Substitute LocationBot. [Given the subject matter, it didn't feel appropriate to include a joke about its whereabouts]
Employer's HR department took a call from my wife and booked all my annual leave for 2026.
Annual leave resets on 1st December each year.
I went to check it today and noticed I'd been fully booked throughout 2026.
The nature of my work is that once its booked it cannot be easily cancelled/rebooked.
I immediately spoke to my boss and then HR who have told me that my wife called in and booked the leave. I've confirmed that she did several weeks ago.
I've told my employer that I want to cancel this. But they can only cancel everything from April onwards due to organising staff rosters.
Can I get some advice? Did my employer breach GDPR by doing this?
Relevant follow-up comment from OP:
She says its to make sure we're always off on the same days and to make planning easier.
She's worried I'm going to use annual leave by myself to cheat on her. I took some annual leave by myself without telling her back in late 2024/early 2025 to play a game that came out. Just wanted some time to myself.
I've already told the police what was going on when she repeatedly attempted suicide to stop my leaving her in 2018 to 2023. Police called out and did a welfare check on her. They spoke to us separately, I told them what she had been doing. I don't know what she said to them.
Police made no arrests or followed up in any way.
I'm just sort of stuck right now and trying to make the best I can of my current situation.
A bit over 20 years ago I was in a similar relationship with my first GF. She would cut herself and threaten suicide if I didn't do what she wanted. Missed school, work, lost friends, it was rough.
At the end I snapped. Handed her a knife, said "Do it, I don't care", left and turned off my cell. She didn't do it.
I can't stomach suicidal people now. If you were actually serious and wanted to do it you wouldn't be telling me. It is performative and intended to get attention, it is childish. Just do it or don't, I don't care, I'm not going to be your emotional hostage.
I had a bloke threaten me with his own suicide if I didn't go out with him, so I said "Go on then," and I've never forgotten the shock on his face.
I never saw him again face-to-face, but I heard about him being out and about and perfectly fine. I told everyone what he'd done and I think they scared him off for me.
I feel the same way despite my best friend killing himself and finding his body which was really traumatic.
People have bodily autonomy and deserve to decide if they want to live or die. All you can do is offer help finding a professional who might actually be able to deal with their issues.
Threatening suicide is, sadly, very common in coercive relationships. People who actually intend to die don't go around telling people about it, as you can imagine!
So this isn't entirely true. People who are seriously considering suicide sometimes will talk about it - because they aren't necessarily 100% committed yet. There's a difference between talking about it and threatening it, however.
Also, sometimes they talk about it because they want help but don't know how to get it. A friend of mine died as a teenager when she tried to check herself in to hospital. She told them that she wasn't safe. They told her if she really wanted to kill herself she'd have done it already. So, she went and did it.
Investigations found against the hospital, but it didn't bring her back. She didn't want to die but knew she couldn't keep herself safe but nobody was willing to help.
A year or two ago, my older half-brother called me in a panic because our mom was angry and upset about something and threatened suicide in a very "the world will be better without me and you won't miss me at all because everyone hates me" kind of way. And I was just like, yeah man, in the 18 years you didn't live with us, she said that and worse whenever she got mad so please forgive me if I don't panic with you. She'd go into screaming crying threatening rages when I was a kid, and I'd cry and beg her not to, and I just can't cry and beg over it anymore. His experience with our mom is so incredibly different from mine, and he refuses to believe it. It's both sad and annoying.
It's also why the best recommendation is to call 911 for a well fare check. If they're serious, they'll get checked in and evaluated. If it's a control tactic, the hospitalization and psych eval is enough of an ego hit that they don't try it again. Especially when they learn they won't get what they want. They'll just get another humbling hospital visit, and still not get what they want.
ETA: My emotionally abusive ex threatened to kill himself when I left him. He didn't reckon on that sending me into Work Mode (I worked with mentally ill/TBI adults) instead of a tailspin. I drove him to the mental hospital and TDO'd him myself and then I never saw him again, by choice. He's still out there, I know because when he got out he'd call my work to breathe into the phone. That stopped after a while.
I feel the same; people who give you verbal abuse and threaten it are usually seeking attention. My aunt, who is bipolar (probably got other issues untreated), alcholic and routinely cycles between alienating and reconciling with any family member who'll entertain her is like this.
Breaks my heart, as we used to be really close, she was like a second mother to me, but as I spent more time with her (I used to love stopping over on some weeks + weekends) into my teens I would see her get drunk to the point she'd soil herself, yell abuse at my uncle and just start demanding more wine.. "I need more wine" is her routine. By the time I was 16-17 I was getting texts where she'd threaten to kill herself and had her yell at me because I snatched a wine bottle away from her when she was going off on her tangent.
We stopped talking because she had become close to my partner (who encouraged me to stay connected with her) only for her to suddenly backstab my partner, cut off contact and refuse to talk to her. Really upset her
It hasn't got any better and last I heard she'd lied to the police saying my uncle hit her (I know he wouldn't, once she got arrested for trying to stab him) and then put herself in the position as a disabled individual with nobody in the house to care for her over the week.
I miss my uncle more than anything but my aunt, I've mentally checked out with.
I'm sorry you went through that. Having to choose, your morals and ethics at war with each other, having your own sense of decency weaponized and used to violate you; that sounds hellish. I hope that is long behind you and left no lasting scars.
Yeah, I mean (secondarily to "this is an international company with 10,000+ employees") this is the bit that's particularly most mental to me!
Surely, even if you're the particularly green HR new-starter and she's a bullying bitch over the phone, you just say "Oh, okay, I'll take your dates and then confirm it with Jeff" or "ah, see, the system only lets Jeff book leave via his account, so I'll get those dates preliminarily blocked and have him officially confirm them later today." Still not great! But, I mean, better.
In most organisations where I was an admin assistant, if I wanted to book leave for my boss 1. I couldn't, he'd have to log in and do it on the HR portal himself, or 2. I'd do it via email trail to HR with him CC'd, and they'd likewise email him back to say it had been done (presumably giving him time to say "WTF, no. My secretary is a crazy participant in a bestselling-supermarket-thriller-novel-esque plan to fuck up my life. Cancel it.")
That would be my advice for OP, I'd be starting with a payphone and a list of the org tree and seeing if I could book my manager, the HR knob and the HR knobs manager some leave.
Yeah, I thought of that too! Although I guess they might have some safeguards in place -- maybe they asked the wife for some identifying information to confirm it was her, like a home address or phone number or something. Not that that would have really proved that she was who she said she was, but it'd set her apart from just some random person who happened to know the names of a bunch of employees...
But yeah, it's... not a great system. (And also apparently not how the system is supposed to work; I think it's obvious that HR fucked up here.)
Think logically about how this entire post is made up. This just didn’t happen.
An interesting and imaginative twist on the “my bitch wife did xyz and I’m massively hinting at you all to tell me to divorce her” that appears on LAUK weekly though.
This could be fake, but the whole thing is so outlandish that I'm inclined to believe it's real.
Normal people don't sit around thinking, "hey, you know what would be a crazy thing for someone to do? Book all your vacation for the whole year so you can't cheat." Because it's so crazy that a normal person wouldn't even think of it.
However, "I'm going to book all his vacation so he can't cheat" is the sort of thing an abuser would easily think of because it makes perfect sense in their skewed worldview.
Along these lines, from work I know a guy at another location from my usual worksite who has several kids with a domineering wife - the only bank account he has is shared with his wife (where I live, you basically can't exist without a bank account), he has NO payment cards because his wife doesn't allow him to have one, and thus the only money he has is the weekly cash allowance his wife gives him.
