Let me describe the situation:
My wife has been having issues with a certain employee at work...long story short, this other employee now goes out of her way to try and exclude/snub/cold shoulder my wife.
Yesterday, this employee ordered pizzas for basically the entire company, then proceeded to walk around and distribute pizzas to every department except for my wife's.
I told my wife what she should have done is gone up to her later and said (as genuinely as possible)
"Thanks so much for not bringing me pizza, I'm really trying to watch my weight so I appreciate you looking out for me". I basically told her, "don't give her the satisfaction of getting under your skin".
My questions are:
1) How would you describe the employee's behavior? I searched around on here last night and "cold shoulder" resonated with me to a degree, but I feel like there's a word/phrase out there to describe someone explicitly ignoring/excluding someone else in an attempt to annoy them/hurt their feelings.
2) How would you describe the reaction I told my wife she should have had? I'm looking for a word/phrase that means "turning a situation around on someone" - this employee was trying to get under my wife's skin so she should have "turned the situation around" and made them think she was actually doing her a favour.