The Banality of Workplace Affairs
The Friday Challenge is workplace affairs. Did your cheaters get it on in the copier room? Were there lawsuits?
***
If you’re gonna cheat, do it with all the romance of Human Resource violations. Maybe it’s those flattering overhead fluorescent lights, or the glow of the copier machine. Or maybe it’s the proximity to other dim-but-willing partners — workplace affairs are incredibly common.
If I had to mine all my chump data, Schmoopie meet-cutes at the office would far outweigh adult dating sites, or paid-by-the-hour companions. Hey, they’re there! Bonding over their progress reports. Looking winsome over widgets. Why not?
And the workplace is the perfect cover.
The most virtuous excuse is “I was working late.” Your hours are unaccounted for, a mystery timetable and you might even get your own work phone and email! Far away from those prying eyes. Heck, your employer might even unknowingly finance your affair. Win win!
So, CN, tell me about the workplace affairs you discovered and any fallout. Were there depositions? Lawsuits? Firings? Or worse, promotions?
Was there more than one workplace Schmoopie? What’s the water-cooler scuttlebutt?
This is also the topic of an upcoming podcast. You can leave us a voicemail here.
TGIF!
Discover more from ChumpLady.com
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
Ha. Ex-husband was the general manager. She was his secretary.
I was probably about 6 months pregnant when the affair started.
When I asked if he was embarrassed at being such a cliche, his response was “she’s not my secretary.”
When he didn’t answer his phone, his calls were put through to her. (Ask me how I found that one out, two days after D-Day 1.) That’s close enough to being his secretary if you ask me, no matter what her job title might have been.
He eventually had to admit the affair and offer his resignation. Imagine his shock when they accepted it.
There’s a special place in hell for FWs who cheat on married spouses.
Love that they accepted his resignation.
My cheating ex and his affair partner are both teachers at a high school. They co-coached an extra curricular team for their school. Worst thing that happened to him was his affair partner getting to coach their team instead of him. Administration told them to stay apart and such, but the others in their cohort (Fellow teachers- all people I met and knew) helped them “Hang out” at work. I do not know any more of the fallout of their affair after that since I washed my hands of that circus.
I caught my then-disabled son’s second grade teacher guiding him around by the hood of his jacket like a dog. It solved the mystery of why I sent a pacifist marshmallow to school one day and got back a kicking, biting street fighter in less than two weeks. I called her on it and the look of utter disdain on her craggy, ravaged, Martha Stewart-wannabe face was… wow.
After talking with a special education attorney friend, I explained the situation to another close friend whose ancestors basically founded the township and who knows where all the skeletons are buried. She told me that, at age sixteen, this teacher had an affair with her own married, middle aged English teacher in the very same school system. The FW left his wife and children, moved the teenage schmoops right into his family home and then sponsored her BA in secondary ed. They taught side by side at the school for twenty years until he retired.
The fact that the whole district turned blind eyes to this sh*tshow turned out to be a dark foreshadowing for how the community would respond to headline news that the school had harbored a credibly alleged child molester on staff for more than a decade: everyone buried their heads in the sand and some even reflexively defended the predator. Nothing changed in the school’s staff vetting process.
Meanwhile just the clues about how this district treated disabled students was enough for us and this friend and I yanked all our respective kids out of the system a few weeks before the child molestation scandal even hit the papers.
Anyway, when I think of that look of disdain on that teacher’s ugly mug, I now interpret it as, “Look, I s*cked wrinkled old d*ck as a child. Why’s your kid so special that he gets to pass through childhood without scars and trauma?”
I also learned that one of the factors that allowed child predators to burrow into the school (another was outed in the wake of this news) was all the extramarital rumpy pumpy going on among staff members. I had to conclude that environments like that are the perfect hiding place for child abusers since everyone’s operating on a secret-guarding system due to “MAD” dynamics (mutually assured destruction). So I suspect that where you find the one, you will certainly find the other.
