Sick at home with a cold. I could have gone to work and braved it out, but work has recently become intolerable and the prospect of dealing with the things that get on my nerves while being sick was not something I could see myself gritting my teeth through. This is day three of calling out sick and I dread going back...

Management placed a new employee in my office who is unfortunately plagued with diarrhea of the mouth and he will literally talk all day long, even if he is talking with himself; he will go from talking about horses to bulldogs to fine details of Medicare insurance rules to the minutiae of his buddy going through a rough divorce to String Theory-- and he just never stops, swinging from topic to topic like a meth-addled monkey. I have tried wearing headphones and even cut him off when calling people on the phone, but he is not discouraged. I even told him in the kindest way that I only need thirty seconds of whatever is being said, not five minutes. I talked to management about it; I was told to gently prompt him. His talking is not only getting in the way of him doing his tasks but has created a disruption of my functionality and it makes me anxious--I told him this as well. All to no avail. 

Even this onslaught of logorrhea was fine on its own, buuut...

In addition to the above, someone lower in scope and knowledge is making things difficult for me, challenging me and wrangling with me whenever our paths cross. For example, when I tried to explain what a code blue is to the team (cardiopulmonary arrest / unresponsive) and what the appropriate response is (BLS and call 911), she butted in with adding that it includes a head injury and she kept talking over me and steamrolling over any clarification I tried to make. I dropped it and let her send an all staff email in which she reiterated her error in writing. And this is not a coincidence or a one time event. The backstory is that I previously used to work in the clinic where her mother worked and her mother was talking all manner of smack about me because I had come from a more liberal part of the state to this conservative side and she decided that she knew all about me. That clinic had a very toxic, punitive culture overall with factions of petty, small-town gossiping females; I transferred as soon as I was able to only for her daughter to come to the same clinic I transferred to as well. She brought that same toxic, back-biting culture with her and I'm getting deja vu.

Is it any wonder that I applied for a new job? Thankfully I got it too. I will still work within the same company, but in an entirely different department. My start date is two months away and I am going a little nuts with anxiety thinking about stepping back into the overstimulating, noisy hell that my current job has become. I don't want to hear all the things that come out of my office mate's mouth; he's a decent fellow and all, but I just can't concentrate and feel like I am held hostage to each and every one of his inordinately lengthy diatribes. I don't want to face the pettiness of the ornery butterface subordinate anymore either because she and her very mediocre existence are empty noise. I just want to be left the eff alone; is that too much to ask?