Woman leaks wild text messages from colleague

A text exchange between two colleagues has gone viral, showing just 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 were done for the day. Unless someone wanted to call your landline, you couldn’t be reached.

Nowadays, people can call, FaceTime, text, or even end up in your direct messages on social media, making maintaining boundaries increasingly difficult.

Australian workers have 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’s still unclear what is acceptable or unacceptable for a coworker, and one woman’s text exchange proved that.

Kait, 25, a retail worker from the United States, posted a series of screenshots on X that revealed the bizarre messages her colleague had sent her.

“I made the mistake of lending a colleague money and now it’s non-stop asking for money, rides and food. No one in management will do anything about it,” she said.

The text exchange began when the coworker asked to borrow $7 and Kait sent her the money.

Then the requests kept coming.

“Can you lend me $10 or $15 and I will pay you and the $7 back on Monday,” reads one message.

When Kait responded, “I only have $3 to my name right now,” the colleague didn’t budge and proposed a new deal.

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

The employee also posted a series of other text messages she received from her coworker, asking for several rides, more money and asking Kait to buy her snacks like milk or a Dr. Pepper.

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

She said the coworker did this to all employees at the place they worked. People have blocked her but some claim she finds them on social media platforms to continue messaging them.

“When a regular customer comes in, she asks if she is currently working. When she does, they immediately leave because she used them for grocery money and never got refunded but kept asking for more rides or more money,” she alleged.

She also said she had given her colleague a maximum of $15 in total, but was fed up with the “ruthless” messages asking for money, food and lifts.

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

“The boundaries are blurring,” she explained

Calder said that when personal text messages become a workplace issue, it’s 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 to stay out of it, but if I have to get involved, I give advice from a distance. I try to give personal advice, but in a professional setting I make it really neutral,” she says.

Calder emphasized that if an employee came to her via a personal text message from a colleague, she as a manager would have a “responsibility” to try to resolve the issue.

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

The recruitment expert also pointed out that sharing text messages between a colleague and yourself online can lead to hurt feelings and tension in the workplace.

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

Calder said it’s not just text messages that lead to inappropriate chats between coworkers; she sees the same behavior in Zoom meetings.

“If you’re in a face-to-face meeting and there’s a group of twenty people, you don’t pass a note to your colleague or write ‘what an idiot’ if your boss says something you don’t agree with, because he I’m going to see,” she said.

“But when you’re in online meetings, people are messaging each other back and forth and saying all kinds of things, and that now includes texting.”

Despite the fact that constantly messaging our colleagues has become normal, people were shocked by the texts Kait shared.

One person called them “weird,” another called them “insane,” while another claimed the lyrics were nothing short of “wild.”

More interestingly, however, people online were divided over whether management should be involved or if this was a personal problem for Kait to solve on his own.

Although technology has been part of our working lives for decades, people are divided over where work and personal problems begin and end.

“This seems like a form of intimidation to me. I would contact HR,” one person advised.

“Block her and pretend she doesn’t exist at work. You probably won’t get anything back from what you lend her, and there’s literally no point in being nice to someone like this,” someone else said.

‘I can’t believe people like this exist, but your management doing nothing is downright hostile. Your colleagues need to work together on this and you need to tell them about the customer.

“There’s nothing management can do,” someone else claimed.

“What should management do in this situation? Am I missing something? Someone from work asks for some money. I’ll lend it to them. They won’t pay me back… now it’s someone else’s problem? another wrote.

“I work in management and the people at the preschool I come to see are insane. It’s absolutely pathetic how adults have to run to management to sort out their completely trivial private matters. I would fire all these kids if I could,” one raged.

“I thought the same thing. What about the problem of this management? That’s a personal matter. What are they going to do?” asked another.