Finally if he needs more money than the allowance he has to explain it to her every time - and if all of this sounds made up, I've verified it from multiple people who've known this guy for years, because everyone boggles at it.
No company in their right mind would book in an employee’s annual leave based off a phone call with their wife. It just wouldn’t happen. Especially as the OP said it was a large company. How did the wife even get an internal HR number? Just made up nonsense
I was actually in this situation once, so it's more that I call BS on it being a large company than thinking its fake.
For me, an ex bf who worked at my same shitty ice cream store did actually rearrange my time off cuz it was more convenient for him. We were 17, and the way you submitted time off was a handwritten note shoved into a hole in the owners office for him to deal with later. Ex BF just submitted a typed note.
So couldn't see this happening in a large office based company post covid where everything is automated/electronic and tons of people are busy... but I could absolutely see it happening at a small company or a large restaurant chain type deal.
I definitely agree with you that at a large office based company post covid, they definitely have an automated system for calling out, and whoever answered the call would be more likely to just send a work instruction (easy) then acutally process the request which would take more time.
I think he knows its not normal when he said that he's only staying with her because otherwise she'll kill herself. Problem is that that's the wrong solution for when people threaten suicide.
It's absolutely not normal or healthy for either of them but it did make me wonder if he has a history of doing just that. Either way, this isn't working.
Could go either way. Had a buddy in the navy who was seeing a mostly very sweet girl who had a history of "being cheated on." She was wicked clingy while also being a drunken flirt any time they went out. We were like 21, she was young and dumb and I hope her life turned around. Anyway, he was a loyal dude who only had eyes for her at the time. He had a hard time seeing that fault in her. It took things blowing up after we came back early from an underway and he saw some undeniable signs that her worries were at least somewhat projection. Whether it was her reaction to a history of bad relationships or she had the self control of a 3 year old, I will never fully know.
Also knew a lot of sailors male and female both that would string along people with "relationships" just to have a cheap place to stay while also getting some strange at least once a week.
But all that to say, sometimes that worry isn't that the other will cheat, but that the worrier is up to no good themselves.
I just want to know how in 2025 someone could just request PTO without logging into some sort of HR/payroll portal with their work account. Not sure how something like that gets approved.
Edit: I’m learning unsavory things about the lax PII security at certain workplaces from replies to my comment. 😱 Makes one concerned about how their customer data is stored if their employee data is free for the taking.
My last job was in the bronze ages technology wise, we had an employee portal but still had to do almost everything related to pay and leave requests in person or on paper. After that, HR would type everything out and put it into the portal. It was a fucking NIGHTMARE to get anything done rapidly.
Boss checks dates against their paper calendar, forwards form to HR.
HR can't approve without knowing if you have time off, but they don't keep track of that! So the form is marked "Rec'd" and forwarded to Payroll.
Payroll checks your PTO balance the Monday after payday, approves the request, scans it, and then emails it back to HR.
HR calls your boss to double check that they haven't changed their mind about the PTO then enters your time off into the portal.
Payroll 'accepts' the vacation in the portal, deducts it from your PTO budget, and you get an automated email sometime in the next five business days.
Total time from form to final email was sometimes more than 30 days.
So no one took vacations.
No, what they did was declare that they'd be sick. You'd go to your boss, tell them that you're going to be sick on a tour of Europe the first two weeks of June, and they'd put it on their calendar.
Then, when your vacation came, all you had to do is enter it into the portal yourself. Sometime on the first day of your vacation payroll would get a simple email from your boss, saying that the sick time was to be re-coded as vacation.
They'd split payroll from accounting in the late seventies, and there was infighting between them over who did what. Then they split the departments again ten years later in the eighties, with bits of both payroll and accounting joining the recruiting department to become HR.
All four bits were still fighting over shit when I was there.
My work use a webform that has a drop-down list of all employees. Pick one, request leave, the stupid webform emails a screenshot to HR. This is only the first defect on that form.
edit: PII handling in the company is atrocious. We get company-wide emails like "Sue will be off today because she's undergoing IVF, please send requests to Jo instead", "Dave is out having gastric bypass surgery". My sick leave requests always say exactly "I was off sick yesterday".
I'd just continually pick the absolute grossest reasons for being sick until they stopped doing that.
"Osric is out sick due to painting the toilet walls brown." "Osric will not be here due to 6 foot projectile vomiting containing copious amounts of corn." "Osric will be out next week to finish burying the bodies in the woods."
HR hasn’t had enough work to do lately, clearly. This will be evidence of a need to amend some HR policy, which will justify their labor hours for at least the next 4 months that it takes to draft the new policies and procedures and pass them back and forth with legal. Legal is also in on this conspiracy, but only because ex employees have figured out the opposing counsel they hate most. My 2 cents.
I just want to know how in 2025 someone could just request PTO without logging into some sort of HR/payroll portal with their work account. Not sure how something like that gets approved.
PTO requests at my work are entirely verbal. We use a calendar in my department to keep track of people's time off. I'm the manager of a two-person team (me and my employee), if he wants time off he just has to ask me and if I want time off I usually don't have to even ask, I just notify the GM and the manager of my sister department.
I can also confirm that it's very verbal where I am too. There is a portal that we have to use. But it's so rare, we usually have to ask the manager how to even do it. And then after it's confirmed verbally, we "officially" request it online.
Not as bad as what's going on in LAUKOP's post. But not all workplaces are super streamlined or modernized. Though I think the company LAUKOP works at needs to seriously re-evaluate their policies. Because this is insane.
Yeah, nobody should be determining an employee's time off other than the employee or their manager. Certainly not their spouse. Although it sounds like LAUKOP's wife is... a problem in general. There is a now-deleted comment where LAUKOP states that they took their some leave last year by himself without telling his wife so he could play a new videogame and she yelled at him because she thought he was cheating.
Verbal where I am, too. Team of 21 people and a certain number of people are allowed off per day (it varies based on the day). They ask, I (or supervisor) approves and throw it on the calendar.
The calendar is available so people can see if there's space to take off or if they need to swap (we run 365, so we have several shifts running).
In some 10K+ organizations there is a woman named Brenda with a Sharpie marker keeping track of everyone's annual leave on a calendar the size of a parking lot.
Sounds like Civil Service to me honestly. They have this kind of holiday system that is just backwards enough to let a spouse book your holidays and not let you cancel them. (I worked for Universal Credit for 3 years, and it sucked.)
Most jobs I've worked you just talk to the manager? One had a big shared paper calendar, and one had paper forms you fill out, and then you'd let the manager know about it. Having to go through a portal for it sounds kind of obnoxious, honestly.
It sounds like you might not work hybrid or remote, but in-person. It makes sense to just talk to a manager in that case, although to cover your back and the company’s it makes sense to have all PTO/STO data logged.
The “why” is for the same reason that OOP posted. Our HR helpdesk request form includes a notice that they will not accept questions or requests from non-company email addresses or phone calls. In person by the requestor or through the portal, sure.
I haven't, no, I've mostly worked retail and food service, with some other fields here and there. But I still don't see why working remote would mean you need to use a portal instead of just... emailing your manager? Using a portal isn't inherently more secure than just refusing requests from non-company emails, like you said. It just seems like unnecessary extra steps, is all.
But I still don't see why working remote would mean you need to use a portal instead of just... emailing your manager?
The portal shows me how many days I have left and when I already planned vacation, and syncs that to my calender. For the manager the same applies if you have limits on how many people can take vacation the same time.
Also, when I am sick i just klick some buttons and do not have to send some email or worse, talk to people.
I mean, my company's portal thing does let you tick a box to remain logged in, and I've got that ticked. Anyone who can log in on my desktop or laptop could just launch the browser and put in a PTO request. I don't have access to anything other than my own info through it, so I don't see it being a major issue for anyone other than myself?
