update: my coworker is working alone overnight despite explicit instructions not to

by Alison Green on December 11, 2024

It’s “where are you now?” month at Ask a Manager, and all December I’m running updates from people who had their letters here answered in the past.

There will be more posts than usual this week, so keep checking back throughout the day.

Remember the letter-writer whose coworker was working alone overnight despite explicit instructions not to? Here’s the update.

Your advice was really helpful, as were some of the comments (though many assumed that my colleague was making drugs after hours? Which is a wild thing to jump to, in my opinion!).

So a couple of quick notes:

A few commenters guessed correctly that safety isn’t actually my job, just something that was assigned to me because someone needed to do it. When I wrote in, all of my knowledge was based on personal research and reading guidance materials. I was in a position to make recommendations but I didn’t have any authority. I scheduled a meeting with my boss to talk about what that meant for me, legally, and his stance was that at the end of the day, I’m not on the hook for us being out of compliance. Making the company aware of safety issues was, at the end of the day, just a nice thing for me to do to help protect my colleagues. It’s the responsibility of the company to hire a trained safety specialist to manage compliance, and once we have the capital to make that happen, he will. In the meantime, he just wanted me to make sure that no one was storing open bottles of ethanol next to a soldering iron or wearing open-toed high heels while making 12M hydrochloric acid solution.

ALSO: THAT THING ABOUT OSHA NOT KICKING IN UNTIL YOU HAVE 11 EMPLOYEES IS A MYTH! OSHA guidance becomes mandatory as soon as you have TWO employees. The 11-employee thing is about reporting and posting injuries with the 300, 300A, and 301 logs.

Some people insisted that staying at the lab late was a definite, sure sign that my colleague was up to something nefarious, and he couldn’t possibly be a “good” coworker if he was having emotional outbursts or breaking rules. This is a thing I’ve noticed a lot while reading AAM comments: people tend to jump to the worst conclusions about what’s happening in the background, and have a really hard time believing that people can be complicated. My colleague has saved my butt more times than I can count, he is a team player to a fault, extremely detail oriented, and great to work with. Behaving badly in one area, or for a specific, limited time frame, does not erase that. (Note from Alison: Thank you pointing this out.)

The actual update:

I did end up mentioning it to my boss. My thought at the time was that, even if I wasn’t legally on the hook for anything, if he did get hurt or sick from working alone, I would never be able to forgive myself. I focused on the legal aspect when I wrote in originally because I felt like I didn’t have standing to say anything on any other basis, in part because he had insisted so vehemently that it was none of my business. Reading the responses helped me realize that actually, yeah, it was my business, for a whole slew of reasons.

It didn’t get fixed immediately, but I think coming forward helped flag the larger issue for my boss and his supervisor, who were able to communicate to him how big of an issue his general behavior had been over the previous few months. I don’t want to share too much of his business, but he was dealing with some really severe personal things and basically wasn’t able to sleep at all. Once he realized that we weren’t going to let it go, he made an effort to address the personal stuff, and over the next few months things got measurably better.

I want to be really clear about this: he wasn’t just being a jerk for fun or because he doesn’t care about people. He was dealing with things that no one should ever have to deal with, some of which were systemic and outside of his control, and it took tremendous effort for him to address those things (Extremely redacted version: a medical professional almost killed him through pure ineptitude and ego. Anyone here with a chronic, invisible illness is probably familiar with how hard it is to get doctors to admit that they made a mistake, or to listen to you about your symptoms.)

Things are much better now! I got some additional, real training on lab safety, I have a better understanding of the expectations for my role, and my colleague is back to working normal hours and being a pleasure to be around.

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  1. Grumpy Elder Millennial*

    I’m glad to hear that things seem to be moving in a positive direction, LW! And I hope your coworker is doing better.

    1. RIP Pillowfort*

      Agreed. And finding out he was dealing with life stress, I really understand why he was doing what he was doing.

      Right or wrong, when I’m stressed out or dealing with a bad stressor, I want solvable problems like I have at work. People were really worried about me after my dad died because I threw myself into anything I could do at work to take my mind off things. I also have co-workers that flex work when they’re dealing with insomnia.

