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agonyaunt2018-05-06 03:22 am
minoanmiss) wrote in agonyaunt2018-05-06 03:22 am
Ask A Manager: My new office is full of dogs -- and I'm severely allergic.
A reader writes:
Thanks to your amazing advice, I was able to land a fantastic job with a big raise after years of stagnant dead-end work. My first day I walked into the office…and it was full of dogs. They have a dog-friendly office, which was never advertised or communicated during the hiring process.
I’m allergic to dogs, VERY allergic. Within ten minutes of arriving at work, my eyes are red, itchy and watering, my nose stuffs up and I get a headache from my swollen sinuses. This is what happens when I’m on medication! If I skip the meds, I break out in hives, start to wheeze and I run the risk of my throat swelling closed. I went to my doctor who referred me to a specialist. I’m already on the strongest meds they give out, and they said as long as I “expose myself” to allergens, this will keep happening and might get worse over time.
I tried to work with my company to fix this: they put me in the far corner away from the majority of the pooches where I’m near a door I can prop open, they have a company that cleans bi-weekly and they let me work from home one day a week. The nature of my job demands that I be in the office at least four days a week, I really have no wiggle room. Even working from home one day a week has been a stretch and caused some negative feelings on my team, even though they hear me sneezing every 20 minutes when I’m there!
It’s been 2 months and while I love the work, love the company and love my coworkers…I’m miserable. I’ve considered looking for a new job, but every job I’ve seen in my field has a “dog-friendly” office. I’m at a loss – their dog-friendly office isn’t ME-friendly. What can I do?!
Ugh, yes, this is the other side of benefits that some people love.
Lots of people are thrilled at the idea of a pet-friendly office, and lots of pet-friendly offices operate successfully. But they really only work in the long-term if there are effective plans for accommodating people with allergies, as well as people who are afraid of dogs (or other animals) or just not comfortable around them.
In a larger workspace, that can mean having pet-free floors. In a small office, that might not be feasible. (And as you can see from this story about someone with allergies who worked in Amazon’s dog-friendly offices, being on a pet-free floor didn’t quite work as smoothly as it was supposed to.)
Working from home can be a solution, but as in your case, that’s not feasible with every job.
The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) does require employers to make “reasonable accommodations” for employees with qualifying disability if doing so won’t impose an “undue hardship” on the operation of the employer’s business. But what’s reasonable to ask, and what’s an undue hardship?
To get an answer, I consulted two awesome employment attorneys: Donna Ballman, author of the awesome Stand Up For Yourself Without Getting Fired, and Bryan Cavanaugh.
Donna and Bryan both agreed that based on your description, the allergy is likely to be covered as a disability under the ADA (which covers “a physical or mental impairment that substantially limits one or more of the major life activities”).
So if the law covers you, what does your employer have to do in response? Bryan says: “To its credit, the employer has already been interacting with this employee to see if there is anything reasonable the employer can do to help the employee overcome the limitations and allow her to do her job. The efforts the employer has offered so far – moving the employee’s desk by door, allowing the employee to work from home one day a week, cleaning the office bi-weekly – are nice but they have not solved the problem. Therefore, technically, neither the employee nor the employer has identified an ‘accommodation’ yet. An accommodation is a modification that allows the employee to perform all of the essential functions of his or her job. That is not happening yet, since none of the ideas mentioned has worked.”
So realistically, what else might you try?
Donna suggests working with your doctor to see what she suggests:
“If there are allergy shots or other medical solutions, great. But they may also be able to suggest some reasonable accommodations you haven’t thought of.
Questions I’d ask the doctor are things like:
1. Is there a spray or something that can be put on the dogs that would keep them from spreading allergens?
2. How far away do you need to be for you to be safe from the dogs?
3. Would any kind of filter or mask work for you?
If the doctor can come up with some reasonable accommodations you can ask for that would address your allergy, the employer has to either grant the accommodation, engage in the interactive process with your doctor and you to come up with an alternative accommodation, or demonstrate an undue hardship.