Is that... a thing your workplace is cool with? I know my employer would be alarmed if I shared my passwords with anybody else, because the whole point of those passwords is to limit access to employees only. There's a lot of confidential information I have access to, and it's not even because I'm somehow particularly privileged in my access, it's just stuff that is either a non-public business stuff or material that the business has a legal obligation to secure. They'd be pretty upset if I shared those passwords, and with good reason.
My roommate's scheduling/timesheet app isn't secured beyond his phone lock and the initial login.
My scheduling/timesheet app requires 2 factor authentication with my work phone even if I'm logging in with my password each time on my personal device.
However, all of our very important and private client notes are in word documents on our personal work laptops that we have to print out once a week and put in their paper file in the office.
A lot of people's scheduling/timesheets aren't using the same system as where privileged information is kept.
There’s ‘compliance’ and there’s ’compliance’ … Would the legal brass clutch their pearls if I said that? Probably. Would anyone on my district level give a shit that I have to have her log in to my laptop to give me phone numbers for clients from our system while I’m on the road and can’t get to them? definitely not.
Having said that, though, is this a thing you've brought up at work? I don't mean the "my wife logs into my laptop" part, but if you're on the road and you need phone numbers for clients and you can't get them, that seems like a legitimate problem and it seems like one that the company could solve... (This doesn't really matter to me, obviously, I'm just curious.)
Its not a company/accessibility thing. I don’t like to be on my phone in the physical sense while driving… so if I’m on the highway and need to call someone I call her or a a coworker to get me a number
I can press the button on the screen and I can dial in the number, but I’m not pulling up and staring at a screen to find a number while in traffic. I care about the safety of myself and everyone else on the road much more than getting a call off
Please get yourself a password manager that isn't Lastpass. It saves a lot of the issues of remembering passwords and is so much more secure than the constant password reuse. It's only a matter of time until a lazy website gets compromised and your password is out there for anyone who wants to use it. Keepass is the most common, but any of them other than lastpass are pretty similar in security.
I'm typically somebody that tries to withhold judgment from relationships because reddit likes to really go overboard sometimes, but this is like classic textbook abusive behavior. If you're at the point where the reason you give for not leaving your partner is that "they will kill themselves" then the relationship is already over, and you're just delaying the inevitable horrific breakup.
With that said though, I dunno if getting his work and HR involved in a quite messy relationship dynamic is the proper move either. Sure, you could probably raise hell and maybe get some results, but it's going to air a lot of dirty laundry and raise questions that you may not want to answer to your job.
Good news is LAOP has some EXCELLENT ammo for their future divorce if they save the documentation. Unfortunately nobody gave them advice to get this all in emails and save them.
They don't need it - England is "no fault", so they do not need to provide a reason or any evidence of anything, they just run through an online timed process.
(Sorting out assets is something else but again this would not be part of it).
Divorces over there don't get nasty with possible PFAs, harassment, stalking, and other abusive things where someone might need to prove a pattern of behaviour?
While not part of the legal divorce process, if she's going to do this kind of stuff at the mention of him leaving she'll very likely make it a part of the overall process of them getting a divorce, and therefore it is still good to document for when he does eventually go to get one. Right?
I worked for a company of 20,000 but our branch had 50. Managers could update the HR calendar in Outlook and that was all the tracking for scheduling. There used to be a form but mostly you just emailed your boss.
It got logged different on the time sheet but that was it.
I put my partners AL through for him as he’s tech illiterate and it’s done online. Obviously we’ve discussed the dates before I do this. Only time I didn’t was when I had surprise concert tickets and didn’t want him to know so I stuck a note in asking his boss to keep quiet til nearer the time of the concert. Only reason I would go behind his back mind you.
Nah, honestly, this sounds like a pretty classic social engineering case. One of the biggest weaknesses of security is people wanting to be nice. Mrs LAUKOP calls up, says she's planning the family vacations for the year and could you please book the following dates off? Maybe makes a little joke about how he might forget otherwise and that would be terrible because she's already booked their rental. HR person slept through the security training and thinks that sounds reasonable because most normal people aren't going to think about the idea of malicious vacation booking. So they put it in to be helpful.
This is really pretty much exactly the kind of thing I'd expect social engineering to work on. It sounds reasonable enough on the surface. Most people want to be helpful and don't think of how things could be used maliciously.
It would sure be nice if we lived in a world where people only do things that are some subset of moral, legal, and logical.
Ah... The dream....
I think this sounds realistic because it's stupid. With all the companies that have been caught with absolutely boneheaded policy, and working for an old and large company to see the various ways in which such a company is only working on leaving the 1990s now, there are undoubtedly a few with blatantly dumb enough bureaucracies to make this sort of thing possible that haven't been exploited hard enough to force them to pay the inertial cost to fix their shit.
Reality is often stranger than fiction because fiction must be plausible, while reality has no such constraint - And here, I can very much imagine a controlling wife managing to get what she wants out of a company whose defense against people pretending to be acting on behalf of their employee is basically "Nah, wing it, we'll know, it's fine"
How in the world does HR out in an employee's vacation dates based on requests from a spouse??
Are folks in the UK that informal?
Ehhhh so there's the requirements and then the reality.
My husband hates making appointments and always tries to get me to do it. If I call up or e-mail and say 'I need to make an appointment for my husband' they reply with 'I'm sorry but we need to speak to him' .... as they should.
I've learnt that if I write the email saying something outlandish like 'I apologise, but despite my insistence that he do it himself he keeps claiming that simple emails are too difficult for him to write and that this malady of ignorance can only be rectified by me making him an appointment to see the dentist for X day' I get a reply from some long-suffering wife saying 'Appointment is confirmed for 3 pm'.
It's not how the system's supposed to work...but I really enjoy coming up with more entertaining reasons for why he won't do it himself. (Like, my love, if you don't want me to tell the receptionist that you're practising your drama queen act and your fingers are attempting to physically retract at the idea of writing this email yourself, do it yourself.) I absolutely was never expecting it to work, for the record; I was just too damn frustrated and shot off an email expecting to get the 'sorry, we need to speak to him' reply but at least I'd've gotten a bit of entertainment into the bargain. However, husbands not doing their own life admin is apparently a tale as old as time.
Well, given that in this case (and many other cases) that threat has worked perfectly well for years, I think you might be underestimating the effect something like that can have on a person.
I imagine I am and it could be my neurodivergence.
I've also voluntarily cut off family members for being shitty people. Which has shocked friends and other family members to a level that makes me wonder if I'm socially inappropriate but not enough to want to adjust.
I'm all for cutting shitty people out of your life. But that's not the aspect of this that makes it difficult for people to leave in these specific circumstances; it's a sense of responsibility or guilt, or fear of how they will be perceived by others if the person threatening suicide goes through with it. They also often aren't in a position to evaluate their situation objectively or game out various outcomes, because they are under a great deal of stress, or they have been manipulated to a point where their thinking is impaired.
The best response for suicide threats is to call 911 on them. Every time. You’re not an expert on whether the threats are real or not.
Keep records of those and other disturbing behavior. Go back as far as you remember. Make copies of voicemails and electronic messages.
I’m sorry this has happened to you. You need a plan that will bring you peace.
(I’ve experienced similar. My heart goes out to you.)
I think the current US political climate has made a lot of people realize the need to cut certain shitty people out of their lives, family or not. Life is too short to surround yourself with hate and bigotry, even those that happen to be family.
This is less "If you leave, I will leave permanently" and more "if you leave, I will burden your conscience and probably sully your reputation with my death". I can see how that can put someone off.
