A woman was left stunned after she was asked to remove her sparkly spider brooch at work because one of her colleagues has a phobia.
The £14.99 accessory, from high street brand Zara, is made from sparkly rhinestones and metal with a safety pin-style fastening.
However, apparently it caused 'distress' to her colleague.
Revealing the incident on parenting website Mumsnet, the anonymous woman said her line manager asked her to remove the brooch after the offended colleague complained.
She wrote: I quite often wear brooches and yesterday wore a new one to work. It is this one from Zara and is a reasonably large sparkly rhinestone spider, which I had pinned to a black jumper.
"Mid-morning, my line manager approaches and asked if I would be prepared to take the brooch off as a colleague had said that they have a phobia and was finding it distressing.
"I took it off my jumper and put it on my coat, which I didn't wear again until I left for the day.
"The complaint will have come from one of three people, based on who saw me yesterday morning. I'm not going to go digging to find out who it was and I don't want to cause anyone distress (which is the word that was used) but I've worked with all three of them for several years and this severe phobia has never come up before.
"I don't want to be a d**k, but equally I really like my brooch and am curious to know if it was unreasonable to wear it to work?!"
Many people told the woman she had done nothing wrong, as one wrote: "You know I would have been bloody minded here. People are not entitled to walk around never being inconvenienced/offended/creeped out. It's a brooch."
While another added: "Surely they could have just not looked at it? Are clothes police going to catch on in the workplace? What about birds on a scarf? Butterflies on a blouse? Leather shoes offensive to vegans? No coffee with milk next.. And they say dc are becoming bloody snowflakes??!!"
A third agreed, saying: "You weren't unreasonable to put it on in the first place and you did the right thing in removing it. Yes some people's phobias can stretch to just images or even mentioning the thing they are afraid of."
However, some users shared their own experiences with phobias to try and explain how her colleague may have felt.
One wrote: "My colleague has a spider phobia. There is no way she could have spent the day looking at that brooch. Just knowing it was there would have been enough. Phobias aren't rational and go way beyond just not liking them."
While another added: "I see both sides and having a phobia is not like having a fear of spiders which I have and have got better as I got older. A phobia is in a different league so unless you have walked in their shoes, please try to understand."
Do you think she should have taken off the brooch? Let us know in the comments section below…
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