Ask a Manager: Coworker Went Through My Trash

[minoanmiss]

[n.b. there is soooooo much more to the story.]

1. My coworker went through my trash and showed my boss my doodles. I work in a law firm and was recently off with Covid. During this time, a coworker (I haven’t been told who) went through my trash bin to find a list of things I had done before leaving (why they looked there I do not know). Sometimes on my break I write doodles (song lyrics/pictures/movie quotes), which include Eminem songs.

Whoever went through my bin found my doodles instead of the lists and decided to tape the ripped ones back together and hand them to the senior partner of the firm. She brought me in to speak to me about these notes and told me that it wasn’t an invasion of my privacy because they were looking for a list. I explained the swear words were part of song lyrics and I am a doodler. However, I never expected any of it to be read or passed about the office and I feel humiliated.

Was this an invasion of my privacy? I just feel like whoever did this has just done it to embarrass me. I got no warning, just told to take my doodles home, which I 100% will be doing. But I feel that since they didn’t find what they were looking for, they should have put my doodles back in the bin.

There’s not a very high expectation of privacy at work, but going through your trash and taping papers back together is weird as hell unless there were some kind of dire emergency and the papers seemed to be what were needed to resolve the emergency. I’m assuming it was pretty clear to your coworker that doodles and song lyrics were … not that.

I don’t know what would have possessed your colleague to spend time taping your papers back together, let alone bring them to your boss. The correct response from your boss would have been, “That looks like her trash, please throw it back away.” No one should have any feelings at all about you choosing to doodle on your breaks.

Any chance this is a misunderstanding because the lyrics were violent or threatening in some way? If so, maybe that triggered your coworker’s concern … but once you explained the situation, that should have been the end of it. Either way, it’s best to keep lyrics and doodles at work relatively clean and non-violent going forward.

Comments

[minoanmiss]

IMO, everyone's an asshole, but to differing degrees. I don't think Eminem's lyrics are generally worksafe but LW has (probably deliberately) not cited whether or not the lyrics they wrote out were from one of Eminem's violent-misogynist-fantasy songs or from some of his other songs about topics not as terrifying, and I can envision someone finding and being alarmed by what looks like a coworker's scrawled screed about how he's going to demolish a woman. That said, there aren't many justifications for rummaging a coworker's trash, pulling stuff out and taping it back together. THAT said, stuff at work belongs to work. And THAT said, workplaces could stand to allow people some human dignity even if they have the legal right to not do so.

In conclusion, leave the Eminem at home, LW.

TW: interpreting a violent media quote as a suicidal ideation indicator

[azurelunatic]

I was once part of a situation where someone (very drunk, and in a state where we were worried about their well-being in general) posted a River Tam quote, from Firefly. One of the violent ones.

They were surprised when the social group's suicide response process activated after they went silent in chat after that, which they discovered when they were annoyedly woken from their drunken slumber by extensive beating on their door from the closest person who knew their address.

Re: TW: interpreting a violent media quote as a suicidal ideation indicator

[minoanmiss]

"Bullet in the brainpan, squish"?

ahahahahahhahaha I don't know whether to cackle or to feel sorry for them.

Re: TW: interpreting a violent media quote as a suicidal ideation indicator

[azurelunatic]

That exact one.

They're doing much better now, thankfully.

[castiron]

So often my feeling when I read AAM is "my workplace isn't perfect, but JHTDC I could have it worse!"

[petrea_mitchell]

I vote in favor of both "your coworker is overzealous" and "keep all text out of your doodles because you never know how it will look out of context".

[feldman]

Yeah, I've worked in such effed-up places that I still habitually redact even my scratch notes, so a coworker digging through trash for kompromat is not shocking, but that this tactic wasn't shut down by management is very concerning.

[cereta]

We had a similar-but-more-serious situation years ago, where one teacher, who was married to another, "tested" the keystroke saving software he was going to use to catch her in the affair she wasn't having in one of the classrooms. Admin (of whom I was a part at the time) took it very, very seriously. If someone rifled through my trash like that? My boss would want to know why.

[feldman]

Yikes, I'm glad they/you took it so seriously!

In my case it was my nominal boss, who was also the HR head. I can't imagine how bad that job would've been if she weren't actively defending a case by a former employee for even more egregious harassment (said employee won). She was also big on "pranks" and enforced birthday celebrations...

[melannen]

If it was something that someone who didn't recognize the lyrics might think was an actual threat (or included slurs that could be interpreted as hate speech) I'm not too surprised that they took it seriously. For that kind of thing, in some workplaces even a custodian emptying the bins might feel obligated to take it to management. I work in a library and we have found discarded possible-threat-of-violence notes in the trash several times; even if they can't be traced to a person they get documented just in case. And it sounds like management accepted the explanation and didn't do anything.

Like, coworker digging through your trash while you're out sick is weird, but once they found "threatening" notes I don't think it's odd that they felt like they needed to do something about it.

[affreca]

One of the hardest parts of returning to the office is that I can't knit during meetings or training any more. So during the last round of mandatory training (powerpoint with pre recorded reading of the slides), I had to resort to doodling. I'm not terribly creative during doodling, so by habit went back to the things I drew in highschool. I got about three lines in before my brain caught up, and I realized doodling knives and axes would give the wrong impression during suicide prevention training.

[minoanmiss]

!

That reminds me of the day that I had to mop the office (long story) and I started humming to myself to encourage myself, and realized just before I started singing aloud that I had picked "Every Sperm Is Sacred".