Certain workplaces provide an exceptional environment that encourages people to attain the greatest possible quality, pushing them to climb the career ladder by providing a positive example and implementing a healthy and safe approach. However, some firms use an antiquated strategy in which they focus solely on the monetary element of employment while disregarding the basic requirements of their employees. When a corporation does not care about its employees, negativity spreads and becomes the norm, causing employees to struggle with forming appropriate bonds with their coworkers, exacerbating an already hostile work environment. For example, consider the protagonist of this story: gossiping. This harmful feature is still one of the most uncomfortable concerns that impacts employees’ emotional and physical well-being. Read the story and what are your views on this.
Source: Reddit
I (24/F) love baking, and I LOVE sharing my baked goods too. I generally get along with everyone else in the office except for this one guy (36/M), which I will call Leo (not real name) whom I wasn’t on very good terms with because of the events that happened years ago when I first joined the company years ago as a fresh graduate.
Leo complained that I am “lazy”, hates “cleaning up after my mistakes” and I made him “vomit blood”. I did ask him for mentoring help to generate the reports in the way he expects but he didn’t want to. Instead he asked me to look at his report and “follow his style”. Fortunately I was redeployed to another role in the same department with a better mentor. We haven’t talked to each other since.
My birthday fell on a Sunday. I decided to bake cupcakes for everyone in the office as a form of celebration, to be given on Friday of that week.
I considered baking one for him but decided against it because of how I tried to share food but was rejected. I believed that even if I made him the cupcake, he would turn it down in a way which would make me “lose face” in front of everyone in the office.
For practical reasons too, I decided to make 24 cupcakes (only have a 12 hole cupcake tray). There would be only 2 rounds of baking. There were 25 people in the office excluding me.
So on Friday, I came into the office with a box of cupcakes, which took me the whole night to bake and I also woke up early to put the frosting in.
Right after lunch, I went from table to table offering my colleagues a cupcake each and everyone was appreciative of it. When I reached Leo’s table, I tried offering it to him. As expected, he said no, but in a manner I found to be pretty respectful.
After distributing the cupcakes, one of my colleagues came up to me and asked for the extra cupcake that Leo rejected. I told my colleague I actually baked just enough for the office, excluding Leo, so there was no extra cupcake. My colleague looked shocked so I told her that baking the cupcakes didn’t come cheap and since Leo was going to reject it anyway, I didn’t bake more. I also told her about the limits of my oven and I just simply didn’t have enough time to do three rounds of baking only to be turned down at the end.
When I came back on Monday, word had apparently spread to everyone in my department about how Leo didn’t “get” a cupcake and I left him out intentionally. Leo didn’t say anything to me about the cupcake thing but I was told by a colleague that he was really upset and he “really loved cupcakes”, and would have “came around if I had just left some in the fridge and left him alone to get it”.
So am I the a**h**e for baking 24 cupcakes instead of more? I mean I could do just one more round in the oven with ONE or two more cupcakes but it would be a waste of electricity and my time.
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