Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hello from Spain, you cultural colonialist. Here it is pretty typical to curse in professional environments.
Just typical? There are places where writing down passwords to post-it notes is typical too, doesn't make it very professional, not without a great deal of sarcasm at the very least, or some good old bikeshedding about semantics. > you cultural colonialist Well at least you got that part of your insult quota completed for the day. People throw around terms like "colonialist" way too easy these days. One would think i…
Perhaps the difference you see is that the Spaniards you work with censor themselves because they believe you or others will be offended. But perhaps when it's just those Spaniards together, or when, say, they are working for a Spanish company where everyone else is Spanish, they let loose and are quite vulgar, because that's socially and professional acceptable in those contexts.
I'm not Spanish either. I'm American and am very aware of the polite sensibilities you're talking about in professional settings. But even that can differ. I joined a previous company when it was around 50 people in total, and stayed with that company as it grew to around 10,000. When we were 50 people there was lots of in-person swearing and poor-taste jokes, because we were small enough to know what most/all people would be comfortable with. But as the company grew, that happened less and less, because people could never be sure of the audience for what they were saying. (I had a similar, if less drastic, experience at another company that grew even just from 15 people to 200.)
This phenomenon seems entirely normal, in pretty much any place, though the details of what is and isn't offensive can be different depending on region or culture.