If there is no accommodation that would allow you to work in the presence of dogs, then the other question to ask is of your employer, namely, whether the dogs are an accommodation for anyone else’s disability. (The ADA also covers emotional support dogs and service dogs, so you have a real pickle if the dogs are there due to disabilities of coworkers.) If not, then a reasonable accommodation might be to ask that the dogs be kept at home or in a doggy day care. It won’t make you popular with your dog-loving coworkers, but an accommodation like that is probably reasonable under the law.”
Bryan agrees:
“One accommodation that would work would be banning all the dogs (except service dogs) from the office. That is something the employer needs to consider seriously. An accommodation is not reasonable and does not need to be offered if it would create an ‘undue hardship’ for the employer. Usually that means an unreasonable expense to the employer. But here, there would not be a direct expense of banning dogs from the office. Rather the employer should consider ‘the impact of the accommodation upon the operation of the facility, including the impact on the ability of other employees to perform their duties and the impact on the facility’s ability to conduct business.’ Banning the dogs would lower morale, but it would not appear to harm the business itself or the business’ operations. This is not a veterinary clinic where it is necessary to have dogs in the workplace. Although we do not know what the business does, the business can presumably operate without animals in the workplace. So while banning dogs may be a drastic change and hurt morale, the employer must consider doing this in order to comply with the ADA.
Whether an accommodation is reasonable and whether an accommodation would present an undue hardship are fact-intensive inquiries. We do not know enough facts to say definitely one way or another whether the employer is required to ban all dogs (besides service dogs).”
But I suspect you really don’t want to be the person who causes your coworkers to lose a benefit that most of them probably love. That comes with its own set of issues.
Bryan also suggests:
“From an HR perspective, the employer should continue to interact with the employee to see if some other modification would solve this problem. For instance, the employer should consider moving the employee to another remote location within the office, moving the employee or his or her own personal office, purchasing a special air purifier, and re-arranging the office such that only employees with low-dander dogs are near this employee. If none of those work, they this employee and employee could very well be facing the choice of (1) banning dogs from the office, or (2) telling the employee to deal with the situation as is, which sounds like it would effectively make the employee resign due to health concerns.
If the employer faced that choice and chose option #2, the employee could file an EEOC charge and then take the employer to court and litigate the issue the whether option #1 would have constituted a reasonable accommodation that the employer was required to implement.”
So again, ugh.
If I were in your shoes I’d go back to your manager and HR and say this: “I appreciate you working with me on moving my desk and setting up telecommuting one day a week. However, I’m finding that I’m still suffering severe allergy symptoms and my doctor tells me that they may worsen with increased exposure to the dogs here. So I need a different medical accommodation to be able to do my job and want to talk with you about what’s possible.”
But if none of the lighter-touch accommodations work, this may come down to a philosophical decision on your part about whether you want to push for the dogs to be removed, or whether you’d rather look for a job that either doesn’t come with dogs or which is set up to allow you to avoid them more easily (by telecommuting or finding a company large enough to give you an office far away from the dander).
This isn’t an easy one.
What do others think?
The rather horrifying but sadly unsurprising followup:
Right after I wrote to you, HR bought me a HEPA air purifier for my desk and announced that dogs had to be washed regularly to cut down on dander. I’m not sure how they planned to enforce it, but one woman who is very well liked announced that her dog had a skin condition that meant it couldn’t be washed often. HR told her that the dog couldn’t be in the office for “medical reasons,” and EVERYONE blamed me. People made comments to each other as I walked by about how I “discriminated” against a dog with a medical condition, how much I must hate dogs, how selfish I am. After a week, one person came into my cubicle where everyone could hear and demanded to know why I worked here when I clearly wasn’t a cultural fit. I had been ignoring the comments and trying to take the high road (was that the right move, Alison? Should I have confronted them right away?), but this was too much. I told her that I was a good fit – I had a strong background in teapot design and a passion for optimizing teapot handles. I reminded her of the times I had helped her brew new tea flavors above and beyond my job. I said that regardless of anything else, I’m here to help produce the best teapots and that I want us all to work as a team to achieve that.
