Is there anything I can do to prevent my co-worker from getting herself fired?
Throwaway because I worry that people from work might find this and connect it to my main
I work at a library with two branches in the upper midwest, and I have a colleague who is flying too close to the sun. We're both women in our mid-20s.
We were hired around the same time (2ish years ago) and have been friendly. Not best friends, but eating lunch together and occasional drinks after work and coming to each other’s holiday parties, that sort of thing. She’s had some upheavals over the past six months (bad break up, moving apartments, her car dying), and two months ago got a new boyfriend. Since then, she’s been really pushing the boundaries at work, thinking no one is noticing.
She works in a cataloging, backrooms type position, and is very good at her job. She’s on the front desk maybe 4 hours a month. However, since the new bf she’s gotten really... daring? stupid? I don’t know the right word. She’s coming into work late and leaving early. She’s spending a lot of time doing online shopping. She says she’s not taking a lunchbreak so she can leave early, but I know that isn’t true a lot of days. Yesterday she asked our supervisor if she could make her position a partly remote one, working two full months out of the office each year. She claimed it was so she could work from home without distractions, but I know it’s because her boyfriend and his family are snowbirds and she wants to live with him while he’s out of town. I told her this was a really bad idea, but she did it anyway. I know she’s not interrupted basically ever. Telling your supervisor that you can’t get your work done in the office is a horrible idea in this job market, especially for positions like hers that don't come up too often (she moved states for this job). My supervisor isn’t stupid. She got told no and my friend was really mad about it and I told her again that I told her it wasn’t going to happen. But she's still mad, and I don't think she understands what she did.
And then, this morning I heard one of those conversations I wasn’t supposed to hear. I was going to get paper from the supply room, which is near my supervisor's office with a hallway, and my Supervisor (head of the branch) had her door closed. I'm pretty sure she didn't think anyone could hear. I shouldn't have listened, but I could hear a muffled angry voice. My supervisor was telling the library director (she bounces between the branches) about how my friend had proposed working remotely for months at a time, and I could tell from her voice that while she was trying to keep her temper, she was really really mad. She’s really relaxed and friendly most of the time so this was kindof concerning. The director was trying to calm her down and told her to start tracking when she arrives and leaves and to pay attention to how much work she gets done. I didn’t hear the rest because I didn’t want them to see me and so got the paper I needed and left but the director also sounded annoyed. She worries about the budget a lot, and I think she might be looking for places to cuts in the upcoming year.
I read recently that a lot of big box stores will let people get away with shoplifting a couple times while they build a case, and then bring the hammer down hard with real jail time, and I'm worried that this might be what my supervisor is going to do, playing out enough rope so that my friend can hang herself. She is planning a vacation in September and I worry that she might come back to having no job. We don’t have a union or anything and are in a right to work/at will state. I don’t want her to get fired and I’m hoping its not too late for her if she were to fix things up and go back to her old self, maybe playing it off as a temporary side effect of the bad changes that happened in her life. Is there anything I can do to be more persuasive? I’m worried she won’t believe me and that she thinks she's so essential and that her position is so critical that she'd be immune to any cuts.
Apologies for any spelling mistakes, I’m writing quickly on my lunch break.
Posted Jul 9, 2026, 7:52 PM UTC