Workplace Nightmares·
DIABETES ON THE CLOCK
A tense office dispute unfolds as a diabetic coworker's needs clash with management's fears and a growing workload, testing fairness, boundaries, and who bears the consequences.
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By 10 a.m., one coworker was already making her shift spill over onto everyone else's.
She had been hired about six months earlier and came in with a straightforward request: she was diabetic and needed accommodation. That meant frequent bathroom breaks, plus time off for doctors' appointments. The poster says the manager agreed, and on paper, that was that.
In practice, it turned into a daily problem.
The poster says the coworker spent two to three hours of an eight-hour shift in the bathroom. Work piled up. Deadlines slipped. When the tasks didn't get done, they landed on the poster's desk instead, adding to an already heavy workload and sometimes pushing them into overtime.
They complained to their boss. His response, the poster says, was fear. He worried about lawsuits and would only tell the coworker, "don't let it happen again."
Meanwhile, the coworker kept showing up with the same pattern. According to the poster, she regularly ate foods they believed she should not be eating as a diabetic: McDonald's, Wendy's, donuts, and Starbucks Frappuccinos. Then came the aftermath. She would get nauseous or unwell, disappear into the bathroom for 30 minutes or more, or leave work altogether because of diabetes.
The poster says the repeated cycle made the situation harder to swallow. They drew a sharp comparison to their own chronic illness, saying they avoid foods that trigger flare-ups and still come to work even when they feel bad. The implication was simple: this coworker knew what set her off, ate it anyway, and left everyone else to deal with the fallout.
At first, the poster says, there was sympathy. But that wore thin.
The coworker, they said, even seemed to know exactly what she was doing. The poster quoted the attitude as: "hehe I shouldn't be eating this but I can't help myself," followed by, "it's my own damn fault I'm feeling like shit."
That was the part that stuck.
The poster ended by saying they no longer saw it as a one-off or an unfortunate condition. In their view, the coworker was not helping herself, kept triggering her own problems, and was turning those problems into everyone else's workload. The line they left it on was blunt: "this woman does NOTHING to help herself and makes it everyone else's problem."