Within 10 minutes, HR sent me an invite to meet with them, and when I arrived there were all three of our HR people – including the director – as well as our company’s lawyer! They wanted my statement on a “workplace incident” – they said that someone accused me of yelling at another employee. I hadn’t raised my voice at all; I was actually proud of how I calmly said those words and my voice didn’t even shake. I told them about the comments and how I was starting to feel like this was a hostile work environment based on my medical condition. The HR rep said that my allergies weren’t covered under ADA and that they wanted to help me work there because they liked me, but that one person was not worth damaging a strong company culture.
While this wasn’t entirely moral, I heavily implied that I’d consulted two lawyers who disagreed with her ADA assessment and that firing me could lead to a lawsuit. I didn’t talk to a lawyer; my comment was based off of the two lawyers who you quoted in your blog post. They decided to “reevaluate the situation,” and it was basically swept under the rug. I don’t know if they spoke to some of the people who made comments, but those stopped within a day.
I wish I could say it got better, but it didn’t. The company then announced that we were going from cubicles to an open floor plan to promote communication between teams. They banned dogs since we were in a temporary work space for three weeks as they ripped up the carpet and put in new desks. The day before we came back into the office, they sent around an email that said that dogs were no longer allowed due to 1) the open floor plan (no way to contain them) and 2) the new carpet (there had been so many accidents that the old carpet was smelly and gross) but that they had negotiated a discounted rate with the local doggie daycare. It’s normally $33/day, but they got the rate down to $22/day. People were up in arms – if this was the middle ages, there would have been pitchforks. They didn’t openly blame me and no explicit comments were made, so I thought it would be OK. I was wrong.
Instead of outright comments, it became subtle things. I was no longer invited to standing meetings and when I pointed that out it was explained away as an “oversight.” I was excluded from new meetings about teapot design that I was integral to and when I found out about them and asked, I was told that teapot handle design wasn’t changing (but it did in the mockups – someone else was doing my job!). If I sat at a table at lunch, everyone at that table was suddenly not hungry and would leave. I would go home and cry; it was like being in high school, but when I brought it up to my boss, she explained that they were oversights or mistakes and that I was blowing things out of proportion.
She seemed so sincere and I felt like she was really trying to support me. I felt like I WAS blowing things out of proportion.
One day I was in a bathroom stall, and I heard my boss and two other coworkers enter. They loudly talked about me, about how my boss was looking for a replacement for me, and how I would be gone soon anyway and then they would petition for the dogs to come back. My boss then said “(CEO) didn’t like the smell of the carpet after dogs had accidents and there was that flea problem last year, so even when is gone it won’t happen, but she ruined a great situation and I want her gone for that reason alone” and then they all laughed. Before any of you ask – it’s illegal to record someone without their knowledge in my state, so I didn’t pull out my cell phone, but I did note the names of the people. My close friend (and one of my only supporters) was also in the bathroom and agreed that if needed, she would testify on record about overhearing that conversation.
I did mention in the comments that my mother was terminal, which is why I didn’t feel I could move to another city with more job opportunities. Throughout the past few months, I’ve been searching but I was having problems answering “why are you leaving your current job so soon?” Eventually, I told one hiring manager the truth and he confided that he is also severely allergic to dogs and that it would never happen at his company (a small start-up). He offered me the job the next day. It was a slight pay decrease, but included stock options and surprisingly better health benefits! I took it and started a week later.
I was so upset about the whole situation that I called a meeting with the company lawyer, HR department, and my boss. I gave notice, saying I was leaving immediately with no transition period due to the hostile work environment. I reported what my boss had said and named the people who were also in the bathroom. When she tried to deny it, I told her I had a witness willing to corroborate everything and she then claimed that I was taking her words “out of context.” At this point, HR and the lawyer asked her to leave the room. I told them that if there were any issue with my paycheck or backlash against me (including defamation), I would bring a lawsuit. We agreed to what they would say if they were contacted as a reference in the future, I got it in writing (!!), they cut the check within minutes, and I left right away. I’ve only been at the new job a few weeks, but it’s a great environment so far and I have high hopes.
There were many questions about why I didn’t see the dogs when I was interviewing. My interviews took place in the front conference room directly off of reception. I was never anywhere near the cubicle farm to see any dogs. A few people also said that if it were their company, they would see it as unfair to lose the dog benefit. I hate to take those comments personally, but it had the ring of “blame the victim.” Maybe I’m bitter, but your “right” to have your dog lay next to you while you fiddle away at your computer does not trump my right to breathe. This wasn’t just a discomfort; if I’d missed a dose of medication or grew more sensitive over time (which my doctor said was happening), I could have had a massive reaction that could have caused serious damage or death. I think many of the readers – and my coworkers – ignored that.