  3. cindylouwho*

    I feel like the people who thought he was up to something nefarious haven’t been in STEM research. This is also my field, and I’ve known bosses who slept on air mattresses in the lab for data points, researchers and students who used machines from midnight into the morning because that was the only time they could get reserved last-minute, people working holidays (all our equipment is booked for Christmas Eve and Christmas already), etc. Working weird hours is super normalized in research. (Not condoning or endorsing it – I don’t work these hours and I think it’s super unsafe!)

    1. Meaningful hats*

      One of my former roommates is an academic in a STEM field. We joked that we could rent his room out to a second person, and he’d never notice because he mainly slept at the lab. He once texted me at 11 pm asking if I could bring him food because he couldn’t leave the equipment he was working with and all the restaurants that delivered to the building had closed. He was lovely and a little eccentric and very dedicated to his work.

      1. Lego Girl*

        Long ago I dated someone doing a PhD in a chem lab and luckily I worked 3-11pm on campus in the library, so our schedules worked together well. He would regularly be there until 3-4 am running some experiment, or have to be back at 5am before something that could run unsupervised finished because other groups used the machines during the daytime hours. I wonder what he’s up to these days.

      2. Delta Delta*

        Yep. I’m good friends with an engineer who does…. I have no idea what he does. But last year he had to jump up and leave our friend group Christmas party because he had to go tend to some piece of equipment in a lab. It’s just how it goes sometimes.

    2. An academic*

      I think what people don’t get is that a lot of this is self-driven. When you are a PhD student or postdoc, your project isn’t the university or the lab’s. It’s YOURS.
      So, if you need to use mice that are exactly 1 day old, you need to go in every day to check if your mice have given birth, even if it’s on a weekend, and do your experiment if they have. If you need to take a photo of an embryo every hours for 24 hours, you sleep in the microscopy room. If you don’t, it’s YOUR paper that the reviewers criticize and it’s YOUR job seminar that will have missing data, so it’s YOUR career on the line. Your PI (head of lab) needs the papers too, but they likely have other grad students and other postdocs. So some of these weird hour stuff is coming from PIs, but a lot of it is just driven by the needs of the experiments and the fact that the sole responsibility for the success of your projects falls on you.

      1. Hroethvitnir*

        Absolutely. There’s definitely unhealthy expectations, and a healthy dose of actually unproductive martyrism, but also biology does not aceed to our whims! I would be super sad not to be able to work alone, ever, even if it makes sense on paper.

        When I worked in a high containment facility we had emergency buttons we carried when we worked alone in there, which could be a nice compromise (if I’m dreaming, haha).

    3. Mgguy*

      Very much this-especially when you’re really deep into research, the lab really starts to become your second home.

      Also, when you REALLY need to get something done, sometimes it just can’t wait, and some things really can’t be left unattended.

      When I was both single and much deeper into research than I am now, I DID maintain the boundary of going home, eating dinner, showering, etc every night and at least laying down in my own bed. More than once though I’d either not be able to sleep, or would wake up with a stroke of inspiration about a problem I was trying to solve or just come up with an idea I wanted to try. As an early 20-something guy who pretty much had no social life, in my mind then, why WOULDN’T I just get dressed, go to the lab, and try out whatever I was thinking about.

      I did know that there would be some inevitable 16+ hour days, and I would plan those out ahead of time. At least in graduate school, after 2-3 of those in a row, I’d just tell my advisor to not expect me in the next day. My first(toxic) advisor would count it against me, my second reasonable advisor would say respond with “Take two days at least, and don’t come back until you’ve had a full night’s sleep.”

      This kind of stuff was normalized enough in my graduate school that I was never alone at any hour of the day or night, and I did at least have the sense to pop into the lab next door or across the hall to say “Hey I’m here” in case something happened.

