Employee social fund gets tense when 23-year-old fresh graduate new hire asks for evidence of costs, coworkers single her out for being "stingy" and not contributing: 'I told him I’d be happy to once I got the breakdown I’d asked for'

Brad Dickson • Managing Editor

Dec 3, 2025 12:00 PM EST

The last thing you want to do when starting at a new workplace is find a way to make all of your coworkers dislike you. Yet, fresh graduates seem to have a reputation for this by getting on the wrong side of veteran staff when they walk in the door with their new degree in hand. Being "all knowledge and no sense," sticking to finer points and technicalities rather than the most obvious path.

You know how this goes: when you have someone training you, they explain the process to you, but then show you the way that you should actually do it to be more efficient. This is how you know you have someone who knows what they're doing, but sometimes new, inexperienced workers take it upon themselves to report this type of trainer for not following the process, rather than being grateful for them sharing their secrets with them.

I like to think of these process adaptations as a sort of process "desire pathways," which are pathways that form in the grass between planned pathways where users have identified more efficient routes. You'll see these out and about on campuses and between adjacent sidewalks, where walkers and passersby have taken these alternative routes to cut corners and avoid walking the long way around. Over time, these new pathways form, and others follow them in turn, creating a snowball effect and solidifying a new pathway where grass will never grow.

But I digress. The real point here is that it's important not to make waves when joining a workplace. While it's a good rule of thumb to avoid contributing money to something you don't know anything about, the last thing you want to be doing is basically broadcasting to your coworkers that you don't trust them and their established social endeavours and processes.

One might argue that the workplace should be funding these activities; this would have been a given in years past, but in the modern workplace, employee-funded celebrations are more common than not. But having it be employer-funded would avoid this situation altogether, preventing anyone from being skeptical of costs and eliminating any cost of anyone skimming a little off the top, while being a boost to morale for relatively little cost to boot.

This out of the picture, surely there's some kind of middle ground here, some compromise that can be struck in order to appease all parties. While the poster isn't necessarily wrong in this situation, I'd be wary of rocking the boat like this with the entire office.

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_{The image is representative only and does not depict the actual subjects of the story.}
"AITA for refusing to cover a shared cost after my coworker wouldn’t show me the break of what the money had gone towards so far?"

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