'I find out she was in the middle of being fired': Coworker cracks friendly joke, unbeknownst to him it was during the most inconvenient moment

Elna McHilderson • Managing Editor

Jun 25, 2023 1:00 PM EDT

They say comedy is all about timing. You never really know if that's true until you experience a poorly timed joke. For example, depending on the audience's vibe, it's always time for a joke at a comedy stand up show. However, if you're at a funeral and you're asked to say a few words—again, depending on the crowd—that's usually a bad time to crack a joke. Those are pretty obvious examples of comedic timing.

A new example has come from a Reddit story. The OP truly made very very poor comedic timing while at work… Apparently, this company was going through some renovations, so they moved around the office a lot. They would be working on one side of the building, but then have to move to the other. Or they would be working on one floor, and then have to go to another. You get the picture. It happens often and fast. This time, they had just moved to a new part of the office. His coworker had a neighboring office to his and they had become friendly. They would chitchat and crack jokes with each other. One day he sees the managers in her office and she is packing up her stuff. For some reason, his first thought isn't that she is getting fired, it is that she is being asked to move to a new part of the office—because that was the norm for the company. So he popped his head into her office and cracked a sarcastic joke about the managers not liking her. He waited for a laugh, but did not get one. Then he noticed she was crying… He slinked away so ashamed of himself and he tried to find her later to apologize, but she was already gone. Read the entire cringy story below!