Thank you to your readers who gave their support, to the two lawyers who gave me free legal opinions, and especially to you for doing the research and giving me the information I needed to get out of that bad situation. I don’t know what would have happened in that first meeting with the lawyer and HR if I hadn’t had that information. I’m still very angry about the whole situation, but I’m trying to let it go and move on.
Thanks to your amazing advice, I was able to land a fantastic job with a big raise after years of stagnant dead-end work. My first day I walked into the office…and it was full of dogs. They have a dog-friendly office, which was never advertised or communicated during the hiring process.
I’m allergic to dogs, VERY allergic. Within ten minutes of arriving at work, my eyes are red, itchy and watering, my nose stuffs up and I get a headache from my swollen sinuses. This is what happens when I’m on medication! If I skip the meds, I break out in hives, start to wheeze and I run the risk of my throat swelling closed. I went to my doctor who referred me to a specialist. I’m already on the strongest meds they give out, and they said as long as I “expose myself” to allergens, this will keep happening and might get worse over time.
I tried to work with my company to fix this: they put me in the far corner away from the majority of the pooches where I’m near a door I can prop open, they have a company that cleans bi-weekly and they let me work from home one day a week. The nature of my job demands that I be in the office at least four days a week, I really have no wiggle room. Even working from home one day a week has been a stretch and caused some negative feelings on my team, even though they hear me sneezing every 20 minutes when I’m there!
It’s been 2 months and while I love the work, love the company and love my coworkers…I’m miserable. I’ve considered looking for a new job, but every job I’ve seen in my field has a “dog-friendly” office. I’m at a loss – their dog-friendly office isn’t ME-friendly. What can I do?!
Ugh, yes, this is the other side of benefits that some people love.
Lots of people are thrilled at the idea of a pet-friendly office, and lots of pet-friendly offices operate successfully. But they really only work in the long-term if there are effective plans for accommodating people with allergies, as well as people who are afraid of dogs (or other animals) or just not comfortable around them.
In a larger workspace, that can mean having pet-free floors. In a small office, that might not be feasible. (And as you can see from this story about someone with allergies who worked in Amazon’s dog-friendly offices, being on a pet-free floor didn’t quite work as smoothly as it was supposed to.)
Working from home can be a solution, but as in your case, that’s not feasible with every job.
The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) does require employers to make “reasonable accommodations” for employees with qualifying disability if doing so won’t impose an “undue hardship” on the operation of the employer’s business. But what’s reasonable to ask, and what’s an undue hardship?
To get an answer, I consulted two awesome employment attorneys: Donna Ballman, author of the awesome Stand Up For Yourself Without Getting Fired, and Bryan Cavanaugh.
Donna and Bryan both agreed that based on your description, the allergy is likely to be covered as a disability under the ADA (which covers “a physical or mental impairment that substantially limits one or more of the major life activities”).
So if the law covers you, what does your employer have to do in response? Bryan says: “To its credit, the employer has already been interacting with this employee to see if there is anything reasonable the employer can do to help the employee overcome the limitations and allow her to do her job. The efforts the employer has offered so far – moving the employee’s desk by door, allowing the employee to work from home one day a week, cleaning the office bi-weekly – are nice but they have not solved the problem. Therefore, technically, neither the employee nor the employer has identified an ‘accommodation’ yet. An accommodation is a modification that allows the employee to perform all of the essential functions of his or her job. That is not happening yet, since none of the ideas mentioned has worked.”
So realistically, what else might you try?
Donna suggests working with your doctor to see what she suggests:
“If there are allergy shots or other medical solutions, great. But they may also be able to suggest some reasonable accommodations you haven’t thought of.
Questions I’d ask the doctor are things like:
1. Is there a spray or something that can be put on the dogs that would keep them from spreading allergens?
2. How far away do you need to be for you to be safe from the dogs?
3. Would any kind of filter or mask work for you?
If the doctor can come up with some reasonable accommodations you can ask for that would address your allergy, the employer has to either grant the accommodation, engage in the interactive process with your doctor and you to come up with an alternative accommodation, or demonstrate an undue hardship.
