Careers are bound to suffer when dirty dealings enter the workplace Not all soap operas are on TV. case in point: I used to work as a programmer for a midsize trucking company I’ll call “US Freightline,” with yards and offices scattered around the Chicago area. Not only was “Joe,” the IT manager (and my boss) a good guy, but, as it happens, his wife “Jennifer” and I were old college pals.One evening, “Alex,” an up-and-coming junior exec, asked me out for drinks. Over the third set of martinis he started pumping me for negative input about my boss Joe. Joe had always been a great manager, though, and that’s what I told Alex.Finally, Alex told me that my career at US Freightline would be significantly enhanced if I’d agree to file a complaint against Joe; he’d leave the exact details to me. I demanded an explanation. All Alex would say was that the request came from “high up in the management chain.” Of course I refused, and immediately told Joe. But when Joe confronted Alex, Alex told him that I’d had too much to drink and must have misunderstood a joke. Weird. A couple of months later I was placed under a new manager: Alex! And three weeks after that, Alex put me on probation. When I pressed for an explanation, he said he had heard complaints about me from some “anonymous” IT staffers. I was pretty sure that this was payback for refusing to file a complaint against Joe.OK, here’s the soap opera part: The next day, Joe’s wife Jennifer called me. Joe had told her about me being put on probation, and she thought she knew why. Sobbing, she told me that she had been having an affair with “Ted,” Acme’s plant manager, without Joe’s knowledge. She had broken it off several months ago, but Ted had threatened to retaliate against Joe at work if Jennifer didn’t come back to him. I don’t know why I was the one who got put on probation rather than Joe, but at least I finally knew what was really going on. Not that I had any idea what to do about it without revealing my friends’ personal business.Finally, without going into details, I told Alex that I knew why upper management had ordered him to put me on probation. Of course, he denied everything. But two weeks later he told me that I was no longer on probation, and that he regretted having put me on probation in the first place. For some reason this did not make me feel very confident, and I started mailing out résumés. A month later I accepted a position with another firm. During my exit interview, Alex said he was dismayed that his actions had caused me to leave the company. He even shed tears, and admitted that Ted had ordered him to put me on probation. He felt he had committed an ethical breach, and promised to write me a letter of recommendation surpassing any that I had ever received. He did, too.How did this tangled story line resolve itself? Joe finally realized that he was going no place at US Freightline, and left for another position. As far as I know, he never found out why his career had stalled. Ted, the plant manager, got into some unrelated trouble and left the company. Alex ended up taking his job.Meanwhile, I’m enjoying my current position very much — and appreciating that my job doesn’t resemble the set of a daytime TV drama. Software DevelopmentTechnology Industry