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agonyaunt2025-08-05 12:21 am
minoanmiss) wrote in agonyaunt2025-08-05 12:21 am
Ask a Manager: Two From The Same Column
Compare and Contrast.
1. Employee’s husband sent revenge porn to a bunch of her coworkers I am in HR at the head office for a small construction company, and recently a colleague who has been going through a divorce experienced a pretty embarrassing incident, although it’s something I consider a non-issue. I think everyone is assuming it was from the husband, but recently everyone in the office with a publicly available work email received an email from an anonymous account with a video showing one of our female colleagues participating in a wet t-shirt contest at a nightclub. At one point she even showed her breasts to the crowd.
I spoke with the colleague and she is very embarrassed and hoping she would not get in trouble because of this. I told her at the time I didn’t believe her participation in a wet t-shirt contest while on vacation was a workplace issue and that she was not in trouble. She is a great person to have in the office and she does great work. She told me she was sorry but I told her not to apologize. We have all done crazy things in our lives. Everyone in our office feels bad, and the women especially are infuriated at what we assume was her husband sending this out. I’m assuming as well that you would agree it’s not something there should be any consequences for at work and that we should move on and get back to work.
The problem is that everyone cannot stop talking about it, and I need to come up with a way to help things get past this. Why can’t everyone be mature adults? Should I consider asking the colleague in the video to send an email to everyone to acknowledge what happened? There are even other colleagues offering to share wild things they have done to make her feel less embarrassed (no videos, of course, just verbal). We’re just looking to get past this distraction and get everyone, including the embarrassed colleague, back to work productively. All the women in the office feel that we cannot let her a##@@&$ husband win. What do we do going forward?
Your initial instincts were perfect: this is not a work issue (and her husband is an asshole).
Definitely do not ask the employee to email the office about it! She’s already dealing with enough; she shouldn’t be asked to shoulder that burden on top of everything else. Instead, talk the people who are continuing to discuss what happened. Tell them that the continued discussion, even if stemming from support from their colleague, is making the situation worse for her by keeping the topic alive in your office. Say that it’s her private business and not something that should be getting discussed at work at all and conversation about it needs to stop, lest it create a less safe or harassing environment for the employee. That’s true even though everyone is supportive of her! She still deserves to be able to come to work without people talking about what her husband did. Shut it down — with the people who are still talking about it, not with the victim.
You should also make sure your employee knows there are laws against revenge porn in most states and at the federal level, and that you support her in pursuing that angle if she decides to.
4. Delivery person uses our lunchroom We get delivery pretty much daily via a big name shipping company. Within the last few months, the driver has taken to having his lunch in our staff lunchroom — using our microwave, tables, and chairs in an area that is off limits to the public. To my knowledge, he didn’t ask anyone if he could; he just started doing it. He’s usually in there around my scheduled lunch hour, and while I don’t begrudge him a place to eat, it does make me uncomfortable that he’s there. Should I bring this to the attention of my supervisor, or would it just make me look like an inconsiderate ass?
It depends entirely on what your company’s security policies are. A lot of companies would have no problem with someone who was there on legitimate business using their lunchroom. Others would. If your sense is that yours wouldn’t care and the guy isn’t being disruptive, there’s nothing wrong with letting him eat there (especially if you’re a pretty large company and it’s not a small office with limited lunchroom space that others are being squeezed out of).
1. Employee’s husband sent revenge porn to a bunch of her coworkers I am in HR at the head office for a small construction company, and recently a colleague who has been going through a divorce experienced a pretty embarrassing incident, although it’s something I consider a non-issue. I think everyone is assuming it was from the husband, but recently everyone in the office with a publicly available work email received an email from an anonymous account with a video showing one of our female colleagues participating in a wet t-shirt contest at a nightclub. At one point she even showed her breasts to the crowd.
I spoke with the colleague and she is very embarrassed and hoping she would not get in trouble because of this. I told her at the time I didn’t believe her participation in a wet t-shirt contest while on vacation was a workplace issue and that she was not in trouble. She is a great person to have in the office and she does great work. She told me she was sorry but I told her not to apologize. We have all done crazy things in our lives. Everyone in our office feels bad, and the women especially are infuriated at what we assume was her husband sending this out. I’m assuming as well that you would agree it’s not something there should be any consequences for at work and that we should move on and get back to work.
The problem is that everyone cannot stop talking about it, and I need to come up with a way to help things get past this. Why can’t everyone be mature adults? Should I consider asking the colleague in the video to send an email to everyone to acknowledge what happened? There are even other colleagues offering to share wild things they have done to make her feel less embarrassed (no videos, of course, just verbal). We’re just looking to get past this distraction and get everyone, including the embarrassed colleague, back to work productively. All the women in the office feel that we cannot let her a##@@&$ husband win. What do we do going forward?
Your initial instincts were perfect: this is not a work issue (and her husband is an asshole).