If there is no accommodation that would allow you to work in the presence of dogs, then the other question to ask is of your employer, namely, whether the dogs are an accommodation for anyone else’s disability. (The ADA also covers emotional support dogs and service dogs, so you have a real pickle if the dogs are there due to disabilities of coworkers.) If not, then a reasonable accommodation might be to ask that the dogs be kept at home or in a doggy day care. It won’t make you popular with your dog-loving coworkers, but an accommodation like that is probably reasonable under the law.”
Bryan agrees:
“One accommodation that would work would be banning all the dogs (except service dogs) from the office. That is something the employer needs to consider seriously. An accommodation is not reasonable and does not need to be offered if it would create an ‘undue hardship’ for the employer. Usually that means an unreasonable expense to the employer. But here, there would not be a direct expense of banning dogs from the office. Rather the employer should consider ‘the impact of the accommodation upon the operation of the facility, including the impact on the ability of other employees to perform their duties and the impact on the facility’s ability to conduct business.’ Banning the dogs would lower morale, but it would not appear to harm the business itself or the business’ operations. This is not a veterinary clinic where it is necessary to have dogs in the workplace. Although we do not know what the business does, the business can presumably operate without animals in the workplace. So while banning dogs may be a drastic change and hurt morale, the employer must consider doing this in order to comply with the ADA.
Whether an accommodation is reasonable and whether an accommodation would present an undue hardship are fact-intensive inquiries. We do not know enough facts to say definitely one way or another whether the employer is required to ban all dogs (besides service dogs).”
But I suspect you really don’t want to be the person who causes your coworkers to lose a benefit that most of them probably love. That comes with its own set of issues.
Bryan also suggests:
“From an HR perspective, the employer should continue to interact with the employee to see if some other modification would solve this problem. For instance, the employer should consider moving the employee to another remote location within the office, moving the employee or his or her own personal office, purchasing a special air purifier, and re-arranging the office such that only employees with low-dander dogs are near this employee. If none of those work, they this employee and employee could very well be facing the choice of (1) banning dogs from the office, or (2) telling the employee to deal with the situation as is, which sounds like it would effectively make the employee resign due to health concerns.
If the employer faced that choice and chose option #2, the employee could file an EEOC charge and then take the employer to court and litigate the issue the whether option #1 would have constituted a reasonable accommodation that the employer was required to implement.”
So again, ugh.
If I were in your shoes I’d go back to your manager and HR and say this: “I appreciate you working with me on moving my desk and setting up telecommuting one day a week. However, I’m finding that I’m still suffering severe allergy symptoms and my doctor tells me that they may worsen with increased exposure to the dogs here. So I need a different medical accommodation to be able to do my job and want to talk with you about what’s possible.”
But if none of the lighter-touch accommodations work, this may come down to a philosophical decision on your part about whether you want to push for the dogs to be removed, or whether you’d rather look for a job that either doesn’t come with dogs or which is set up to allow you to avoid them more easily (by telecommuting or finding a company large enough to give you an office far away from the dander).
This isn’t an easy one.
What do others think?
The rather horrifying but sadly unsurprising followup:
Right after I wrote to you, HR bought me a HEPA air purifier for my desk and announced that dogs had to be washed regularly to cut down on dander. I’m not sure how they planned to enforce it, but one woman who is very well liked announced that her dog had a skin condition that meant it couldn’t be washed often. HR told her that the dog couldn’t be in the office for “medical reasons,” and EVERYONE blamed me. People made comments to each other as I walked by about how I “discriminated” against a dog with a medical condition, how much I must hate dogs, how selfish I am. After a week, one person came into my cubicle where everyone could hear and demanded to know why I worked here when I clearly wasn’t a cultural fit. I had been ignoring the comments and trying to take the high road (was that the right move, Alison? Should I have confronted them right away?), but this was too much. I told her that I was a good fit – I had a strong background in teapot design and a passion for optimizing teapot handles. I reminded her of the times I had helped her brew new tea flavors above and beyond my job. I said that regardless of anything else, I’m here to help produce the best teapots and that I want us all to work as a team to achieve that.
