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Imagine retiring, but you have some vacation time built up. Instead of being in the office the last few weeks, you’re basically already retired as you burn through vacation time.

I say “basically” because there’s still the HR paperwork to be officially retired.

In this story, an HR worker explains what happened when she was handling the paperwork for an employee who is retiring. Since the woman is at home using up vacation time instead of in the office, the employee requested to communicate via her personal email instead of her work email.

The HR rep didn’t have a problem with that at all, but now she’s wondering if she messed up when she CC’d the supervisor to the retiree’s personal email.

Keep reading for all the details.

AITA for CC’ing a soon to be retiree’s supervisor to their personal email?

So one of my duties at my job is to handle the retirement process for soon to be retirees.

I had an employee who is retiring and asked to keep things confidential, specifying no mass emails to others about her retirement, and to email her on her personal email but that is about it.

I didn’t think much about it as I just assumed she didn’t want to log onto her work email as she is just running out her vacation time before her retirement.

She retires in two months but asked me to finish her retirement process ASAP.

The lady retiring sounds really grumpy.

I’ve been emailing back and forth with her, mentioning that I have other urgent deadlines first and I will get to hers when I can. I provided her the documents needed and mentioned the process will not be fully done until we get closer to her retirement date to avoid any changes and system errors for doing it too early.

Eventually, I end up missing one of her emails where she asked if I received a certain document.

A few days later, instead of sending a simple follow-up email, she sends me a lengthy email about how my “workload is none of her business and that I should be capable of finishing my tasks and work on hers” and that I am unprofessional for not replying back to her email and CC’d my supervisor.

She again asked if I received the document and when will I finish her retirement process and said that she expected a reply back within the next two days.

She replied and replied again, CCing everyone who would possibly need to be looped in.

I sent two back to back replies, one apologizing that I missed her email and confirmed that I received the document from her supervisor.

The second that I need additional documents that the supervisor would normally have to approve on and so I attached the additional forms in the email, no big deal. (Her supervisor is new and is unfamiliar with retirement process so I was not provided everything).

I ended up CC’ing both my supervisor and hers in both replies if there is a need for confirmation and just to keep them in the loop.

But that still wasn’t good enough.

She then again replies back with another lengthy email stating that I “repeatedly” broke confidentiality by CC’ing her supervisor to her personal email, am being completely unprofessional, rude, and that I am only CC’ing her supervisor out of “retaliation” of her initially CC’ing mine.

She also questioned why I even accepted an incomplete (it wasn’t but I required more documents from her) form from her supervisor when she already provided me a pdf (when I asked her to fill out the correct form and not a random pdf file).

She ends it off stating that out of the 25 years she’s worked here that this is the worst HR service she’s ever experienced.

She’s wondering if she really did mess up.

Looking back on it, I guess should have asked her to specify the degree of confidentiality as I only assumed things such as personal information on the documents, why she’s retiring, or her pay, etc. so I guess kind of messed up that one..

AITA for not asking her to clarify on how confidential..?

Was it wrong to CC the supervisor?

Let’s see what Reddit has to say.

This person doesn’t think she did anything wrong.

This is a good point.

The retiree started it!

I assume her supervisor does know she’s retiring but for whatever reason the retiree doesn’t want her supervisor to have her personal email address.

Does it really even matter? The woman is retiring. She never has to see any of these people again. Who cares who has her personal email address? If she’s worried the supervisor will email her, she can block her.

I don’t understand why the retiree is so upset.