Just today, I found out that the reason my boss and the other woman in our group were on vacation all week is that they were on their honeymoon. I had kinda figured out shortly after I was hired that they were a couple, since he was always bringing her coffee and lunch. Our group, including the new graduate who just started this month, comprises 6 people.
What I find odd is that I had no idea they were getting married. No office gossip, no overheard conversations about caterers and flowers, nothing. Even when I asked the boss where he was going, he just said “Cape Hatteras” - no more, no less.
No, my feelings aren’t hurt that I wasn’t invited. No, I don’t expect my coworkers to share the details of their private lives with me. But I’ve never worked in an office where news of something like a marriage, an engagement, or an expected child wasn’t shared with everyone. Heck, some places, we even heard about impending divorces.
Would you consider this to be normal or weird based on your work experiences?
I could see a smaller office being more intimate. When you’re on a 150+ open cubefarm, maybe not. Someone was always getting married or having a baby. I didn’t announce anything. I was Facebook friends with two coworkers and my boss when I wrote that I had plans to get married. One congratulated me in the office and a few others overheard. And I told one coworker. And started sometimes referring to my fiancée instead of girlfriend. But we weren’t really much for talking about personal business. One busybody expressed disappointment when she found out two months after the fact, but otherwise it wasn’t really subject of much conversation.
Strictly speaking, they were doing the right thing etiquette wise - it is considered rude to discuss details of an event in front of people who are not invited.
Previous work situations, not counting temp jobs, were generally in groups of 15 to about 40, within organizations of 400 to over 2000 total employees. It wasn’t unusual for someone to share “Did you hear that Mary in Team X just got engaged?” or “You know that Bob and his wife are expecting their third, right?”
I personally took advantage of office gossip when I wasn’t sure how to tell my boss I was pregnant, especially because I knew I was pregnant when I interviewed for the job. I just let it slip out to the office blabbermouth, knowing the boss would get word by the end of the day. Yeah, I know, real profession of me… I plead youthful ignorance.
Anyway, it seemed to be pretty common for word of life events like that to get around, either via announcements by the involved parties or office grapevine. That’s why this situation seemed so unusual to me.
**LC **- I agree, discussing the specifics of a wedding around those not invited is tacky, but just to say “Hey, we’re engaged!” doesn’t seem such a breach of etiquette. But what do I know - we eloped.
They might have been trying to escape a nepotism policy in your company. Typically someone is not allowed to be the supervisor of another person with a family or romantic connection. In a place that small, there might not be a transfer opportunity.
It cannot be avoided when they come back, though. One of them is likely to have to leave.
I’ve always worked in offices where it is against the rules for bosses to have relationships with their direct reports. In my current workplace, relationships between employees in the same office aren’t even allowed. So perhaps there’s no gossip because the situation is too delicate.
Or it could be that no one really cares that much.
I wonder if it might be a case where one or both of them left existing spouse(s) to marry the other. In that case I can see them not wanting too much attention; husband/wife stealing is still looked down upon.
Nepotism isn’t an issue at all. The company’s founder has his 5 children and several in-laws in an assortment of positions. My husband and I both work there, altho in different facilities (they have 4, I think.) These two were both single, so there were no exes in the picture.
There might be an issue of wife being direct report to her husband, but considering how much work our group has and how few employees (even counting the n00b who’s still learning the basics of the job and the software) I don’t see any shifting of bodies any time soon. And, frankly, from what I understand, they’d have a tough time finding anyone within the organization who wants to work for my boss, but that’s another story.
I am glad they’re not all lovey-dovey-goo-goo-eyed in the office, so there’s that. On the other hand, what happens when they have their little spats?? Whatever. I can leave any time I want to - I only took this job for something to do. I can go back to being retired any time I want to.
The other extreme: Back in the '80s, I worked for a small company of about 15-20 people. The wife of one of the owners had a baby, and the clueless boss brought in a videotape of the actual birth. He wanted each of us to take it home, watch it, and pass it around. :eek:
What was it with taping births in the 80s??? I worked in an office that had 3 branches. A guy in not-my-branch photographed and taped his child’s birth, and he brought in the pics to share! :eek: Thankfully, someone convinced him to quit showing them in the office before he got to my cubicle.
In one of my more recent temp jobs, the guy in the next cubicle was *waaaaaaay *too willing to share everything about his attempts to impregnate his wife - like all the tests and stuff they were undergoing, all the results, and lots of TMI. As it happened, my husband was my boss there, and I told him what was going on - he put a stop to it post-haste. None of the comments were addressed to me, but you can’t *not *overhear in a cube farm.
More recently, I worked in a department of about 60 people, and one women took her daughter to get her hair cut for Locks of Love. That, we didn’t mind her telling us about it, but when she brought in 54 pictures (you read that right, FIFTY-FOUR PICTURES) of this being done, and expected us all to look at them while she delivered a running commentary, that went a little too far.
Even then, most people knew what human childbirth looks like, and it’s not very pretty. I could see showing a tape like this to an adolescent, but only if the tape was made for educational purposes. What did his wife think about this?
In an “office” (actually, a large computer-center in the computer room) where I worked many years ago, there was an office romance, with male shift supervisor + female floor worker. It worked out okay.
The lab has the usual frowning attitude toward office romances, but it wasn’t taken all that seriously. Unless there were problems, I suppose. This relation was relatively discreet, but not secret by any means. In any case, nobody (that I knew of) thought that there was any favoritism going on, and the female floor worker was a very good worker, and nobody (that I knew of) doubted that. They kept it pretty much professional while at work, as far as I could tell.
Eventually, they did get married. After that happened, I think one of them got transferred to either another shift or to another computer center at the lab.
ETA: Overall, the lab was a largely “academic” environment, so there was a certain degree of hang-loose attitude floating around, about everything in general. I once played a minor prank with one of the computer systems which would certainly have been an instant firing-on-the-spot offense in the Real World, but I got off with simply saying “I deny everything and I promise never to do it again.”
