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

[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.