      Shared equipment access is DEFINITELY a big one too. At my graduate school, anyone who relied heavily on NMR could get into strange situations with that. We had 3 in the department, and M-F 8-5 the rules were that you could book a maximum of 30 minutes at a time, or if you needed a longer appointment(1 hour max) you could only do that once a week. Longer experiments had to be done outside those hours. It actually worked out well for me because I’d MAYBE use NMR once every other week, rarely needed more than 15 minutes, and it was not unusual that given the other constraints, I could often slip in a 15 minute with little notice(I also knew who the people were who rarely used all of their booked time, so if I needed 5 minutes I would ask if I could tag onto the back of their appointment if they were done).

      In retrospect, none of it was healthy, and it shouldn’t be normal, but it is. And yes now, especially with a family, I set boundaries that unless some exceptional circumstance arises, you can expect me there at normal business hours but not outside those.

    4. Kella*

      To me, the weird thing in the original letter was not that this guy was working so much, it was how angry and defensive he would get anytime told him he wasn’t supposed to do that. Wanting to hit deadlines or finish projects is usually not enough to result in someone yelling at you when you tell them they can’t work off-the-clock hours in unsafe conditions. Working 36 hours *at a time* is also a dangerous amount of time without sleep.

      OP is right that sometimes people in the comments jump to the worst possible thing. But that’s also supported by the fact that so many times when letter writers report a problem which, in isolation is bizarre and unexplainable, it indicates a much deeper, widespread problem that the LW has left out. Updates so frequently reveal that their problem was just the tip of the iceberg. And it was true! The coworker did have something much bigger going on, commenters were just wrong on what it was.

      The takeaway here is not that the worst case scenario theory is never correct but rather that we, the commentariat, don’t know what we don’t know, so it’s very difficult to accurately guess what the nature of the rest of the iceberg actually is.

    5. Blarf*

      I checked the original comments. One person suggested drugs, and three people agreed. I appreciate that there’s an issue in the commentariat at large with overdramatizing, but what’s happening here is actually really similar to overdramatizing. OP had an emotional response to something and overqualified it.

    6. Gloaming*

      100%. I’ve had impromptu lab meetings at 11 PM because sometimes that’s just when people are in.

    1. Don't Send Your Kids to Hudson University*

      I came here to say something like this as well. This letter writer sounds like the sort of diligent and empathetic coworker we’d all be lucky to have and I wish this kind of careful and nuanced thinking was more common in professional settings. We could all learn a lot from you LW!

      1. JustaTech*

        Thirding!
        Startups and science can lean towards a lot of time in the lab and it’s great to have someone else in the trenches say “hey, this is a safety boundary” because they really understand where a lab-lifer is coming from.

        OP, I’m glad that everyone is doing better and I wish you great success in all your studies and filings!

    1. Lana Kane*

      Right? It’s a breath of fresh air to see someone who can hold space for how complex people truly are.

  6. JukeBox*

    Thank you. I am happy to hear that things got better. I also appreciate your not making your colleague the bad guy, and pointing that out.

      1. Oregonbird*

        Publishing house magazines have 4-5 days every month no one goes home or gets more than a nap. It’s a bonding experience! We need industries that accept and even promote alternate approaches to work – creatives and insomniacs have to make a living.

        1. Aeryn Sun*

          I think as long as it’s accommodating to people who can’t do that. Some folks might be happy working weird long hours, whereas I know I could not do that for both physical and mental health reasons. I think that’s the big thing that worries me about people working long hours, that it goes from “this works better for some people” to “This is an expectation and those who don’t do it aren’t team players.

          1. Nicole Maria*

            I feel like for very specific jobs like this, things like overnights are pretty much required, and if you’re not able to do them maybe the job isn’t for you.

            Even in my small college newspaper we did all nighters the night before every print edition was released, so for me that’s normal and fine, but I know there are other jobs/careers that I’m not naturally suited for.

            1. Mgguy*

              My wife is a nurse.

              “12 hour” shifts that really are more like 13-14 hours all said and done are the norm for hospital bedside nursing. 3 shifts in a row(a normal work week is 3 shifts) pretty well wipes her out, and she’s done 4-5 in a row before due to scheduling weirdness. Overnight shifts are pretty much mandatory at some point in their career-when she was first hired at her hospital the requirement was that basically half her shifts(3 weeks out of a 6 week block) were nights. As she moved up in seniority she was able to reduce that, and now only has to work the odd night shift now and again.

