Senior manager discovers her company is acquiring her former company after she burned bridges with them when she quit: 'My old coworkers will be joining my team. Ugh!'

Imagine the absolute worst group of coworkers you have ever had the misfortune of dealing with coming back into your professional life years later.

You thought you got rid of them. You thought you'd never have to collaborate with them again. You wouldn't have to handle their short tempers, their poor work ethic, or their overall lack of proper skills in an office environment. Well, unfortunately for this author, her former colleagues found a way back into her life, and it was not better this time around.

For some context, the author relates to her professional beginnings. At her first company, she wasn't savvy enough yet to see the red flags in terms of how upper management treated the employees there until she became their problem. When she received a job offer from her dream company after not seeing any improvements within this toxic work environment over the course of a year, she did what anyone else in her position would do. She put in her two weeks' notice and began planning her exit.

But HR made that exit a bit more complicated than it needed to be. They strictly enforced a new policy that the employee needed to stay for a full month and not inform her colleagues. Eventually, the treatment she received only got worse, and the idea of staying for several weeks beyond that point became unbearable. The author left imminently and, for better or for worse, bridges were burned. 

She thought she had left this chapter of her professional life in the past, having ascended to a senior management role at her new company. However, when she was informed that her current company would be acquiring her former company and that her ex-coworkers would now be working under her, all that tension came back to the surface.