In this story, HR is literally sleeping with the guy who filed the complaint. I think it's safe to say that we've surpassed normal levels of dysfunction.
I think it bears repeating that HR exists to protect the company, not the employee. Often, an interaction with HR will work out terribly for the employee when HR is acting in the company's best interests.
That's not the case here though. They're just terrible.
I've been berated by people (especially HR people) for giving this advice, but I couldn't agree with this more. HR does not exist to help the employee, period. Because they manage benefits, it's easy to get confused and think of them as your advocate, but they are not. If you have an issue in the workplace, you first must figure out what to do, and then you talk to HR. It should be your last step.
Even in that role, the HR failed miserably, so much that she got fired, and the letter writer got rehired with so much more money. He should've threatened to sue and say "Let's see who the courts think is insane here.". But how it happened in the update is the best, with the HR being fired after the boss finding out about her misconduct from the lawyer. If he had threatened to sue and she realized she had no case, she would've backed down, they both would've kept their jobs, but she would have started a new medium to long term mission of figuring out a bullet-proof way to get him fired.
What I fear for is that the termination will be in his records and he will have to explain this extremely bizzare story to whoever asks or is interested. I'm glad it all worked out so well for him. Hopefully that silly detail will not affect his future.
What "records" do you speak of? One can choose to include or not include references on your resume, and your former employers can choose to say whatever they want to people checking refs (but, by convention, and to avoid legal trouble, will usually just confirm dates of employment). And since he was re-hired and is on good terms with the owner and his boss, I don't see any reason to even include anything about leaving the company, at all.
Not sure why there's three replies asking about "records." It's right there in your resume - date you worked at a company, huh weird, only 2 months, what happened?
The alternative is having whatever you had on your resume before + 2 month gap, which if anybody asks about you I guess lie. It's not a nothingburger though.
Even just reading the original article, it was painfully obvious that there had to be some sort of emotional entanglement between the offending party and someone in HR, either romantic or (less likely) blackmail.
Re update link: "As much as I hate to go based on office talk, it seemed that the HR woman and the food thief may have been romantically involved."
That explains why it sounded like HR had an ulterior motive by appearing to side with the thief without seeming interested in the spice-fan's side of the story.
I don't think the police are there to intervene in petty squabbles like lunch theft, annoying as lunch theft may be. Getting the lunch owner fired, on the other hand, is a serious matter, and firing the thief and HR because of them doing this to the lunch owner is a proportionate response.
And he's being compensated to build his skills and increase his professional value. Excellent leadership shown by the owner once he caught wise of what took place IMO
It's literally incredible that they fired someone for having their lunch stolen. It's great that sanity prevailed, but gods what a ridiculous situation. I hope whoever that HR person was is never employed in a position of authority again. The lunch thief is bad, but the HR person is much, much, worse. I'm still mad over here just thinking about it.
Sounds like they work at a big old company with lots of layers of middle management. I can't imagine a startup with a lunch thief being able to be realistically hidden.
That's what at-will employment means. Really he was fired for crossing the power structure of the office, which is always a disaster even if it's a secret power structure.
Well, to me it seems plausible that the writer is not telling the whole truth. They noticed food being stolen from the fridge and he purposely put extremely hot spice in the food to harm the perpetrator.
But how do you prove that. And even if you prove it, would it hold in court since the food was stolen?
> They noticed food being stolen from the fridge and he purposely put extremely hot spice in the food for the purpose of getting back at the perpetrator.
Even if that were the case (which I doubt), why is that wrong? On what planet is it OK to defend the actions of the thief?
edit: If he would have poisoned the food and the thief died, would that be ok?
I guess the point I'm trying to make is that if he did purposely contaminate the food in order to get back at the thief, instead of just talking to him about it, the talk with HR seems justified.
We won't all agree on ethical system and world views, but a useful thought experiment is whether or not you'd be willing to shoot Hitler at any point in history.
Maybe it is "always wrong" given a particularly rigid and simplistic code of ethics, but in American society at least we are very comfortable with the notion of causing deserved harm (whether physical, financial, or merely emotional) to wrongdoers as a deterrent to others.
I hope you do not actaully think that is way things are or the law works because it does not.
In the US the law allows for you to make the case of self defense, it is a defense for violations of the law. I.E. it is always illegal to kill someone, but it is a defense if you kill someone who was trying to kill you..
Things like bobby traps, or poisoning your food against a thief would not be legal under American law. For example I can not setup a series of Automated Gun Turrents in my home to kill anyone that breaks in, but I could (in some states) shoot someone myself if they break in.
In a food theft case as an individual could in fact assault someone possibly even commit battery against someone in order to prevent the from stealing my lunch but I could not say put bobby trap that could cause physical harm to them on the lunch
I certainly understand that it's not legal to turn your house, nor your lunch, into a deathtrap. Nor at any point did I claim that any particular kind of action was legal. I said that Americans generally feel that we're collectively justified in harming certain kinds of people. That's not a claim about legality. That's a claim about how a subset of the population feels.
My use of "we" was merely meant to indicate that our society, through the apparatus of our legislators, has decided that our society is justified in doing harm to certain classes of people and has set up mechanisms for doing this. I was not using "we" in the "me and my immediate peers" sense.
It's not always wrong to cause someone else harm, either legally or ethically. The principle of legal self defense using reasonable force is well established in many legal systems and is considered ethical in many ethical philosophies for example. Where the line of "reasonable" lies is often a subject of debate however.
