Trust No One.
Somebody in my friend's workplace lifted $200 from her purse when she wasn't looking.
It's terrible to have something like that happen, and realise that you can't trust the people around you. Worse still, you don't know whom to trust or not to trust, and because of that you begin building walls around yourself because you suddenly feel so vulnerable. Not to mention stupid.
My policy has always been to try to be nice to everyone and yes, I expect everyone to be nice to me too, dammit. Most of the time this is actually the case, but the times when it doesn't work I'm all shocked and disbelieving and feel cheated. How could this person be nasty to me when I've never done anything to him/her?!
On that note, office politics really suck. I've so far been fortunate to always be too junior (read: unimportant) to be embroiled in office politics. I left my first job after four years, just in time coz a year or so more and I'd have been at the point where escape attempts would've been futile.
Even then, some people did try to involve me -- one of my colleagues tried, a few times, to turn me against my boss and even encouraged me to report my boss to the union for yelling at me. Hey, she yelled at me coz my work wasn't done on time. If she'd yelled at me for no good reason other than PMS, that would've been a different matter altogether. But as it was, I felt she was justified in yelling. And no matter how exasperated or frustrated she became over our work, she never made it personal. I liked that, very much.
Before I began working, I used to hear stories of office politics from my working friends. Some of them are harrowing enough to make you wish to be a student forever. I listen to the stuff that's going on in various workplaces and I cannot believe people would actually behave that way. Unfortunately, they do.
I don't understand nasty people. I understand people looking out for Number One, and being aggressively, single-mindedly ambitious. But I don't understand people who like to stir up trouble for the fun of it, or shoot innocents who aren't even standing anywhere near their paths. Really, what is the point?