Within 10 minutes, HR sent me an invite to meet with them, and when I arrived there were all three of our HR people – including the director – as well as our company’s lawyer! They wanted my statement on a “workplace incident” – they said that someone accused me of yelling at another employee. I hadn’t raised my voice at all; I was actually proud of how I calmly said those words and my voice didn’t even shake. I told them about the comments and how I was starting to feel like this was a hostile work environment based on my medical condition. The HR rep said that my allergies weren’t covered under ADA and that they wanted to help me work there because they liked me, but that one person was not worth damaging a strong company culture.
While this wasn’t entirely moral, I heavily implied that I’d consulted two lawyers who disagreed with her ADA assessment and that firing me could lead to a lawsuit. I didn’t talk to a lawyer; my comment was based off of the two lawyers who you quoted in your blog post. They decided to “reevaluate the situation,” and it was basically swept under the rug. I don’t know if they spoke to some of the people who made comments, but those stopped within a day.
I wish I could say it got better, but it didn’t. The company then announced that we were going from cubicles to an open floor plan to promote communication between teams. They banned dogs since we were in a temporary work space for three weeks as they ripped up the carpet and put in new desks. The day before we came back into the office, they sent around an email that said that dogs were no longer allowed due to 1) the open floor plan (no way to contain them) and 2) the new carpet (there had been so many accidents that the old carpet was smelly and gross) but that they had negotiated a discounted rate with the local doggie daycare. It’s normally $33/day, but they got the rate down to $22/day. People were up in arms – if this was the middle ages, there would have been pitchforks. They didn’t openly blame me and no explicit comments were made, so I thought it would be OK. I was wrong.
Instead of outright comments, it became subtle things. I was no longer invited to standing meetings and when I pointed that out it was explained away as an “oversight.” I was excluded from new meetings about teapot design that I was integral to and when I found out about them and asked, I was told that teapot handle design wasn’t changing (but it did in the mockups – someone else was doing my job!). If I sat at a table at lunch, everyone at that table was suddenly not hungry and would leave. I would go home and cry; it was like being in high school, but when I brought it up to my boss, she explained that they were oversights or mistakes and that I was blowing things out of proportion.
She seemed so sincere and I felt like she was really trying to support me. I felt like I WAS blowing things out of proportion.
One day I was in a bathroom stall, and I heard my boss and two other coworkers enter. They loudly talked about me, about how my boss was looking for a replacement for me, and how I would be gone soon anyway and then they would petition for the dogs to come back. My boss then said “(CEO) didn’t like the smell of the carpet after dogs had accidents and there was that flea problem last year, so even when is gone it won’t happen, but she ruined a great situation and I want her gone for that reason alone” and then they all laughed. Before any of you ask – it’s illegal to record someone without their knowledge in my state, so I didn’t pull out my cell phone, but I did note the names of the people. My close friend (and one of my only supporters) was also in the bathroom and agreed that if needed, she would testify on record about overhearing that conversation.
I did mention in the comments that my mother was terminal, which is why I didn’t feel I could move to another city with more job opportunities. Throughout the past few months, I’ve been searching but I was having problems answering “why are you leaving your current job so soon?” Eventually, I told one hiring manager the truth and he confided that he is also severely allergic to dogs and that it would never happen at his company (a small start-up). He offered me the job the next day. It was a slight pay decrease, but included stock options and surprisingly better health benefits! I took it and started a week later.
I was so upset about the whole situation that I called a meeting with the company lawyer, HR department, and my boss. I gave notice, saying I was leaving immediately with no transition period due to the hostile work environment. I reported what my boss had said and named the people who were also in the bathroom. When she tried to deny it, I told her I had a witness willing to corroborate everything and she then claimed that I was taking her words “out of context.” At this point, HR and the lawyer asked her to leave the room. I told them that if there were any issue with my paycheck or backlash against me (including defamation), I would bring a lawsuit. We agreed to what they would say if they were contacted as a reference in the future, I got it in writing (!!), they cut the check within minutes, and I left right away. I’ve only been at the new job a few weeks, but it’s a great environment so far and I have high hopes.
