‘Forget elephants in the room: what’s a blue whale in the room you’ve seen go unaddressed?’ – 19 moments of enormous awkwardness

We all know the phrase ‘the elephant in the room’. It means a problem that is incredibly obvious, but everybody is avoiding discussing it. However, what if the problem is even bigger than an elephant? What if it’s a an even more enormous mammal of an issue which is making things incredibly uncomfortable?

Over on the AskReddit page, user KindaWithdrawn asked:

Forget elephants in the room. What’s a blue whale in the room you’ve seen go awkwardly unaddressed?

And lots of people chimed in with some situations that made them cringe themselves almost inside out.

1.

‘Work zoom call. One of the managers was running late and thought his camera was off – turns out it was on and he had just gotten out of the shower butt naked and everyone saw his huge schlong on camera. He soon realised and quickly turned off the camera. The meeting went on like normal and nobody said a word.’
–bigbel100

2.

‘I worked as a nurse in operating theatres. The anaesthetist was having an affair with the scrub nurse and the surgeon was the anaesthetists wife who knew about the affair. That was a VERY awkward case. Nothing went down, it was a routine case with no problems. But the psychological tension could be cut with a scalpel.’
–VerityPushpram

3.

‘When I was still in college, there was a tutor who was married and had kids. Everybody knew this , she was very obviously having an affair with another tutor they barely hid it. Nobody called them out, not even the head of the department.’
–FunkyElderberry

4.

‘I did training at a previous job and since it was going to be done on Zoom they just said go ahead and work from home that week. We came back from lunch, and in the background you could hear porn being played. Ultimately it got louder and louder, and there was some smacking involved. Finally the trainer said ‘Could you guys check you’re muted?’. Of course we all knew who it was, but they had the grace to not call them out. The guy who was not muted didn’t make eye contact with any of us when we returned to work the following week. Nobody brought it up. We all knew.’
–zerbey

5.

‘I used to work in an office where my cubicle was next to the boss’s daughter. We were office buds and would chat and banter all day. Our cubes were also right next to the bathroom. Her dad, our boss, would use that bathroom and it was the most heinous thing I’d ever experienced. The most violent shits I’d ever heard and they smelled truly awful. Like a dead opossum. I honestly wondered if he had some serious illness.

This happened at least once a day. And of course his daughter and I would never acknowledge it. Her dad would go to that bathroom and we just immediately switched from chatting to staring at our computers in stone cold silence. Silence only interrupted by the most terrible sounds imaginable.’
–thelesserkudu

6.

‘My old boss said ‘Hitler had the right idea about the gays’ in front of me and some other people. I’m gay, and I’m pretty sure he knew, so I didn’t feel comfortable saying anything, but I paused waiting for the others to. No one said anything. So I just walked away. It was in the middle of a conversation and noticeable.’
–greyslayers

7.

‘I live in Canada, where you just don’t really see guns very often, especially not open carry in a city. While working in a drugstore in a city some old guy came in with a massive rifle strapped to his back and everyone kinda just pretended not to see it. It was super weird.

I think it might’ve been an air rifle for biathlon or something, but a lot of drugstore employees in Canada probably can’t tell things apart from far away, I know I can’t and was never completely sure lol. I just saw him walk past management on his way in and they clearly saw it and said nothing so no way I was gonna be the one. Nobody mentioned it later either.’
–Feral_doves

8.

‘On a global level, the current ongoing collapse in biodiversity. We are causing a mass extinction and it’s barely even talked about. It’s at least as big a problem as climate change which gets way more press. I think it’s ignored because seriously addressing it might be even harder than climate change and we’re utterly failing at that.’
–Mnemia

9.

‘Company-wide Zoom meeting. Exec logs in with a bottle of scotch, clearly tipsy. Starts off with, ‘Let’s be honest, none of you are hitting Q4 targets’. Nobody said a thing. HR just sent a follow-up email thanking him for being transparency.’
–IllWasabi8734

10.

‘I had a job where the full company, all employees meeting (remote, thankfully) included within the span of about ten minutes: 1) the upper management level congratulating themselves and each other for record profits for the fifth year in a row, and 2) a ‘sincere’ apology that they simply did not have the budget leeway to provide raises for anyone working at the ground/customer facing levels. I quit a week later.’
–FalseMagpie