For a while now I’ve loved reading the AITA (Am I The Asshole) posts on Reddit and various Facebook groups. Most of them, I find, are people who are making a stand about something and being gaslighted by people who have been getting away with the misbehavior for a while. In the case above, one person is making the rest of the office (including her boss) uncomfortable.

This brought back a memory for me, going back to the late 1980s and early 1990s. I worked for a freight company. Our accounting system was on a PC network, but our shipping system were on old Datapoint computers.

These were the terminals. We weren’t networked to each individual office, but twice a month they would send us files that I would process to use for how we paid the airlines. We had two or three large servers in the back room as well. At the time, I had my own office with these computers and access to the storage area where the servers were. I could close the door if I had to. These computers threw off a lot of heat. There was a huge problem keeping them cool.

Inevitably, during the day in the office, someone would crank the heat and in a little while, I’d be sweating. That wasn’t necessarily what bothered me so much, but the Datapoint computers would crash and I couldn’t reboot them until they cooled down. If it was right when the sales reports to the airlines were due, we could have a problem. It happened a number of times.

As is the case in many offices, this created conflict. My bosses would get angry that the computers crashed, but they’d never tell the people who cranked up the heat to knock it off. Instead, they seemed to be more angry with me that it had happened. What did they expect me to do? Finally, after a couple of years of this, they added a wall air conditioning unit to my office so I could keep it cold enough for the computers. During the hottest days of summer, it still wasn’t always enough, but it helped.

I don’t understand why I was the one questioned when this happened. Someone else (and we all knew who it was) cranked the heat up. Sit them down and tell them not to do it. That’s the job of a boss/manager. Just like in the case above, she needs to put on her big girl panties and tell the person that the space heater needs to be gone. Not only is it affecting her ability to work, but it’s also a fire hazard. If her worker is cold, there’s a thing called sweaters that help in that regard.

The problem is bosses/managers who get to be too friendly with employees or worry about being disliked. I know the other people in the office hated it when I turned down the temperature settings. I wasn’t doing it for me – I was doing it to keep the computers up and running. And yet when they crashed because someone had cranked the heat, that was also my fault instead of calling the person to task that was doing it. For what it’s worth, I don’t talk to anyone from that job that I had for about 11 years, but I have a lifelong friend who worked in the same building and couldn’t stand the people I worked with just in her brief encounters with them.

There are also bosses/managers who want to avoid conflict. These are some of the worst to work for because they will defer to the people who are bullies at the expense of other employees. I had one at the hotel I worked at, and it was awful how he would never stand up for his employees in the face of guests who needed to be told to go find another place to stay. When it’s an office workplace, it’s even worse because the bad employees often run roughshod over them. Eventually, the good employees get fed up and leave and then no one understands why it happened.

So no, you’re not an asshole for being fed up with the space heater, but you aren’t really a good manager if you’re letting her run the office instead of you.