… that you not only , wish you wouldn’t have seen but , can’t even mention it because you weren’t supposed to see it in the first place ,if you were following the rules.
Would you keep quiet and tarry on ? Would you start drinking and going to church to scrub your soul of what you saw ? Would you post an anonymous flyer at work telling others … if I get caught , I lose a killer paying job and possible although not probable, prosecution . I can’t keep quiet even though most of my fellow workers wouldn’t believe me anyway, so why should I bother .
I’m actually thinking on just quitting and moving on and hopefully don’t get followed
I would say what to do about it heavily depends on what the secret is. What is the likelihood it will hurt you or others in some way and to what extent, for example.
That said, I think there are many ways to leak information anonymously, if you think that would be your best bet. You’d just have to think about it and watch for your opportunity.
I walked in a conference room at work once to get a chair and walked in on 2 other employees closing a drug deal. I went to me supervisor and told him and he said he’d take care of it.
Nothing was ever done, and shortly after that, my van started getting vandalized at work… I quit that job.
Is someone being murdered or raped? Is your workplace a front for a drug cartel? If the answer’s no, and someone is merely dealing drugs or stealing company money or peeing in the pickle jar, well. As the examples north of this post show, it doesn’t pay to be a whistleblower. The course of action that benefits you personally the most is to keep doing your job and say nothing, and maybe quietly see if another company in the same industry would like you to work for them for more money. It’s a lot easier to get another job at a competitor while you still have your current one.
If someone is being raped, it’s up to them to report it and you can come forward as a witness when they do. If someone is being murdered - well, obviously stop going to that workplace.
Interesting that you mention church… they hired a new supervisor for my department (“Mitch”) that was a pathological liar. When I asked the big boss about some questionable/shady requests made by Mitch, the boss said “You do whatever he tells you to, no questions asked.”
When Mitch asked me to help him carry stuff to his car (partially his artwork, but part of an ad campaign we all worked on, and of course paid for by the big boss) and later asked me to lie to the accountant about it, I stopped by church on my way home. Had a great talk with the pastor who assuaged my guilt, and basically said God forgives those who repent (which includes trying to fix it). No “tarrying on” (reference to OP’s creative vocabulary).
So I shouldn’t feel guilty … IF I ratted on Mitch.
I did, and it turned out well. (Didn’t expect that on the SDMB, did you?)
Went to the boss with tail between legs, confessed my part in Mitch’s deception(s), got profusely thanked… and an hour later Mitch was packing up his things and getting escorted out.
Apparently (and lucky for me) Big Boss’s trust in Mitch and the chain of command disappeared the minute Mitch tried to pilfer from the company (and take sole credit for the work he’d done as part of a team). Turned out, when the boss asked other employees, they ALL had Mitch stories… the liar was trying to build his own business on the boss’s dime (working on his own projects all day while putting off showing progress on company work, and trying to get our biggest clients to jump ship to his “new, leaner one man ad agency” by lying to them, too).
If you observed someone else breaking the rules while you yourself were breaking the rules, you are in a difficult position. If you confess your rule-breaking in the course of reporting the other person’s rule-breaking, you will both be fired. If either or both of you get caught, you will both get fired.
I think you’re screwed and should start looking for another job. At the very least, you will have something lined up before you got to management to tell them about your transgressions, the other person’s, or both.
Your only change, I guess, is if your rule-breaking is minor and the other person’s is not. You may have a chance in that case. But maybe not.
I need more details. Not to make a better recommendation, I just want to know.
If someone’s stealing from the company, that NEEDS to be reported. In the end, it could lead to the OP not having a job any more, because the company went under.
To begin with there are things I wouldn’t be interested in reporting, like, say, someone doing drugs or people having sex in a meeting room.
But you seem to refer to something really, really bad. So, my first reflex would be to say : “I would report” but then you seem to have done something also really, really bad yourself to become aware of the situation, since you think you might not only get fired, but even be prosecuted. If I was fired from my current job at this point, I’d be in deep shit. If on top of this I’m going to jail…huh!
That said, I’ve difficulties thinking of something I couldn’t possibly report anonymously. Maybe you’re working in a small company where the pool of people who could potentially be aware of whatever happened is very limited, and it would be very easy to figure out it was you?
But since it seems the OP won’t have a job anymore if he reports it…
Also, since the OP feels like quiting over his discovery, I’m assuming something worst that embezzlement. I mean, if I discovered that my company was making money selling medecines laced with strychnine to children hospitals in developing countries, I would feel like quiting. If I discovered that some executive was stealing money, I might not like the guy, but I would have no reason to want to leave the company.
