You have no right to privacy in an employment situation.

While your particular contract may offer some allowances, typically speaking an employee has no right to attend to any private matters while on company time. No phone calls, no emails, no texts, no social media, unless they are on your own time (after working hours, or while on scheduled or alloted break).

The market capitalists would have you cheer this inhumane attitude as "lean and mean". A workforce held in fear of being fired for the smallest infraction and replaced is what keeps the US economy "competitive". The constant pressure of fear from the market, while producing a nation full of neurotic, often violent, sociopaths, makes the US economy the envy of the world, they say. Love it or leave it—if you can.

Of course, it is not only capitalism that benefits from a surveillance culture and holding a populace in fear. Plenty of other social structures have operated this way.

So don't lose your faith in humanity—except insofar as it has repeatedly and enthusiastically agreed to the terms of its own dehumanization.

Sure, it was rude for that person to eavesdrop but your choice of using a stairwell instead of leaving the building is what caused this issue. If you needed privacy that much, you needed to leave the office that much as well.

I strongly disagree with #1, 2, and 3. People working in an office setting work hard for long hours and keep their noses to the grindstone. But they also have lives. They have parents, children and spouses that need tending, cars that need repairing, apartments that need renting, medical issues in need of attention. A decent workplace provides a place for employees to use the phone in privacy. All of us are more than just work units.

@4 - You must be very young and naive to think corporate workplaces are in any way obligated to provide personal privacy to employees, most employee agreements/contracts pretty much take that away with many other rights during the hiring process. Their house, their rules, sound familiar?

And way to stereotype office workers, btw, you must work in a cubicle farm somewhere, probably with a wall covered in Dilbert cartoons, lol.

Whoa - what kind of toxic workplace do you work in where your first thought was that this coworker is eavesdropping with the intent to mock you, not just awkwardly waiting for you to finish so as not to disrupt your conversation?

If all you saw was their shoes through a gap in the stairs, they could have been using headphones for all you know.

But I'm sure your personal shit is REALLY interesting.

At my office, junior employees are constantly looking for an empty office from which to make personal calls. They work long hours and have lives, I just don't understand why they don't take an extra 30 seconds to go to the lovely plaza outside. The fact that LW has access to a stairwell tells me they couldn't have been far from a parking lot or something more private.

@5 No, @4 is correct. Even nearly 20 years ago I worked in offices that had little spaces designed specifically for private calls. We're short on space at my current spot, however, and couldn't build one out. It's not about obligation, it's about facilitating a good work environment.

some off you have internalized your masters' values. someone needs a minute, and all you can say is the boss isn't required to give it to them?

time is money, steal some today.

A stairwell, really? Every stairwell I've ever been in is an echo chamber. Anyone one to six or more floors from you could eavesdrop without trying.

@5 Dick-from-Texas: To mischaracterize someone's statement and then attack the the mischaracterization is a low rent rhetorical technique best left to the spittle flecked right wing radio screamers. It is dishonest and contemptible. I am not young or naive, but a grey-beard with a finely honed sense of skepticism regarding corporate culture and practice . I am amazed and appalled by the embrace of the idea by (apparently younger?) folks that one must scuttle outside in the pelting rain to join the nicotine addicts for any private conversation. People do work hard, and life is messy. This is not a stereotyping of office workers, but a simple fact. The idea that the employer so owns you during during work hours so that no privacy is allowed is grotesque, and in fact is not decent. You may need to tolerate these conditions for survival, but to embrace them? Are you forelock tugging peasants bowing before your overlords? As for cubicle culture: For the young people working today in the current office style of long tables with people elbow to elbow and nose to nose, pecking furiously away at miniature keyboards on tiny screened laptops, the cubicle would seem to be the height of decadent luxury.
@9: Exactly!

I see quite a few fools here are completely ignoring the person's actual complaint, and instead want to grind their personal axes. The person was complaining about a coworker actively eavesdropping on a private conversation. Regardless of the person's reason for being in the stairwell, when they realized someone was trying to have a private conversation, politeness dictates that they not eavesdrop. In fact, that they did not make a sound to indicate that they were in earshot and continued on their business shows it was intentional rudeness.

I’m guessing that the co-worker had their “head down,” as described, because they were staring at their own phone, and had no interest whatsoever in your business.

not pictured:

All the fluffy, meaningless personal calls taken in said stairway by the O.P. and others prior to this rant. This one essentially was the OP complaining that they were unable to successfully break an office rule without consequences.

Yes, this could be yet another example of the corporate machine grinding you down to pay for ever increasing dividends to the billionaire gods, or it could be the effective exercising of rules designed to punish freeloaders that want to get paid on the clock for handling personal shit. This is The Stranger, so let's all rally (without evidence) for the former.

This might clear things up, maybe not - here goes: person we’ll refer to as eavesdropper was about to use said stairwell, but just before opening door hears convo, waits and listens to discern if it’s ok to enter. Upon realizing this conversation might continue in same location, thinks better of barging in and takes the elevator. No villain - no victim in this case.

None of the commenters, nor the LW, really know what was going on with the "eavesdropper", unless the LW left out pertinent information. It's all a guessing game based on very scant evidence by everyone involved. What is this? Reddit?