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Antiwork

My manager had a breakdown because I brought up an incident that happened at work

One evening, around 7pm that a coworker and I were just finishing up, we hadn't locked the doors yet but we had turned the main lights off. We hear the door open and it's one of our patients that is a minor (13/14) and he was mentioning that he came from the football game (which was down the street). We ask him all the important questions, “Where is your mom?” “Is someone getting you?” Etc. We are aware he is a minor, autistic and can only talk to a few people in the office that he is comfortable with. He has issue with authority, clearly. He has also had incidents of (almost) pulling the fire alarm at school, talking about inappropriate things (guns, his bow, etc.) and just not listening to instruction. After figuring out his mom is on her way (she is a patient as well and very familiar…


One evening, around 7pm that a coworker and I were just finishing up, we hadn't locked the doors yet but we had turned the main lights off. We hear the door open and it's one of our patients that is a minor (13/14) and he was mentioning that he came from the football game (which was down the street). We ask him all the important questions, “Where is your mom?” “Is someone getting you?” Etc. We are aware he is a minor, autistic and can only talk to a few people in the office that he is comfortable with. He has issue with authority, clearly. He has also had incidents of (almost) pulling the fire alarm at school, talking about inappropriate things (guns, his bow, etc.) and just not listening to instruction.

After figuring out his mom is on her way (she is a patient as well and very familiar with us) we ask how his day is and how he is doing. He goes on about how he had a bad day, is visibly a bit aggravated and talking about how the cops at the school thought he had guns and that someone thought he was talking about guns. He mentioned that he had a bow at home, but no guns. He was upset about the rest of the conversation that followed. We reiterated that guns are unsafe to bring to school and what not, he laughed and just blew it off. It was uncomfortable to have those conversations, since we work in an area around guns and violence. I do not know this patient and what they are capable of, even a grown adult I would have been very nervous. I write an incident report about this happening, in hopes that the office is made aware, as well as my manager. My manager is 7 months pregnant and is how classified as “high risk” due to stress. Unfortunately, the stress is all her own doing. SO, apparently when she came in on Monday she read the incident and had a total breakdown, crying, upset, etc. I wasn't there that day, fortunately.

My CFO (who is acting manager when she is gone) calls me up to her office, in a message saying, “When you get a minute, we can talk about the “incident” that happened.” So I go up there and she has the incident that I TYPED OUT CLEARLY STATING WHAT HAPPENED. She mentioned my coworker did not mention being uncomfortable. I stated that it's fine that she felt safe, but I was uncomfortable with the conversation that was happening. I am RARELY uncomfortable and I've worked there almost 2 years and NEVER have made an incident report. To which the manager said, “These incident should not be brought up – this pushed [manager] over the edge and these incidents are not at top priority. They are so small compared to everything we are trying to do/change around here [they are changing a bunch of policies and what not around the office that cause a lot of stress]. You should have called his mother. He probably felt safe here because he was getting bullied at the game he was at.” Which was untrue, the kid just decided to give a goose chase to his mom and wanted to leave because he was bored. I agreed that he should feel safe at the office and what not, the issue is the topic of conversation mixed with being a bit agitated. My CFO tried to tell me “Try to figure out these things by yourself and not bring it because these things are not a big deal/are unimportant. You're making mountains out of mole hills. There were things you should have done to resolve this instead of wasting time and typing this out for a little problem because you were “uncomfortable”. “

To preface this, we've not had issues with this particular patient but there was a patient before I was there that would stalk the front desk girls, follow us to our car and even follow us home.

I'm unsure if I'm over reacting, if what I did was right, if this is normal how management is/how they should act, etc.

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