If you’ve spent any time exploring the fringes of sci-fi horror, you know that the early 80s were a goldmine for the weird, the visceral, and the conceptually brilliant. Among the standouts is David Cronenberg’s 1981 cult classic, Scanners. While it’s often reduced to that iconic exploding head scene in pop culture memory, Scanners offers much more than just practical effects mastery. It is a…

i think my boss is gaslighting me? AIO?

i work at a hotel and i’ve been off for the past week. today was my first day back.

while checking in a guest, our key scanners stopped working. usually i’m pretty good at fixing little issues like that, but for some reason i glanced at the scanner and blanked. i ended up calling my boss and asking how to fix it.she said, “have you unplugged it and plugged it back in?”

i was super embarrassed because i literally know that. i was a little hungover and figured maybe my brain was just moving slow today. anyway, when i unplugged the scanners, i noticed they looked different than i remembered. even the sound they made when scanning cards seemed different. i texted my boss and said i think i was confused because i hadn’t seen these scanners before. she replied that they’re the same scanners we’ve always had.

i felt like i was going insane. i called my boyfriend and told him i thought i was losing my mind. he said i’d just been gone for a week and was probably overthinking it. i accepted that explanation and moved on.

later in the day, though, the scanners kept having issues and my coworker made a random comment. “i thought these ones would work better.” i stopped and said, “wait, what do you mean these ones?” she told me the key scanners had been replaced last friday. i was like HOLD ON.

so i called my boss and said, “(coworker) just told me the scanners were replaced last friday. no wonder i thought they looked different.” my boss said my coworker was mistaken and was probably thinking of a door battery that got replaced that day. according to her, these are still the exact same scanners we’ve always had.

i told my coworker what my boss said, and she doubled down. she said she’s 100% sure the scanners were replaced because it literally happened right in front of her, and my boss was there when it happened. she said she doesn’t understand why my boss would say that to me.

this is such a stupid non-issue, but now i’m genuinely confused. my coworker had absolutely no reason to lie to me, and i hadn’t even told her that i thought the scanners looked different beforehand.

am i crazy? why would my boss lie about this ? why would my coworker lie? am i overreacting to think im being gaslit right now ? is this not super weird ?

Reddit consensus: OVERREACTING (YOR) (95% confidence)

Top comment: “YOR. I don’t think your boss is trying to gaslight you, it’s more likely that these are just a newer version of what you guys had before and she’s not realizing that they’re noticeably different. Does she use them very often? It sounds like they look different but similar enough that you didn’t even notice until you were having to pay more attention to it while troubleshooting. And if there’s someone above her or someone else who schedules tech stuff like this, she might not have realized they replaced the key scanners that day, too”

Notable explanation: “YOR and man I wish people would stop using gaslighting when they just mean lying”

View on Reddit