My boss's wife always gets passive aggressive when she isn't having a great day. When we're working at the school, it's just the two of us, up on thirty-five foot scaffolding with not much more than our breathing, the school bells, and maybe an occasional talking point such as the weather or the nature of our cats to break the silence. If she's having a bad day, I'm the only thing around to take out her frustrations on, so she does.

The worst was the day that she got frustrated with me for proving her wrong in some way. Whatever it was was insignificant enough to forget, but significant enough for me to feel the need to correct her on whatever it was. It had something to do with cleaning the surface of the mural. She got kind of quiet with I told her what needed to be said, and proceeded throughout the day to tell me what to do as if I were doing things incorrectly. Maybe I should have left well enough alone to begin with -- but I'm the one that's going to be doing the painting on the missing areas, and whatever she was doing was causing a great deal of paint loss.

She told me that I needed to stop rubbing the swab across the surface of the painting. I told her that I wasn't, that I was rolling it. She told me that the way I was holding it made that impossible. I had no idea how to respond so I just said ok, and kept doing what I was doing. There's no way to correct what isn't wrong. She said things that embarrassed me that had nothing to do with work and if I had predicted that sort of response, I would have kept my mouth shut.

Nothing since has been as awkward or as uncalled for. However, she still maintains some passive aggression in the workplace if she's frustrated with whatever she's working on, or hasn't had a smooth day in general.

Today:

"I'm going to iron over to this seam." I said. She had begun ironing as far over as she expected to go, which was about a foot short of that seam. I was ironing a larger area to begin with, and half of her section won't be able to be ironed today at all. I thought giving her that one foot would be entirely fair.
"Oh, um, all right."
I continued to iron, my section being pretty easy going and quick to iron.
I reached the end of my section on the upper platform. "I'm going to clean and see how it goes." Our problem was that before this second ironing, flakes of paint were coming up when we tried to clean. I would be able to clean now while she finished up her ironing and we'd make even more head way.
After five or ten minutes, "You still have alot of ironing to do. I thought you were just testing to see if it would flake or not. You don't need to clean it like that right now. Also, we have a different kind of cleaner, so you don't have to clean it that much."
"I finished my section of ironing, and there's alot of consolodant on the surface that the neutral soap won't be able to go through, I was just trying to break the surface."
"Well, I didn't know you were going to be cleaning it, I thought you were just testing to see if it would flake or not." She repeated. "There's still all of the ironing on the second level to do."
"Yeah, there's not much of that." I couldn't help but be a smart-aleck. It didn't matter if I cleaned now or later. She was taking such a long time ironing that I could probably clean and iron on the second level while I waited for her to finish her section.
"Well, that needs to be done first, before anything else."
I didn't say anything, I just put my cleaning supplies up and got my iron and went to the second level.

It's not a big deal, and nothing that I should talk back about, but there's no logic to her responses and no consistency. There's no way to tell if what I'm doing is going to be ok or not, because it all depends on whether or not she's having a bad day.

I'm sure I would respect her more if it wasn't obvious that when she's passive-agressive it's personal, not professional.