Having a baby is already an incredibly personal milestone that some expectant parents don’t even share with their closest friends and family members for a while.
So how would you feel if a coworker who worked in another state (and you weren’t even that close with) started acting super invasive about your pregnancy and even tried to secretly schedule an ultrasound to find out your child’s gender?
That’s the bizarre situation this 31-year-old woman has found herself in. And now, she’s considering going to her company’s HR department about it.
For some background, she’s currently six months pregnant and works for a big company. Even so, her team is quite small, consisting of just herself, her manager, and three other colleagues.
One of those colleagues is a 35-year-old named Amanda, who’s sort of new on her team. Apparently, Amanda has been working for the overall company for more than 10 years, but she only joined her specific team around six months ago.
“While we are on the same team, we work in different cities, so we mostly communicate through calls, chats, emails, and online meetings,” she detailed.
“My role does not require me to travel, but Amanda does come to my city about once a month or once every two months.”
Anyway, she claims that she and her husband are generally more private people. That, coupled with the fact that her pregnancy is considered “high risk,” is why they decided not to share the news that they were starting a family right away.
However, that became more difficult once her belly started to show. And one day, a colleague’s remark about her baby bump in the office led Amanda to learn she was pregnant during a virtual team meeting.
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Initially, Amanda was actually pretty upset that she was the last person on their team to find out. And at the time, she just tried to explain how she and her husband weren’t telling people, and the only people who really found out about her pregnancy were those who saw her bump in person.
Well, following that conversation, Amanda proceeded to talk about her own struggles getting pregnant over the next few weeks. Her coworker started sharing everything from information about her appointments and treatments to her partner’s lack of interest in the process. Plus, Amanda even admitted to being “jealous” of her becoming a mother.
“I felt bad for Amanda, gave her some links to programs our company offers that deal with family planning, and I told her to keep her head up,” she recalled.
“I didn’t ask a lot of questions, but I tried to offer support when she brought these topics up.”
This all led to a very strange phone conversation last week. One day, Amanda called to ask if she knew her baby’s gender yet, and she lied, saying she didn’t.
She didn’t lie out of malice, though. Instead, she and her husband are simply planning to do a joint gender reveal and baby shower soon, and she doesn’t want to “slip up” and give the gender away if she accidentally uses a pronoun in a sentence about her child. That’s why she’s just been telling everyone she doesn’t know the gender yet.
Regardless, once Amanda thought she didn’t know, she proposed a weird plan. Her coworker said they should each take a half-day at work and offered to visit her city. Then, Amanda claimed she’d “cut her a check” for a 3-D ultrasound so they could find out the gender together.
She was totally caught off guard and tried to tell Amanda no by saying, “Oh, that’s too much. Thank you, though.” Nonetheless, her coworker wouldn’t stop insisting. It turned out that Amanda wanted to “spoil” her unborn baby if she couldn’t have her own.
“I told her politely yet firmly that it was not necessary. Ultrasounds are expensive, and my husband would be accompanying me to any and all of my appointments,” she stated.
“We have everything set up with our OB, and we didn’t want to go to a third-party out-of-network for additional screenings.”
Afterward, she believed Amanda understood her perspective as well. But unfortunately, she was completely wrong.
That’s because over the weekend, she received an alarming call from her manager. She immediately noticed how his tone was off, and it took him a little while to reveal what was wrong.
“I didn’t want to ruin your weekend, and I wanted some time to sit on this and think. But I need to tell you something about Amanda,” he said.
She discovered that following their conversation about the ultrasound, Amanda had called her manager and attempted to obtain her personal information. This included her doctor’s name and her address. Her coworker also admitted to calling around for ultrasound availability and wanted her information so the appointment to find out her baby’s gender could be made close to where she lives!
Amanda told her manager about their conversation, too, and stated that, even though she’d said no already, the appointment was “important” to her.
During the call, her manager (thankfully) made it clear that he couldn’t provide her personal information. Still, Amanda kept begging him for 20 whole minutes, and he was forced to bring up company policies.
“He told me that it made him extremely uncomfortable. He said it reminded him of an old movie called ‘The Hand that Rocks the Cradle,’ and that Amanda seems obsessed,” she shared.
In fact, her manager was so put off that he even offered to write a statement regarding his discussion with Amanda if she chose to report the situation to HR.
This has left her torn over what to do. On the one hand, Amanda has always had a bit of an overbearing temperament, yet it’s never gotten this bad. So, she’s not sure if this behavior aligns with her coworker’s personality, and she’s just “taking it the wrong way.”
“I don’t want to cause a ruckus at work, and since we are such a small team, I feel like it will impact our dynamic quite a bit,” she vented.
“Amanda also works in a completely different state, so I don’t know how ‘real’ a threat she could potentially be.”
Regardless, the comments about her pregnancy and the attempt to get her personal information have understandably made her nervous. Now, she’s wondering whether to report Amanda’s intrusion to HR and, if so, how they could even help.
Do you agree with her manager that Amanda seems inappropriately invested in her pregnancy? If you were in her shoes, would you speak to HR about this?
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By Katharina Buczek
Katharina Buczek graduated from Stony Brook University with a degree in Journalism and a minor in Digital Arts. Specializing in... More about Katharina Buczek
