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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{ 46 comments }

{ 46 comments… read them below or add one }

  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.

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  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!)

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    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.

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      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.

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      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.

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    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.

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      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).

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    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!

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      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!

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  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.

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      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.

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        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.

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      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.

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      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.

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    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.

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  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.

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      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.

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    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)

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      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.

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      2. Mary*

        I mean, considering some of the comments we get on here – especially with the LW calling out the commenters – the fact that your first thought is another site is ngl, kind of hilarious.

        Like, I don’t disagree about the other site, but we just had a letter the other day (the guy that brought his kids to work) where some people jumped automatically to how his ex-wife must be The Worst.

        This isn’t specific to one site.

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    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.

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    6. 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?

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  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.

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    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.

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  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.

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  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…

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  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.

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    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.

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    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.

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  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!

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    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.

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  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!!!!

    Reply ↓

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