I hate this so much, Obviously, at the age of 16, this teacher had been a victim herself. However, instead of protecting her and punishing her abuser, they basically rewarded her for staying captor-bonded and harming other vulnerable people (like your son). How many other kids (including other underage girls) did this man victimize while she looked the other way (in addition to committing abuse herself)? One can only guess, I think. Almost makes me lose faith in humanity (thankfully, I still believe that better people exist).
damn that was a look under a particularly slimy rock
That’s atrocious! I am glad you pulled your kids out.
Ex-Mrs LFTT and her AP affair V1.0 (he was married but she wasn’t) was a workplace affair that occurred before I met her. Their workplace found out and shut it down ….. but Cheaters will always find a way to cheat some more.
I married her not knowing that she’d ever been involved with a married man and she never mentioned him once during 25 years of marriage.
Ex-Mrs LFTT and her AP V2.0 Redux/The Director’s Cut (same AP, but now she was married to me and he was by then twice divorced with – allegedly – a girlfriend) happened after she reached out to him via Social Media (such a cliché) and started meeting up with him when she was supposed to be going to Choir Practise (more cliches).
The rest is history.
I guess he was always “the one” and that I was the placeholder as far as she was concerned, and that the kids were just collateral damage on her path to the happiness that she believes that she was entitled to.
He is welcome to her, because she is a terrible person.
LFTT
My 4 children were just collateral damage as well. Very sad.
They are all cliches. FW helped hire a woman to a small online education company. She was junior to him… of course. Within a few months they were taking “business trips together”… he never had business trips for this company before. He was suddenly leaving after dinner and needing to be over her house to make “international calls late in the evening.” In the end, I figured it out (just a few months into their affair). And it turned out he had already been fired from the company and was given a few weeks to tie up loose ends. I contacted his bosses (the whole place was only about 12 people in a fancy office in a high rise). The next morning AP and FW had to sign with the corporate attorneys that they wouldn’t sue over anything. Oh yes… and AP also served as HR (no shock there). FW had targeted a semi single mom (she was separated from her husband… a German citizen who moved back to Germany.) I got to read their boring emails and texts. Such romance as AP: “I got my nails done” and FW’s “I see.” (This in the middle of a conference room meeting with everyone from the company). Their s*exy talk was mostly “your back”… “you’re so tall.” I guess that’s what happens when FWs write their own scripts lol
Yes, he had numerous work- related betrayal objects, though he also had numerous that had no relationship to work, but still handy, easily available (key attractants). A number of betrayal objects he first encountered at work were also married, though certainly not all. Handy and available were always key. He knew some of their spouses/partners. Some were single/divorced and sought out married men for the ease and lack of any need to pretend they were anything other than transactions. His workplaces were uninterested in his personal life at the time. He used the corporate credit card to purchase their time and favors, and then the family card/cash when that wasn’t enough to cover the encounter. This was a decades-long set of behaviors, all over North America. Later, a few managers told me they had concerns, but stood down. They didn’t want to cause a fuss, they said, and as he was a (a Midwest born and raised) minority, they feared it might be seen as discrimination, even though in his industry he wasn’t a minority. There were no lawsuits, though I wondered later on about his being terminated from one employer and his departure from another…I found out later there were concerns that weren’t acted on. He typically stretched out work trips, ripping off an employer to cheat, taking long road trips, extra hotel nights, bats and restaurants, boat rides, etc. (Loved taking betrayal objects to eat lobster in Maine )Things like movies, entertainment, shopping, liquor stores were not typically on the corporate card. I spent decades on the road for work, all over US and Canada. Never cheated. Never had time. If I had a few unscheduled hours, I would sleep, take a long bath or give myself a facial mask and read . How different!
