Worker Left 'Mortified' After Accidentally Showing Boss An Email Accepting Another Job During A Screen-Share
This is why you always need to be extra careful whenever you're sharing your screen.
fizkes / Dean Drobot / Shutterstock via Canva Pro As part of a close-knit team of workers, one person on Reddit made the completely understandable mistake of exposing matters of her personal life to her boss — except, that personal matter was one about her future employment.
She would soon be leaving her job, and as much as she regrets her decision to leave, it was something that she was excited about seeing as it “is a better fit with the kind of work I want to be doing,” she just didn’t expect to let her current employers know about it so soon.
Her coworkers saw her job acceptance emails during a screen-share.
Well, who knows if they really saw it, but it was definitely on their screens. Posting on Reddit’s “r/tifu” subreddit, which stands for “Today I F--ked Up,” she revealed how, well…she “f--ked up.”
You might be asking yourself, “well if she accepted this job wouldn’t she have told her current job?” As she explains it, “Because I haven't signed a contract yet, I also haven't given my current employer my notice.”
That makes sense, she probably doesn’t want to count her chickens before they hatch in case anything goes awry. Once she’s sure about having the new job and when her start date would actually be, then she would have given notice. Unfortunately for her, she never got the opportunity to do so.
“So this afternoon I was in a meeting with my team, including my team lead and our ‘manager’ (who is also the CEO and whom we all get on well with),” she explains. “We were brainstorming some design solutions (I'm a designer) and my coworker suggested there was a feature in Gmail that was similar to what we wanted to achieve.”
Since she had already been screen sharing, she didn’t think twice about heading over to Gmail to look at the feature that her coworker had been talking about. What she wasn’t aware of, however, was that she was currently logging into her personal email account.
The emails from her new job were right at the top of the page.
“At the top were 2 unread emails, but below that in the Read section, The Email was the top one, with [the] subject ‘Job offer’ and preview ‘Thank you for accepting our offer! We're glad you want to join our company.’”
When you’re seeing a screen share, do you, personally, snoop around looking at everything on the screen? Listen, everyone’s eyes wander, but she’s not 100% sure that theirs did.
“I didn't realize until like 5-10 seconds in when I immediately opened a new tab and tried to play it off. I am absolutely mortified,” she wrote. “No one let on that they saw it, but if they did (and I think that's not unlikely), the email preview left absolutely zero doubt about what was going on.”
If their eyes wandered for two seconds, it would be pretty easy to find, but really, what do you say in that situation? She explained early on that she was part of a team of four workers, so her leaving would cause a major disruption.
“I really hope my new employer will send me the contract tomorrow (my day off) so I can sign it ASAP and give my notice first thing Monday…,” she continues, “and apologize profusely in case my boss saw it. I really really really did not want them to find out like this.”
Many people hoped that if her boss did see it, then they would be transparent about it and part amicably, but with all the workplace tension going on these days, who knows what would happen.
Isaac Serna-Diez is an Assistant Editor who focuses on entertainment and news, social justice, and politics. Keep up with his rants about current events on his Twitter.