And as someone that also loves super spicy foods to the point that I eat whole peppers raw, anyone that is brave enough to eat my food is welcome to try.
If your body can't take the heat, you shouldn't be eating my food.
This is no different than if a celiac food thief started eating someone elses food that contained gluten. Its not up to the person that brought food to make sure their food never contained things allergic to everyone in the office. The thief should keep their mitts off something they don't know might hurt them.
This person sounds like they had an allegic reaction to capsacin. They also hopefully learnt that stealing food might mean they'll trip up their reaction. And in the end, they learnt that filing complaints with the HR person you're sleeping with might end up with both of you being fired.
It wasn't contaminated, merely spiced; assuming the story about him eating some himself to demonstrate that it was his normal (hot) level of spice. The idiot here is someone eating something that is obviously far too spicy for them - which is not going to be a secret, something obvious from the first bite.
The writer continued to bring equally spice food and consume it. They let someone else taste it to confirm it was exceptionally spicy, then ate it in front of them without issue.
Unless their plan for revenge started years back when they started slowly building up their tolerance and taste for spicy food, I really don't see how that's even close to the most plausible explanation.
Once I had some roommates who would steal my food from the refrigerator. Several years after I moved out a friend recommended making cat food lasagna as revenge as it wouldn't harm the perps, just be somewhat gross. (Note that I don't recommend this. I am just saying that if catching the perps with food is a goal then there are better options.)
What would be the goal of the writer for even sending this to Ask A Manager with false events?
And more importantly: does it matter? If you come down to it, we don't even know if the writer exists at all. It's just an hypothetical event that serves as fodder for discussion.
Kind of orthogonal to the story, but anyone who steals lunch or food from a co-worker should be fired immediately. There's a 0% chance that someone who steals others' stuff is a good, honest person in other parts of their life.
Firing someone for a mistake is a fairly extreme response, and should be reserved for extreme mistakes. This sounds like a correctable habit, with some mentoring and coaching.
Usually people that I've worked with that have this kind of habit also have other habits, like copying open source into commercial code with no regard for license, checking in code under other people's names, flagrantly disturbing massive chunks of code (e.g. checking in whole-repository reformat) without telling anyone, etc.
It's definitely marginal and indicates a kind of thoughtlessness. Firing? Maybe not. But it's not easily forgotten.
There is a big difference between mistakenly eating someone else's lunch and being a thief.
It's conceivable that someone could have a visually identical container (brown paper bag) and a visually identical lunch (sandwich and apple), in which case yes - that would be a mistake.
I'd bet that that is the case for much less than 5% of the lunches misappropriated.
Calling deliberate theft a "mistake" is fundamentally dishonest - it pollutes the meaning of the word mistake.
If you're a white-collar worker who is making a decent paycheck, you should definitely be accountable for the action of taking clearly-labeled food that doesn't belong to you. We should be merciful and try to help them, but that person is also committing a small form of thievery.
you have to be a complete fool to not recognize the container you brought your lunch in (written with your name on it even), but the lunch itself. This is such a BS response.
Mistakes happen. There are all sorts of ways you could accidentally eat someone else's lunch, and having a 'zero tolerance' policy is a good way to end up firing an innocent person.
Same lunch box as someone else. In an office of 7 people, I had the same lunch box as two coworkers. Have someone else make your lunch or bring a generic enough item and it could happen.
Honest mixups happen and when they are followed up with an apology then it's fine. Let common sense prevail.
I've eaten/drank parts of co-workers lunches unwittingly thinking they were part of the community food/beverage selection.
I never got reprimanded, but I did have to sheepishly explain to a coworker that I drank his soda thinking it was one of the community ones since it was in the door of the fridge and unmarked.
I now work at a company with an extensive free kitchen and you have to do an extremely good job of marking your personal food since the default assumption will now be that the food is everyones.
This happens occasionally at my work, and I'm pretty sure it is always accidental - but it is because we get food delivered every day, and a combination of food not being very well labeled, orders getting messed up, and people forgetting what they ordered that day - things get mixed up.
That said, I really can't imagine any situation where it is reasonable if you are talking about people's homemade lunches, in a well labeled lunch box - as is the case in this story.
There's company paid lunch where the leftovers are put into the fridge for people to take it later before throwing it out. A coworker puts their own food into the fridge without putting their name on it. You take your coworkers food thinking it was leftovers from lunch.
Sure! I have worked in a lot of offices over the years, and most of these have actually happened at least once:
- Someone tells another coworker they can have their lunch, but they grab the wrong one (because the tag fell off or they didn't see the label)
- Someone says there is leftover food available in the kitchen after some catered meal, and the person didn't realize that container wasn't part of it.
- A new employee got confused about which refrigerator is the 'office stocked one' and which one is the 'personal items one'
- It was fridge cleaning day, and the person thought the food was getting tossed out anyway, so they ate it. Turns out the person was going to eat it that day (this one is borderline, not only because it is kinda gross but also kinda not cool)
- Two people had similar lunches and they just grabbed the wrong one without paying a ton of attention (much more common when a group of people go out to lunch together and come back with leftovers)
- A loose, packaged food item got knocked over and fell into someone else's food container.
Some of these are probably pretty rare, but I have seen many of them happen.
Takeout box is the same and food is similar.
I have the same container and it isn't labeled.