My cheater and his mistress work for the federal government (think labor law) in cities 2000 miles apart – he in the midwest and she on the west coast. They met and f*cked at a seminar. Part 2 of the seminar was a month later – he went days after I had back surgery despite me begging him to skip the seminar to take care of our 4 children and the house. He refused and I, of course, had no idea of the affair. I discovered the affair 11 months after it started. I found substantial proof that they used work resources to conduct the affair and spent hundreds, now thousands, of hours texting, calling, and hooking up on “business trips”. The mistress even stalked me using government time and her government phone (but that’s a whole other story). She filed for divorce 4 months after the affair started, thinking my ex was going to leave his family for her. I reported her to the Inspector General for using work resources to stalk me and sent hundreds of pages of proof of the affair and the stalking. No action was ever taken. Instead, they both received multiple promotions and the cheater is now running the entire region of his federal agency and she is second in line in her region. I left a long time ago and they are still engaged in their long distance affair, no doubt still cheating the federal government on work time and resources.
As a taxpayer, I am so mad!
Right?? It’s just another slap on the face.
Mine was director of a large London office. First he shagged a colleague on a Berlin work trip, then kept going to the Colchester office for ‘meetings’. He then started early morning shagging one from his own office, on the board room table. Apparently at the Christmas party he shared one in the eve, and the other later. The latter ended up getting pregnant, when I was newly pregnant too. I lost my baby from the stress probably. She ended up aborting. What a mess these losers create.
My friend and I used to joke that my husband and his work ho must have been plotting to take over TSA or whatever career ambitions their middle aged minds could stir up. She had got some award from DC and he loved the little power trip from his management position. She filed for divorce as soon as ours was finalized. Karma bus hit her hard. About 6 months after her divorce was finalized, my Ex unexpectedly died. Best revenge is living well. I’ve retired early and she’s 11 years older than me and probably still at her daily job of reviewing Excel spreadsheets.
Yep. My FW’s affair was with his boss.
We lived a couple of hours drive from his office and his company would pay for up to three nights a week to stay in a hotel to reduce travel. Chumpy old me thought those nights staying over was to reduce his stress. I actually encouraged him to stay over two nights every week because I was worried about him driving tired, FFS!
This staged the perfect setting for an affair of course and is why he got away with it for so long. I didn’t think to question what he was doing those nights away. Took 1.5 years for me to find out.
Apparently they bonded over how impressive each were at their jobs. Classic ego-massaging (and no, they’re not heart surgeons or human rights lawyers, just bog-standard office workers!). She’s a borderline alcoholic (FW’s words, not mine) with a cocaine habit, who likes to get very messy on a night out. But she’s “good fun”. According to her ex-husband, she’s also a classic narcissist who emptied their kids’ university savings accounts to pay for a boob job.
I’d have loved nothing more than to destroy their careers, but no/less income for him would mean no/less child maintenance for me and my children, so that wasn’t an option. Turns out their company knew anyway. All the usual office gossip about them and some staff even raising complaints to HR. But nothing happened. The company obviously didn’t give a sh*t as long as the work was getting done.
She’s now progressed to a bigger and better job at a different company. I sometimes wonder if FW is worried about her new office “friendships”. I mean, surely you would be?!
Not sure about actual coworkers being shmoopies, but I know for sure that eX used the work- trip resort hotels as “meet, greet, dinner date and then fucque” locations for the prostitutes he ordered up on the dial- a – fuque websites. I guess these websites are like door dash but for “buy a woman’s body for the hour”. Honestly, I think he resorted to this because he could find no coworkers who would actually want to schtuppp with him.
Yes my ex started an affair with a woman on a more junior role in his office that started an eight year double life affair. I spoke to her a few times after dday – he dumped her as well for a new workplace affair at the same time as my dday – and even though she felt he singled her out for special attention from the first day he met her, and was probably similarly grooming other victims, he was in such a powerful role that she believed he was untouchable and never brought any hr action against him to my knowlege. She quit and gave up her career to avoid having to be around him. The karma bus knocked him down a bit when he was voluntold to retire a few months later, so word may have gotten around, but there was no formal outting of his sexual harassment.
