Ask a Manager: How to tell your boss a sex worker stole your work laptop

[ermingarden]

I have a question on behalf of a friend (yes, I promise it is actually a friend and not me). He was staying overnight on a business trip and decided to hire a sex worker. This is perfectly legal in our part of the world and he used his own personal funds. While he was in the bathroom, the sex worker robbed him, including his work laptop. How should he go about informing work what happened?

In theory he could just explain that he had an “acquaintance” come back to his room and not proactively volunteer that the acquaintance was a sex worker, but the company will likely want him to file a police report (and will wonder why he hasn’t done that already). Once that happens, it’s going to be hard to avoid the rest of the story coming out … and that could potentially be very bad for your friend (not necessarily that he hired a sex worker but that he did it on a business trip and it resulted in the theft of company property, and possibly sensitive company property). He’d be more likely to keep his job if the laptop got lifted from a restaurant or other public place. It’s a bad situation.

Comments

[ermingarden]

The poor decision-making in this one is just...something else. Wow.

[shanaqui]

I feel like this is a non-answer, though to be honest I don't think there's a "save this guy's job" answer here.

Still, since it's legal to hire a sex worker in that part of the world, then he should start by filing the police report, and just report to work that the laptop was stolen from his hotel room, and that he's filed a police report. If they need more details than that, he may have to come clean; since it's an error of judgement rather than an illegal act, and he's a guy, you never know -- it might be viewed as stupid but not worth firing him for right away, depending on the workplace culture.

Lying about the situation will definitely not go anywhere good when he is inevitably caught.

[ambyr]

I do wonder sometimes whether anyone’s done a broad analysis of increase of loss of company-owned IT equipment in a hybrid/WFH world. The assumption our IT office seems to have is “well, you’ll drive it from the secure office to your private, secure home in your private automobile,” which…does not align great with the actual lives of young urban professionals around here, who are likely to live in group houses where they may or may not know all the guests coming and going and commute via transit, where bag-snatching is a common problem.

[tielan]

My first instinct was a big giggle.

I would tell the truth, but that's because I don't have the facility or luck or chops or whatever to be able to lie my way through the cops and HR and whoever else I'd have to tell this story.

[azurelunatic]

The LW shows up in the comments; the eventual solution that the friend came up with was to describe the situation as a "date".