Serious question, did anyone else get quietly frozen out at work over one bad joke in a group chat?
Back in 2021 I was on a five person team at a marketing shop in Cincinnati and I dropped a dumb joke in our private Slack channel that I thought was harmless. One person screenshotted it and sent it to HR two days later, and I got pulled into a 30 minute meeting where they read the message back to me out loud. I said sorry right away and explained it was a bad attempt at humor, nothing more, but the vibe flipped overnight and two coworkers stopped replying to me at all. I stuck it out for four more months and then left for a smaller company where nobody knew the story. Has anyone else had a private chat moment come back at them like that, and how did you handle the silence after?