NEED TO KNOW
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One woman was happy to make baked goods for her office until they called her ‘mom’
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When she told her coworkers they could call her by her name, one said she ‘overreacted’
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The woman defended her decision to stop bringing in baked goods for the office
A 34-year-old woman stopped giving her coworkers baked goods after disapproving of the nickname they gave her.
In a post on Reddit, the woman shared that she regularly brought homemade cookies or banana bread for the people in her office.
“People seemed to appreciate it, until recently,” the woman shared. “Last week, a coworker joked that I was ‘the office mom.’ Everyone laughed, but I felt weird about it. Then another guy said, ‘You should bring snacks more often, Mom.’ “
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Stock photo of a woman making a cheesecake
The woman told them, “You can call me (my name) not mom.” They laughed at her, and someone told her not to be so “uptight.”
The comment was the straw that broke the camel’s back, so she “stopped baking. Simple as that.”
“The next Monday, one of them asked, Where are the muffins? I said, ‘Didn’t feel like being the office mom this week,'” she recalled. “It got quiet after that.”
“Now I’m being told I’m ‘making things awkward’ and ‘overreacting.’ I didn’t yell or anything. I just stopped doing free labor that suddenly came with a nickname I didn’t like. Am I overreacting for pulling back?”
People in the comments supported the woman for setting a boundary with her coworkers.
“No. Good for you. You didn’t overreact,” one person commented. “You asked nicely for the nickname to be dropped, and they decided to ignore you and not care about your feelings. Baked goods are a treat, not a right, and certainly not for anyone by passing your feelings and calling you something you’ve said you don’t like.”
Another person added in their own experience, writing, “makes all the sense in the world to me. But then I’ve also been the one bringing in baked goods. It is always interesting to me how amazingly rude people think that defending their inconsiderate actions by saying, ‘oh, come on. You are overreacting. Don’t be so uptight.’ As opposed to, ‘I apologize for being so rude,’ is going to convince the person they insulted to continue to be generous with them. They had their chance. No banana bread for them.”
Read the original article on People
