AITAH for embarrassing my coworker after he nearly ruined a campaign for our client by (nearly) sending a bazillion emails to completely wrong people?
As a preface, I (M31) am currently employed at a small marketing consulting agency. There’s only a couple of us in total yet almost every day of the week belies a subtle battle of personalities beneath the surface. Sometimes I think the boss man is too lax when he’s considering new hires, because I swear that one recent one in particular (here half a year) got the job on a combo of recommendation plus charismatic personality, which is important in this line of work, but it can be a detriment when they use charisma to downplay their mistakes = leading up to refusal to learn.
Enter Jake (M40) our paradoxically older junior. Jake is one of those people who thinks confidence and drip can substitute for actually checking his work. Type a fella who’s constantly saying ‘bro trust me it’s fine, it’s gonna work’ but dispersing responsibility when times to actually own up to your actions. We have clear protocol in other words but he thinks he knows better.
Today my manager put me and Jake on working the same client account because a big campaign would be launching soon and all had to be in order. We were building outreach for a cybersecurity client, very specific targeting because of strict compliance. Now, we use a pretty standard stack (Sales Navigator and Expandi to automate the sending and sequencing for the required volume on the Linkedin side)... It’s something you learn to use in the first max 2 weeks in our agency. To Jake’s credit though, we did recently experiment with a lot of different - and differing* - apps and it was easy to get all confused about what’s being used, and how. But that’s why you ask, my brother, and that’s why you learn and don’t just DO IT as fast as possible because you think you’re on top of everything. And possess experience you don’t.
I feel a ramble oncoming but suffice it to say here that if you’ve ever done this kind of work, you might have an inkling of how the wrong filter can completely nuke a campaign.
To cut to the moment of shit going down insane like, I reviewed the campaign drafts before the actual launch and I notice the audience size is WAY too big, like absurdly big for what’s a focused targeted and pressure based campaign. I dug through the filters and realize Jake had accidentally removed a bunch of important filters, including, added a shitload of new ones - his reasoning being that I told him to find any high value prospects sorted by fields that we weren’t able to scrape already or cross-reference. He somehow messed up this simple task, something you learn in your first week in this position. Sigh….. Meaning we were about to send hundreds of connection requests and burn through our whole outreach list simultaneously, and probably end up getting our accounts all flagged for spam in the process. To make matters worse at least several dozen people we have working relationships with were on this list and were NOT crossreferenced, as I wanted Jake to do and he did not, in fact, do.
I think of myself as a laid back guy, and I would be able to overlook and brush aside anything of this sort, usually. In the end it was just an awful WHAT IF situation in the end.
But I couldn't let it slide because of one single thing I knew already about Jake, and that's the simple fact he was a stoner. Essentially yeah... he likes to smoke, in big copious quantities on his days off, something a mutual friend of ours told me (and insinuated it wasn't just his days off either). We discussed this in private, how it’s all cool but DON’T bring it to work or be under the influence on the job. Other than that I don’t care.
I have nothing to back it up, except the way this stupid mistake slipped through but I’m POSITIVE he was high as a kite when he screwed up. WE have about 45 min for lunch and a bit of rest around 4 to 5PM so it must have been then. That’s the assumption I went with.
I turned into rage incarnate in that instant n called him a stupid good for nothing, irresponsible blitzed out stoner of a man who only got this job on recommendation and that he was a complete embarrassment for someone who’s in his 40s but still behaving like a teen. That the company basically took pity on him but he’s behaving like we all owe him a favor for basking in his presence. Called him many other ad hominem things just because I just don’t like him, but that unprofessionalism of his is what got me into this fit.
When I was done, Jake just went from flushed to staring at me all dumbfounded. Didn’t even try denying anything, just pure unadulterated awkwardness. His shift was pretty much over so this sent him packing. A couple coworkers told me I was right and that he’s been screwing things up for months, but another said I embarrassed him unnecessarily and should’ve just reported it to our (admittedly too lax) boss man and let him sort it out since he was the one who took him up… so let him deal with this mess.
Still I can't help but feel ashamed for my particular choice of words, that I just flung at him in rage, and I feel like this could have been handled much more professionally from my end. With a bit more grace at least.
AITAH here?