one of the most explosive letters in years, we have to shut down all heterosexuality until we can figure out what is going on
This post was written by Alison Green and published on Ask a Manager.
A reader writes:
The backstory: I went back to university in my late 20s to do my PhD, and shared an office with a few other students for many years. One of the students, Jacob, completed his thesis and was moving back to his home country, so we all went out for congratulatory/farewell drinks. One thing led to another and Jacob and I spent the night together. A few weeks later, I realized I was pregnant and I had no way to contact Jacob. His university email and mobile number had been deactivated since he’d left the university and the country. I didn’t need anything from him and was fine to raise the child alone, but I thought he had a right to know. I googled him a few times over the years but never found him.
This last week, our department head emailed everyone to introduce and welcome our new manager, Jacob, with a photo and a blurb about his education and work history so I know for sure it’s him. The night we spent together changed my life because it made me a parent, so I have thought about Jacob from time to time when my daughter asks about her dad or I notice a genetic trait she didn’t get from me. However, I doubt Jacob has given that night a second thought. I have no idea whether he will have any concerns about being my manager given our history, or whether I’m making a bigger deal of this than I should. For what it’s worth, in my years of sharing an office with Jacob, he seemed easy-going and practical.
In our company, it is common for everyone in the department to reply-all to these introduction emails and introduce themselves, welcome the newcomer aboard and explain how their role will interact with theirs. I’m not sure if my email should note that Jacob and I studied together years ago as a way to get that out in the open? Or should I email him individually and offer to have a discussion about keeping our history out of the workplace if he thinks it’s needed? I’d appreciate any suggestions for language that indicates I’m not concerned and will be completely professional.
And then, in direct contradiction to that, I’d also appreciate a script for a separate email saying “can we please meet outside of work because I need to tell you something important about our history” so I can tell him about his daughter. If you or any commenters think I shouldn’t tell him, or I should let him settle in to his new country and new job first, I would definitely take that on board.
Oh my goodness.
This is what is professionally referred to as a real clusterfudge.
The issue isn’t that you’re making too big a deal out of it; you’re not making a big enough deal of it. It’s a really big deal.
I’m less concerned about the one night together than I am about the fact that you share a child (and that he doesn’t know that yet). Normally the night together would give me some pause too — since he’s your manager and that can complicate things, even if you’re both scrupulously professional about it — but that’s vastly overshadowed by the shared child.
Jacob can’t possibly be assumed by any objective observer to be able to manage you objectively or credibly or fairly when you have a child together. Your employer almost certainly wouldn’t have hired him to manage you if they’d been aware of the situation.
Which is no one’s fault! Jacob didn’t know (and doesn’t know), your company didn’t know, and you had no way of knowing he was under consideration.
But here you all are.
One of you is almost certainly going to need to change jobs. Until that can happen, the best solution would be for you to report to someone other than Jacob, but how feasible that is depends on things I don’t know, like the nature of your jobs.
I strongly recommend doing one, and possibly two, things before you do anything else: definitely talk to a lawyer, and ideally talk to a therapist too. The lawyer because of potential legal ramifications that you want to be prepared for (how will you respond if Jacob wants shared custody? what if your employer tries to push you out? both of those could end up being non-issues, but the potential ramifications are significant enough that I’d want you going in prepared and with help lined up) and the therapist because the situation is serious enough that some professional guidance will help.
The new Apple Sports app for iPhone is pretty good but isn’t great for keeping up with football — MLS & the European leagues are there, but no Champions/Europa Leagues, national teams, etc. Hopefully that’ll change.
Katie do you want to tell the story about your conference this week
I am a relative NYT crossword n00b, so I just found out about XWord Info and the wealth of statistics available there — it’s like sabermetrics for crosswords. Word nerds, I’m sure there are other CW resources like this out there…share your faves?
Wow. It’s worth clicking through to see it larger (mirrored here). You can see the Keflavik airport to the northwest of the fissure and Reykjavík is the darker area in the upper part of the image, just right of center. This image really underscores the extent to which volcanoes are fiery, slashing cuts to the Earth’s skin. It’s bleeding! Bleeding lava!
If you want to check out the satellite imagery for yourself, you can find it on Copernicus Browser. I tried for a few minutes to duplicate Langbroek’s view (“combined natural colour + SWIR”) but couldn’t quite manage it.
This post was written by Alison Green and published on Ask a Manager.
A reader writes:
I … have a problem at my new-ish attorney job at a tiny law firm. There are five people in the office total and we have one communal coffee pot. I was told at the beginning that the office does not supply coffee because the two partners do not drink it and so we have to take turns buying it for the office.* The two admins told me I could buy whatever I wanted on my turn as long as the coffee was 1) dark roast and 2) unflavored. Great!