Food got moved around.
Forgot I didn't bring food that day.
I've caught myself once or twice where I grabbed the wrong thing. But sometimes in a rush, in sleep addled daze, or just not paying attention, it could happen. I would hate to be fired for a mistake like that.
One comes to mind for me. At my office, people will often leave snacks, leftovers, or just food for the office on a table for anyone to take. It's within the realm of possibility that someone may leave their lunch unattended on the table and a passerby may think it's up for grabs.
A whole lunch may be a bit much unless it’s some sort of pre-packaged food, but a few I have seen over the years:
- Grab-and-go sandwich from local vendor was eaten by wrong person. They had a similarly wrapped sandwich in the same refrigerator.
- Identical brands of yogurt, milk, cream, etc. were used by a non-owner with a similar bottle.
- Similar fruit was taken.
- Identical brand peanut butter was used by the non-owner.
None of these other than maybe the sandwich are like the original post, but these mistakes do happen.
In these cases, it was always resolved with an “oops, sorry” and a replacement item (sometimes waved off)... and usually more deliberate bespoke labeling or containering of common items.
Do tell, which are a couple of those ways that someone might accidentally pick someone else's lunch box, open it, and start eating some unknown food without realizing?
It might be precariously positioned, and an unwitting coworker might have the misfortune of opening the refrigerator door only to see your pyrex lunch container fall to the ground and shatter. They clean it up, but are in too much of a rush to make a company-wide announcement of the smashed lunch.
You come back to a missing lunch and become incensed, but start to cool off when given an explanation.
I use the same container as a coworker. His wife packs his lunch. When I bring in chili or spaghetti he could honestly mistake it for his own. Less likely with most of my lunches though.
And that’s not a hypothetical. He hasn’t confused our lunches but we do use the same style Pyrex containers. Mine is usually in a bag with fruit and such, but occasionally I put it in the fridge by itself.
Oh! and another: We have a certain corner table in our lunch room where we traditionally put free food. Someone set their lunch item there while doing something else. I grabbed it and ate it. When we realized I apologized profusely(while other co-workers said "oops, she shouldn't have put it there"), then bought her a replacement.
Accidentally take, sure. Accidentally consume? Maybe one bite. Unless there were some odd circumstances, like mental deficiency, or nearly identical meals, beyond one bite is very difficult to believe.
I accidentally consumed a coworkers yogurt cup once (and told her/replaced it as soon as I realized). I had started daring a different coworker and she had said something like "you can eat my yogurt in my yellow bag at the front-left of the fridge". Unfortunately, we had 2 fridges in the break room at the time...
> There are all sorts of ways you could accidentally eat someone else's lunch
Usually if one is a self-centered jerk who just grabs the first thing that barely looks like their lunch from the fridge and doesn't care much about others.
Or if people just buy similar lunches from the same place and keep all of them on the fridge, confusing similar names/packaging, but yeah, it's usually the 1st case.
Here’s what that sounds like when an innocent person does it: “I’m so sorry, your bag looked just like mine and I didn’t notice it until I heated it up. Can I buy you lunch?”
Someone who has to be confronted is just hoping you’ll believe their excuse because that’s worked in the past.
Yeah... no. I just don't see how this is possible, other than a 1 in a million case of a coworker happening to use exactly the same container which contains a meal that had the same appearance as your own. It's just not plausible.
Really? You think that 100% of employees steal from their co-workers at some point? I guess I must be crazy because I've never done that, nor considered it.
I would certainly quit a company with a culture of dispensing harsh and summary justice.
And, while I agree that eating other people's lunch is unethical, we should be very wary of the "broken window" attitude towards lashing out severe punishment for minor things.
Very often it goes together with leniency towards CEOs "giving themselves" huge exit bonuses & so on.
For me it looks like HR is just trying to protect an essential/key employee of the company agains a new employee even if what has been done is unethical. Some employee may think that they can do anything because the company can't replace them.
I actually had a boss who stole my lunch. His wife cooks for him so he didn't know/remember what food he was bringing to work and he had the same kind of (IKEA) lunch box as me.
He apologized and bought me lunch the next day so it was absolutely fine in the end but there was a moment of confusion and some colleagues mocking me.
I'm sorry, but how are the other replies to you defending this behavior...?
I have never "accidentally" eaten an entire lunch that wasn't mine. I'm actually offended that people are defending this. It's stealing. It's petty, childish, dishonest behavior. I think I would just be dumbstruck speechless if a coworker actually was brazen enough to just take my food and eat it. It's comically absurd.
I agree completely. Not only does theft make their work untrustworthy, their actions have a huge impact on the morale of their coworkers.
I have fired an employee for stealing lunches (with plenty of evidence, of course). I would have fired the person in this story immediately if it were within my power.
Similarly, I have also fired people for other obvious character failures, such lying about bereavement leave to take time off. (It happened so often at one job that I ceased to be amazed when I caught it.) For example, one guy brought me an obituary for his dad that was obviously altered (fonts on dates didn't match, etc.). Google immediately informed me that his dad had died three years earlier. That was a fun conversation.
For those who think such behavior should be considered a mere mistake and that firing is too extreme, please tell me how such poor character can be corrected by actions taken by management at their workplace. If the job requires good character, then the only correct response to such behavior is to separate them from the company, as happened in this case.
