I’ve always been fine as long as I follow it with, “Pardon my French.”

First I was asked politely to not swear, even if I was not a customer facing employee.

Second time I was cautioned was because I’d switched to swearing in another language. Manager thought it was hilarious, but they still knew I was swearing.

I spent the next five years being increasingly creative with how I swore. A temporary (and loud) revert to English swearing when I was in a workplace accident was kindly ignored due to circumstance.

There was no third warning.

The difference is between cursing and cursing AT someone.

“The garage door broke.” “Ah, fuck.” - Fine “You fuck.” - Not acceptable

If you get a written warning, it’s probably time to start looking for a new job regardless.

I curse all the time and once I’ve even said “you’re a dickhead” to the boss. Nobody cares

I mask at work. At work I’m happy and helpful. I don’t cuss. I don’t get involved in drama. I don’t cause problems. Keep my head down, punch that clock, make my money. That’s the only reason I’m there.

I do my cussing at home. A place without judgement or guidelines to abide by.

https://youtu.be/PrqALXdmqJU?si=HIz4tbmmF0I_8Oke

I’m a professional and I conduct myself like one at work. Your coworkers have the right to work in a non-hostile environment, and believe it or not, some people consider profanity to be hostile. Plus, there are more effective ways to communicate your thoughts in a professional environment than through profanity. I’ll occasionally swear with a coworker I’m close with if we’re one-on-one, but never in a group setting. Cursing is expected - almost mandatory - in some careers such as a restaurant kitchen, or a construction site, but I don’t work in that sort of environment anymore.

I might die if I couldn’t cuss while working. I’d just fucking explode.

I cuss during job interviews, both as the interviewer and applicant.

I have avoided that so far but I have had a few faa’s and shii’s and such where I stopped myself.

the profanity flies frequently at my place of work. we do give writeups if our employees are saying that in front of customers.

except for me, because I don’t curse (out loud). in fact if I start doing it everyone around me would actually be worried if I was okay.

I once got fired for changing the title of my personal homepage of our ticketing software to “Fuck this fucking shithole”. Bosses found out when they cloned my account for testing while I was on vacation.

In their defense, it was pretty stupid of me to do that. In my defense, fuck that fucking shithole.

At my company, they used to be a lot more tolerant of it, but we had exactly one person complain about excessive use of coarse language and then HR cracked the whip. They still don’t really care that much about using swear words when just interacting in person with other people, as long as it’s not bothering anybody else, but they heavily police our work chat to make sure that all of our messages are above the board in terms of professional conduct. Which makes sense, I can’t really argue against the logic that the work chat should be a professional setting where you can communicate your thoughts and feelings without having to resort to using profanity. Sometimes people have to be reminded to not use profane language, but they never call anybody out specifically, they just send out “reminder” messages whenever they see it and usually the person who is responsible knows not to keep it up or else there will be a more direct reprimand.

It would be hard for me to not sometimes utter “fuck” under my breath while I’m at work, but if my bosses were concerned about it, I would just start channeling that into more work-appropriate language.

My boss told me verbally “don’t call your colleague a fascist by email or anything else that leaves a record”, so that was nice of him.

Work in software project management. People swear pretty regularly. The higher up in the hierarchy you go, the more they swear. If a job gave me a warning for that I might leave because they treat their employees like children.

If I get a written warning, is this a reason good enough to start looking for employment elsewhere?

To those of you not in America. Is it different where you are?

Germany here. We have explicit laws protecting workers.

If the company wants to terminate your contract, then there are only a limited number of specific reasons that are allowed. And then they must observe a notice period usually (1-2 months). The worker can easily go to court against it (costs are moderate) to have it checked.

If they want to fire you immediately (all subsidiaries of foreign corporations usually want that, and most of the German big corpos too), they can suspend you from working, but you still get your pay until the end of the notice period, or you can make a termination agreement that ends the contract immediately and you get all that money (plus maybe a little more, negotiable) at once.

And there is another way: if you have severely violated your duties, then they can terminate you immediately, without paying any longer.

But it is only with very serious violations, where they can argue that it isn’t tolerable for the company to have to endure you any longer. Many such events actually go to court afterwards, so they really have to be careful to do it right.

If the violation was not so severe, they can give you an official warning, usually in writing. You can also go to court against the warning, and the court can nullify it, if it was wrongful.

If you have received a warning and it was valid and afterwards you do the same violation again, then they can also terminate you immediately. And again, you can go to court to have it checked, like above.