‘I've stopped using exclamation marks when responding to emails from my boss’: When a boss told an employee to “get over” their mother’s death, the employee’s response left the internet thrilled

There’s a story circulating on Reddit, and it’s striking a nerve for good reason. The Reddit user had just lost their mum. Grief is hard enough as it is, but doing it while continuing to show up to work every day makes it even harder. But it's not just the loss itself; what pushed their situation from painful to almost unbearable was their boss’ reaction to it.

He told the employee to get over it. He said their mother's death was creating more work for him.

The employee couldn’t leave. They had bills to pay and were already quietly looking for a better role elsewhere. But they weren’t going to keep sending out warmth they no longer felt. So they came up with a way to express their feelings without saying a word, without lodging a complaint or initiating a confrontation they couldn’t afford.


The employee stopped using exclamation points in their emails to the boss.

The punctuation protest that broke a boss
That is almost absurdly small and that’s exactly the point.

“I always start emails with a positive first sentence. Something like a simple 'Good morning!' or 'I hope you're having a nice day!' I still do this on emails to my boss, but I have omitted exclamation points entirely,” the employee wrote. The post, shared around a year ago, has garnered over 30,000 upvotes and hundreds of comments.

They had been working for the company for over ten years. Anyone who worked closely with them knew the tone had changed, and the boss knew right away. Then he started to reply in a panic, frantically, loading up his own emails with exclamation marks at a frantic rate, which he’d never done before. The employee could see it was eating him up.

What the employee was doing was not unprofessional. They hadn't raised their voice, missed a deadline or written one unprofessional word. They had just stopped padding her communication with performative cheer, and that was enough to somehow break him.

Why do so many employees live this story
This moment resonates because it’s not rare. The Harris Poll’s 2023 Toxic Boss Survey found that 71% of American workers have had a toxic boss at some point in their career, and 31% are currently working with one. The survey of 1,233 employed US adults said toxic behavior can include micromanaging, stealing credit, having unreasonable expectations and being completely unapproachable. The same survey found that 73% of workers with a toxic boss experience weekend anxiety about going back to work on Monday, a sign of how far bad leadership bleeds into life outside the office.

And for millions of employees, especially millennials in mid-career, trying to balance rent, loans and thin savings, the choice between a bad boss and financial ruin isn’t really a choice. Most stay. Most take it on the chin. This Reddit user just found a better way to take it in.

What experts call ‘withdrawing emotional labor’
Leadership coach Dana Mahina, founder of Bloom Women’s Group Coaching, told Newsweek the move wasn’t petty; it was strategic. “The employee's quiet rebellion isn't petty; it's self-preservation. Sometimes, the most powerful response to toxic behavior is to simply stop feeding it with your energy,” she said.

It's got some real science behind it. A peer-reviewed study published in BMC Psychology found that repeatedly forcing employees to manage their outward emotions to meet workplace expectations, such as smiling through tension and staying upbeat under pressure, can lead to deep emotional exhaustion and withdrawal behavior. Research has shown that such superficial display of emotion is one of the best predictors of disengagement at work. In simple terms: it costs a lot to appear warm when you no longer feel it, and when you stop appearing warm, people notice immediately.

As Mahina put it, “The brilliance of this approach is that it's completely professional while being quietly subversive. The employee is still doing their job, still being polite, but they've withdrawn their emotional labor and the boss can sense something has shifted.”

Grief at work is a bigger problem than most employers realize
Underneath all this is something much more serious than punctuation, and it’s a hurting child whose pain was an inconvenience.

A study published in The Transdisciplinary Journal of Management found that employers often do not meet the real needs of grieving employees. Most responses to grief in the workplace are focused on efficiency and getting back to performance quickly, not human support. Many grieving employees said they felt pressured to recover quickly, and some were reprimanded for displaying any emotion in the workplace. The study also revealed that failing to offer meaningful support to grieving employees leads to reduced engagement, lower satisfaction and increased turnover costs that organizations will pay far more for than a few days of compassionate leave ever could.

Mahina didn’t hold back, “This employee experienced one of life's most devastating losses, and their boss essentially told them their grief was inconvenient. That's not just poor leadership; that's dehumanizing.”

A dangerous game, but the internet isn't complaining
Not all see this as a clean win. Even subtle passive resistance can leave a paper trail, cautioned Veronica Lichtenstein, a licensed mental health counselor. “Emails are permanent records, and passive aggression even in punctuation can backfire,” she told Newsweek. But if the boss sees the shift as hostility, the employee could end up looking like the problem, the last thing they want when they're quietly searching for a new job.

Lichtenstein also pointed out the real problem beneath the surface. “Exclamation points aren't the real issue here. The deeper problem is a toxic work environment where an employee feels compelled to weaponize tone because their boss lacks basic empathy.”

But the Reddit community was firmly on their side. One comment put it perfectly: “This is such a good petty revenge. He can't legitimately complain because you aren't doing anything wrong, but it is driving him nuts.” The next step, another said, would be to respond to requests with a lowercase “sure” with no punctuation at all.

This is not, at heart, a story about a missing exclamation mark. It’s about an employee taking back the one thing their boss could never give them a performance review on: their energy.