Employee makes half-joke about asking for 'allowance' when boss calls them family, boss retaliates and buries him under projects: 'It was clearly tongue in cheek'

That's what went wrong in this story, where a new employee made a joke that they didn't think much of, which ended up having ramifications for his career. He thought he was just saying something silly to break the tension and speak to a larger truth about workplace culture. While some of his colleagues laughed, his boss took it seriously. But instead of facing that friction head-on and communicating about what went wrong, they let it come out in passive-aggressive ways. Read on to see what happened in this story and decide what you would have done in his shoes. And see what advice commenters had to give.