They're aware this isn't a real threat. Nobody who'd actually do this would weaponize it this way - If they wanted to do it, they would be doing it or quietly figuring out how they would without having someone stop them. This is a very classic abusive/manipulative technique, and the answer is literally never to play into it.
The best possible solution is definitely to take it seriously - Do what you'd do if anyone confessed to you that they were considering suicide, and call the police, work towards getting a psychiatric hold, and so on. Nobody can be mad at you for taking it seriously, after all - And if they were the exception that proves the rule by meaning it then you've done the right thing.
But if they were using it as a threat... Few things are better against an abusive/egotistical person than taking away their power, flipping their attempt to control you into them (briefly) losing control of themselves, and embarrassing them for it. Plus, they'll learn a lesson, and stop doing that shit, which the world is certainly better off without.
The best way I've found to explain abuse tactics is it's like bowling - virtually nobody takes formal bowling lessons, we all just kind of teach ourselves through trial and error, but by the end we all end up bowling mostly the same way, because there's only so many ways to throw a bowling ball to hit the pins.
Abusers are the same way, they want control over you and they poke and prod and try different approaches until they get it right. And because human brains are mostly the same, like bowling balls, abusers organically come up with the same handful of tactics that work.
Threatening suicide works because it comes after months or years of convincing you that everything they do or feel is your fault - the old line "look what you made me do." It always starts small and exploits someone's inner goodness, no one wants their loved one to be upset, and doing this one small thing differently is not a big deal when it makes them happy. And then another thing, another thing, another thing, and before they realize it they genuinely, sincerely believe it, like: I came home from work 30 minutes late, and that made them upset, so it's my fault they're upset, so it's my fault they smashed up everything in the kitchen. And by that same logic: I want to leave because they treat me badly, but me leaving will kill them (note the grammatical shift), and since the bad treatment is my fault anyways, if I was just a better partner I wouldn't be this unhappy, so clearly I should stay and just try harder.
I suspect the threat sounds outlandish to you because we're being dumped in the deep end without that slow build up of manipulation, and in a perfectly rational world why would I ever feel guilt or responsibility for the bonkers things that go on inside your head? And you can actually see this in real life too, if you or a friend have ever had a crazy dating experience where they blow up your phone in jealousy after the second date, or demand you grovel for forgiveness for being slightly late after only two weeks in. That's somebody who wants to be incredibly controlling of you, but because you're not in that deep you still have the perspective to be like "lol fuck that," and it's a funny story you share with your friends years later instead of a nightmare.
None of this shit even has to happen at a conscious or deliberate level, it's as simple as "doing this got me what I wanted," like a cat who figures out that knocking something off the counter gets your attention. It worked on laukop, and he's not the first and he won't be the last.
He phrased it as taking leave by himself “without telling her,” which did feel sneaky, but it doesn’t justify this or abuse (and may be a symptom of trying to avoid abuse).
Edit: I’m just saying how I read that specific comment before I put it into the larger context. It doesn’t mean I think he’s wrong or that abuse is acceptable.
I felt like he could have told her, but seeing how she went around him to like that, I understand why he couldn't tell her. I don't believe she would have agreed.
It feels like his life isn't his own. I understand that marriage equals compromise, but one of them is that your spouse has some freedom of action. It doesn't feel like he has any.
He did it to play a new video game, so it wasn’t even something nefarious. She sounds like one of those partners that insists that video games aren’t an appropriate hobby for adults.
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In the comments OP says I'm past years he's booked secret vacation time to play video games. So part of me admires his wife for winning at his own game.
(Edit: I read it as 2 years originally but I think it's just one. Still.)
I don't think it was secret vacation time as such, he just booked it without specifically telling her about it. Which I get can be a bit of a hazy distinction, but I think there's a pretty big conceptual difference between "I'm doing this in secret and I don't want my wife to find out this happened" and "I'm doing this because it's a normal thing somebody might do and I didn't specifically tell my wife in advance that I'm gonna stay home and play this video game for a couple days."
I mean, in a normal relationship it would be a polite thing to let your spouse know just as an FYI, but in a normal relationship you'd also expect the spouse to react to that with nothing more than "oh, okay." But this is, of course, pretty damn far from a normal relationship...
You think that she has booked his entire allocation of annual leave is "winning at his own game" because he previously took time off of work to play games!?
I'm sorry, you "admire" a domestic abuser? Who screams at her partner for using his holiday time without consulting her, books up ALL of said holiday time in order to control his movements and threatens suicide when he tries to leave?
Taking a day off without telling your spouse ahead of time is in no way, shape, or form a “secret” that should have any impact on a relationship. I’ve taken leave spontaneously over the years to work on home projects, personal projects, relax, etc and the only reaction I’ve ever gotten from my wife is a smile and conversation about what I got done.
If something ever happened to my wife and I ended up in a relationship with someone who accused me of something nefarious upon finding out that I took a last-minute day off, I would end that relationship immediately.
Edit: I should also specify that this extends both ways. I’ve come home on occasion to find my wife there well before her day should have ended and I don’t think my mind has ever leapt to the idea that she did so to hide something from me.
Substitute LocationBot. [Given the subject matter, it didn't feel appropriate to include a joke about its whereabouts]
Relevant follow-up comment from OP:
Another relevant follow-up comment:
Christ, that’s grim.
life insurance, wait it out a year, then move out. If she tops herself you can at least dry your tears with that sweet insurance money?
Flags so red it looks like a soviet celebration.
Jeez. Op is in quite the toxic relationship. Hope they can get help. Also hope they don't have kids.
Here I was expecting some lols, but god damn that woman is crazy and op needs an exit strategy
A bit over 20 years ago I was in a similar relationship with my first GF. She would cut herself and threaten suicide if I didn't do what she wanted. Missed school, work, lost friends, it was rough.
At the end I snapped. Handed her a knife, said "Do it, I don't care", left and turned off my cell. She didn't do it.
I can't stomach suicidal people now. If you were actually serious and wanted to do it you wouldn't be telling me. It is performative and intended to get attention, it is childish. Just do it or don't, I don't care, I'm not going to be your emotional hostage.
I had a bloke threaten me with his own suicide if I didn't go out with him, so I said "Go on then," and I've never forgotten the shock on his face.
I never saw him again face-to-face, but I heard about him being out and about and perfectly fine. I told everyone what he'd done and I think they scared him off for me.
I feel the same way despite my best friend killing himself and finding his body which was really traumatic.
People have bodily autonomy and deserve to decide if they want to live or die. All you can do is offer help finding a professional who might actually be able to deal with their issues.
Threatening suicide is, sadly, very common in coercive relationships. People who actually intend to die don't go around telling people about it, as you can imagine!
So this isn't entirely true. People who are seriously considering suicide sometimes will talk about it - because they aren't necessarily 100% committed yet. There's a difference between talking about it and threatening it, however.
Also, sometimes they talk about it because they want help but don't know how to get it. A friend of mine died as a teenager when she tried to check herself in to hospital. She told them that she wasn't safe. They told her if she really wanted to kill herself she'd have done it already. So, she went and did it.
Investigations found against the hospital, but it didn't bring her back. She didn't want to die but knew she couldn't keep herself safe but nobody was willing to help.
Sometimes people who have decided to commit suicide seem happier because they’re relieved.
[deleted]
Did you get the help you need?
A year or two ago, my older half-brother called me in a panic because our mom was angry and upset about something and threatened suicide in a very "the world will be better without me and you won't miss me at all because everyone hates me" kind of way. And I was just like, yeah man, in the 18 years you didn't live with us, she said that and worse whenever she got mad so please forgive me if I don't panic with you. She'd go into screaming crying threatening rages when I was a kid, and I'd cry and beg her not to, and I just can't cry and beg over it anymore. His experience with our mom is so incredibly different from mine, and he refuses to believe it. It's both sad and annoying.
