Featured on @StorylineReddit: November 11, 2025
The moment arrives brightly. A local radio host congratulates her by name on a pregnancy that doesn’t exist. He sounds delighted. He sounds sincere. In the office, people laugh.
It’s meant to be funny. A small team, a shared station, a running bit with a host who’ll read almost anything on air. She’s been away for a week and comes back to find her name and workplace folded into public celebration. The assumption is simple: she’ll laugh too. She does.
Some workplace tensions are obvious and sharp. Others drift in disguised as camaraderie. This one sits in that softer space at first no shouting, no open hostility, just a line crossed with a grin.
The story isn’t only about a fake announcement. It’s about the kind of room where that announcement feels like an acceptable move, and about how long it can take to recognize what, exactly, was off.
A workplace prank escalates outward. Coworkers contact a local radio host and ask him to congratulate their colleague on a pregnancy she is not having. The announcement airs repeatedly while she is away. When she returns, the office continues the bit comments about caffeine, about due dates, about baby planning. She is the only person who did not consent to the joke.
She first handles it socially, telling them to stop. Then formally, by alerting a director who shuts down the radio mentions. The laughter ends. What replaces it is silence. No apology, just a lowered volume and a shift in eye contact.
Months later, during a personal upheaval, she discovers an internal messaging channel where coworkers had been discussing her privately for some time. By then, the company’s deeper issues are harder to ignore: fractured leadership, improvised HR, rigid communication norms, an atmosphere that encourages side channels.
Eventually, she leaves for an organization with clearer structures and more visible safeguards. The incident becomes part of a longer pattern rather than a standalone mistake.
Text Version
my coworkers are joking I’m pregnant when I’m not + 6 year update
EXTERNAL
my coworkers are joking I’m pregnant when I’m not
Originally posted to Ask A Manager
TRIGGER WARNING: hostile workplace, public humiliation
Original post June 19, 2019
The company I work for is really small and we tune into the same local radio station every day. The station has a tiny listener base and our song requests have become so frequent that my coworkers have got a good rapport with one of the show hosts. I’ve never emailed in or interacted with the host in question.
I come in today after a week off and hear myself being congratulated on the radio on my pregnancy … which was made up by my coworkers. Alison, what the hell. Everyone laughed and I wasn’t sure what to do but laugh along too. The host has apparently been doing this for a full week while I’ve been away (!?), saying both my name and the company’s. Beyond that, he sounded really earnest and genuinely happy, which is making me feel even worse.
There is the occasional prank in the office, but they’ve always been harmless. This feels like a line has been crossed and I don’t know what to do. We have monthly one-on-ones coming up and I’ll be speaking to our manager, but I’m not sure what do to in the meantime.
After I heard it on the radio, everyone made comments about my pretend pregnancy. I don’t want to hear how caffeine is bad for the baby or planning the due date. I’m a woman in my mid-20’s in 2019 and can’t even believe I’m having to write this at all. My general response to not-funny jokes is just to not laugh or look confused, but I can’t take the thought of being publicly congratulated by a stranger. Tomorrow I’ll be asking the next person who makes a joke to be the one to write in and reveal the truth, but I know this won’t go down well.
I’m the quietest person in the office and probably the most private, but it feels like such a bizarre thing to joke about that I don’t even know what the funny part is meant to be? I don’t want anyone to get formally disciplined for a one-off misjudgment, but I’m also not sure how to articulate why it’s a misjudgment without ruining my relationships with anyone.
Update 1 Sept 12, 2019 (3 months later)
Firstly, thank you so much for publishing my letter and for your thoughtful response. I was intensely frustrated when I wrote to you and worried I was overreacting, but your response along with the insight and stories of your commentators proved exactly why pregnancy isn’t something to joke about.
Thankfully, I have a positive response!
A few commentators wondered if I was the only woman on the team. Staggeringly, the team is mostly women. We’re all around the same age, but I’m the only person who isn’t vocal about staying child-free. I think this is why they didn’t consider the prank to be a big deal, but every way I look at it just shows some terrible judgement.
As we’re a small company, the HR is split between our office manager (female, who was in on the prank) and our director (male, who wasn’t). The director wasn’t in the day after I heard the announcement, but I shut down any attempts to laugh about it with “stop, I don’t like this.” The following day, I pulled my director aside and told him that a) I wasn’t pregnant and b) the whole thing was problematic and needed to stop immediately. He was shocked that I hadn’t been in on the prank and was very supportive.
Not long after, he pulled the office manager aside for a chat and then asked if I could help him with an errand that took us both out of the office for a while. When we came back, everyone was very sheepish and the radio was turned right down. No-one has apologized so I don’t know if they thought of me as a spoilsport, but I don’t really care!
A few people wondered if the radio presenter knew the pregnancy was fake, but I think he believed it was genuine. My coworkers have played the game of “what crazy thing can we get him to say” before, and I think I was just collateral damage this time around. One of my coworkers emailed him and he stopped all mentions of the prank right away. But, in a twist, the radio station is (almost) no more! A couple of weeks after all this went down, every live show stopped and it looks like it’ll fold any day now.
