A young employee claims her 26-year-old colleagues made her miserable for months, until a July confrontation changed her response

A teenage restaurant worker’s TikTok about workplace bullying has pulled in hundreds of thousands of views, as she questioned why older coworkers keep singling out teenage girls. The video comes from maddie ruth, who posts as @maddieunleashed, and it has resurfaced after being picked up by the Daily Dot.

Filmed in her car, the clip opens with on-screen text asking why adult coworkers “love to bully teenage girls.” The creator then wonders what it is about 26-year-old coworkers that makes their lives “so miserable they want to make a teenage girl feel terrible about herself.” She also asks whether the problem is that she’s younger and “making your same paycheck,” before asking if they’re jealous of her.

According to the video, she confronted the coworker who had been bullying her for months a day before posting. She says she felt “pretty dang great about it” and was floating around the restaurant afterward. The TikToker then turns the clip into advice, telling women being bullied at work by a man in his 20s or early 30s to stand up to him and tell him he’s being an a**.

Plenty of viewers said the same thing has happened to them at their jobs

The comment section filled with people sharing their own workplace bullying stories, and many said the problem is far from unique to one restaurant. The most-liked reply framed it as a difference in stakes, with the commenter writing that older coworkers get “mad cuz it’s my side hustle” while the job is their career. Another viewer asked why her 60- and 40-year-old coworkers were making her cry every other shift.

Several commenters described situations that went well beyond rude remarks. One person recalled working at Wingstop in college, where a 43-year-old man allegedly told her “we are not equals” because he was older, even though they made the same hourly wage. According to that commenter, he was fired the next day. A 25-year-old viewer added that, in her experience, coworkers over 50 were the ones making younger staff feel miserable.

Not everyone agreed that workplace bullying comes down to age, however. A commenter who said she’s 30 wrote that she prefers working with younger people, calling them friendlier. Her problems, she said, have always come from adults who take the job too seriously. Others pushed back on the premise entirely, with one person joking that their grown coworkers are lovely and the real problem is the 18-year-old boys.

A few people with the opposite experience chimed in, too. One self-described older colleague said she adores the younger women she works with, and warned that older managers are the ones to watch out for. Another said their older coworkers laugh along when they talk back, and asked where everyone else was working. Those replies were outnumbered, however, as most of the thread read like a list of shared grievances.

The creator didn’t name the restaurant or the coworker she confronted, and the hashtags on her post point to work as a host. Her complaint about being singled out by older staff echoes other workplace bullying accounts that have spread online, such as a 21-year-old whose supervisor criticized her bathroom breaks before HR stepped in.

The creator hasn’t shared a follow-up about the confrontation, so it’s unclear whether standing up to the coworker changed how she’s treated at the restaurant.

Attack of the Fanboy was unable to independently verify the coworker’s side of the story, as this account originates solely from maddie ruth’s TikTok video.