the salsa dancing resolution, the salary disclosure, and other times you should have stopped reading but didn’t
Earlier this summer, we talked about times you should have stopped reading something … but didn’t. Here are 15 of my favorite stories you shared.
1. The bulletin board
One time, legitimately poking around a server trying to find something I was legitimately entitled to read, I found a spreadsheet with everyone’s salaries. No password or anything.
I looked. And what I saw was sufficiently eye-opening that I waited until I had the office to myself and printed it and pinned on the bulletin board. Management were super mad and went on a hunt to find the perpetrator, even proposing that there should be 100% camera coverage in the office precisely to catch anyone doing this again.
2. The set-up
I read something I wasn’t supposed to, and it was a set-up! Staff knew that legal needed to be involved in a meeting but team members were explicitly told not to include any attorneys. A staffer intentionally printed the meeting agenda to the printer in the attorney hallway, hoping someone would see it on the printer and get curious. I saw it, I read it, and I invited myself to the meeting, much to the executive’s chagrin and the staff’s relief.
3. The sex transcription
I used to review medical transcription and dictations for chart accuracy. One of our married, beloved, most charming doctors was having a very salacious affair with one of the nurses and nobody knew. Then he forgot to shut off his dictation when she paid him a closed-door sexy visit. The software we used was surprisingly cutting edge for the time and even now with AI and would transcribe everything even “thumping noise” and “gasping.”
I took it to my supervisor and never heard about it again. Last and only sexy transcription I got to read.
4. The Copilot incident
At one point, Copilot was able to read and reference all non-private documents on our intranet, including Teams meeting notes, sharepoint documents, etc. I was looking for an HR policy doc and couldn’t remember where it was saved, so I asked Copilot to find it.
It came back with a detailed summary of a fairly high-level manager’s challenges following this policy (which was about fostering a non-toxic workplace). It turns out that person’s manager hadn’t locked down access to the folder where they were keeping their investigation notes. It was stored in a place that wouldn’t have normally been findable if you didn’t know what you were looking for, but if you did find it, there was nothing blocking access for me (or Copilot).
I never fessed up to what I saw, but I did mention to HR that they may want to up their training on protecting private info in the age of Copilot, and that we may want to train Copilot to not necessarily do a deep dive into individual’s One Drives if it wasn’t asked to do so. I think they listened, because now it’ll search my own One Drive and folders shared with me, but I haven’t gotten a response from a public folder that hasn’t been explicitly shared with me in a while.
5. The Word doc
Not me, but former colleagues of mine in a different department. Some colleagues who hated my terrible ex-boss kept me updated on her antics for the 2.5 years between when she laid me off and when she herself was fired. She had managed to replace everyone in my former department with her incompetent and vicious minions, who were making said colleagues’ jobs harder. Exboss decided to foster this toxic atmosphere by creating a Word document that they used in lieu of an internal chat program that she and her minions could use to trash talk everyone else at the organization. I guess the thinking was it would be more hidden from IT? The problem was … the Word document was on the department’s Public folder — meaning anyone in the org with access to the server could access the document … including my disgruntled colleagues.
Said colleagues used said Word document to stay one step ahead of Exboss in her machinations to make the “collaborative” work her department did with their department more difficult. They eventually brought the document to the attention of the head of the organization, although it is unclear how much that document played a part in Exboss’s eventual firing (she was already on thin ice at the time as it was for being generally bad at her job, and all the document did was show she wasn’t professional in her relationships with others).
6. The Zoom transcript
I had a Zoom interview with a panel including the HR person. After the interview, I noticed I had a missed call and a message from that same office. I was surprised to have heard back so fast, and I regretted that I had missed the call.
The message was L O N G. When I played it back, it was a voice message taken IN the meeting held directly after my interview to discuss me. The whole thing. All of it was accidentally recorded by their HR person. I did get the job, they were terrible, but that is another story.
7. The hiring notes
When I became department chair, I had access to my own hiring folder — and I could not resist. I am ashamed but yeah I looked in it. Nothing much of interest except this one thing. I was asked during the meeting with the department if I planned to have more children (I had a two-year-old son at the time). It was before there were clear rules about this — gender discrimination was barely illegal and still the norm. I was offended but couldn’t BE offended or tell the senior person that is was inappropriate so I said, “Well, that is between me and my husband and God.” Turns out one key person who voted to hire me did so because of my “deep religious faith.”
8. The personal inventories
We had a weird online file management system back in the early 90s. I was looking for something that had been created before I worked there, and none of the files had very useful names, so I ended up poking around quite a bit until I stumbled upon my manager’s personal household inventory. Literally a list of every box in her attic and very detailed lists of what it contained (like, not “summer clothes,” but “red Calvin Klein v-neck dress bought for conference in NYC in 1985”). Nothing embarrassing but fascinating. And when I found similarly named files, I couldn’t help looking. Again, nothing anyone would be embarrassed about, just an odd peek behind the curtain of someone else’s life.
What I didn’t realize about our weird file management system was that when you opened it, the last few files opened by ANYONE showed up at the top of the list. So the next day my manager was confused to find all of her personal inventory files right there at the top of the “recently accessed” list.
