Employee Lends Her Laptop to Her Manager, Who Reads Private Messages to Their Boss

No matter where you're working — whether it's in an office, retail, food service, or whatever else you can name — workers are entitled to private conversations among their peers. Nobody is out to get anybody with sending messages or professional work DMs and it's normal to make a friend with whom you'd want to chat privately at work in between shifts or assignments. For the most part, we can all try to respect each other's professional and personal privacy as we navigate our workplaces.

Most of us would want to make sure that our private conversations, no matter how innocent or non-abrasive they are, remain private except for the people within that conversation. Unfortunately, Ocean on TikTok (@oocean.e) was not met with that particular common courtesy at their job. In fact, her manager was able to get ahold of their laptop and had the audacity to read this employee's messages to the worst person to read them with. Here's the full story.

Hopefully, you've never had an invasion of privacy in the workplace that's anywhere near as bad as the one that Ocean had. According to her, the event took place five months before she posted her video in early August 2023.

According to Ocean, she had lent her manager her laptop after her manager's laptop broke. However, Ocean found out through another friend that her manager looked at her work messages and read them to her boss. Not only that, but the manager even had the nerve to send the messages out to other staff. The contents of the messages were never disclosed, but that's already an egregious violation of trust.

Not taking that lying down, Ocean contacted their boss, who helped her write up a message to her manager expressing her displeasure with these events. The message even came with a meme to punctuate Ocean's point.

In the message, Ocean calls her manager's actions a "massive invasion of my trust and privacy" and says she's "not one bit OK with it."

"The past is the past and we are in different places now, but [I] was super disappointed to hear this," Ocean wrote in the message.

Folks in the comments were incredibly sympathetic to Ocean's plight. One person wrote, "Yeah, I wouldn't be so forgiving."

Several people even suggested that Ocean file a lawsuit against this manager. For the most part, however, many people were desperate to hear an update to the situation.

A few days later, Ocean complied with everyone's request. Though she opened with a tease that she was going to sue and have her manager sent to jail, that was purely a prank. The real outcome is nothing so salacious.

According to Ocean, her manager replied half an hour after Ocean sent her message with a "full-line apology." Ocean even forgave her on the spot.

"Everyone's f------ asking and it's a boring story," Ocean admitted.

However, people were satisfied with the uneventful conclusion. One person even commented: "The internal conflict of having wanted a juicier follow-up but also being happy you got an apology."

All workers should be entitled to a level of privacy, especially when it comes to computers.