My office gives $500 “conduct bonuses” if you have zero HR issues. It is a quarterly thing, meant to encourage a positive work environment in our high-stress marketing firm in Manchester. For most of us, it’s a nice little extra for being a decent human being. But Megan reports everyone for tiny things, so she’s the only one who gets it.

She even reported me for humming while I was checking a spreadsheet last Tuesday. I didn’t even realize I was doing it, but ten minutes later, I had a formal email from HR about “noise violations” and “disrupting the workplace harmony.” That was the final straw. It felt like she was weaponizing the system to keep the $500 for herself while the rest of us suffered.

I decided that enough was enough. If Megan wanted to play the game of constant surveillance, I was going to play it better. I started keeping a detailed log of every time she took a personal call at her desk. I noted down when she came in five minutes late or took an extra-long lunch break to run errands.

I even managed to snap a photo of her using the office printer for a stack of colorful flyers that didn’t look like company business. I spent two weeks gathering “proof” of her violations to take to HR. I wanted her to feel the same sting of losing that bonus that we all felt every quarter. I wasn’t being mean; I was being fair, or at least that’s what I told myself.

I marched into the HR office on Friday morning and laid out my findings to our manager, Sarah. She looked through the notes and the photos with a very serious expression on her face. She thanked me for my “diligence” and asked me to wait in the breakroom while she called Megan in. I sat there, sipping a lukewarm coffee, feeling a bit of a rush from the justice I was about to serve.

They called her in about ten minutes later. Through the glass wall of the office, I could see Megan looking small and pale. She wasn’t her usual sharp, confident self. As Sarah started showing her the evidence I’d provided, Megan didn’t get angry or defensive. Instead, she put her face in her hands and started to shake.

What HR uncovered surprised me. It turns out that Megan wasn’t reporting us because she was greedy or malicious. Sarah came out to talk to me after Megan left the room, looking much more somber than I expected. She asked me to sit down because she thought I deserved to know the full context of the situation I had ignited.

Megan was living in her car. Those $500 bonuses weren’t for “extra” spending or a nice dinner out; they were her literal lifeline. She was reporting every tiny infraction because she had convinced herself that the only way to keep the bonus—and therefore keep her car insured and fueled—was to be the most “perfect” employee on paper. She thought the system was a competition where only the top person survived.

The personal calls I’d logged were to her younger sister’s school because their parents had passed away a year ago and Megan was now the sole guardian. The “extra-long lunches” were her running to the food bank before it closed. And those colorful flyers she was printing? They were “Missing Person” posters for her sister’s dog, the only thing they had left from their old life.

I felt a wave of nausea wash over me as I realized what I had done. I had spent two weeks meticulously documenting the struggles of a woman who was just trying to keep her head above water. My “justice” was actually a hammer being swung at someone who was already shattered. I had seen her behavior, but I had never bothered to look at her life.

“She’s not losing her job, Arthur,” Sarah told me, her voice gentle but firm. “But because of the formal documentation you provided, I can’t give her the bonus this quarter. The rules are the rules.” I looked through the glass and saw Megan packing a few things into her bag, her shoulders slumped in total defeat. The $500 she had been counting on to fix her car’s radiator was gone because I didn’t like her reporting my humming.

I didn’t go back to my desk. I followed her out to the parking lot, my heart pounding in my ears. I found her standing by an old, rusted sedan that looked like it had seen better decades. She saw me and didn’t even look angry; she just looked tired. “I’m sorry about the humming,” she said quietly. “I shouldn’t have reported that. I was just scared I wouldn’t be ‘best’ enough.”

I reached into my pocket and pulled out my wallet. I didn’t have $500 in cash, but I had the check from my own performance bonus I’d received for a separate project earlier that month. I handed it to her, but she shook her head, her eyes filling with tears. “I can’t take that,” she whispered. I told her it wasn’t a gift; it was an apology for not seeing her.

We stood there in the cold wind of the parking lot, and for the first time in the three years we’d worked together, we actually talked. She told me how she’d lost her apartment after her dad’s medical bills wiped them out. She told me how she tried to act like a “corporate shark” because she thought that’s what people respected in this city. She was just a kid playing a part she didn’t understand, trying to protect her sister.

I realized that the “conduct bonus” system was flawed from the start. It turned colleagues into competitors and neighbors into spies. By focusing so much on the $500, we had lost sight of the people sitting three feet away from us. I had become exactly what I hated about Megan—a person who looked for the worst in others just to get ahead.

I went back inside and told Sarah I wanted to withdraw my complaint, but it was already in the system. So, I did the only other thing I could think of. I sent an email to the entire department, explaining that I had made a mistake and that I was starting a collection for a colleague in need. I didn’t mention Megan by name, but I told the story of someone struggling and how I had almost made it worse.

The response was overwhelming. By the end of the day, our coworkers had chipped in over $1,200. People who had complained about Megan for months were the first ones to put money in the envelope. It turned out that everyone was just waiting for a reason to be kind instead of being right. We had all been so caught up in the petty “conduct” rules that we forgot about actual human conduct.

Megan was able to get a small apartment near her sister’s school with that money. She stopped reporting people for tiny things, and I stopped humming quite so loudly. The office atmosphere changed almost overnight. We stopped looking over our shoulders and started looking at each other. The $500 bonus is still there, but now, if someone makes a mistake, we talk to them instead of talking to HR.

This experience changed the way I walk through the world. I learned that you never truly know what battle someone is fighting behind their “annoying” behavior. Being right is never more important than being kind, and “justice” without empathy is just another form of cruelty. We are all just trying to get through the day, and a little bit of understanding goes a lot further than a formal report.

I hope this story makes you pause before you judge that person in your life who seems a bit difficult. We are all carrying bags that are heavier than they look. If we spend our time looking for violations, we will always find them, but if we look for the person, we might find a friend. Let’s try to be the reason someone feels safe at work today instead of the reason they feel hunted.

Please share this story if you believe that empathy is more important than office politics, and like it to spread a little more kindness. We all have the power to change someone’s life just by changing our perspective. Would you like me to help you find a way to reach out to a difficult coworker and build a bridge instead of a wall?