A few years ago I had a coworker who started showing up to work clearly drunk. His speech was slurred, he smelled like alcohol and sometimes he even fell asleep at his desk. I liked the guy but it got to the point where it was affecting the whole team. After weeks of debating it I finally reported him to management. They fired him the next day. I felt awful but also thought it was the right thing to do. We work with sensitive data and it just wasn’t safe or professional. Months later I ran into someone who used to be close to him. They told me he’d been struggling a lot since then and he ended up losing his apartment after getting fired. I’ve carried that with me ever since. I don’t think I did anything wrong but it still doesn’t feel good to know that my actions played a part in making someone’s life worse even if it wasn’t intentional. Last night I was playing on my pc to unwind and it hit me again how easily we can end up as the bad guy in someone else’s story while just trying to ...