From what I’ve gathered, he’s just a regular guy who did an afternoon show for fun. None of his shows have ever featured shock value or pranks, which is why the whole thing felt cruel. On the other hand, my coworkers do have a habit of taking things too far.
Update 2 Oct 9, 2025 (over 6 years later)
I was reading AAM as I do every afternoon when one of the recommended posts catapulted me back into my past. I’m the reader who wrote to you about six years ago about my co-workers who wrote into a local radio station to pretending I was pregnant as a “prank.” I’ve been meaning to share an update for a while now, and this felt like a sign. In the years since, things got okay, worse and then much better.
After the first post, I spoke to my director to put a stop to the joking around. No one apologized, acknowledged that they’d crossed a line, or even made eye contact for a while, but I was just grateful that the jokes were over.
A few months later, my relationship unexpectedly fell apart, and a couple of weeks after that I found a channel on our internal messaging system that had been set up to talk about me behind my back. It had been running for months, predating the radio prank, and was absolutely a nail in the coffin. We also now had an external HR provision by this point, so I made a formal complaint against everyone involved. A coworker had been on the ropes for a while and they were let go not long after. I’m not sure how much the channel played a role in this, but it certainly didn’t help. The others apologized to my face, which I was grateful for at the time.
As some background, when I first started, the company was owned by two directors, a husband and wife. A couple of years into my tenure, one served the others with divorce papers and the business was squarely in the middle. But even before I started there were office norms that were only there to keep us in our lanes. We weren’t really allowed to talk to one another other than on IM, were made to take staggered lunches alone, had to sit with our screens facing outward so the boss could monitor what was on them, and so on. I found out later that my job only opened up because one director got drunk and threw a punch at a past employee on a work night out, prompting a few people to quit. When that director finally left, the other did try to open up communication but things just ran too deep. I’m sure I contributed to this environment too and I remember being deeply frustrated with nowhere for it all to go.
I also don’t remember exactly what the messages in the channel said but I was so angry that it snapped me out of my post-breakup funk and made me realise that my workplace was crap and was not going to change. I searched for all the jobs I could find with a short list of prerequisites — they must have an active HR department, visible salary scales, and be based in an interesting part of the country. I applied for the one that was closing first, which turned into one of the best things I ever did. I said yes to an interview because I’d never been to this city and at least if I didn’t get the job I could spend a couple of hours in a museum I always wanted to visit. I interviewed in February 2020, got the job, and started my new role that April, just after the first Covid-19 lockdown hit in the UK. I moved to my new city about five years ago as restrictions were starting to lift, so as people were getting used to socializing again there was me starting life again in my late 20s.
I’ve since changed roles a few times but have been in the same organization, and I can honestly say things are a million times better. My job is infinitely more fulfilling, has scope to grow, and I’m strengthening skills that are niche enough to be interesting and broad enough that I’m not stuck in a corner. I’m also actively involved in our workplace union so there’s a perfect outlet to channel any injustices in a positive way.
I’m not in touch with anyone in my old job. I wish them the best and hope everyone is successful and fulfilled in their own ways, but it took me far too long to realize it wasn’t the place for me. The fact I didn’t realize this after someone wrote to a radio station to pretend I was pregnant is beyond what I’d ever put up with now. I’m still embarrassed by the whole ordeal but grateful I can look back on it as a bizarre story rather than a situation I’m still stuck in.
Source
It begins with a voice on the radio saying her name as if it belongs there. Cheerful. Certain.
In the office, someone jokes that caffeine is off-limits now. Another asks about the due date. A third leans back in their chair and grins. She laughs because the room is laughing. No one asks her whether she knew.
In small workplaces, humor often becomes a kind of glue. The team had already been playing a game with the host—testing how far they could push the script. From their vantage point, this may have felt like novelty, not violation. Just another escalation in a running bit. Something bigger, louder, funnier.
The sequence is straightforward: email sent, announcement aired, repetition while she’s gone, continuation when she returns. Expectation that she’ll perform along with it. The steps stack neatly.
The director intervenes. The radio is turned down. People avoid eye contact for a while. No one says sorry. The temperature drops a few degrees and stays there.
Then the messaging channel surfaces months later. Not as a joke, not as performance just a parallel space where she had been discussed out of view. That detail shifts the scale. The prank stops feeling isolated. It looks more like one expression of something already humming in the background.
The company’s rules had long encouraged distance: staggered lunches alone, screens facing outward, conversations routed through internal messages. Speak here, not there. Watch, don’t gather. The private channel fits into that pattern without friction.
She describes herself as the quietest person in the room. That detail lingers without explanation.
Her departure is almost administrative. A shortlist. An application. An interview in a different city. A new structure.
What’s striking isn’t simply that the joke happened. It’s how long it took for its proportions to become clear. The radio voice fades, but the memory of standing in that room laughing when she didn’t want to doesn’t quite dissolve.