              She is now working more in a mentoring role than strictly nursing, and does work some shifted hours from a normal 7-7 shift(10AM-10PM is common, but occasionally some 5AM-5PM) as they need mentors there close to around the clock.

              Still, though, at her hospital there are senior people who work mostly if not entirely nights by choice.

              And at the end of the day, someone has to work the night shifts. Hospitals don’t shut down at 5:00PM. Scheduled surgeries and the like usually happen during “normal” hours M-F, but not everything can be scheduled. A few years ago, my high school aged nephew was playing in a baseball game and took a line drive over his right ear. That happened at about 6:00PM, and if he hadn’t been in the OR at ~7:00PM that night, chances are good he wouldn’t be able to walk or talk today if he’d even survived. As it is, you wouldn’t know it had ever happened. I’m sure most people could tell a similar story about some sort of situation.

              That’s not to say hospitals don’t abuse their staff, as a lot do(especially nursing, techs, assistants, and the like). I question whether it’s safe for someone literally making life or death decisions to be doing if after working 40+ out of the last 72 hours, especially as that’s both a physically and mentally draining job. I sometimes help my wife with some scheduling work that she does for others, and it’s common for someone to basically have a 24-hour turn-around from night to day(i.e. clock out at 7:30 on a Tuesday morning after working the previous night, then be back at 7:00AM Wednesday for a 12 hour day). That’s probably a whole other discussion, though.

        2. Observer*

          We need industries that accept and even promote alternate approaches to work – creatives and insomniacs have to make a living.

          Which is fine when safety is not on the line. Even insomniacs actually have degraded performance after a certain amount of time. Printing the wrong caption on a graphic might (or might not) be a career limiting move, but it’s not likely that someone might die. Mixing up the measurement scale when fueling up a plane, on the other hand? Yeah, a LOT of people might die.

          The safety implications in a research lab are really, really significant.

        3. spiriferida*

          Blink twice if you need help, Oregonbird.

          But more seriously – working long hours and having some degree of rush to a deadline is fine, but it isn’t actually healthy or sustainable in the long term. And in a lab situation, where you’re working with chemicals and compressed gasses like the LW, mistakes caused by sleeplessness can be deadly.

          Alternate approaches to work that help creatives and insomniacs would be allowing flexibility to shift work hours. 36 hours in a row isn’t an alternate approach to work, it’s crunch, and if you’re crunching as a business model, then something can and will go wrong.

          1. Nicole Maria*

            I’m not sure exactly that Oregonbird does for work, but in print publishing (ie. magazines and newspapers) there is going to be that “crunch” time, just based on the nature of news and of publishing. Any workarounds would reduce the quality/timeliness of publication. I just made a comment that even my little college newspapers had a weekly all-nighter the day before our print edition went to the publisher.

      2. Sola Lingua Bona Lingua Mortua Est*

        I haven’t worked 36 in a row–my max was somewhere around 30-31 and it was before I became a remote worker–but I have put in 8 hour shifts programming overnight when I can’t sleep. The rationale was along the lines of “insomnia is going to subside at some point and that’ll go down easier if I already have my work done” and I wouldn’t be surprised if LW’s coworker was applying similar logic.

      4. But Of Course*

        Hell, I worked 36 hours in one go (as part of a larger stretch of over 100 hours in a week) in publishing, thanks to a crappy mid-list author who thinks she’s much bigger than she actually is.

        1. irrelevantsia*

          I am a bookseller and I’m literally desperate to know which author you’re talking about! :p

    2. magic*

      The update explicitly mentions learning that the coworker couldn’t sleep at all due to what he was going through.

      1. MigraineMonth*

        Which sounded like it was both extremely stressful and life-threatening. I’m so glad he’s doing better!