My ex was the welding foreman for a crew, she was a crew member on another crew (same company). She flattered him and said talked about how much she could learn from a boss like him and that she would love to be on his crew. Well shortly after D-day, she was suddenly on his crew (there were openings because he other male crew member lost respect for him once they found out what he did). So now he’s her boss, and all his old crew members left, both his old foremen called me saying they cant believe it. So now they travel, work and live together fulltime and I hope they spend every miserable second of it together forever. Could I have called and told his HR person (that loved me) about the affair…yes, but then I would be ‘that’ ex wife. I would rather them discover how miserable it is on their own. But yeah, proximity and flattery was all it took, he wasnt around any other women, but the 1 time he was…
Cheaty McLiarface was the boss. He always had female favorites, infatuations, and eventually a work wife. If an employee complained they were dismissed. After all, he was the boss and entitled to show favoritism.
He found his affair a block away working at a public business. But Cheaty had boundaries. She wasn’t an employee and if he never touched her, she was just a really good friend… for eight years… that I know of.
Oh yes! My #2 cheater was under HR review when I dragged out a confession after a long talk. He was having sex in empty patient rooms (. Maintainance guy with keys)with a cafeteria gal who made his eggs just right. I called his boss and they ended up transferring her and letting my now- ex take a one day off penalty. it was a double standard and I actually felt sorry for the lady because sex with my husband with ED and pill support, was likely a HUGE disappointment. It was the end of our marriage right there and also.the Tip of the iceberg.
FW was a physician in his early 60s who had an affair with one of the much-younger married nurses. He said, “We bonded over taking care of sick patients.”
So, you see, they weren’t just sleeping together; they were healing the sick together, which is a strange euphemism for sex. Their love was forged in service of the sick. Guess he thought it was almost holy. #Jesuscheater #cliché.
Of course, being a physician, he had the perfect excuse to go into work early, late, and at odd hours. I felt bad for him–the poor, suffering doctor. I would often get up early so that I could make the coffee and/or his breakfast to speed him along his way to “heal the sick.” Or at the other end, I would hold dinner for him, sometimes waiting until after 9pm. I still kick myself for missing the signs, but I was just an unsuspecting, trusting spouse.
Also, not one to accept blame, he blamed the AP for flirting with him. He was the victim of a temptress. He was powerless…for 3 years.
No doubt he threw other excuses at the fridge, including that our marriage was basically over. I think he didn’t bother trying that excuse on me because we’d just done our financial plan, had a fairly robust sex life, and were talking about retiring to our newly renovated lake house. The lie was too big even for him, which is saying a lot. But I bet he tried it on others.
By the way, when I asked him how it felt to be a cliché [I mean, doctor/nurse affair!], he blurted out that he wasn’t one. Self-awareness was never his strong suit.
P.S. We were married 35 years. They got married one year after he disclosed the affair, saying he thought “he’d be happier with her.” He also said that he still loved me: “I think you can love two people at once.” Lying and betraying is a heckuva way to show love. 🤦🏻♀️
Oh, and yup, married 34 years, and he wanted to stay married to me and keep his “girlfriends,” plural, who were really strippers he was paying huge sums of money to. Smart enough to make it thru medical school, but such an idiot in so many other ways.
Mine is also a doctor. He also used the famously long doctors’ hours as a cover, and I didn’t see it. I worried over his long, stress-filled hours too and tried to be as supportive of him as I could. I even suggested him cutting back his hours. Some of his partners, women with young children, did that. Oh no, he said selflessly, there are sick patients to take care of. Yeesh.
At the place I worked almost 30 years ago, we all received an email across the company saying, “As of this morning, Mitch and Tammy no longer work here. If you need assistance…blah, blah, blah.” Apparently the vice president and head of HR got caught in the company fitness room. They were both married.