I don't know if I would sack them right off the bat, but I would definitely keep a very close eye on them. The fact that they are adults in the workplace who steal from colleagues definitely points to their character simply being incompatible with societal norms, so who knows what other demoralising actions they are taking part in?
Six-year-old primary school children who haven't been disciplined yet steal lunches. Not supposedly functional members of society.
When I was younger, sometimes I would hesitate to fire people even though they had crossed a bright line into fireable territory. With experience, it became very clear that it was never a good idea, so I stopped hesitating.
That sort of thing gets old, though, so I don't manage anyone now. Life is much less stressful that way.
In this instance (and most of the similar instances), if he needed the day off, he would have gotten it with fairly minimal notice. Without pay if he had used up his available PTO, yes, but so was the bereavement.
I've never had someone steal my lunch, nor have I stolen anybody's lunch, so the issue seems a bit moot to me.
Steal my _chair_, though, and may all the laws of Gods and Men come down upon you in their most unmitigated rigor! That has happened to me _way_ too often.
I generally agree with what you're saying. It's kind of hilarious to me that so many people here don't know what "stealing" means. Have they not read the article at all? News flash: the act of stealing requires intention. Accidentally swiping someone's ambiguously-labeled lunch is very different!!
I think the issue is that it can be difficult to prove/disprove intent for something like stolen lunches unless there was a camera pointed at the fridge (or some other clear indicator) if you're going to fire someone over it and be protected against a wrongful termination suit.
It's a bit over the top to have that in place to enforce the policy unless it was a known issue in that workplace. So the statement the GP made seems a bit extreme without context.
Given enough time, someone who steals from coworkers will eventually steal from the company. Antisocial behavior isn't about the victims, it's about the behavior. They may say things like "I would never do that to YOU", but in the end, when it is to their advantage, they will do that to you.
Completely different scenarios. Stealing an office pen is slightly immoral but basically affects no one. Stealing a lunch ruins someone's day, and is a direct insult to their time and existence. An absolute false equivalence and you know it.
If you believe that theft is an isolated incident then sure. I'd argue that someone who steals a coworker's lunch is not a good person in other areas of their life.
My guess is this falls under the same purview as booby-trapping your house: Yeah, they're committing a felony by breaking into your house, but you're not allowed to setup a "Home Alone" defense system (if nothing else because first responders might need to get into your home).
It's dumb in this case because the "booby trap" likely isn't one at all, but at a very cursory glance I could buy that someone would make their lunch exceptionally spicy to thwart a would-be thief - in the same vein that people might suggest laxatives, etc.
Anyway, I'm surprised people don't just have locked lunchboxes or something like that.
It's true that booby traps are not allowed by the Geneva convention but that convention only applies to conduct in a war. I'm curious what law applies in the US.
I imagine the castle doctrine would apply. Kevin McCallister could have justifiably killed the burglars in Home Alone. It was actually rather nice of him to just use non-lethal booby traps.
The laws vary by state, some allow you to use traps as long as they don't cause serious harm, while others don't let you use them at all. No state allows you to set a lethal booby trap.
Yes. The basic idea is that you cannot do via a trap what you couldn't do in person, which I think is sensible. If you are not allowed to shoot someone who merely sets foot on your property, then you are also not allowed to rig a shotgun to a tripwire that does the same thing.
Another more similar example is if the thief had a food allergy, say peanuts, and they stole a meal containing peanuts and got sick. I don't think most judges would argue that people need to ensure their meals can be eaten by anyone.
Though some schools do ban all peanut products for lunch. I am not a lawyer, obviously.
> It's like a thief complaining because they crashed the car they stole from you.
To take this further: It's a bit like they crashed the stolen car because you cut the brake lines in anticipation of someone stealing it (a bit extreme obviously, but just bear with me).
Which is interesting: I actually wonder whether you would be found at least civilly liable in that instance.
I'm not sure that the original advice given was ideal. I'd recommend consulting with a lawyer first before giving any information to HR given that OPs job was at risk. But I'm happy for OP that it all worked out in the end.
I was just about to start typing about potential legal action -- the thief basically admitted the theft (despite HR stating" there's no evidence of theft"...)
Totally agree with the other poster that lunch theft should be a firing offense, as, if they're not honest about that, they're not honest.
Who steals other people's food? This is completely bizarre to me. Do these people do it every day and just never bring their own lunch? Do they just see something that takes their fancy and decide to nick it?
"Sorry boss, I have stomach issues I need to take a laxitive but the taste makes me sick so I mix it with my lunch, heres my prescription, by the way and on an entirely unrelated note...has anyone seen Peter this afternoon?"
That was just the tip of the iceberg though. That place had some serious thefts going on. Once, a group leader's iMac was stolen one day: it was tied to the table with a Kensington lock, but the chain was just sawed off...
I don't know the motivation but it's a common problem for some reason. I worked at one place where it got so out of hand me a few other co-workers got fed up and spiked a bunch of our leftovers with brutally hot habanero sauce and left them in the fridge in the lunchroom. It worked.
I work in a shared working space, it's just me using my stuff yet the amount of milk, tea bags and sugar I get through and have to keep buying... Even tried labelling it yet people just to go to fridge or cupboard and help themselves... It's so annoying.
At the coworking space I frequent there is a small bucket and a sign, when people take some sugar or a teabag or whatever they drop a quarter or a dime in the bucket. Whenever the space is out of teabags someone empties the bucket and buys some.