It's also why the best recommendation is to call 911 for a well fare check. If they're serious, they'll get checked in and evaluated. If it's a control tactic, the hospitalization and psych eval is enough of an ego hit that they don't try it again. Especially when they learn they won't get what they want. They'll just get another humbling hospital visit, and still not get what they want.
This is the way.
ETA: My emotionally abusive ex threatened to kill himself when I left him. He didn't reckon on that sending me into Work Mode (I worked with mentally ill/TBI adults) instead of a tailspin. I drove him to the mental hospital and TDO'd him myself and then I never saw him again, by choice. He's still out there, I know because when he got out he'd call my work to breathe into the phone. That stopped after a while.
Or, the second they get back out the hospital, they punish you for it.
I mean, abusive relationships are abusive, yes. Hopefully during that time away someone can work on getting help leaving the abusive relationship.
But the abuse is always going to happen, you can't escape it truly.
It's a bit of both (saying so and not saying so) as someone who has family members who have committed suicide 😅
I feel the same; people who give you verbal abuse and threaten it are usually seeking attention. My aunt, who is bipolar (probably got other issues untreated), alcholic and routinely cycles between alienating and reconciling with any family member who'll entertain her is like this.
Breaks my heart, as we used to be really close, she was like a second mother to me, but as I spent more time with her (I used to love stopping over on some weeks + weekends) into my teens I would see her get drunk to the point she'd soil herself, yell abuse at my uncle and just start demanding more wine.. "I need more wine" is her routine. By the time I was 16-17 I was getting texts where she'd threaten to kill herself and had her yell at me because I snatched a wine bottle away from her when she was going off on her tangent.
We stopped talking because she had become close to my partner (who encouraged me to stay connected with her) only for her to suddenly backstab my partner, cut off contact and refuse to talk to her. Really upset her
It hasn't got any better and last I heard she'd lied to the police saying my uncle hit her (I know he wouldn't, once she got arrested for trying to stab him) and then put herself in the position as a disabled individual with nobody in the house to care for her over the week.
I miss my uncle more than anything but my aunt, I've mentally checked out with.
I stayed for 2 extra years and had a lot of unwanted sex because he threatened to kill himself. Surprise surprise, when I finally left he didn't.
I'm sorry you went through that. Having to choose, your morals and ethics at war with each other, having your own sense of decency weaponized and used to violate you; that sounds hellish. I hope that is long behind you and left no lasting scars.
Yeah, sounds like OP needs /r/relationship_advice, not /r/LegalAdviceUK
A not uncommon theme in the legal advice subs, although usually it's less serious and dramatic than this one
Not a "toxic relationship". This is flat out abuse
So, I guess anyone could just call HR for that company and say they are the spouse of an employee and fuck up their whole year.
Yeah, I mean (secondarily to "this is an international company with 10,000+ employees") this is the bit that's particularly most mental to me!
Surely, even if you're the particularly green HR new-starter and she's a bullying bitch over the phone, you just say "Oh, okay, I'll take your dates and then confirm it with Jeff" or "ah, see, the system only lets Jeff book leave via his account, so I'll get those dates preliminarily blocked and have him officially confirm them later today." Still not great! But, I mean, better.
In most organisations where I was an admin assistant, if I wanted to book leave for my boss 1. I couldn't, he'd have to log in and do it on the HR portal himself, or 2. I'd do it via email trail to HR with him CC'd, and they'd likewise email him back to say it had been done (presumably giving him time to say "WTF, no. My secretary is a crazy participant in a bestselling-supermarket-thriller-novel-esque plan to fuck up my life. Cancel it.")
That would be my advice for OP, I'd be starting with a payphone and a list of the org tree and seeing if I could book my manager, the HR knob and the HR knobs manager some leave.
Yeah, I thought of that too! Although I guess they might have some safeguards in place -- maybe they asked the wife for some identifying information to confirm it was her, like a home address or phone number or something. Not that that would have really proved that she was who she said she was, but it'd set her apart from just some random person who happened to know the names of a bunch of employees...
But yeah, it's... not a great system. (And also apparently not how the system is supposed to work; I think it's obvious that HR fucked up here.)
Think logically about how this entire post is made up. This just didn’t happen.
An interesting and imaginative twist on the “my bitch wife did xyz and I’m massively hinting at you all to tell me to divorce her” that appears on LAUK weekly though.
This could be fake, but the whole thing is so outlandish that I'm inclined to believe it's real.
Normal people don't sit around thinking, "hey, you know what would be a crazy thing for someone to do? Book all your vacation for the whole year so you can't cheat." Because it's so crazy that a normal person wouldn't even think of it.
However, "I'm going to book all his vacation so he can't cheat" is the sort of thing an abuser would easily think of because it makes perfect sense in their skewed worldview.
Along these lines, from work I know a guy at another location from my usual worksite who has several kids with a domineering wife - the only bank account he has is shared with his wife (where I live, you basically can't exist without a bank account), he has NO payment cards because his wife doesn't allow him to have one, and thus the only money he has is the weekly cash allowance his wife gives him.
Finally if he needs more money than the allowance he has to explain it to her every time - and if all of this sounds made up, I've verified it from multiple people who've known this guy for years, because everyone boggles at it.
No company in their right mind would book in an employee’s annual leave based off a phone call with their wife. It just wouldn’t happen. Especially as the OP said it was a large company. How did the wife even get an internal HR number? Just made up nonsense
No company in their right mind, but plenty of companies have terrible policies and/or security, as anecdotes in this thread show.
I was actually in this situation once, so it's more that I call BS on it being a large company than thinking its fake.
For me, an ex bf who worked at my same shitty ice cream store did actually rearrange my time off cuz it was more convenient for him. We were 17, and the way you submitted time off was a handwritten note shoved into a hole in the owners office for him to deal with later. Ex BF just submitted a typed note.
So couldn't see this happening in a large office based company post covid where everything is automated/electronic and tons of people are busy... but I could absolutely see it happening at a small company or a large restaurant chain type deal.
I definitely agree with you that at a large office based company post covid, they definitely have an automated system for calling out, and whoever answered the call would be more likely to just send a work instruction (easy) then acutally process the request which would take more time.
Yeah I saw it when it went up and LAOPUK going "She booked the time so we have same time off because she thinks I'll cheat on her."
Says its like its a totally normal thing to do.
LAOPUK if you ever see this.
That is not normal. That's fucking insane.
Don't worry, half the UK has told him this in response to the original post.
I think he knows its not normal when he said that he's only staying with her because otherwise she'll kill herself. Problem is that that's the wrong solution for when people threaten suicide.
I saw that and thought it was bad enough. The info LAUKOP's added about her behaviour when he attempted to leave in the past is horrible.
Maybe normal if OP had agreed to it, a bit unconventional but not outlandish. OP's circumstances are just... argh.
The paranoia about cheating is a red flag for various reasons.
Like the possibility of it being a projection of something she did? That can get kind of ugly as they isolate you more and more
Could use some couples therapy at the very least
I think they’re past the couples therapy point, he said they’re only together because she said she’d kill herself if he left.
I'm probably being too naive but I almost feel like he think the "cheating" is having alone time. Cheating her out of commingled time or something?
But it's probably the cheating we're all thinking.
I mean in her mind, there could very well not be a distinction between those two.
It's absolutely not normal or healthy for either of them but it did make me wonder if he has a history of doing just that. Either way, this isn't working.