The coffee of choice for the two admins is a huge tub of Kirkland coffee from Costco. [Editor’s note: To shop at Costco, you need to purchase a membership, which is around $60 annually. They sell products under their store brand, Kirkland, that can’t be purchased anywhere else.]
I HATE this coffee. I also neither want nor need a Costco membership. Because I was told that I could buy anything, I bought the biggest tub of non-Folgers ground coffee I could get at Target, which I knew I liked. The tub “ran out too fast” and we only had it for like, a week. I refuse to believe we ran out of a giant tub of coffee in a week. Suspicious, but (I thought at the time) irrelevant.
So soon it’s my turn again and I ask the admins if they would mind if I just do a repeat order on Amazon for a big tub of coffee and that way they don’t have to pay for it because it’s expensive. They enthusiastically agree to this. I order a big tub of coffee. They report it is “flavored” and “tastes like caramel.” It is not flavored. It is a house blend. I ask if they have any suggestions. They do not have specific recommendations, but they reiterate they want the darkest roast possible that’s unflavored. I’m like great, okay. My parents drank Peet’s french roast my entire childhood and both of them are a) coffee snobs and b) do not like flavorings of any kind. Guaranteed win, right?
Wrong. I get the bag and it says it has “notes of chocolate truffle, smoke, and caramel.” They insist it is flavored. I explain it is not and that the description is like wine notes where wines say they have hints of cedar or whatever. They do not believe me. I make the pot of coffee the next time I am in first. They immediately report it is somehow BOTH “bitter” and also “tastes like caramel.” I said they asked for a dark roast which is always bitter and that it definitely 100% is not flavored. They insist it’s “weird.”
My stance is that they said I could buy whatever I wanted in the first place, I have bought three options that conform to the given standards, I should be allowed to pick coffee I like for my turn, and I should not have to pay for a membership card to a store solely to get coffee I do not like.
Their stance seems to be passive-aggressively letting me spend $20 on coffee repeatedly and declaring there’s something wrong with it every time.
I have suggested that perhaps that I could Venmo one of them to pick up the coffee they like (and let go of wanting to like said coffee). Apparently part of the point of taking turns with the coffee is to take turns having to go out of your way to run the errand. This is not an option.
I guess my question is not “am I being reasonable” because I’m pretty sure that I am. My question is “is this a hill worth dying on?” and if the answer is “no,” then “how do I get out of having to get a Costco card to buy one (1) tub of coffee every two months that I do not like?”
* As a side note, I also see this as a problem because admins should not have to buy coffee for lawyers, even if we are taking turns.
You are indeed being reasonable. Something is up with the coffee situation. Do they only like Kirkland coffee? If so, why don’t they just say that?
(And yes, admins should not have to buy coffee for lawyers. But I get just going with the system that’s there when you started and not rocking the boat, especially when this boat is already so weird and fraught.)
Anyway, if you want to solve it with a minimum of fuss — which is probably the most practical move here — delivery services like Instacart will generally deliver from Costco, which would mean you could just get it delivered from there without having to get your own Costco membership.
To be clear, this is ridiculous and you should not have to pay the delivery mark-up to resolve this, but it will make the problem go away. Consider it a $10 aggravation fee.
Alternately, you could say to the admins, “I’ve bought three types of coffee and none of them have been right. I can’t get Kirkland coffee because I don’t have a Costco membership. So I can reimburse someone else who picks it up there, or you can tell me another kind of coffee you’d like me to get. Pick anything, and as long as it doesn’t require me buying a special membership like Costco, I’ll get it for the office. But I need you to choose it so I don’t keep buying coffee no one likes.”
If that doesn’t work, the only remaining solution is to swipe an empty Kirkland container the next time one runs out, fill it with the plain dark roast of your choice, and bring it in and see if everyone loves it.
help me decide if i love this or if we need to just sink knifecrime island into the sea for their actions
In a piece about how English and North American robins (two unrelated species that don’t even share a biological genus or family) got their names, Robert Francis shares how some English birds were given people names…and some of them stuck.
During the 15th century, the English had an endearing practice of granting common human names to the birds that lived among them. Virtually every bird in that era had a name, and most of them, like Will Wagtail and Philip Sparrow have been long forgotten. Polly Parrot has stuck around, and Tom Tit and Jenny Wren, personable companions of the English countryside, are names still sometimes found in children’s rhymes. Other human names, however, have been incorporated so durably into the common names that still grace birds as to almost entirely obscure their origin. The Magpie, a loquacious black and white bird with a penchant for snatching shiny objects, once bore the simple name “pie,” probably coming from its Roman name, “pica.” The English named these birds Margaret, which was then abbreviated to Maggie, and finally left at Mag Pie.[2] The vocal, crow-like bird called Jackdaw was also once just a “daw” named “Jack.”
