my coworker isn’t willing to tell a teenager helper that he’s accidentally killing all our fish

This post was written by Alison Green and published on Ask a Manager.

A reader writes:

I work in the five-person office of a large pre-school. My colleague, Amy, keeps a five-gallon fish tank near her desk with between two and four fish in it. The tank is in full view of the office door and the lobby beyond. The fish are important to the school; when our young students are overwhelmed and need to calm down, the office fish are often their first stop with their teachers, and “saying hi” is often enough to stop a crying jag. The kids love watching the brightly colored fish, who all have fun names, and Amy loves them, too. She takes great care of the fish, arranging feedings with others when she’ll be out of the office, making sure the tank’s heater and filter work properly at all times, and generally being a pretty good fish parent for someone who isn’t a hobbyist fish-keeper. I am not a fish person myself, but I love animals and have close friends who are extremely passionate about their aquariums, so I’ve absorbed a lot of knowledge from them, enough to know what constitutes good fish care, and have passed along tips when appropriate.

Amy pays a teenager, Jake, who is the son of one of our longtime teachers, to clean the tank at regular intervals. Jake is polite, friendly, and seems to care about doing a good job. Except … multiple times now, fish have died within a few days of a tank cleaning. It’s not clear what the exact issue is with the tank, but I suspect the cleaning chemicals are not properly rinsed out or the tank water is otherwise chemically unbalanced.

Most recently, after a mass fish casualty event, the tank was cleaned, left empty to filter for a week or so, and finally, on Tuesday, brought three fish and a snail straight from the pet store. She let them acclimate to the tank temp in their bags for a while, as recommended, and then loosed them in the water. Thursday morning, less than 48 hours later, two of the three fish died before the school day was over.

After the previous deaths, Amy and I were talking about it and she was very sad about her fish, and concerned that a fish would die without her noticing and a child would see the dead fish in the tank. That’s always been a possibility, of course, but now it seems like an inevitability. I named the pattern I was seeing with Jake’s cleanings and she said she had noticed the same. I gently suggested that maybe Jake doesn’t clean the tank anymore and she agreed that it was a problem … but she would feel bad telling him he couldn’t do it anymore and causing him to lose out on the spending money he earns. As far as I know she intends to have Jake continue cleaning the tank and has not spoken to him (or his mom) about the deaths despite the frequency, and the monetary and emotional cost of replacing the fish so often. We haven’t yet spoken about the new deaths.

I feel like this situation is a product of the “they’re just fish” mindset so many have that treat pet fish as disposable and replaceable, and easily avoidable with one slightly awkward conversation. I feel like my hands are tied here, because they’re not my fish, it’s not my money, and I am not Amy’s supervisor, but it’s a huge downer every time. My boss doesn’t seem like a good choice for any sort of intervention, because she treats her own office fish as disposable. Do I have any recourse here to push for a change, or should I let go and let Amy handle it as she sees fit?

I think you have not only standing to speak up, but an ethical obligation to speak up!

Amy is knowingly putting living creatures into a situation where they’re likely to die within days and the only reason she’s not doing anything to stop it is because she wants to avoid a mildly awkward conversation with a teenager.

Primarily this is horrible to the fish, but it’s also pretty unkind to Jake — she’s assuming that he would rather go on being responsible for killing fish (assuming that is indeed what’s happening) than handle hearing “hey, we need to do something differently with how we’re cleaning the tank.” This is not such a sensitive message to deliver that she should need to tiptoe around it to this extent. And it’s good for teenagers to learn things. This is something Jake would probably want to know.

If Amy really can’t bring herself to have a pretty basic, straightforward conversation with a teenager, then she needs to stop buying more fish. The kids will survive that if that’s the decision; that’s far preferable to continuing to throw their much loved fish friends into what appears to be a near-instant death chamber.

So please, talk to Amy again! Maybe you can say, “I think Jake would feel really awful if he ever realizes what’s happening and that no one just educated him about how to fix the problem. And I don’t think we can ethically continue keeping fish without fixing it. Personally I feel really awful seeing fish killed like that, and I think Jake would strongly prefer to get some guidance on keeping them alive, if it is an issue with the chemicals. If you really don’t want to talk to him, I think we have to stop putting fish in there.” If you’re up for it, you could add, “I feel strongly about it so I’m willing to help talk with him if you want me to.”