agonyaunt | Ask a Manager: I walked in on the company owner having sex in his office

!!!!!

I started a new job last Thursday at a small consulting company. I’m very excited about the company and the role, and it’s a better fit than my previous opportunity. It’s an eight-person team, consisting of the owner, two VPs who report to him, an executive assistant who reports to him, and four junior/mid-level staff, with two of us reporting to one VP and two of us reporting to the other.

Anyway, my first two days of work went very well. I’d briefly met most of my coworkers during the interview process but had a chance to talk with all of them more, and also by chance met the owner’s wife on Thursday when she stopped by for lunch. Everyone’s been very kind and welcoming and I couldn’t be more excited.

My problem is, when I got home last night (Friday), I realized I’d forgotten to bring with me some materials I’d planned to read over the weekend. So I drove back to the office to get them. When I went inside, I went to my office and grabbed the materials, but as I was walking out I noticed that the light was still on in the owner’s office and the door was wide open. His office is pretty large so you can’t actually see his desk until you’re in the doorway and you turn all the way to the right.

I decided to walk down to say hi, figuring he might have heard my footsteps anyway and thus been wondering who was still around. When I walked into his office, I looked over toward his desk and to my great surprise, he was in the middle of intimate relations with someone who was not his wife that I’d met on Thursday!

I freaked out in the moment and didn’t know what to do, so I just blurted out “ohmygod I’m sorry I came back to pick something up and just wanted to say hi have a great weekend!!!” and then I ran out and went home. They were of course caught by surprise too when they saw me, but didn’t say anything since I just made the above comment and left so quickly.

So what do I do now? On the one hand, I’ve been there for two days and don’t know any of the specifics of the owner’s personal life beyond that he’s married. Maybe his wife already knows? Maybe it’s an open marriage? I’m inclined to just stay quiet and focus on doing the best job I can. My secondary thought was to approach my direct boss (one of the VPs) and ask what to do, but I realized they might not be aware of all of this and it’d open a can of worms.

What do you think? My boyfriend and my family agree I should just keep quiet and possibly accept that I’ll need to find another job if it’s just too awkward all-around.

Ugh. I’m probably going to advise saying nothing, but I have some caveats.

First, though, you don’t need to speculate on whether he has an open marriage or not. It doesn’t matter. (I mean, it undoubtedly matters to his wife, but it isn’t something that should impact you how proceed.)

Okay. So, at least in my opinion, ideally everyone involved would look at this as: you walked in something private, you left, end of story. And in that case, it doesn’t make sense to bring this to one of the VPs, since that would make it a bigger thing.

To be clear, that doesn’t mean that what happened was okay! It’s not okay for people to have sex at work (with the door open, WTF?) where others might see them, even after hours. But I’m talking practicalities here, and given this particular set of facts — new to the job, after hours, no one expected to be there — “whoops, that was private, wiping it from my mind” is probably the smartest approach.

However, what we don’t know is how the owner is going to handle this. Maybe he assumes you’ll chalk it up as none of your business and that’ll be the end of it. Or you might be in for a very awkward apology this week, who knows. (Or, for all we know, maybe he doesn’t even realize that you saw enough to know it was him. Or maybe he didn’t see enough to know that it was you.)

But there’s also a chance that he’s going to be uncomfortable around you now and that’s going to affect you at work, or possibly even end in you being pushed out. And if that’s the case, alerting someone to what happened could give you some protection … although in an eight-person firm, if the owner wants you out, you’re probably getting pushed out. (It’s also worth noting that the company isn’t large enough for federal sexual harassment protections, including retaliation provisions, to be in place. The threshold for that law is 15 employees. Some states have protections that kick in at lower numbers, though, so you might look that up for your state, just so you know.)

I think there’s a good chance that you can just move forward and it’ll be fine. But the other possibility is there (and it’s especially hard to predict since you’re new and don’t know him)

There’s also the question of how you feel. Can you work with this guy comfortably? Some people would be able to move forward without this looming in their minds, and some would feel forever uncomfortable.

So where does all that leave you? If you’re comfortable continuing to work there as long as he’s not weird about it, I’d see what the next week is like. Gather more data, basically. If it feels like you can just move forward, okay. If you’re getting the sense that you can’t (or he can’t), you’ll have to cross that bridge at that point.

None of which is a very reassuring or precise answer, I realize. But I think that’s where you are.

(Don’t have sex in the office, people!)

Ask a Manager: I walked in on the company owner having sex in his office

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