly measures. Instead for their entertainment they had to make me go through manipulative behaviours in attempts to make me go crazy, lose my sanity or realise my own mistakes.
So, the life lessons I got from this entire experience are,
- NEVER TRY TO BEFRIEND YOUR COWORKERS UNLESS THEY ARE THE ONES WITH GENUINE INTENTIONS
- JUST BE DONE WITH YOUR WORK AND GET OUT
- DO NOT TRUST PEOPLE WHO ACT INFRONT OF YOU
- NEVER SHARE YOUR LIFE AT WORK CUZ THAT GIVES THEM THE OPPORTUNITY TO MAKE IT WORSE
- WORK IS JUST WORK, COWORKERS ARE COWORKERS
Sadly, these were life lessons for me given by some racist locals at work, while on the other hand, this is just how their work culture is and they tend to manipulate those who don’t abide by this culture especially if you are an immigrant. Now I don’t want to portray this post as a diss towards Woolworths as a whole but just one of their stores having such a shameful work culture despite them stating to be a safe environment for all to work as a multicultural team.
Honestly, the easiest way to fight off all these manipulations is to not even think about it and focus on yourself. However you have to give up your friendly gestures towards those people to keep your guards up which is something I realised much later than I should have so I kept thinking about it and acting on it unknowingly pushing myself towards harm. Though it could have been worse but I got away with minimal damage. Now, finally this brings us to this point where you are reading my story unless you are here to say TLDR.