We have a few women in my office that have broke down, freaked out or been in tears. We have had many men end up in loud inappropriate screaming matches with others in the office. We had a least one woman also get into a screaming match with her boss and actually storm out.
(Bolding mine.)
This may be a semantic and, yeah, probably sexist problem. ‘Freaking out’ suggests, to me, doing something highly disruptive and out of the norm in a somewhat relaxed setting. But if certain kinds of behavior are the norm in a workplace, however disruptive and aggressive (e.g. fist pounding, yelling 'til red in the face), they probably won’t be seen as ‘freaking out’… even if they should be.
ETA All this to say we don’t have much to work with if no one knows how Annie defines a freak out.
Note that the OP’s standards for classifying something as a “workplace freakout” may differ sustantially from the standards used by other posters here. Until she can clarify this a bit more we can’t know just how bad her freakouts were on an objective basis.
If women always seem to end up crying in your presence you might want to spend some time on self-reflection.
I think we can all agree that this constitutes a workplace freak-out.
I’m betting that Annie’s incident was nothing on this scale.
I’d agree with that, but at the same time, it was enough for the police to take her in, and I’m going to assume that the freak-out that earned her the cuffs was on par with the hundreds of others at the office.
Worst I’ve ever seen at my workplace was two female secretaries who got into an actual fist-fight. Ended with both fired and police investigating (no charges were laid).
Can’t say as there is a higher incidence of “freak-out” among women than men in my experience.
Where the fuck do you people work? I had one mentally unstable boss years ago who used to berate staff, but she was dealt with by the Board of Directors as soon as they got wind of it. I can’t imagine working in a place where this is just par for the course.
Heh. I should mention that in all the freakouts I described, the freakeroutter lost the job with the month. In some cases it was within the hour.
I certainly agree: if the freakout is disrupting the work of the organization, the employee doesn’t really need a second chance, let alone a two hundredth chance. I’d likely leave a job in which a coworker was freaking out on a monthly basis.
I am female and an emotional, sensitive female to boot, and I have never freaked out in the office and I resent the idea that it’s a female thing, somehow. No one has ever seen me cry at work, and hopefully no one ever will!
As I said, those secretaries were dealt with - they were fired.
Well, yes, I probably should have excluded you from my question. I just find it odd that there are so many workplaces where people are freaking out to this degree.
I kind of would have liked to have been a fly on the wall at your place, though.
Thanks for reminding me of this one.
I had a company try to pull something similar on me once. I returned the favor by turning around and shutting down the company. Dozens of people lost their jobs, several people lost their houses, and the owner’s life was ruined beyond repair. One of my fondest memories of the incident was one of my former coworkers calling me one evening and telling me that “Steve (the owner) broke down and started crying at my deposition today.” Moral of the story: if you’re going to have disgruntled employees, fer God’s sake *don’t *be involved in any criminal activity.
Oh, do share the story with the rest of the class, Washoe.
It would take too long to explain, so here’s the 2-minute disco version: the company was at death’s door. They were $29 million in debt and only had about $8 million in real assets, including all accounts receivable. So in a last-ditch effort to save the company, they tried to defraud an asset based lender into extending them a $35 million revolver using fake collateral. One night they got into my face about something stupid, so I told them to go fuck themselves and walked out. Unfortunately, I couldn’t resist the urge to shoot my mouth off, so as a parting salvo I gave them the 411 on how I felt about bank fraud and what its possible attendant penalties were. They called the cops and told them that I was going to come back and shoot them. The cops showed up at my door two weeks later and asked me if I were planning to shoot them. I told them that that would only occur if they shot at me first. Despite the fact that the cops couldn’t help but notice an AR-15 with a 30-round clip sitting on my coffee table in case just such an event occurred, they accepted my assurances that I would only return fire, not initiate it.
Oh, lovely. Worst I could have ever done is turn someone in to the BSA for massive pirated software, but I never did.
[sigh] I keep checking in to see if there’s news…
But I’d settle for more details of Washoe’s Workplace Without Shame. Did you indeed blow a whistle on them? To the lender? And I’d love to hear what they got in your face about-- hoping it’s something petty, so they could reflect later and think “If only we hadn’t gotten pissy about Washoe’s Dogs Playing Poker tie, we might still have careers”.
Good for you! Revenge is sweet, but Justice is even better.