    3. Moira's Rose's Garden*

      It’s common enough in research that in and of itself, working extended stretches isn’t concerning. It may be part of something concerning, but far more likely to be the result of lab staffing, the needs of a particular experiment or assay, a huge funding or publication deadline looming & etc.

      1. Observer*

        That doesn’t make it less concerning. It just means that someone decided that something is more important than safety.

  8. nofiredrills*

    Thanks for the update. I’ve noticed that internet comments in general have shifted to assumptions and strong moralizing when we only have a snippet of info.

    1. magic*

      Yeah, a lot of cognitive distortions get endorsed and encouraged because they start with a grain of truth.

      1. Lana Kane*

        Excellent point. Explains why you can have a wild hot take that people buy, because a little bit of it is true. A good reminder for all of us to be on the lookout for that in our own behaviors.

    2. Lana Kane*

      Oof yes, I immediately thought of Reddit when the LW mentioned the wild conclusions and not seeing people as complex individuals. It’s endemic and I’m not sure if people have always been like this and it’s just visible now because of social media, or if we’re seeing an actual shift. (Obviously humans are individuals and this tendency has always existed, I’m speaking more in –waves arms– societal terms)

      1. But what to call me?*

        I’d say it’s always been there but we’re now much more likely to encounter little snippets of information about people we know nothing else about in contexts where it’s easy and rewarding to speculate about them with large groups of people who also don’t know anything else about the person in question. It’s gossip but on a much larger scale than in the past and about people who are so distant from the gossipers that they almost seem imaginary.

      2. AMH*

        I too am grateful for LW’s ability to see nuance and give people grace. I had to, for lack of a better word, deprogram myself from the AITA-style of judgement (spent some time on a sub that pointed out the fakes, the trends, and the signs of AI as well as highlighting the all or nothing smugness of the commenters). Snap judgements and wild conclusions feel good to make in the moment, as does “righteous” anger, but it does feel like we’re expecting perfection instead of expecting humans to be human.

      3. Numbersmouse*

        I agree and almost want to call it the “Reddit effect”. To theorise a little, I think as judgement-centric communities (such as AITA and its 35000 offshoots) have gotten so popular, they’ve also become bloated with sensationalist fiction because it garners so much attention and makes for monetisable content. And because Reddit is so big and that content gets monetised on tiktok and youtube, those commenting norms of inflated expectations, catastrophising, and excessive speculation are starting to bleed into other comment sections.

        This site has been one of the best in that regard, largely due to its audience and to Alison’s occasional redirection of comment threads that are getting out of hand, but you can still see some of the effects of this shift in expectations.

    3. Egg Roll*

      Yeah, not to harp too long on this point, but thank you LW for pointing this out, thank you Alison for shouting it out, and thank you to those who don’t immediately and constantly do it.

    6. MigraineMonth*

      Very true. On the other hand, it’s really hard to bring a nuanced perspective when there’s so much context missing from letters. Which is an inherent weakness of the medium (I certainly don’t want to read a 500-page novel before Alison’s advice!).

      It’s hard to tell from a couple of hundred words whether the coworker losing their temper at work is usually a calm person who’s going through a rough time or has a temper problem. It’s particularly challenging since many letters about people with serious issues start with “Sue is an excellent employee [except Sue doesn’t do her job]” or “Bob is such a nice guy [except he creeps on young women in the office]”.

      The “he’s obviously making drugs!” suggestions are weird enough that I just add them to my “or maybe he has a secret evil twin who sneaks in after he goes home!” fanfic.

    7. No Rudolph*

      I feel like everyone is so familiar with the “my boyfriend is great, except [long list of behaviors which are mutually exclusive with said boyfriend being great]…” syndrome that they a) diagnose everything as that situation instead of believing people when they say someone is deviating from usually good behavior, and also b) really want to get the rush of being the one to “break the news” that if the person does X then they’re not actually so great, are they?

    8. Zeus*

      It’s a trend I’ve been noticing in comments all over for…ten-ish years now? I think of it as the AITA-fication of the internet, even though it started before the AITA Reddit sub became well known.