Yep my cheater had a workplace affair that SO should’ve had him fired, but he got away with it and is still working for the same organization in the same senior position. 😡
His AP was a young single mom who was recently divorced (and her friendship with my ex began when she relied on HIS emotional support through her divorce – all kinds of wrong with that). She was a local in the developing part of the world we were living in, and was engaged to someone else and then married the whole length of the affair with my husband. There were serious power imbalances, which my ex found delightful I’m sure.
He completely manipulated things so that she was his underling. When he was asked to head up a huge new pilot project, he asked her to quit her job and be his project manager. Her doing so meant she was entirely in his grip.
Mostly I didn’t think anything of their long hours on video calls together (we both worked from home) or their frequent travels together, because a) I trusted him completely, and b) I thought she was unattractive. She lived at a distance and they mostly worked together from a distance.
But then when I agreed to host her overnight – twice! – my skin crawled because they were inappropriately close and I felt like a 3rd wheel in my own home. Still, I stuffed my suspicions down…he would *never* be unfaithful!
My D Day #1 was on a Saturday when he claimed to have a “work meeting”, but not in our home office. In our bedroom!
I didn’t leave until after D Day #2 more than 1 year later. At first I honored his request to keep our separation and the reason for it from our organization leaders. After all, it was my livelihood, too, at stake. But I soon grew tired of his clear avoidance of all consequences and gave an ultimatum that he tell his boss or I would.
At that point HR got involved, and they met with him a couple of times and me only once. Imho HR totally dropped the ball, and soon let him resume his work as normal. They didn’t care about me, about the AP’s chump, about the clear abuse of power in the 3+ year affair. They only cared about keeping the scandal hidden to protect the organization’s reputation. “Nothing to see here, folks.”
The minute I could, I resigned from the toxic organization. Good riddance!
I could write so much about my experience with this, but just one part of the story will suffice. My FW was doing at least two other coworkers and I suspect another in her school district. Post divorce I met a friend of my brother who worked in the district office where my EX was employed as a Second Grade teacher. She relayed to me that FW was a Jonah there and was frequently reassigned because principals and other teachers didn’t want to work with her. But they kept renewing her contract because she was highly contentious and they knew it would result in an expensive lawsuit. We now have two adult sons and three grandchildren between us, but I stay as No Contact as possible. I remarried four years post D-Day to another chump who also had a work FW. We are loving our retirement in NorCal wine country, both FW FREE!
Over the years my ex had subordinate women who would look at him with adoring admiration but would not look me in the eye whenever I met them at social functions. I trusted him 100% so it is only in retrospect that I think something must have been going on.
Fast forward to more recent times and he started a new job working for a woman who was married with small children. She was in awe of him (as most people were) and the narcissist in him loved that he could teach her things about management she didn’t know. Frankly he talked about her like she was dumb and inexperienced—he loved being in a position of authority, and it must have been gratifying to have that even with his boss.
At home he was texting his boss nonstop and whenever I asked about it, he insisted he had to do whatever it took to succeed in his new job. He wouldn’t allow me to see what they were texting because they worked on classified projects. He “worked” on the company’s days off, came home late, etc. I found out later that he would drop his phone off in the office and then drive off with her. That way if I ever checked his location it would show him at work. If I couldn’t reach him all day, he would say he was working in a SCIF (a location where cell phones are not allowed). His building was secure so there was no way for me to ever show up to see him. The only time he ever took me to the office was when his boss was out of town. To this day I have never met her. My kids did when they went to “Take Your Daughters To Work Day.” I had no job because we moved so often for his career and my role was to support him and raise the kids. Yet he talked glowingly about his boss and how she was a great role model to the kids because she had a successful career. It was a slap in my face after all that I had sacrificed.
When I found out about the affair my ex said he couldn’t tell me about it because he—get this— couldn’t trust me! He thought I would report him and make him lose his job. I never did because it was not in my financial interest for him to get fired. A year or two after our divorce they both left that company at the same time. I suspect someone found out what they were up to. He blew up his career all on his own.
He owned a restaurant/bar. Perfect excuse to be out late. He loved to sleep with his employees. He even had a secret child with one.