This sounds like a call center or similar place where they're desperate to fill the cubes with as many warm bodies as possible, sociopath or not. The behavior of HR suggests a less than professional workplace with high turnover.
If you crowd rats together in a small cage (the modern open office) they will start irrationally attacking and abusing each other. 95% of office dysfunction can be explained by this.
I'm fairly sure most of the stuff on ask a manager is complete fiction, or at least heavily, heavily rewritten. Pretty much everything has the same writing style.
One mystery that continues to fascinate me is when people at work say things to me that are obviously irrational -- are they sincere or is it some kind of manipulative power play?
I've had managers ask me things such as "When will the rebuild of the website be done" and I answer "In two months" and they say "You have two weeks" and I say "Maybe 6 weeks, but not 2" and then they repeat "You've got two weeks." I wonder if they realize they sound crazy? I can imagine a few possibilities:
1.) Possibly they feel that they won a concession by getting me to shift from "two months" to "maybe 6 weeks" and they think they will get more concessions from me if they just keep pretending that two weeks is the only allowed answered?
2.) Is it a threat? What are they are going to do when we miss the obviously impossible deadline?
3.) Are they pretending to be serious about two weeks, or do they really think it is possible? Perhaps they are paranoid and they think that every worker is lying to them all the time?
I run into deeply irrational behavior at work all the time. I find the amount of it to be surprising. I was thinking about this when I wrote "The accusation that you are irrational -- is it the truth, or a manipulative power play" but there I focused on personal situations, and I mostly leave is as an exercise to the reader to imagine how it extends to work situations.
Since I have no fears of getting fired I would respond "2 weeks? Then you'll get a very broken website.". If they ask "Are you being sarcastic?" I would respond "Are you?".
That's still less than 3 weeks, and also doesn't make any sense (there's 5 business days in a week, and unless specified it doesn't make sense to change units)
I always assume these type of "threats" are heavy handed suggestions for unpaid overtime. If you're telling him 2 months, and you assume a 40 hour work week, maybe he expects you'll work 120 weeks and get it done roughly on time? Its also possible that the manager has no idea what the scope of work is, has a different view of the scope of work is than you do, or in extreme\hostile situations thinks you're taking advantage and being lazy ("if only my reports would work harder!"), which also sounds like wanting forced unpaid overtime unless your productivity is unusually low.
By answering "Maybe 6 weeks", you just validated their belief that the full project deadline is negotiable, and so now they're just bargaining from a position of power.
This is the correct answer. When making a concession like this, always take something away. "We can do the website in 6 weeks, but we will have to remove the ability for users to upvote". If that doesn't sit well, send a list of the features, along with their timeframes and ask them to choose which features to cut.
You still get the irrational answers back though unfortunately, but it is a more balanced position.
Indeed. 8 weeks that in an informal conversation was cut by 25% communicates that you really didn't know how long it would take. 8 could mean 6, or 10, or 2.
I'd leave that toxic workplace as soon as I find a better option with the minimum pay I need.
A dog is very friendly to everyone. But some street dogs are dangerous. It is not their fault. They have been abused and exposed to harassment when they were young. They think all humans are dangerous, so they'll bite anyone that approaches them.
The same is happening for your boss. He had a bad relation with developers (or employees) and then his subconscious is generalizing it over every other person.
So he thinks that any employee is a lying prick piece of shit. And that the only way to get you to work is to dominate you. Because that's how things work in his mind.
Needless to say, the best course of action is to leave to a saner workplace.
Slightly off topic, but a dog's default state is not friendly to everyone, harrasment/abuse is certainly not required for an unfamiliar dog to be unfriendly. It has taken a lot of work to domesticated them, but many dogs are only friendly towards humans through exposure and positive reinforcement.
If you get in these conversations, when they say "You have 2 weeks", I found it to be best to shift the conversation to cutting scope rather than giving out shorter estimates.
Its also helpful to get an answer to why they need it in 2 weeks, so you can say "I can get Y done in 2 weeks, which is the part you need for demo Z".
I imagine that such managers feel helpless, placed between the people "below" them actually doing the work and the people "above" them that are the ones imposing the broader but equally impossible deadlines for the business. (To be slightly less sympathetic, a manager might feel that their own pay/prospects will improve if they can produce results faster than rationally expected).
In order to maintain a feeling of control, or of providing value, the manager falls into the mindset that the one input they have into the process is that they nominally get to set deadlines (for each task of a given scope and level of quality), even if those deadlines are repeatedly missed. The temptation is that they think that the shorter the deadline, the faster the development and the better the result.
I think it's safe to assume power play in most such instances, though the perpetrators may have little more self-awareness than a dog does when it pee-claims things. People who grow up in authoritarian households tend to just repeat that behavior, as obedience is valued more highly than correctness. They care about you doing what they say, full stop.
Reddit's /r/legaladvice subreddit has had a lot of interesting corporate mismanagement stories lately (with the typical take-with-a-grain-of-salt caveat).
It’s the equivalent of a Penthouse “you’ll never believe what happened next” letter for office drones. I can’t believe so many people are taking it at face value!
Science fiction is presented as fiction, people discuss it as fiction. The comments here are very much a different story, so please take the time to read them.
It's clearly being presented as a true story by the original source. If it's not true it's not food for any kind of thought it's just a really badly written and stupid short story. Stop trying to justify lying.