      It’s the same sorts of attitudes that people bring into judging a situation, even (especially) when they don’t have all the facts: in every story there is a good guy and a bad guy; if we can’t tell which one is the bad guy, or they’re not bad enough, then there must be something else going on that makes them secretly very bad.

      That’s it in a nutshell, anyway.

  9. brjeau*

    This is a great update all around! I’m so glad your coworker is doing better. And thank you for the reminder that we shouldn’t rush to judge a whole person as terrible based on one unpleasant thing about them. It’s far from an issue with just this site, I think it’s an internet-wide problem, but any opportunity to check that impulse is a good one.

    1. ThursdaysGeek*

      Solzhenitsyn wrote that “the line between good and evil runs through the center of every human heart,” and it’s a good reminder than none of us are entirely good nor bad, and people are definitely complicated.

  10. H.Regalis*

    This is a thing I’ve noticed a lot while reading AAM comments: people tend to jump to the worst conclusions about what’s happening in the background, and have a really hard time believing that people can be complicated.

    Agreed. It also seems like whatever the LW says in their letter, a lot of commenters are sure it’s the exact opposite: The convicted child molester, the coworker who got a second job doing pharmacy deliveries while on sick leave for COVID, etc. People in the comment section come up with some wild theories about what “really” happened.

  11. Bruce*

    I remember reading the original story and thinking of my friend in college who had an accident in the chem lab late at night. Luckily he recovered, and was clear to people that he learned to not work with nasty chemicals late at night alone! Glad your coworker is doing better…

    1. Wilbur*

      Yeah, I know plenty of people here have mentioned that this is just how it is but a safe result is not the same as a safe action. You can run red lights in your car every day and not get in an accident but that doesn’t mean it’s a safe result. I know there was an incident in my town where someone asphyxiated under some heavy equipment. My understanding was they didn’t know the contractor was on site, so no one knew to check on them periodically. If you’re going to be working alone and isolated, please set up a way to check in with someone periodically.

  12. Former Lab Rat*

    I’m retired now but yes, science doesn’t always work 9-5. And there are experiments that once you start you have to finish in one go. Think of old-fashioned protein purification before the dawn of affinity tags. [You could always identify a protein- or bio- chemist because they were the ones carrying a winter parka into the lab in July – they had major cold room time.] Some lab equipment is in high demand and if you can only get the flow cytometer at 10pm you just deal with it. Sometimes an experiment just requites timepoints over 12+ hours.

    But it is true long hours without sleep can lead to mistakes. I remember coming into the lab multiple days to see a coworker’s bench littered with test tubes from an abandoned assay. Instead of breaking it down into batches he tried to do 200 Miller assays at one go. For 3 days running! Failure each time. Yes, this was before 96 well plates – I’m that old.

    1. Lisa Simpson*

      Spouse does MRI research with human subjects. In grad school his lab would get a block of time at the hospital’s imaging facility sometime between 4 pm and 11 pm. If their slot that ended at 11 pm ran over, they’d get to meet the primate researchers, whose scan slots started at 11 pm and ran into the wee hours of the morning, so that the hospital’s patients wouldn’t know they were using the same MRI machines as monkeys and freak out.

    2. Hroethvitnir*

      I often think about how fast technology moves! I started research in 2016, so I’ve never done DNA extraction without columns (except one-offs in undergrad). Hell, my first western blots used a quick transfer system and could be done in a few hours. It was an optimised protocol.

      One of my chemistry lecturers got her PhD using primarily x-ray diffraction to describe one protein of interest. A peer of my supervisor’s PhD project was SEM of a sectioned organ (which sounds amazing, because you literally walked between huge prints of the images). The fact many faculty have done PCR manually blows my mind.

      The changes in biology have been so fast, I feel like we’re all still adjusting.

      1. Former Lab Rat*

        Oh I didn’t miss phenol DNA extractions at all. I also did RT DNA sequencing with P32. And poured the gel!

  13. WeirdChemist*

    I’m glad your boss came to the realization that you all should hire someone who’s main job is safety, hopefully that comes to pass soon! Putting someone “in charge” of safety without giving them the authority to actually enforce anything is a recipe for disaster.

