How do you deal with it?

Happily I am not in a bullying environment anymore but there was a time from 1994 to 2000 when no matter where I went or what I did, someone somewhere took a severe dislike to me and let me know about it. I never dealt with it I suppose - I just let it run its course and as soon as I could leave the school/job/group where it was occurring, I did.

Thing is, it's actually very hard to stand up to bullying even if you are the outspoken type, which I'm not, and I can totally see why many people refuse to talk about it - I even had one case where the people I would have gone to for help were the very same people doing the bullying so I felt as though there was nothing I could do.

So how do you/would you deal with a bullying situation? In particular, what if the bully or bullies are people in authority over you like your boss or teacher? What would you do?