I sincerely don't get that position. We've been presented with a story; whether that story actually happened in unknowable. So how can it possibly affect the story's quality as food for thought?
How can it possibly have any value whatsoever if it's not real?
If it's real you can wonder ok what motivated actual people to behave in this way, what actually happened?
If it is made up (which it almost certainly is because it's so far fetched and ridiculous) then it has zero value. There's nothing worth thinking about here or discussing if it didn't actually happen. Like I said it's just a really poorly written short story.
You don't discuss literature the same way you discuss journalism. I can't believe you don't already know that?
Unfortunately, my past experiences as a senior operations manager and site director with 500 to 1000 employees, reading these stories only makes me remember similar situations. They are all too believable and real to me.
The solution still stands. In a non-threatening way you make it known you know an activity or accusation is unfounded and, if pressed, you may take further action. And you do this in writing, clearly stating it is for documentation purposes. Nothing will make HR/legal stop in their tracks faster (unless you really are in the wrong)
Let's say you have a particular illness that required a particular supplement that could be added to food, if that food is stolen and causes discomfort, that case could be proven in court if you have a diagnosis telling you to add it to your food.
Even considering how bizarre this is and how it was more to the story as jobowoo pointed out with the update, there is also a lesson here: If the situation warrants complaining to authorities, complain first or you'll be fighting an uphill battler even if you are in the right.
219 comments
[ 4.2 ms ] story [ 213 ms ] threadOne suspects this could be written on every occasion.
That's not the case here though. They're just terrible.
http://www.askamanager.org/2016/10/update-a-coworker-stole-m...
What I fear for is that the termination will be in his records and he will have to explain this extremely bizzare story to whoever asks or is interested. I'm glad it all worked out so well for him. Hopefully that silly detail will not affect his future.
Just an FYI, there is no such thing. There isn't going to be a record that he was fired.
The alternative is having whatever you had on your resume before + 2 month gap, which if anybody asks about you I guess lie. It's not a nothingburger though.
Internal company records don't matter for shits.
I'd hope the owner of the company would be willing to provide a reference explaining that he was the victim of misconduct.
That explains why it sounded like HR had an ulterior motive by appearing to side with the thief without seeming interested in the spice-fan's side of the story.
For doubling your pay? Insane!
TLDR: Guy gets his job back and a generous raise (almost double his paycheck) after getting fired and threatening legal action.
Looks like the situation worked out fairly well in the end.
But how do you prove that. And even if you prove it, would it hold in court since the food was stolen?
Even if that were the case (which I doubt), why is that wrong? On what planet is it OK to defend the actions of the thief?
edit: If he would have poisoned the food and the thief died, would that be ok?
I guess the point I'm trying to make is that if he did purposely contaminate the food in order to get back at the thief, instead of just talking to him about it, the talk with HR seems justified.
But more directly relevant, does the thief have no agency?
In the US the law allows for you to make the case of self defense, it is a defense for violations of the law. I.E. it is always illegal to kill someone, but it is a defense if you kill someone who was trying to kill you..
Things like bobby traps, or poisoning your food against a thief would not be legal under American law. For example I can not setup a series of Automated Gun Turrents in my home to kill anyone that breaks in, but I could (in some states) shoot someone myself if they break in.
In a food theft case as an individual could in fact assault someone possibly even commit battery against someone in order to prevent the from stealing my lunch but I could not say put bobby trap that could cause physical harm to them on the lunch
My use of "we" was merely meant to indicate that our society, through the apparatus of our legislators, has decided that our society is justified in doing harm to certain classes of people and has set up mechanisms for doing this. I was not using "we" in the "me and my immediate peers" sense.
No, self defense is one reason.
And as someone that also loves super spicy foods to the point that I eat whole peppers raw, anyone that is brave enough to eat my food is welcome to try.
If your body can't take the heat, you shouldn't be eating my food.
This is no different than if a celiac food thief started eating someone elses food that contained gluten. Its not up to the person that brought food to make sure their food never contained things allergic to everyone in the office. The thief should keep their mitts off something they don't know might hurt them.
This person sounds like they had an allegic reaction to capsacin. They also hopefully learnt that stealing food might mean they'll trip up their reaction. And in the end, they learnt that filing complaints with the HR person you're sleeping with might end up with both of you being fired.
Unless their plan for revenge started years back when they started slowly building up their tolerance and taste for spicy food, I really don't see how that's even close to the most plausible explanation.
And more importantly: does it matter? If you come down to it, we don't even know if the writer exists at all. It's just an hypothetical event that serves as fodder for discussion.
It's definitely marginal and indicates a kind of thoughtlessness. Firing? Maybe not. But it's not easily forgotten.
It's conceivable that someone could have a visually identical container (brown paper bag) and a visually identical lunch (sandwich and apple), in which case yes - that would be a mistake.
I'd bet that that is the case for much less than 5% of the lunches misappropriated.
Calling deliberate theft a "mistake" is fundamentally dishonest - it pollutes the meaning of the word mistake.
you have to be a complete fool to not recognize the container you brought your lunch in (written with your name on it even), but the lunch itself. This is such a BS response.
Want to give us some examples?
Honest mixups happen and when they are followed up with an apology then it's fine. Let common sense prevail.
I never got reprimanded, but I did have to sheepishly explain to a coworker that I drank his soda thinking it was one of the community ones since it was in the door of the fridge and unmarked.
