A woman has struck fear into the hearts of everyone who uses chat platform at work after confessing that a ‘snog, marry, avoid’ game she played with her co-workers saw her entire team get the sack.
A moan about a colleague is commonplace, normally with your office mate in the break room or via a text after hours. It’s pretty standard, albeit unprofessional, especially when stress levels in the workplace soar.
But with remote working amped up by the pandemic, platforms like Slack and G-Message are where we all chatter now. Yet, ever wondered if the boss might peek at those messages?
A TikTok user, known as @natnooner, shared how she lost her job after her employer discovered their group chats. Spilling the beans on the platform, Natalie called it “the most humiliating thing I’ve been through”, highlighting that anything typed on a company’s system might not be private.
She explained: “This exact thing happened to me back in 2019 when they fired the whole admin team, myself included.” Delving into the office drama, Natalie recounted how her already under-resourced team had been compounded by micromanagement, dragging morale to rock bottom. She revealed: “We’d always chat to each other using Skype for Business and we’d just chat generally about how s*** the day was and if we ever talked about managers we’d use their first initial. PSA, they still know who you’re talking about.”
She explained that creating a group chat one week for arranging farewell drinks led to some rather unconventional stress relief: “And let me tell you this was not appropriate for work. It was stuff like ‘would you rather put a cactus up your flower and go for a bike ride or work where we were working’. Of course you can guess what most people chose.”
The mischief escalated with games like ‘snog, marry, avoid,’ picking from an eclectic mix including Shrek, Stuart Little, or colleagues, Natalie added with a hint of mischief.
Despite considering it harmless banter, she was stunned when management summoned her and a colleague to scrutinise their use of Skype and inspect their private messages. Natalie recounted the chilling aftermath of their discovery, saying they were left on edge for months without any further mention of the incident. That was until her colleague was summoned to a meeting and abruptly dismissed on the spot.
She continued: “We’re freaking out and then I get called in and on the table is a whole stack of papers with our whole conversation from that week printed out. My manager proceeds to read the whole conversation out to me in full and asks me to comment on everything.”
She shared some of the most memorable parts of the meeting, including having to explain that when she said she would kiss Shrek, she was referring to the fictional green ogre – which she confirmed. Natalie admitted she wept throughout the entire ordeal, describing it as the most embarrassing moment of her life.
She humorously noted that in the group chat she had ironically written “imagine if this ever got read hashtag fired”. Ultimately, Natalie and her colleagues were suspended with pay before being terminated via email for gross misconduct.
She concluded: “Moral of the story is don’t write anything on your work laptop, phones, messages that you wouldn’t want your manager to see.”
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