Why would you say that?

There is some weird stuff going down at work. For legal reasons (and because I would like to keep my job) I can't say where I work or really tell you too much about it. However, what I can say is that at my work we seem to have two main groups of people. The "family", whose members are a kind of Mafia type group who get places by bullying others and by sucking up and batting their eyelids the right direction. (Both male and female there); and the "2nd cousins" who are loosely associated with the "family" by way of sucking up, but will never quite be taken into the fold. [And yes, we do use inverted commas to refer to them. I'm not just being typographically annoying.]

Then there's the rest of us. We don't even have a fancy name for ourselves. We work hard. We work bloody hard and get no recognition for it. Members of the "family" take the credit for our work and if we dare complain about it, we get demoted or given the worst possible tasks or evicted from the area. I've seen plenty of good people refuse to give into the "family" and get booted out of the organisation. When you're part of a group of roughly 15,000 people, that sadly doesn't get noticed.

We have a new girl in our area who came from the very top of the organisation, the bigwigs area. The moment she stepped into the area she found out about the "family". Unfortunately she's extremely vocal and negative about the long lunches from 11am until the next day, unfair overtime privileges, and has recently been added to their blacklist.

This afternoon she said to me quite frankly 'have you noticed that it's all the pretty girls who are in the "family"?'. She said it 3 times in the next 2 or 3 minutes.

I didn't know what to say. She's not ugly by any means. She has the most gorgeously clear skin I have ever seen, actually. Was she telling me that *I* am ugly, straight to my face? I do admittedly have some rather unusual and unbecoming facial expressions (I have been told that since the day I was born and it's bugged the crap out of me, but I was born with this face and there's not much I can do about it).....but was she looking for me to say to her "no no, you're really pretty"?

I KNOW I am on the outside of the "family" group, because I will never give up my integrity and become part of the "family" to progress when I do not deserve it, but was she actually saying to my face that I am not pretty, or am I just overly paranoid?

It's annoying me. We now have a 5 day weekend and I am going to stew on this. I know I shouldn't, but I am. I did a spot of retail therapy tonight to try to shake it off. It didn't work. I went to McDonalds and ate a rather thigh-enlarging calorific comforting meal and that didn't work either.

Hrmm.