I now work at a company with an extensive free kitchen and you have to do an extremely good job of marking your personal food since the default assumption will now be that the food is everyones.
That said, I really can't imagine any situation where it is reasonable if you are talking about people's homemade lunches, in a well labeled lunch box - as is the case in this story.
- Someone tells another coworker they can have their lunch, but they grab the wrong one (because the tag fell off or they didn't see the label)
- Someone says there is leftover food available in the kitchen after some catered meal, and the person didn't realize that container wasn't part of it.
- A new employee got confused about which refrigerator is the 'office stocked one' and which one is the 'personal items one'
- It was fridge cleaning day, and the person thought the food was getting tossed out anyway, so they ate it. Turns out the person was going to eat it that day (this one is borderline, not only because it is kinda gross but also kinda not cool)
- Two people had similar lunches and they just grabbed the wrong one without paying a ton of attention (much more common when a group of people go out to lunch together and come back with leftovers)
- A loose, packaged food item got knocked over and fell into someone else's food container.
Some of these are probably pretty rare, but I have seen many of them happen.
I've caught myself once or twice where I grabbed the wrong thing. But sometimes in a rush, in sleep addled daze, or just not paying attention, it could happen. I would hate to be fired for a mistake like that.
- Grab-and-go sandwich from local vendor was eaten by wrong person. They had a similarly wrapped sandwich in the same refrigerator.
- Identical brands of yogurt, milk, cream, etc. were used by a non-owner with a similar bottle.
- Similar fruit was taken.
- Identical brand peanut butter was used by the non-owner.
None of these other than maybe the sandwich are like the original post, but these mistakes do happen.
In these cases, it was always resolved with an “oops, sorry” and a replacement item (sometimes waved off)... and usually more deliberate bespoke labeling or containering of common items.
Also, especially in tech workplaces, never underestimate absentmindedness.
You come back to a missing lunch and become incensed, but start to cool off when given an explanation.
It would be easy for someone to think some food was leftover from the day before, or that an apple or yogurt was meant for anyone.
And that’s not a hypothetical. He hasn’t confused our lunches but we do use the same style Pyrex containers. Mine is usually in a bag with fruit and such, but occasionally I put it in the fridge by itself.
Oh! and another: We have a certain corner table in our lunch room where we traditionally put free food. Someone set their lunch item there while doing something else. I grabbed it and ate it. When we realized I apologized profusely(while other co-workers said "oops, she shouldn't have put it there"), then bought her a replacement.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16944591
Usually if one is a self-centered jerk who just grabs the first thing that barely looks like their lunch from the fridge and doesn't care much about others.
Or if people just buy similar lunches from the same place and keep all of them on the fridge, confusing similar names/packaging, but yeah, it's usually the 1st case.
Someone who has to be confronted is just hoping you’ll believe their excuse because that’s worked in the past.
And, while I agree that eating other people's lunch is unethical, we should be very wary of the "broken window" attitude towards lashing out severe punishment for minor things.
Very often it goes together with leniency towards CEOs "giving themselves" huge exit bonuses & so on.
The issue is that the last employee has to have the moral integrity to fire himself.
He apologized and bought me lunch the next day so it was absolutely fine in the end but there was a moment of confusion and some colleagues mocking me.
I have never "accidentally" eaten an entire lunch that wasn't mine. I'm actually offended that people are defending this. It's stealing. It's petty, childish, dishonest behavior. I think I would just be dumbstruck speechless if a coworker actually was brazen enough to just take my food and eat it. It's comically absurd.
I have fired an employee for stealing lunches (with plenty of evidence, of course). I would have fired the person in this story immediately if it were within my power.
Similarly, I have also fired people for other obvious character failures, such lying about bereavement leave to take time off. (It happened so often at one job that I ceased to be amazed when I caught it.) For example, one guy brought me an obituary for his dad that was obviously altered (fonts on dates didn't match, etc.). Google immediately informed me that his dad had died three years earlier. That was a fun conversation.
For those who think such behavior should be considered a mere mistake and that firing is too extreme, please tell me how such poor character can be corrected by actions taken by management at their workplace. If the job requires good character, then the only correct response to such behavior is to separate them from the company, as happened in this case.
Six-year-old primary school children who haven't been disciplined yet steal lunches. Not supposedly functional members of society.
That sort of thing gets old, though, so I don't manage anyone now. Life is much less stressful that way.
I agree, most companies don't offer enough PTO.
Steal my _chair_, though, and may all the laws of Gods and Men come down upon you in their most unmitigated rigor! That has happened to me _way_ too often.
It's a bit over the top to have that in place to enforce the policy unless it was a known issue in that workplace. So the statement the GP made seems a bit extreme without context.
Sure, they are all technically "stealing" stuff, but lighten up.
It's dumb in this case because the "booby trap" likely isn't one at all, but at a very cursory glance I could buy that someone would make their lunch exceptionally spicy to thwart a would-be thief - in the same vein that people might suggest laxatives, etc.
Anyway, I'm surprised people don't just have locked lunchboxes or something like that.
https://definitions.uslegal.com/b/booby-traps/
The laws vary by state, some allow you to use traps as long as they don't cause serious harm, while others don't let you use them at all. No state allows you to set a lethal booby trap.
Here is the California law about them: https://law.justia.com/codes/california/2005/pen/12355.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katko_v._Briney
Except it wasn't a booby trap. It's like a thief complaining because they crashed the car they stole from you.
