A woman was left in disbelief after her workplace told her to tone down her Halloween cheer due to her spooky brooch leaving a colleague terrified. The woman, who said she often wears brooches to work, decided to upgrade for the Halloween season with a sparkly rhinestone spider accessory.
But a few hours into her shift, she was asked by her manager if she could remove the brooch - because it was causing "distress" to a co-worker who has a phobia of spiders. She explained that she doesn't know who the complaint came from, but insisted she had never heard of any of her colleagues suffering from arachnophobia before she wore the brooch, the Mirror reports.
In a post on Mumsnet, she said: "I quite often wear brooches and yesterday wore a new one to work. It is from Zara and is a reasonably large sparkly rhinestone spider, which I had pinned to a black jumper.
"Mid-morning my line manager approached and asked if I would be prepared to take the brooch off as a colleague had said that they have a phobia and was finding it distressing. I took it off my jumper and put it on my coat, which I didn't wear again until I left for the day."
She added: "The complaint will have come from one of three people, based on who saw me yesterday morning. I'm not going to go digging to find out who it was, and I don't want to cause anyone distress (which is the word that was used) but I've worked with all three of them for several years and this severe phobia has never come up before. I don't want to be a d**k but equally I really like my brooch."
Commenters on the post were split over whether the woman should stop wearing her brooch, as while some said her co-worker was being "ridiculous", others sympathised with their phobia.
One person said: "It's a brooch, not a pet tarantula. They are being ridiculous." While another added: "Fear of real spiders is one thing, fear of a piece of jewellery is quite another."
But someone else disagreed, as they wrote: "If someone has a real phobia of spiders, it's not inconceivable that they can't even mention the word. There are varying degrees of arachnophobia, and some people can't tolerate seeing the word spider written down or seeing images (not just photos).
"A phobia is an irrational fear of something, so just because it doesn't make sense to you, doesn't make it any less traumatic for them."
And a fourth stated: "My colleague has a spider phobia. There is no way she could have spent the day looking at that brooch. Just knowing it was there would have been enough. Phobias aren't rational and go way beyond just not liking them."
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