The English also gave their ubiquitous and beloved orange-bellied, orb-shaped, wren-sized bird a human name. The first recorded Anglo-Saxon name for the Eurasian Robin was ruddoc, meaning “little red one.” By the medieval period, its name evolved to redbreast (the more accurate term orange only entered the English language when the fruit of the same name reached Great Britain in the 16th century). The English chose the satisfyingly alliterative name Robert for the redbreast, which they then changed to the popular Tudor nickname Robin. Soon enough, the name Robin Redbreast became so identified with the bird that Redbreast was dropped because it seemed so redundant.
This post was written by Alison Green and published on Ask a Manager.
One of the most interesting things about offices is how they develop their own subcultures, rituals, and traditions. I recently asked about unusual office traditions you’ve seen or experienced, and here are some of my favorites you shared.
• My office has a “talking shrimp” that we use instead of a “talking stick” in brainstorming meetings where we otherwise run the risk of all talking over each other. It’s a foam replica of a cooked jumbo shrimp — headless and legless but we’ve added googly eyes. The tradition has evolved to the point that now in virtual meetings people will sometimes put a shrimp emoji in the chat when they want to talk and the meeting leader will recognize them saying “you have the shrimp.”
• All of our baby showers are veggie themed. It started several years ago when the pregnant person and the office clown were talking about gift baskets. Clown said, “Wouldn’t an onion basket make a nice gift!” It went from there. I started a week before the shower, which did in fact feature a basket full of every kind of onion known to man. Showers since then have included sprouts, potatoes, and turnips; the most recent one was asparagus.
• My first day at one of my first jobs out of college I was given a $30 gift certificate to a local yarn store and was given instructions to go find yarn that “felt right to me,” buy $30 worth of it, and bring it in the next Monday. There were a couple of suggested weights and the firm instruction that I not purchase acrylic, and while it was extremely weird to me, I did as I was directed and showed up for work with a couple of skeins.
Turns out we had a woman who’d worked there longer than God and who crocheted in all her meetings to help her focus. She’d make granny squares out of every new hire’s yarn and they’d be added to the office afghan blanket – by the time I started working there she’d been at it for years and there were multiple blankets floating around the office. Anyone could check out a blanket, but only for a day at a time because they were extremely in demand. The director had started the whole thing years and years ago when he’d noticed her crocheting, was fascinated, and asked if she’d mind taking on a special project. She said okay, but she wasn’t providing the yarn, he said that’s fine, and had it written into the budget.
She retired when I’d been there for five years, but by that point she’d trained a successor and the tradition was still alive when I left a couple of years after her.
• In my department, we celebrate a wide variety of made up holidays. For example, a policy such as Policy 9.13 Nepotism would be celebrated on September 13 with your relatives’ favorite treats. There are also a variety of other holidays, such as Toast Day and Fa-La-La-Latte Day.
• We have a “Wall of Same.” If two or more coworkers happen to come into the office dressed very similarly, they’ll ask someone to take a picture and add it to the board. It’s fun to notice with someone “Hey we’re wearing almost the same thing! Let’s take a picture.” One day, a few years ago, there were about 6 of us who happened to wear something burgundy on the same day — a sweater, blazer, pants, or skirt. I’ve moved on from that office but I still have that picture!
• At a software development firm, we had the Build Breaker Trophy. It was a spectacularly ugly statue of a merman riding a seahorse, which somebody had fished out of the office dumpster. If you broke the build (translation: messed up the shared project code so that it blocked everybody else’s work) then you got presented with the Build Breaker Trophy, and had to display it on your desk until you could pass it on to somebody else.
• We have a periodic International Snack Battle, where people bring food in a given theme from a place they have lived or a culture they like (including here). It’s done during an extra long tea break. Themes have included milk, dessert, (non-alcoholic) drinks, pineapple, lemon… Everyone gets the chance to try new things and learn about new recipes / local bakeries / unique products, as entries need not be homemade. Each person present can vote for top three on presentation and on taste. Spreadsheet tabulation ensues. Winner chooses next theme. (People usually include allergen info on a label without being prompted, and they sometimes bring something that stretches or doesn’t fit the theme, if that’s what they’re feeling.)
• My floor has all of the lights off. We don’t like fluorescent lights. New people get a handful of poop emoji erasers to use as weapons to toss when you need someone’s attention but they have headphones on.
• At a place I used to work we had a tradition called Bad Decision Friday. It was a small, very casual nonprofit. We’d either go somewhere together and have greasy, regrettable food, or–if it was busy — we’d order greasy, regrettable food delivered. The camaraderie! The indigestion! I miss that place.
