Workplace Nightmares·
THE PAY GAP
An anonymous poster uncovers a shocking salary gap after glimpsing a colleague's offer letter, triggering obsessive math, a growing spreadsheet, and escalating, unspoken frustration at work.
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The salary gap showed up by accident, in a bright open office, on a screen Greg had left unlocked.
"This happened two weeks ago and it has been eating me alive," the poster wrote. Greg sat directly across the aisle, their monitors facing each other. One day, Greg stepped away from his desk with a PDF open at 400% zoom. From four feet away, the poster caught a glimpse of the page, and then the page itself.
It was Greg's offer letter.
"I have never once looked at his screen on purpose," the poster said, but there it was: the number. Greg made $31,000 more than the poster.
Same title. Same team. Greg had started eight months later. And, the poster realized with fresh outrage, they had even trained Greg on several work tasks.
"I trained the man who makes thirty one thousand dollars more than me."
From there, the math started taking over everything. Meetings became a backdrop for silent calculations. The poster began converting the gap into hourly losses, into daily differences, into a number that kept getting more unbearable the longer they stared at it.
"The DIFFERENCE between us sitting in this same meeting listening to the same person talk about Q3 projections is $14.90," the poster wrote.
Then came the spreadsheet. Then another layer of obsession. The poster tracked the cumulative gap in a password-protected Google sheet called "Greg Data," adding the difference day by day instead of saying anything to a manager or trying to negotiate.
"I cannot stop doing math now," they admitted.
Greg, unfortunately for the poster's peace of mind, was not some impossible jerk or slacker. He was competent, pleasant, and friendly. He brought stroopwafel cookies. He attended the poster's birthday dinner. He even offered the poster a stroopwafel later on, which the poster accepted.
"Greg just offered me a stroopwafel. I took it. It was delicious. That makes it worse somehow."
The poster kept digging and found Greg's old job posting. The salary range covered both of them. There was no mystery there, only placement. The poster was at the bottom, Greg at the top.
"I'm just at the bottom and he's at the top," they wrote.
By the time of the post, the gap had reached $6,100 over fourteen working days. The spreadsheet kept growing. The meetings kept going. The math kept landing.
"I'll stop tracking it when I get a raise or when I lose my mind, and honestly at this point its a coin flip."