every time I want to talk to my boss about something work related I ask for a private conversation, because this is the way it should be, at least I see it that way.
I work with several forklifts and mistakenly though 2 were broken because I couldn’t start them. Because we all need the forklifts and my boss was on holiday I started looking for a mechanic within the organization, always informing the substitute boss as well.
Regular boss comes back from his holiday, asks me to come to the office, asks me point blank in front of everyone else to hear what I was thinking to do that. 2 secretaries and 3 coworkers heard the whole story.
I presented my side of the story and after a short discussion my boss a mechanic and me went to check the forklifts were the mechanic started them, so I was wrong all along.
I apologized to them both and repeated I wanted to save time, because boss was on holidays and I wanted to have all forklifts in working condition, because we all use them extensively.
If I was the boss in this situation I’d have conducted the conversation behind closed doors, not in front of the whole office. It feels like mobbing and makes it difficult to trust this person.
Is this a red flag or am I overreacting?
Yes, 100%. That’s more than a red flag. A red flag is a warning sign of a problem. That’s just a problem.
I mean, isn’t the point of a red flag to point at extant problems? In most situations I can think of, red means present danger. Yellow/orange or less bloody colors are usually the warning ones.
Sure in colloquial terms, a “red flag” doesn’t have to be a literal danger, but it still generally means “a thing to genuinely be concerned about is here”.