I am a manager at a company and my colleague and I are basically on the same managerial level and report to the same boss. We’re in the same division, but the way our work is set up is that I make purchase for the company and he organizes, processes, and ships out our orders to our customers.

For a while now, it had always seemed like if anything were to go wrong in the entire process at all then fingers would be pointed at my section. My team would have to redo our workflow every time. My former manager left because it was too much to handle. This has made me very afraid to get anything wrong. I have anxiety and may be falling into depression because of my fear to make mistakes.

Recently, one of the products I purchased was shipped to the wrong location for our customer, but I caught it just in time so the customer wouldn’t notice. The thing is when I purchased this item, I emailed my teammate twice and called him about how the order should be processed and shipped. I told him to email our team when the job was completed (which he didn’t). However, the mistake happened when he routed that item to the wrong location but at the same time told the delivery person to ship it to the location I told him. When the delivery person scanned the package it told him to go to the wrong location and that’s where he went. If I didn’t check on the order it would’ve been shipped to the wrong location and the patron would’ve complained.

I talked to my colleague initially and he didn’t seem like he took my concerns seriously so I went to my manager and we all sat down to discuss this. We came up with a workflow to fix this, but my colleague looked upset that I brought this forward.

I don’t know if I’m being mean because my department used to get blamed for everything and maybe I’m trying to even the score subconsciously or if my concerns were valid. I hate that I made him upset and potentially ruined our work camaraderie.

He has always been nice me and he was never one of the people who complained about my department before.

The next day he slapped me in the face after he was scolded by our boss and he was fired.

Should I have kept quiet about it?