updates: the proselytizing tech, the gross coworker, and more

Here are three updates from past letter-writers.

1. A medical tech repeatedly proselytized to me

I had an appointment with my doctor this morning and told him that one of the techs had made me uncomfortable by repeatedly discussing her religious beliefs with me even after I directly asked that she not. I used the phrasing a couple of commenters suggested — that she essentially was telling me that if I accepted Jesus into my life, my mental health would improve. My doctor thanked me for telling him, apologized for my experience, and said that he would make sure that this behavior would not happen again with me or other patients. Interestingly, he did not ask me which tech (there are two — the other was always very professional), so I suspect either he already had heard about this from another patient or just knew immediately which tech it had to be.

I don’t know that I would have talked to him about this if it weren’t for all of the encouragement that I received, and I definitely feel better about the practice now that it has been discussed. Again, many thanks to you and to the Ask A Manager community!

2. Coworker hawks up snot in the kitchen every day (#2 at the link)

Not long after my first message (almost two years ago now) I injured my foot and was unable to go into the office at all (or walk, really) for several months. After that, I still mostly still worked from home until a couple of months ago when management started getting a little more serious about people actually being in the office.

The second day I was back in, I was walking by the office kitchen when I heard the mucus action start again. TWO YEARS and nobody had said anything, apparently! I was kind of grumpy about being in the office at all so I just walked in and said, firmly but as politely as possible, “Can you please do that in the bathroom instead of the kitchen? It’s super gross. Thank you.” She looked a little startled (I mean, after years of this, and nobody saying anything, she had no reason to think it was an issue) but said okay.

And she hasn’t done it again when I’ve been here. I still head home for lunch usually, but there haven’t been any recurrences and my office experience has been blissfully free of the sound of sinus clearing. I still would rather be working from home, but at least the office experience is a little more pleasant than it was.

3. HR sent me confidential salary info, then recalled it, then told the whole company not to discuss salary, then backtracked, then doubled-down (#2 at the link)

I wrote in last year wondering if I could get in trouble for not telling my boss that our HR manager sent me confidential salary information. It was not a letter that I thought would ever have an update, but this was too wild not to share. A few days ago, I got to work and there was AN FBI AGENT standing in the lobby. Apparently the HR manager was also the business manager at her church and between unauthorized transactions and secret credit cards, she had stolen almost $650,000 from them over the course of several years. She was investigated for it a year or so ago but as far as we knew had been cleared, and we were able to verify that she didn’t try any financial shenanigans here, which is why she still worked for us.

Her boss jokingly asked a couple of us if we thought he needed to update the handbook to specifically state that getting arrested by the FBI is grounds for immediate termination, because, well, apparently it is.

We now have a sign noting the number of days since law enforcement was last here, and a common answer to “How are you?” is “Pretty good, I didn’t get arrested by the FBI!”

The post updates: the proselytizing tech, the gross coworker, and more appeared first on Ask a Manager.

View the full article