I am trying to figure out what the hell is happening at my workplace. I started less than half a year ago. It’s an admin roll in social services, extremely fast paced, lots of deadlines, I have minimal support. The work is fine, I’m smart and picking up on things quickly. But I’ve worked in social services my whole life, and it’s never been like this.
What I’ve experienced in social services has been the genre of toxic where everyone is trauma-bonded, professional boundaries blur due to the fucked up shit we’re always facing, everyone’s going out for drinks to brain-dump, etc etc.
This is something else. The first thing: there’s this culture that we don’t “do” pleasantries; i.e. when I walk into the office in the morning and say “hi, good morning!” to the room, or I answer a phone call from a colleague with “hi ____”, “This is [my name]”, or even just “hello?”, (instead of just saying “yeah?” exasperatedly or just jumping into the conversation), I am looked at as weird. I don’t see anyone else doing these pleasantries with each other, and when I do them, people look at me like I’m from another planet. As if they think I am fake.
Secondly, yesterday a coworker was clearly sobbing at his desk. Shaky breathing, as if he was trying to calm down. This person is a manager. One of his subordinates asked “you okay?”. He didn’t respond. He proceeded to enter and exit the room about 4 or 5 times every 5-10 mins or so, as if he was leaving, trying to calm down, and then re-entering the room and sit down and try to start working again, but then would need to leave again.
While the one coworker asked if he was okay, everyone else either ignored it or had their headphones in so couldn’t hear / was facing away and didn’t see. I asked my boss at the end of the day, “it seems like so-and-so might not be okay? Is everything OK? Should we check in?” And she quite literally laughed it off.
We have a new colleague who came to me (I think I might be the most approachable person in the office atp) last week with a “what the hell is going on here?”. Noticed all the same things as me. I didn’t know what to say.
It’s making me nervous because I feel like there must be some piece of information I’m missing, and I feel like I need to know that piece of information in order to keep myself safe. It feels like there’s some big secret I have not been let in on yet.