Could go either way. Had a buddy in the navy who was seeing a mostly very sweet girl who had a history of "being cheated on." She was wicked clingy while also being a drunken flirt any time they went out. We were like 21, she was young and dumb and I hope her life turned around. Anyway, he was a loyal dude who only had eyes for her at the time. He had a hard time seeing that fault in her. It took things blowing up after we came back early from an underway and he saw some undeniable signs that her worries were at least somewhat projection. Whether it was her reaction to a history of bad relationships or she had the self control of a 3 year old, I will never fully know.
Also knew a lot of sailors male and female both that would string along people with "relationships" just to have a cheap place to stay while also getting some strange at least once a week.
But all that to say, sometimes that worry isn't that the other will cheat, but that the worrier is up to no good themselves.
Jodie is always there for the girlfriends/wives.
I just want to know how in 2025 someone could just request PTO without logging into some sort of HR/payroll portal with their work account. Not sure how something like that gets approved.
Edit: I’m learning unsavory things about the lax PII security at certain workplaces from replies to my comment. 😱 Makes one concerned about how their customer data is stored if their employee data is free for the taking.
My last job was in the bronze ages technology wise, we had an employee portal but still had to do almost everything related to pay and leave requests in person or on paper. After that, HR would type everything out and put it into the portal. It was a fucking NIGHTMARE to get anything done rapidly.
It can get worse!
One company I worked for had a six-step system.
Total time from form to final email was sometimes more than 30 days.
So no one took vacations.
No, what they did was declare that they'd be sick. You'd go to your boss, tell them that you're going to be sick on a tour of Europe the first two weeks of June, and they'd put it on their calendar.
Then, when your vacation came, all you had to do is enter it into the portal yourself. Sometime on the first day of your vacation payroll would get a simple email from your boss, saying that the sick time was to be re-coded as vacation.
what the shit
Departmental infighting.
They'd split payroll from accounting in the late seventies, and there was infighting between them over who did what. Then they split the departments again ten years later in the eighties, with bits of both payroll and accounting joining the recruiting department to become HR.
All four bits were still fighting over shit when I was there.
You, whenever you want to take a holiday
Jesus Christ, I feel actually sick thinking about trying to navigate that.
My work use a webform that has a drop-down list of all employees. Pick one, request leave, the stupid webform emails a screenshot to HR. This is only the first defect on that form.
edit: PII handling in the company is atrocious. We get company-wide emails like "Sue will be off today because she's undergoing IVF, please send requests to Jo instead", "Dave is out having gastric bypass surgery". My sick leave requests always say exactly "I was off sick yesterday".
I'd just continually pick the absolute grossest reasons for being sick until they stopped doing that.
"Osric is out sick due to painting the toilet walls brown." "Osric will not be here due to 6 foot projectile vomiting containing copious amounts of corn." "Osric will be out next week to finish burying the bodies in the woods."
HR hasn’t had enough work to do lately, clearly. This will be evidence of a need to amend some HR policy, which will justify their labor hours for at least the next 4 months that it takes to draft the new policies and procedures and pass them back and forth with legal. Legal is also in on this conspiracy, but only because ex employees have figured out the opposing counsel they hate most. My 2 cents.
PTO requests at my work are entirely verbal. We use a calendar in my department to keep track of people's time off. I'm the manager of a two-person team (me and my employee), if he wants time off he just has to ask me and if I want time off I usually don't have to even ask, I just notify the GM and the manager of my sister department.
I can also confirm that it's very verbal where I am too. There is a portal that we have to use. But it's so rare, we usually have to ask the manager how to even do it. And then after it's confirmed verbally, we "officially" request it online.
Not as bad as what's going on in LAUKOP's post. But not all workplaces are super streamlined or modernized. Though I think the company LAUKOP works at needs to seriously re-evaluate their policies. Because this is insane.
Yeah, nobody should be determining an employee's time off other than the employee or their manager. Certainly not their spouse. Although it sounds like LAUKOP's wife is... a problem in general. There is a now-deleted comment where LAUKOP states that they took their some leave last year by himself without telling his wife so he could play a new videogame and she yelled at him because she thought he was cheating.
Verbal where I am, too. Team of 21 people and a certain number of people are allowed off per day (it varies based on the day). They ask, I (or supervisor) approves and throw it on the calendar.
The calendar is available so people can see if there's space to take off or if they need to swap (we run 365, so we have several shifts running).
Just wait until you hear how easy it is to get private health data!
In 2007, I worked for a large division of a Fortune 500 company. I had just come from an internship from a small company that had everything online.
My boss at this company kept track of our PTO on a spreadsheet on his computer. He didn’t care to do a good job keeping track.
I left that job after a year and the new job had everything online.
There's still plenty of small businesses running on paper calendars and Excel spreadsheets.
OOP said this was a company with 10,000+ employees.
In some 10K+ organizations there is a woman named Brenda with a Sharpie marker keeping track of everyone's annual leave on a calendar the size of a parking lot.
And that one time Brenda got sick was pure unadulterated chaos.
And that's how it came out that Brenda was stealing vast sums of money from the company.
Goddamnit Brenda, not again.
That's why they can't cancel the leave, it's already marked in Sharpie and they can't get it off without damaging the calendar.
That just means you are running on legacy cobol and access databases everywhere.
Sounds like Civil Service to me honestly. They have this kind of holiday system that is just backwards enough to let a spouse book your holidays and not let you cancel them. (I worked for Universal Credit for 3 years, and it sucked.)
Which is exactly why this post is clearly made up lmfao this simply would never happen.
“Hi HR, I’m Mrs LAUKOP. I’m booking in his annual leave - can you please book off x y z?”
“Sorry we can’t do that. Bye”
Use the telephone
It’s a made up story
Most jobs I've worked you just talk to the manager? One had a big shared paper calendar, and one had paper forms you fill out, and then you'd let the manager know about it. Having to go through a portal for it sounds kind of obnoxious, honestly.
Why? It's easier for me as a manager. I get an email notification they want, leave and I hit approve or deny.
(In reality I just hit approve without looking at the requests, I just trust they have worked out their workload).
It sounds like you might not work hybrid or remote, but in-person. It makes sense to just talk to a manager in that case, although to cover your back and the company’s it makes sense to have all PTO/STO data logged.
The “why” is for the same reason that OOP posted. Our HR helpdesk request form includes a notice that they will not accept questions or requests from non-company email addresses or phone calls. In person by the requestor or through the portal, sure.
I haven't, no, I've mostly worked retail and food service, with some other fields here and there. But I still don't see why working remote would mean you need to use a portal instead of just... emailing your manager? Using a portal isn't inherently more secure than just refusing requests from non-company emails, like you said. It just seems like unnecessary extra steps, is all.
The portal shows me how many days I have left and when I already planned vacation, and syncs that to my calender. For the manager the same applies if you have limits on how many people can take vacation the same time.
Also, when I am sick i just klick some buttons and do not have to send some email or worse, talk to people.
I mean, my company's portal thing does let you tick a box to remain logged in, and I've got that ticked. Anyone who can log in on my desktop or laptop could just launch the browser and put in a PTO request. I don't have access to anything other than my own info through it, so I don't see it being a major issue for anyone other than myself?
I :
- email my boss for approval. It'll always be approved.
- I send calendar notifications to my wider team.
- Update a spreadsheet I hold with my own leave allowances.
- Update a wider team spreadsheet of when people are on leave.
[deleted]
Is that... a thing your workplace is cool with? I know my employer would be alarmed if I shared my passwords with anybody else, because the whole point of those passwords is to limit access to employees only. There's a lot of confidential information I have access to, and it's not even because I'm somehow particularly privileged in my access, it's just stuff that is either a non-public business stuff or material that the business has a legal obligation to secure. They'd be pretty upset if I shared those passwords, and with good reason.
