At my first company I was part of a team of about 20 people. In this team there were multiple instances of office romance drama. We had a manager with a wife and kids that cheated on them with a marketing colleague during a company skiing holiday, we had a team member that had a (not so) secret relationship with a manager and we had a colleague that was in a relationship with a colleague from another department and then started cheating on him with a direct colleague.

The first one I don’t know too much about because it happened before I came to that team but the second and third ones I was in the middle of. The colleague-manager relationship was especially weird because to me and my direct colleagues it was obvious what was going on, they weren’t hiding it that well. But when people asked them about it, they would always deny it which was kinda weird. Anyway, after one of them left the company they supposedly fell in love afterwards and are now (to my knowledge) still together.

The cheating colleague was a whole different story. She had a relationship with a guy from another department who was pretty good looking but he was an ass. They were even living together. She then proceeded to fall in love with a direct colleague from our team and ended up meeting up with this colleague in the company bathrooms during lunch breaks… This went on for a bit (and was somewhat common knowledge in our team) before she broke up with her partner and started living with the new one. Pretty weird. Also, there were multiple occasions where I saw her straight up kissing another guy in our team on the lips for his birthday which was a bit strange as well.

Last story: at my latest company I got hired to be a business analyst. When I walked in, there was no way I was going to be able to carry out this role. They asked me to use data to support and advise but there was literally no data available. So I stepped in together with another colleague to work on this for the next year or so, with great success. We had a whole data platform with interconnected data and a visualization tool by the end.

However, close to the time we finished our work a new colleague joined our team. When he presented himself, his tasks fully overlapped with my original role. I went to my de-facto manager (my actual manager was only HR-responsible and was not very available at the time) and asked him if this person was my replacement, I got told that he wasn’t. The new guy then proceeded to start getting in my way every step of the way. I went to him and asked him if he was there to take over some of my work, he said no. Long story short, by the time it came to the time of the decision of extending my contract to a contract without an end date, they gave me a bunch of negative feedback (which I later found out mostly came from the newly introduced colleage) and only offered me a temporary extension.

This got me so frustrated and annoyed that I ended up quitting over it. They were very surprised by that but I did not hold back with my feedback during my exit interviews. Luckily I’m now at a different company that seems a much better fit for me where I can actually carry out work that I like. But yeah, overall a pretty eventful 8 years so far…