A woman named Karen had the ultimate ‘Karen moment’ and it completely backfired as she tried to sue her former employer.
In your career you will likely have a bunch of different jobs. Some of them will be great and you’ll be sad to leave and for others, you can’t get out the door fast enough.
But no matter your feelings, if you failed to get a farewell card would you kick up a fuss?
Well one British woman wasn’t having it and decided to go down the legal route.
Karen Conaghan claimed that her former company IAG – one of the world’s biggest airline companies and the parent company of British Airways, Aer Lingus and Iberia – failed to acknowledge her existence by not giving her a goodbye card.
There is a good reason Karen didn’t get this kind of goodbye (Getty Stock Image)
She claimed that failure to do this victimized her and breached equality law.
But an employment tribunal revealed there was more to the story.
The tribunal was told that managers did in fact get her a goodbye card but only three people decided to sign it. They then decided not to hand it to Conaghan as the gesture seemed more insulting, according to the judge.
Judge Kevin Palmer said: “He believed it would have been more insulting to give her the card than not to give her a card at all.”
Conaghan brought a total of 40 allegations against her former employer in her lawsuit. This included sexual harassment, victimization, and unfair dismissal, but the court dismissed every claim.
The tribunal concluded that the instances ‘either did not happen or, if they did, they were innocuous interactions in the normal course of employment,’ according to a report by The Times.
And she certainly didn’t get this leaving gesture either (Getty Stock Image)
The judge also weighed in on Conaghan’s character based on the allegations as well.
He described one of the allegations as being indicative of Conaghan’s ‘view of normal interactions being something more sinister’.
He continued to state that the former employee had exhibited ‘conspiracy theory mentality’ when it came to ‘simple, normal workplace interactions’.
The Guardian reported an alleged example of this by revealing that she had complained after a coworker asked ‘Are you taking the p*ss, Karen?’, after she claimed she was doing ‘all the hard work’.
The term is a popular rhetorical British phrase for questioning if someone is making fun of you or ‘pulling your leg’.