Recently, I finished dealing with the most obtuse workplace drama. Let's talk about it! For the characters involved, I will be referring to them as Cat, Rabbit and Dog. Anyone with common sense understands that dating among coworkers is always a dubious situation, and this incident was no different. Prior to about a month ago, Cat and Dog were working in the programming department together peacefully. Cat and Dog were also exclusive romantic partners. The calm was then disrupted when Rabbit transferred teams due to a personality mismatch, which should've been the first red flag. All hell breaks loose as it becomes clear that Dog has been dating both Cat and Rabbit at the same time, promising both parties exclusivity. Instead of requesting a team change like before, Rabbit decides the best course of action for them is to begin engaging in petty, frivolous, reporting to HR for every single teeny tiny possible reason they can find. Like clockwork, Cat retaliates in the same fashion. For the next month I am funneling conversations from HR, to cat and rabbit, and back again. Every time a complaint goes through, I have to process about a dozen emails worth of investigation in between, leaving me very little time at all to do my management duties like scheduling, correspondence, hiring and delegation. I am talking everything from cat reporting rabbit for bringing a weapon into the office(It was a potted cactus), to rabbit reporting her back for "hoarding the staplers" which was just rabbit putting her stapler in cat's office(There were cameras, it wasn't sneaky.) Transferring Dog to a different unit did not help in the slightest; I wish it were so simple. Both Cat and Rabbit were brilliant programmers, so it would've been a shame to lose either of them. Had that not been the case, I would not have hesitated for so long. Moreover, I had no guarantee that if I removed one or the other, that they wouldn't turn on Dog and start doing it in that direction instead, or sue the company for favoritism. To avoid the hassle of being sued for choosing cat over rabbit or vice versa, they were both laid off for workplace harassment. Other incidents included rabbit planting a spoiled egg in cat's desk, cat swapping a fourth coworker's lunch into rabbit's lunch bag so it would appear stolen, rabbit reporting cat for being distracted and not working outside of break hours(she was just listening to music,) and cat putting extremely spicy pepper sauce on her lunch, sneaking the condiment bottle into the community fridge, and then accusing rabbit of putting the hot sauce on her food. Sometimes, I genuinely wonder if I'm living in an episode of The Office.