    Glad to hear that things are improving for your coworker!

    1. Hannah Lee*

      Yes! That entire passage of the safety situation at LW’s employer rang so true, and is one I’ve seen play out at several jobs. ‘Someone’ winds up doing it, or getting voluntold to do it, but they don’t have full authority or backing to actually address things.

      But in LW’s case, their boss saw the situation pretty clearly:
      “It’s the responsibility of the company to hire a trained safety specialist to manage compliance” and if company management doesn’t bother to do that, it’s not on LW if there are things that are not as safe as they should be. As a conscientious employee it is so easy to forget that and tie yourself into pretzels trying to fix things you just can’t fix.

  14. Chick-n-boots*

    OP, this is such a great update! And an excellent reminder to all of us to do better. One of my goals for 2025 is to always choose kindness – in action, in thought, in assumptions. Just, really, if there is an opportunity for me to think or do something and I can do it with kindness, that’s what I want to do. There’s a lot of anger and negativity out in the world (and don’t get me wrong, a lot of it is very justified here in the darkest timeline) but if I can counterbalance that with just a little bit of kindness and empathy, that’s the energy I want to put out into the universe.

    Hang in there everyone!!!!

  15. Observer*

    I’m glad that your colleague is doing better.

    And I am also glad that you reported the problem and that someone took it seriously.

    The reality is that he’s not a monster, but he was doing something risky and was refusing or unable to recognize the risk he was taking, and posing to others. Having with authority push back was probably the best thing that could have happened to him, because it forced him to step back.

    And my sympathies on dealing with the medical malpractice! That stuff is 8infuriating*! I hope he got *some* recompense (although nothing really “makes up” for it.)

  16. Ace in the Hole*

    >My thought at the time was that, even if I wasn’t legally on the hook for anything, if he did get hurt or sick from working alone, I would never be able to forgive myself.

    This is exactly how I think of things and safety is my official, primary job. In fact, it’s one of the reasons why I went into safety/compliance.

    Not everything is within our control. Sometimes, I do everything within my power and someone still gets hurt. That’s upsetting but I don’t blame myself for it. But if I knew about a safety hazard and chose to do nothing, then I feel responsible for whatever happens. Ultimately, I don’t care about safety because it’s the law… I care about safety because I care about people.

  17. Cookie Monster*

    “This is a thing I’ve noticed a lot while reading AAM comments: people tend to jump to the worst conclusions about what’s happening in the background, and have a really hard time believing that people can be complicated.”

    Very much, this. I think part of it is that Alison has rightly and incisively called out people in letters by saying “I know you said [manager/employee, etc.] is good, but if she’s doing this one bad thing, I have a hard time believing they’re fine otherwise.” And very often she’s right! But I think the commentariat have taken this idea and run with it. Now ANY manager, co-worker, etc., who exhibits even the tiniest negative behavior simply canNOT be any good in any other way.

    I know we’re all working with limited info when we make these judgements about these people we’re reading about, but it ends up getting very repetitive and unhelpful.

  18. bye*

    Thank you for calling out those AAM comments, sometimes it gets so ridiculous. It even comes from frequent commenters on this site. It’s either jumping to conclusions based on minimal information or starting off with an unrelated story about their own experience so that they can then jump to conclusions.

  19. Fairy Snowglobe*

    (Extremely redacted version: a medical professional almost killed him through pure ineptitude and ego. Anyone here with a chronic, invisible illness is probably familiar with how hard it is to get doctors to admit that they made a mistake, or to listen to you about your symptoms.)

    I 100% believe you and your colleague. I no longer bother going to the doctor as I do not feel safe around them, and asking them for help has been nothing but a waste of my time and money.

    Sending your colleague all my good thoughts for healing and hoping he can find/has found one of the good doctors out there.

  20. JewishAndVibing*

    As someone who used to work in a lab in an academic setting, the fact people thought him working kate meant he was up to no good is kinda hilarious.

    Great update OP! Glad things are getting better

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