Next time you’re about to have a moan about your boss or colleague via the work chat, think again as one woman has revealed how her ‘snog, marry, avoid’ conversation ultimately got her fired
A woman has issued a stark warning to anyone considering having a moan about their manager on a work chat, admitting her ‘snog, marry, avoid’ conversation ended up getting her whole team fired.
We’ve all had a grumble about a colleague, whether it’s face to face with your work bestie in the staff kitchen, or a little moan over text in the evening. When you spend so much time with people in a stressful environment it’s inevitable tensions are going to fray.
However, thanks to Covid-19 and everyone working from home a lot more things like Slack and G-Message have become the norm for employees to communicate effectively. But have you ever stopped to consider if your boss might take a look at your conversations?
One woman has revealed how she was fired from her job, along with her whole team, after their group chats were discovered. TikTok user Natalie, who goes by @natnooner on the platform, shared the hilarious tale as a warning to all.
She claimed it was “the most humiliating thing I’ve been through”. Claiming how messages sent on a corporate site can be read by your employer, she began: “This exact thing happened to me back in 2019 when they fired the whole admin team, myself included.”
Giving some background to the grumbling, Natalie explained that her team were very understaffed at the time, being micromanaged and everyone’s morale was very low. She continued: “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.”
Natalie explained that one week someone in the team made a group chat as one of their colleagues was leaving and they were discussing where to meet for goodbye drinks. Admitting it had been a tough week, to lighten spirits someone started a ‘would you rather’ conversation. Natalie joked: “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.”
“We also somehow started playing ‘snog, marry, avoid,’ and would be between Shrek, Stuart Little or someone we work with,” she finished, giving the camera a knowing look.
Thinking nothing of their group chat, Natalie said she and another guy on her team were surprised when they were pulled into a meeting to discuss how much they were using Skype and that their manager wanted to go through their messages.
After the horror of the situation dawned on them, Natalie said they unnerved and were left on tenterhooks for months with no other mention of it. That is until her colleague gets called into a meeting and is promptly fired, effective immediately.
She went on: “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.”
Admitting some of her favourite lines from the meeting, she revealed that she had to clarify that she meant she would snog Shrek the fictional green ogre. Which she did. Confessing she cried during the entire interview and that it remains the most humiliating experience of her life, she joked that in the group chat she actually says “imagine if this ever got read hashtag fired”.
Natalie revealed that she and her colleagues were eventually suspended with full pay before ultimately all getting the chop from work via email for gross misconduct. She finished: “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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