Definitely do not ask the employee to email the office about it! She’s already dealing with enough; she shouldn’t be asked to shoulder that burden on top of everything else. Instead, talk the people who are continuing to discuss what happened. Tell them that the continued discussion, even if stemming from support from their colleague, is making the situation worse for her by keeping the topic alive in your office. Say that it’s her private business and not something that should be getting discussed at work at all and conversation about it needs to stop, lest it create a less safe or harassing environment for the employee. That’s true even though everyone is supportive of her! She still deserves to be able to come to work without people talking about what her husband did. Shut it down — with the people who are still talking about it, not with the victim.
You should also make sure your employee knows there are laws against revenge porn in most states and at the federal level, and that you support her in pursuing that angle if she decides to.
4. Delivery person uses our lunchroom We get delivery pretty much daily via a big name shipping company. Within the last few months, the driver has taken to having his lunch in our staff lunchroom — using our microwave, tables, and chairs in an area that is off limits to the public. To my knowledge, he didn’t ask anyone if he could; he just started doing it. He’s usually in there around my scheduled lunch hour, and while I don’t begrudge him a place to eat, it does make me uncomfortable that he’s there. Should I bring this to the attention of my supervisor, or would it just make me look like an inconsiderate ass?
It depends entirely on what your company’s security policies are. A lot of companies would have no problem with someone who was there on legitimate business using their lunchroom. Others would. If your sense is that yours wouldn’t care and the guy isn’t being disruptive, there’s nothing wrong with letting him eat there (especially if you’re a pretty large company and it’s not a small office with limited lunchroom space that others are being squeezed out of).
This set surprised me
"Domestic violence worker here by trade. We dislike the term “revenge porn” and instead use “image based abuse.”"
When I read the headers and thought, "oh here we go, there's going to be a huge debate," it was true but not at all about the one I thought it would be about. I expected to find two to five commenters who dismissed or defended the image-based-abuse sender for various manosphere reasons but absolutely no one did, which was nice.
But the one about the UPS driver BLEW UP. I think it was fueled mainly by a commenter (who IMO disqualified themself from their username) who insisted that ever letting any driver into one's business premises would get someone raped. This person even called it sexism to disagree. Meanwhile other people came in swinging with accusations of classism and maybe racism, while others labeled "maybe think about why you're uncomfortable here" as accusations of same. People invalidating others' experiences all around. Yikes.
I do hope if LW #4 can get anything out of the contretemps it is to examine her [1] feeling of discomfort. That kind of feeling can be an important warning sign. It can be bigotry in action. It can be many things. I think if she can figure out more about why she feels uncomfortable it can tell her what to do.
[1] On AAM she/her are often used as default pronouns for sociopolitical reasons.
Re: This set surprised me
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So is it possible your commenter was someone who genuinely believed what they were saying? Sure. But it’s also entirely possible it’s someone who’s getting paid to help destabilize other societies, and they do so by making people feel appalled and/or angry at others. It may well just be empty words designed to provoke.
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I'm sure UPS drivers are no more likely to rape people while on the job than literally anybody else.
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I read an analysis of how they operate, and it's pretty damn sophisticated, with each poster taking a specific role. Can't lie, their propaganda machine is really good at this.
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(Where I used to work, because of the nature of the worksite, all site visitors had to be approved, accompanied by an employee, and could only be there on official business. This driver would have been banned from the site if he ever tried to eat lunch in our lunchroom.)
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Eactly. This is all that needed to be said on the topic and instead people threw fireballs at each other.
One comment I liked deliberately compared two workplaces to make this point. One was amenable and one was not because they were different places doing different things.
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This is what I would expect as well.
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Epic. boggles
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You know, in all that fighting no one mentioned this.
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ahahhahaha!
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But I do think the major issue is, are there questions of site security, and at least the need for permission for h&s reasons.
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And yeah, the idea that all that is being weaponized against hobby cyclists, for goodness’s sake, should be absurdist comedy. This happened just pre-Covid, but ever since I’ve felt dubious any time someone has rushed in somewhere semi-popular - no matter the topic - to post something inflammatory. Unless I directly know them myself in physical space, I’ll never know whether it’s real, it’s someone misled by disinformation, or it’s a disinformer.
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Re: This set surprised me
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That makes sense. When you grow up somewhere and you’ve never known anything different, to a fish it’s just the water the fish swims in: so normal it isn’t even visible or noticed.
(plus trolling cyclists has gotta be better than being in the army).
If I had to be in a war, I’d do everything I could to get a desk job where I wasn’t being shot at or put through physical misery constantly. 100% relatable.
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Oh yeah.
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Also, this makes me think how in Ender’s Game (or one of the sequels? But I think it’s the first book), Ender’s brother and sister go on the nets to argue various opposing positions, masking the fact that they were still children/teens by setting up personae as Demosthenes and Hobbes.
I like it a lot better in fiction….
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I spent 11 years working at my family's company, and we had a small private conference room right next to our kitchenette. Everyone working in the office was at the owner/executive level so there weren't really any concerns about office personnel overhearing something, but there were definitely meetings where our own employees were asked to come back in an hour for things like emptying the trash or running the vacuum.