My roommate's scheduling/timesheet app isn't secured beyond his phone lock and the initial login.
My scheduling/timesheet app requires 2 factor authentication with my work phone even if I'm logging in with my password each time on my personal device.
However, all of our very important and private client notes are in word documents on our personal work laptops that we have to print out once a week and put in their paper file in the office.
A lot of people's scheduling/timesheets aren't using the same system as where privileged information is kept.
And a lot of workplaces are just really weird.
There’s ‘compliance’ and there’s ’compliance’ … Would the legal brass clutch their pearls if I said that? Probably. Would anyone on my district level give a shit that I have to have her log in to my laptop to give me phone numbers for clients from our system while I’m on the road and can’t get to them? definitely not.
Fair enough, I guess!
Having said that, though, is this a thing you've brought up at work? I don't mean the "my wife logs into my laptop" part, but if you're on the road and you need phone numbers for clients and you can't get them, that seems like a legitimate problem and it seems like one that the company could solve... (This doesn't really matter to me, obviously, I'm just curious.)
Its not a company/accessibility thing. I don’t like to be on my phone in the physical sense while driving… so if I’m on the highway and need to call someone I call her or a a coworker to get me a number
I can press the button on the screen and I can dial in the number, but I’m not pulling up and staring at a screen to find a number while in traffic. I care about the safety of myself and everyone else on the road much more than getting a call off
Well, certainly not messing with your phone when you're driving is the right move!
She knows your work passwords? That’s wild!
As a cybersecurity professional... SDJL:AKFHL:JKAHj
That is all.
I'm a software dev currently working on internal credentials management tools for the systems we're selling.
I would like to concur ASFKDO;LKFDSC;WEROJI
Thank you for your time.
Thanks for the new passphrase!
[deleted]
I work in cybersec and I just got the shivers reading this. Wow.
Yeah, if their company found out, it might be a fireable offense. Especially if they have to take any sort of annual compliance training.
Please get yourself a password manager that isn't Lastpass. It saves a lot of the issues of remembering passwords and is so much more secure than the constant password reuse. It's only a matter of time until a lazy website gets compromised and your password is out there for anyone who wants to use it. Keepass is the most common, but any of them other than lastpass are pretty similar in security.
Please stop doing this. Tons of password managers out there. At the very minimum you shouldn't be using personal passwords for work.
I'm typically somebody that tries to withhold judgment from relationships because reddit likes to really go overboard sometimes, but this is like classic textbook abusive behavior. If you're at the point where the reason you give for not leaving your partner is that "they will kill themselves" then the relationship is already over, and you're just delaying the inevitable horrific breakup.
With that said though, I dunno if getting his work and HR involved in a quite messy relationship dynamic is the proper move either. Sure, you could probably raise hell and maybe get some results, but it's going to air a lot of dirty laundry and raise questions that you may not want to answer to your job.
Good news is LAOP has some EXCELLENT ammo for their future divorce if they save the documentation. Unfortunately nobody gave them advice to get this all in emails and save them.
They don't need it - England is "no fault", so they do not need to provide a reason or any evidence of anything, they just run through an online timed process.
(Sorting out assets is something else but again this would not be part of it).
Divorces over there don't get nasty with possible PFAs, harassment, stalking, and other abusive things where someone might need to prove a pattern of behaviour?
so you might need to separately get a court order to stop that but it is nothing to do with the divorce itself.
The process was changed this way to stop abusive spouses trying to stall a divorce or putting people in a court room situation.
Once you do the online process, regardless of what the other partner thinks or wants to do - it does not matter, the process rolls on.
While not part of the legal divorce process, if she's going to do this kind of stuff at the mention of him leaving she'll very likely make it a part of the overall process of them getting a divorce, and therefore it is still good to document for when he does eventually go to get one. Right?
The funny thing is he never said OP shouldn't document that stuff, just that it's not needed for the divorce itself.
I worked for a company of 20,000 but our branch had 50. Managers could update the HR calendar in Outlook and that was all the tracking for scheduling. There used to be a form but mostly you just emailed your boss.
It got logged different on the time sheet but that was it.
I left a few months ago.
I fear OP will end up in a news story having been murdered when he tries to leave.
This sounds like a plot twist from a bad rom-com, where the spouse is the unintentional villain instead of the hero.
How in the world does HR out in an employee's vacation dates based on requests from a spouse??
Are folks in the UK that informal? "Aye Sharon, we'll put Tom off on holiday August first to the tenth, no worries, see you down the pub later."
Or did she impersonate Tom when she called in, I didn't read through all the comments to see that.
I put my partners AL through for him as he’s tech illiterate and it’s done online. Obviously we’ve discussed the dates before I do this. Only time I didn’t was when I had surprise concert tickets and didn’t want him to know so I stuck a note in asking his boss to keep quiet til nearer the time of the concert. Only reason I would go behind his back mind you.
It doesn’t. The post is fiction.
Ah OK, what's the basis for saying it's fiction?
The fact that this simply wouldn’t happen.
“Hi HR for (Company), this is Mrs LAUKOP, I want to put in all his annual leave for 2026”
HR: “sorry, what the fuck, no”
Nah, honestly, this sounds like a pretty classic social engineering case. One of the biggest weaknesses of security is people wanting to be nice. Mrs LAUKOP calls up, says she's planning the family vacations for the year and could you please book the following dates off? Maybe makes a little joke about how he might forget otherwise and that would be terrible because she's already booked their rental. HR person slept through the security training and thinks that sounds reasonable because most normal people aren't going to think about the idea of malicious vacation booking. So they put it in to be helpful.
This is really pretty much exactly the kind of thing I'd expect social engineering to work on. It sounds reasonable enough on the surface. Most people want to be helpful and don't think of how things could be used maliciously.
It would sure be nice if we lived in a world where people only do things that are some subset of moral, legal, and logical.
Ah... The dream....
I think this sounds realistic because it's stupid. With all the companies that have been caught with absolutely boneheaded policy, and working for an old and large company to see the various ways in which such a company is only working on leaving the 1990s now, there are undoubtedly a few with blatantly dumb enough bureaucracies to make this sort of thing possible that haven't been exploited hard enough to force them to pay the inertial cost to fix their shit.
Reality is often stranger than fiction because fiction must be plausible, while reality has no such constraint - And here, I can very much imagine a controlling wife managing to get what she wants out of a company whose defense against people pretending to be acting on behalf of their employee is basically "Nah, wing it, we'll know, it's fine"
Ehhhh so there's the requirements and then the reality.
My husband hates making appointments and always tries to get me to do it. If I call up or e-mail and say 'I need to make an appointment for my husband' they reply with 'I'm sorry but we need to speak to him' .... as they should.
I've learnt that if I write the email saying something outlandish like 'I apologise, but despite my insistence that he do it himself he keeps claiming that simple emails are too difficult for him to write and that this malady of ignorance can only be rectified by me making him an appointment to see the dentist for X day' I get a reply from some long-suffering wife saying 'Appointment is confirmed for 3 pm'.
It's not how the system's supposed to work...but I really enjoy coming up with more entertaining reasons for why he won't do it himself. (Like, my love, if you don't want me to tell the receptionist that you're practising your drama queen act and your fingers are attempting to physically retract at the idea of writing this email yourself, do it yourself.) I absolutely was never expecting it to work, for the record; I was just too damn frustrated and shot off an email expecting to get the 'sorry, we need to speak to him' reply but at least I'd've gotten a bit of entertainment into the bargain. However, husbands not doing their own life admin is apparently a tale as old as time.
Of all the made up LAUK posts, this one takes the biscuit.
I honestly hope you're right, because it'd mean someone isn't in that situation.