Another more similar example is if the thief had a food allergy, say peanuts, and they stole a meal containing peanuts and got sick. I don't think most judges would argue that people need to ensure their meals can be eaten by anyone.
Though some schools do ban all peanut products for lunch. I am not a lawyer, obviously.
To take this further: It's a bit like they crashed the stolen car because you cut the brake lines in anticipation of someone stealing it (a bit extreme obviously, but just bear with me).
Which is interesting: I actually wonder whether you would be found at least civilly liable in that instance.
It's more like you have a manual transmission, and your thief crashed because they only know an automatic.
Changing your job in response to someone stealing your lunch seems a little extreme.
I'm not sure that the original advice given was ideal. I'd recommend consulting with a lawyer first before giving any information to HR given that OPs job was at risk. But I'm happy for OP that it all worked out in the end.
I was just about to start typing about potential legal action -- the thief basically admitted the theft (despite HR stating" there's no evidence of theft"...)
Totally agree with the other poster that lunch theft should be a firing offense, as, if they're not honest about that, they're not honest.
The mind boggles.
Its so shameful.
It can be mind-boggling, but it definitely happens.
I don't know what it is about office spaces that causes latent kleptomania to surface with such regularity.
https://www.thefreelibrary.com/Escaping+the+Laboratory%3a+th...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_B._Calhoun
https://youtube.com/watch?v=0Z760XNy4VM
https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/the-doomed-mouse-utopi...
I've had managers ask me things such as "When will the rebuild of the website be done" and I answer "In two months" and they say "You have two weeks" and I say "Maybe 6 weeks, but not 2" and then they repeat "You've got two weeks." I wonder if they realize they sound crazy? I can imagine a few possibilities:
1.) Possibly they feel that they won a concession by getting me to shift from "two months" to "maybe 6 weeks" and they think they will get more concessions from me if they just keep pretending that two weeks is the only allowed answered?
2.) Is it a threat? What are they are going to do when we miss the obviously impossible deadline?
3.) Are they pretending to be serious about two weeks, or do they really think it is possible? Perhaps they are paranoid and they think that every worker is lying to them all the time?
I run into deeply irrational behavior at work all the time. I find the amount of it to be surprising. I was thinking about this when I wrote "The accusation that you are irrational -- is it the truth, or a manipulative power play" but there I focused on personal situations, and I mostly leave is as an exercise to the reader to imagine how it extends to work situations.
http://www.smashcompany.com/philosophy/the-accusation-that-y...
I wouldn't work at a place where the person tasked with supervising and organizing my work is clearly incapable of doing so and also rude.
Edit: Unless you have recourse with higher ups - in that case try talking to his superiors.
You still get the irrational answers back though unfortunately, but it is a more balanced position.
It happens in movies and it always works.
A dog is very friendly to everyone. But some street dogs are dangerous. It is not their fault. They have been abused and exposed to harassment when they were young. They think all humans are dangerous, so they'll bite anyone that approaches them.
The same is happening for your boss. He had a bad relation with developers (or employees) and then his subconscious is generalizing it over every other person.
So he thinks that any employee is a lying prick piece of shit. And that the only way to get you to work is to dominate you. Because that's how things work in his mind.
Needless to say, the best course of action is to leave to a saner workplace.
Its also helpful to get an answer to why they need it in 2 weeks, so you can say "I can get Y done in 2 weeks, which is the part you need for demo Z".
In order to maintain a feeling of control, or of providing value, the manager falls into the mindset that the one input they have into the process is that they nominally get to set deadlines (for each task of a given scope and level of quality), even if those deadlines are repeatedly missed. The temptation is that they think that the shorter the deadline, the faster the development and the better the result.
It seems a lot more likely this site made this insane story up to drive traffic.
And it’s from 2016.
There was a recent "poisoning" case where instead the OP was the victim (https://www.reddit.com/r/legaladvice/comments/89wgwm/tricked...), commenters found out the perpetrator posted in the subreddit before (https://www.reddit.com/r/legaladvice/comments/8825e8/threw_a...), and the outcome is just as satisfying (https://www.reddit.com/r/legaladvice/comments/8d0z1u/tricked...).
This link makes them show up again: https://www.removeddit.com/r/legaladvice/comments/8825e8/thr...
There are more unlikely stories on the same site, like this one: http://www.askamanager.org/2017/05/im-in-a-dominantsubmissiv...
The good old days of social experiments on HN.
...The dozens of comments taking it at face value?
I don't even see why it's relevant whether it's true or not.
If it isn’t true how is it relevant to anything?
Just because you're discussing it seriously doesn't mean you take it at face value. Just look at discussions about fictional works, particularly SF.
If it isn’t true how is it relevant to anything?
It's just food for thought and discussion. Is it relevant whether Schrödinger actually put a cat in a box?
It's clearly being presented as a true story by the original source. If it's not true it's not food for any kind of thought it's just a really badly written and stupid short story. Stop trying to justify lying.
I'm feeling like Brian: https://youtu.be/9czBBKof7Yo?t=1m30s
If it's real you can wonder ok what motivated actual people to behave in this way, what actually happened?
If it is made up (which it almost certainly is because it's so far fetched and ridiculous) then it has zero value. There's nothing worth thinking about here or discussing if it didn't actually happen. Like I said it's just a really poorly written short story.
You don't discuss literature the same way you discuss journalism. I can't believe you don't already know that?