37. Inappropriate Calendar
One of the more recent ones and the one I personally found to be the weirdest:
I had taken a contract job in between jobs, still in my primary field of employee/labor relations. The only difference–and it is a huge one–is that this job was in an office atmosphere rather than a factory atmosphere.
During my 2nd week on the job, I am approached by one of the women ( “Kate”) from another department. She is coming to me because there is a ‘very inappropriate’ calendar down in the lower level break room and since I’m HR she thought that I should address it.
I thank Kate for bringing it to my attention and head down to the break room to find the inappropriate calendar. When I get into the break room I see two calendars: one of those large write-on ones with just the days and another one with scenes of the Great Lakes. No bikini calendars, no calendars with anything that remotely could offend anyone. I look around a bit and see nothing I figure that someone must have gotten wind that HR was coming and removed whatever the offending calendar was.
About two hours after I had come back upstairs after determining that there were no offensive calendars, Kate bursts into my office and accuses me of not taking care of removing the offensive calendar. I calmly tell Kate that she needs to calm down and that there were no inappropriate calendars in the downstairs break room when I checked. Kate shakes her head ‘no’ and says that she will show me where the offensive calendar is.
I follow Kate down to the break room and when I open the door still see the same two calendars and for a second think I am on an episode of ‘Punked’. Kate runs over to the calendar with the scenes of the Great Lakes and points to it, announcing that the calendar needs to go because it ‘triggers’ her.
What?!
It gets worse. She gets ‘triggered’ when people say the word ‘lake’. Kate wants the business cards co-workers put up for their side businesses for lake charters because she can’t stand to see the word ‘lake’.
By sheer coincidence, we hire a guy with the last name Lake. Kate throws a fit over that as well and says she is going to sue for emotional trauma because we are being cruel.
None of us understands why she lives in this city since we are right next to Lake Erie and the company is literally a couple of blocks from it. She says we need to accommodate her and build a wall so she doesn’t have to see the lake while she’s at work.
Yup, no problem. The total piece of the cake is building a wall around Lake Erie.
The funniest thing about it is that she had a boss who catered to this.
He did not believe me that being ‘triggered’ by a lake was NOT something that we had to accommodate.
Don’t miss that job at all.