There were many questions about why I didn’t see the dogs when I was interviewing. My interviews took place in the front conference room directly off of reception. I was never anywhere near the cubicle farm to see any dogs. A few people also said that if it were their company, they would see it as unfair to lose the dog benefit. I hate to take those comments personally, but it had the ring of “blame the victim.” Maybe I’m bitter, but your “right” to have your dog lay next to you while you fiddle away at your computer does not trump my right to breathe. This wasn’t just a discomfort; if I’d missed a dose of medication or grew more sensitive over time (which my doctor said was happening), I could have had a massive reaction that could have caused serious damage or death. I think many of the readers – and my coworkers – ignored that.
Thank you to your readers who gave their support, to the two lawyers who gave me free legal opinions, and especially to you for doing the research and giving me the information I needed to get out of that bad situation. I don’t know what would have happened in that first meeting with the lawyer and HR if I hadn’t had that information. I’m still very angry about the whole situation, but I’m trying to let it go and move on.
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ETA: In the comments to the followup there's a discussion of what would happen if someone with a service dog and someone with a severe allergy worked at the same place. People got kind of heated but most people acknowledged that it would be a complex situation.
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I know I sound unsympathetic, here, but you know, I would love to be able to have a cat on my lap at work, but nobody ever suggests that as a feasible thing. Nobody brings kittens to the migraine floor of the hospital for some animal therapy. Because (1) enough people are allergic to cats that people in general, including most cat owners, understand what a problem it would be, and (b) it wouldn't be much fun for the cats. I know that dogs are different in many ways, but I'll never understand the (small minority of) dog owners who think their dogs should be allowed to go anywhere with them.
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(See also: the tech office that maintained it was fine to have a full-sized beer fridge, even though HR knew of someone with alcoholism who'd had to leave the job.)
Service dogs aren't actually that complex; the office just needs to make reasonable accommodations. When I go work in offices with an open floor plan, I can't sit in the open floor plan with everyone else. They either need to put me in an open floor somewhere where nobody can hear me dictate and I can't hear others talk, or (because they always try the first one, and I always let them find out it's impossible) they need to find me a closet somewhere to make into an office. Same with service dogs and allergies; it's just two conflicting medical needs. Those two people can't sit together, and if that's inconvenient, well, sometimes things are. If neither of them is the person who's willing to be physically exiled without a fuss, they're being unreasonable in a difficult situation. If the company doesn't make sure physical separation doesn't harm group cohesion or opportunity for advancement, then the company is probably violating the law.
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Congratulations to LW for escaping a hazardous situation and finding a job with a dog-free company.
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I get that cats are lovely and that they keep the mice down (mice in libraries eat books because binding glue is edible), but...
There was a mystery author I used to enjoy but whose works I gave up on when it became clear that she didn't believe that cat allergies existed as anything except a huge signal that the person was Evil and making excuses to cover for just loathing cats. A 'cat allergy' almost always gave away who the murderer was.
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Of course, the LW's real problem was with her coworkers. As I said recently, I am sincerely impressed by how shitty people can be. This story is incredible and certainly puts my minor office drama into perspective!
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Flames. Flames on the side of my FACE.
I know Ask a Manager and Captain Awkward have a big lovefest going on in general, but I'm trying to imagine the CA commenters going to town on the AAM commenters for this one. That page is chock full of people who say it would be a horror, an utter horror, do have a dog-friendly office perk taken away. (And, at least as far as I got, nobody suggesting any accommodations from the dog side, like, the company switching to hosting an onsite doggie daycare in a nearby building. Instead, it was all "well, the person with a medical condition can have shots, so she's not protected under the ADA!")
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Oh my God I wanted a smite button for that comment.
Later in the discussion, and in the comments to the update, peeople push back against that malarkey, but I wouldn't recommend reading through the whole pile to get there. (I shouldn't've read the whole thing anyway.)
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Honestly, LW probably got lucky here. If the office is this willing to flip to toxicity over a reasonable and nnecessary medical accommodation, god only knows the fallout that would result from ... getting a promotion someone else wanted, or something. What they had to go through sucked, but wow, that was a hell of a mine canary for the horrors of that particular workplace.
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