9. The software demo
An accounting software rep gave a demo of our new system at our all-staff meeting using live salary data, names and all. I could see the finance director’s creeping horror when he realized what was happening.
10. The resolutions
A few jobs ago, I worked for a boss who was a doofus and also just an asshole. Think Michael Scott but also an arrogant asshole who blamed others for his mistakes. (I couldn’t watch The Office and still can’t.) Anyway, I was dropping off a note on my boss’ chair to let him know I would be out the next day (he forgot about emails and verbal reminders and I guess it didn’t occur to him that he could check people’s calendars?). As I bent down slightly to put the note on his chair, I saw a small notepad on his desk with a list that went something like this:
Things I will do for our relationship:
-I will not go to the bar alone
-I will not go salsa dancing alone
The list had two or three other items that I’ve forgotten, but the “I will not go salsa dancing alone” is burned in my brain.
11. The File
I used to work at a large state agency. Management was about as transparent as a brick wall, and this was especially true when it came to promotions and new hires – hiring managers had to provide written justification for why any given interviewee was or was not selected, then several layers of management had to approve those decisions, HR had to run recommended candidates against Civil Service requirements to make sure they were actually eligible for the job, and only after clearing those hurdles would HR approve a hire, which was then communicated (slowly) back down those several layers of management to the hiring manager, the candidate, and other staff.
We could go months between interviews and an announcement that so-and-so would be starting in the role in two weeks… unless you knew about The File. The File was an unlocked Excel sheet that belonged to HR, buried deep in the agency network that showed, for those who knew where to find it, everyone who responded to the job posting, who was interviewed, who was selected for the position (and any backups), and the hiring manager’s justification for selecting or not selecting each candidate that was interviewed. For the small group of us that knew how to find The File, we had the satisfaction of knowing who got a job weeks before it was announced, as well as insider info as to management’s opinions on anyone who interviewed for a promotion and you better believe we checked The File regularly every time our office had an open position or big shots were gunning for promotions at HQ.
I left that job two years ago and as far as I know, The File is still in use and HR is still completely unaware that it’s unlocked.
12. The stolen glory
I live in an area where a major disaster, one that you are aware of, and received national and international news coverage, occurred a few years ago. Let’s say it was the Hindenburg disaster. Unsurprisingly, it had a big impact on people who were local. It was scary and it was sad.
Maybe three or four years after, I was working on a project led by one of our VPs. On a day when he was out of office, he asked me if I could go to his office and locate a specific report we needed to reference. While looking for the report in a stack of papers, I saw a piece of paper and “Hindenburg” jumped out at me. Reader, I read it. It was a first-person essay, with some notes about where he might submit it for publication (the New Yorker, the Paris Review — he was aiming high) about his own experiences on the day of the “Hindenburg disaster,” and how he just happened to be in a nearby field, and felt the heat of the flames, how he did his best to help emergency responders, how he didn’t know what he would say when he arrived home that night and his children asked him why he smelled like smoke, and so on. The whole tone was “I don’t consider myself a hero, but … ” I had no doubt he was the writer, because the essay included lines such as “as the vice president of operations for a teapot company, I did not have any prior experience with German zeppelins, but I turned out to be a quick study.”
That man was sitting in the conference room watching local news coverage, like everyone else in our office, on that day. He was not in a field, he did not feel the heat of the flames, and so forth. He was not in any way dirigible-adjacent. I have thought about this essay every time I have interacted with him since.
13. The employee satisfaction survey
I work in IT so I have seen A LOT of things. The one that stands out though, has nothing to do with my role. A few years ago, we had an “anonymous” employee satisfaction survey from HR. Instead of sending the aggregate results, they sent out the responses. They attempted to unsend but at the time, if someone had opened it, it couldn’t be pulled back. So the entire document was still forwarded by anyone who had seen it to anyone who hadn’t. Some people really let loose in the supposedly anonymous survey, naming names and acts that had only been rumors. It was obvious many people didn’t understand that there is no such thing as anonymous at work and even if there was, they had put so many identifying details, they might as well have written their names in neon. There was a huge uproar for a few weeks and then everything settled back down. Nothing was done about any of the complaints, no one was reprimanded and HR has not sent out an employee satisfaction survey since.
14. The scathing exit
There was a hilarious, very long and articulate scorched earth “I Quit and You All Suck!” document that a departed employee saved in PCDocs, or whatever the DMS was at the time. No one ever deleted it, and once in a while I’d go have a look at it just for giggles. Of course in a DMS, every access to a document was logged – which showed that LOTS of people also checked it out occasionally. Shine on you crazy diamond!
15. The disclosure
At my first corporate job, I walked up to the printer one day to grab my file and found that someone had printed off an Excel file showing the salaries of every single employee, including the C suite. I took it to my boss to ask her what to do, and she said “Let’s snoop!” and took it from me. And BOY, did we snoop. Found out later that someone was fired from HR and sent that file to multiple printers on his way out to cause chaos. I used the data to show I was underpaid and multiple other folks did too, so I suppose the HR guy did us all a favor with his tantrum.
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