100%. Everyone’s PTO is booked via an online portal now. You’d get an email when it’s booked and when it’s approved. Do not believe it
Yeah, the most plausible explanation for how this happened (if it actually did) is that OP gave his wife the login credentials to the online portal.
Killing oneself as a threat to not leave is wild.
Like I don't want to be around you anymore and your threat is that you super won't be around me?
Well, given that in this case (and many other cases) that threat has worked perfectly well for years, I think you might be underestimating the effect something like that can have on a person.
I imagine I am and it could be my neurodivergence.
I've also voluntarily cut off family members for being shitty people. Which has shocked friends and other family members to a level that makes me wonder if I'm socially inappropriate but not enough to want to adjust.
I'm all for cutting shitty people out of your life. But that's not the aspect of this that makes it difficult for people to leave in these specific circumstances; it's a sense of responsibility or guilt, or fear of how they will be perceived by others if the person threatening suicide goes through with it. They also often aren't in a position to evaluate their situation objectively or game out various outcomes, because they are under a great deal of stress, or they have been manipulated to a point where their thinking is impaired.
The best response for suicide threats is to call 911 on them. Every time. You’re not an expert on whether the threats are real or not. Keep records of those and other disturbing behavior. Go back as far as you remember. Make copies of voicemails and electronic messages.
I’m sorry this has happened to you. You need a plan that will bring you peace.
(I’ve experienced similar. My heart goes out to you.)
I think the current US political climate has made a lot of people realize the need to cut certain shitty people out of their lives, family or not. Life is too short to surround yourself with hate and bigotry, even those that happen to be family.
I'm Canadian, and when I watch your news it makes me wonder what terrible ways I would act out in that environment.
This is less "If you leave, I will leave permanently" and more "if you leave, I will burden your conscience and probably sully your reputation with my death". I can see how that can put someone off.
Interesting, that isn't how I relate to others so it's just not something I would have considered.
This is it, surely. All those many people on LAUK advising OOP to just leave her presumably don't have consciences themselves.
Or they are aware just how rarely abusers follow through with this type of threat.
I don't have a conscience? Neat.
They're aware this isn't a real threat. Nobody who'd actually do this would weaponize it this way - If they wanted to do it, they would be doing it or quietly figuring out how they would without having someone stop them. This is a very classic abusive/manipulative technique, and the answer is literally never to play into it.
The best possible solution is definitely to take it seriously - Do what you'd do if anyone confessed to you that they were considering suicide, and call the police, work towards getting a psychiatric hold, and so on. Nobody can be mad at you for taking it seriously, after all - And if they were the exception that proves the rule by meaning it then you've done the right thing.
But if they were using it as a threat... Few things are better against an abusive/egotistical person than taking away their power, flipping their attempt to control you into them (briefly) losing control of themselves, and embarrassing them for it. Plus, they'll learn a lesson, and stop doing that shit, which the world is certainly better off without.
It's a pretty common abuse tactic
(Threating to kill yourself, ar least; i don't know how often people go through with it)
The best way I've found to explain abuse tactics is it's like bowling - virtually nobody takes formal bowling lessons, we all just kind of teach ourselves through trial and error, but by the end we all end up bowling mostly the same way, because there's only so many ways to throw a bowling ball to hit the pins.
Abusers are the same way, they want control over you and they poke and prod and try different approaches until they get it right. And because human brains are mostly the same, like bowling balls, abusers organically come up with the same handful of tactics that work.
Threatening suicide works because it comes after months or years of convincing you that everything they do or feel is your fault - the old line "look what you made me do." It always starts small and exploits someone's inner goodness, no one wants their loved one to be upset, and doing this one small thing differently is not a big deal when it makes them happy. And then another thing, another thing, another thing, and before they realize it they genuinely, sincerely believe it, like: I came home from work 30 minutes late, and that made them upset, so it's my fault they're upset, so it's my fault they smashed up everything in the kitchen. And by that same logic: I want to leave because they treat me badly, but me leaving will kill them (note the grammatical shift), and since the bad treatment is my fault anyways, if I was just a better partner I wouldn't be this unhappy, so clearly I should stay and just try harder.
I suspect the threat sounds outlandish to you because we're being dumped in the deep end without that slow build up of manipulation, and in a perfectly rational world why would I ever feel guilt or responsibility for the bonkers things that go on inside your head? And you can actually see this in real life too, if you or a friend have ever had a crazy dating experience where they blow up your phone in jealousy after the second date, or demand you grovel for forgiveness for being slightly late after only two weeks in. That's somebody who wants to be incredibly controlling of you, but because you're not in that deep you still have the perspective to be like "lol fuck that," and it's a funny story you share with your friends years later instead of a nightmare.
None of this shit even has to happen at a conscious or deliberate level, it's as simple as "doing this got me what I wanted," like a cat who figures out that knocking something off the counter gets your attention. It worked on laukop, and he's not the first and he won't be the last.
He phrased it as taking leave by himself “without telling her,” which did feel sneaky, but it doesn’t justify this or abuse (and may be a symptom of trying to avoid abuse).
Edit: I’m just saying how I read that specific comment before I put it into the larger context. It doesn’t mean I think he’s wrong or that abuse is acceptable.
Might have thought it was the only way to get time off without ‘having’ to spend it with her
I felt like he could have told her, but seeing how she went around him to like that, I understand why he couldn't tell her. I don't believe she would have agreed.
It feels like his life isn't his own. I understand that marriage equals compromise, but one of them is that your spouse has some freedom of action. It doesn't feel like he has any.
I don't blame him.
Can you really not see why someone in such an obviously abusive and controlling relationship might seek respite?
Hence the part in parentheses saying that.
He did it to play a new video game, so it wasn’t even something nefarious. She sounds like one of those partners that insists that video games aren’t an appropriate hobby for adults.
She doesn't want him doing anything that's fun for him and doesn't involve her, because she's a psycho.
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In the comments OP says I'm past years he's booked secret vacation time to play video games. So part of me admires his wife for winning at his own game.
(Edit: I read it as 2 years originally but I think it's just one. Still.)
I don't think it was secret vacation time as such, he just booked it without specifically telling her about it. Which I get can be a bit of a hazy distinction, but I think there's a pretty big conceptual difference between "I'm doing this in secret and I don't want my wife to find out this happened" and "I'm doing this because it's a normal thing somebody might do and I didn't specifically tell my wife in advance that I'm gonna stay home and play this video game for a couple days."
I mean, in a normal relationship it would be a polite thing to let your spouse know just as an FYI, but in a normal relationship you'd also expect the spouse to react to that with nothing more than "oh, okay." But this is, of course, pretty damn far from a normal relationship...
You think that she has booked his entire allocation of annual leave is "winning at his own game" because he previously took time off of work to play games!?
I'm sorry, you "admire" a domestic abuser? Who screams at her partner for using his holiday time without consulting her, books up ALL of said holiday time in order to control his movements and threatens suicide when he tries to leave?
You sound like you are just as unpleasant as the mans abusive wife.
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Screaming at your spouse and possessive behaviour begets them trying to avoid spending time with you.
Taking a day off without telling your spouse ahead of time is in no way, shape, or form a “secret” that should have any impact on a relationship. I’ve taken leave spontaneously over the years to work on home projects, personal projects, relax, etc and the only reaction I’ve ever gotten from my wife is a smile and conversation about what I got done.
If something ever happened to my wife and I ended up in a relationship with someone who accused me of something nefarious upon finding out that I took a last-minute day off, I would end that relationship immediately.
Edit: I should also specify that this extends both ways. I’ve come home on occasion to find my wife there well before her day should have ended and I don’t think my mind has ever leapt to the idea that she did so to hide something from me.