Woman leaks co-worker’s wild text messages: ‘Sounds like harassment’

A text exchange between two co-workers has gone viral, revealing how few boundaries some people have when it comes to work.

It used to be that when you finished work, you left the building and you were done for the day and, unless someone wanted to call your landline, you weren’t contactable.

These days people can call, facetime, text or even slide into your direct messages on social media, making maintaining boundaries increasingly difficult.

Australian employees recently won the right to ignore work messages and calls outside of working hours, within reason and depending on their role and expectations.

However, it is still blurry about what is acceptable or unacceptable from a co-worker, and a woman’s text exchange has proven that.

Kait, 25, a retail worker from the United States, posted a series of screenshots on X revealing the bizarre messages her co-worker had been sending her.

“I made the mistake of loaning a co-worker money and now it has been non-stop asking for money, rides and food. No one in management will do anything about it,” she said.

The text exchange started with the co-worker asking to borrow $7 and Kait sending her the money.

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Then the requests kept coming.

“Could you loan me $10 or $15, and I’ll pay you back Monday and the $7,” one message reads.

When Kait replied, “I only have $3 to my name right now,” the co-worker didn’t relent and proposed a new deal.

“Could I have the $3 I sent back to you on the Saturday? Plus the $7,” she asked.

The worker also posted a series of other text messages she’d gotten from her co-worker, which included her asking for various lifts, more money and asking Kait to buy her snacks like milk or a Dr. Pepper.

The tweet has been viewed over 28 million times, and Kait, who didn’t expect the thread to blow up so much, offered further context around the messages.

She said the co-worker has done this with all employees at the place they’ve worked. People have blocked her, but some claim she finds them on social media platforms to continue messaging.

“A regular customer when they come in now asks if she’s currently working, if she is then they immediately leave because she used them for grocery money and never paid her back but kept asking for more rides or more money,” she claimed.

She also said that in total, she’d only given her co-worker $15 max but she was sick of the “relentless” messages asking for money, food and lifts.

It might sound like a bizarre and very specific scenario, but recruitment expert Roxanne Calder told news.com.au that these types of personal texts between co-workers are constantly causing workplace problems.

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“The boundaries are blurred,” she explained

Calder said when personal text messages become a workplace problem, it is really “difficult” to navigate as a boss because you don’t want to overstep.

“I’ve had to deal with it a lot. I try and keep out of it, but if I have to get involved, I give advice at a distance. I try to give personal advice, but in a professional setting, I make it really neutral,” she said.

Calder stressed that if an employee came to her over a personal text message from a co-worker, she’d have a “responsibility” as a manager to try to resolve the issue.

“Personally, I’d say that I didn’t think it was appropriate, and I’d explain the ramifications and explain the emotional side of it,” she said.

The recruitment expert also pointed out that sharing text messages between a co-worker and yourself online can lead to hurt feelings and workplace tension.

“For emotional reasons, I don’t think it is fair or right,” she said.

Calder said it isn’t just text messages that lead to inappropriate chats between co-workers; she sees the same behavior in Zoom meetings.

“When you’re in a face-to-face meeting and there’s a group of 20 people, you don’t slip a note to your co-worker or write ‘what an idiot’ when your boss says something you disagree with because he is going to see it,” she said.

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“When you’re in online meetings, though, people are messaging each other backwards and forwards and saying all kinds of stuff and that now extends to texting each other.”

Despite the fact that constantly messaging our co-workers has become normal, people were scandalized by the texts that Kait shared.

One person called them “weird,” another called them “insane,” with another claiming the texts were nothing short of “wild.”

More interestingly, though, online people were divided on whether management should get involved or if this was a personal problem that Kait needed to sort out herself.

Even though technology has been a part of our working lives for decades, people are divided on where work and personal problems begin and end.

“This sounds like harassment to me. I would contact HR,” one advised.

“Block her and pretend she doesn’t exist at work. You probably won’t get anything you loan her back and there are literally zero benefits to being nice to a person like this,” someone else said.

“I can’t believe people like this exist, but your management not doing anything is downright hostile. Your co-workers need to band together on this and you need to tell them about the customer.

“Management can’t do anything,” someone else claimed.

“What is management supposed to do in this situation? Am I missing something? Someone from my works asks for some money. I lend it to them. They don’t pay me back … now it’s someone else’s problem?” another wrote.

“I work in management and the kindergarten s–t people come to me with is insane. It’s absolutely pathetic how adults need to run to management to sort out their completely trivial private s–t. I‘d fire every single one of these children if I could,” one raged.

“I was thinking the same thing. How is this management’s problem? That’s a personal issue. What’re they going to do?” another asked.

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