• I worked in a TV newsroom many years ago that had a gargoyle statue on the corner of the assignment desk. He was the “Breaking News God” and every time someone touched him, some major incident would inevitably happen that would require reporters and photogs to rush out the door and producers to completely re-tool their rundowns. It was a workplace full of skeptical journalists, but everyone was wary of the BNG.
• We had The Team Plant. It was a nice ordinary office houseplant in a basket, and it didn’t belong to anyone in particular. Most of the time it lived on a credenza in the middle of our open space. But sometimes the team would just decide that you deserved or needed to have The Team Plant on your desk for a while.
You might find it on your desk if you got a promotion or had a new grandchild, or if your car was damaged in a fender-bender or someone on your account team left the company, or if you had a cold and were dragging. It appeared on my desk the week my father died and stayed there for a while, and then one of my co-workers completed a difficult project and I passed it on to him.
• My former office has the New Hire Frog. Every new hire, regardless of experience, is bequeathed this gaudy frog statue from the former new person, along with a list of Rules of the Frog. Rules include “rub frog’s belly for luck but no more than once a day” or “don’t place frog on your cubicle’s wall because he is afraid of heights” or “bring the frog with you to workload meetings so Head Boss remembers you don’t know all the ins and outs.” Silly, simple, occasionally practical stuff.
Supposedly the frog was liberated from a tequila bar in Mexico by a former employee, but no one ever got a straight answer from him so no one really knows where it came from. But faithfully does the frog stand upon each new hire’s desk.
• We had a huge oil painting donated by a board member long ago, it was an amateurish coastal harbor scene in odd colors, with a pink lighthouse with beams shining out from it that looked a bit … well, phallic, in a way that once you noticed it you could not un-see it. If you were out on travel or vacation and had enough wall space in your office, you might come back and find it hanging there. Then you had to keep an eye out for an opportunity to pass it on to the next lucky staffer. Nobody ever discussed this directly, it was just a thing that happened as if by magic. When we moved to a much smaller office space it was discreetly (and well) hung in the building’s common area.
• A few decades back when I was working as a computer technician the place I worked had a fun tradition. On the last Friday of the month, the boss would buy a case of beer, and around 4:30 we would gather in the loading dock and drink some beers while we took turns using a The Official Company Bat (TM) to beat any malfunctioning equipment into small pieces of scrap.
• I used to work with a museum with a lot of outdoor space for the public to enjoy free of charge. One summer day I decided it was far too hot to eat lunch in my office without any climate control, so I took my sandwich to the gazebo. This woman with about 10 macaw parrots climbing all over her, sauntered up the path. She then entered the museum, and began placing the birds on people.
I love birds. I even have my own parrots! Never would I think of bringing my girls to a public space and just put them on people. And yet, everyone acted like this was a perfectly normal thing. And everyone stopped what they were doing, even giving tours, to play with the birds they had been handed. The birds were delightful!
When she left, I kept asking people if it really had happened, and their response was, “Oh, that’s just the parrots for peace lady. She comes here sometimes to give the birds some shade.”
• At one workplace we had Salad Days in the summer. A coworker had a large garden (maybe actually a small farm?) and several times during the growing and harvesting season he’d announce a Salad Day and then bring in a HUGE amount of greens and veggies and other people would bring in things like dressing or cheese or croutons or fruit or bread or whatever might go on or with a salad and we’d all just eat giant salads for lunch.
• We have a company-wide White Elephant gift exchange every Christmas. It’s absolute madness, and a lot of fun. One year, an intern submitted several beautifully framed photos of himself. The recipient proudly displayed them at his desk until the following White Elephant, when he wrapped them up and put them back in gift pile. And the same thing happened the year after that, and the year after that… It’s now been more than 15 years, and the photos of Intern Nathan have showed up in the White Elephant every year since.
• My workplace has a cat. He was not originally ours, he moved in at some point. We are a very secure site, with badging in everywhere, secured perimeter, 24/7 security guards etc., and a cat who is just allowed to wander around. He has a Facebook page which has more likes than that of the institution’s leader, he features in the Newcomers’ Guide and if we have visitors, we sure check whether he is at his usual spot, to show him off. He has an official entry on our website. Search for Micky the Space Cat!
• I worked in a very casual workplace (shorts, jeans, basically anything goes as long as it’s not too revealing), and we would occasionally have a “Formal Friday” (like casual Friday, but the opposite, get it?). Some people would just dress office snazzy, some would wear something you’d wear to a cocktail party, and some people used the opportunity to bust out their 80s/90s apparel with shoulder pads and chunky gold jewelry. Good fun. (And, of course, totally optional.)
• I have just joined a team where people have huge adult terry cloth bibs to wear at lunch time. (The kind that can be bought in bulk for nursing homes.) Mine was bestowed on me this week and I am surprisingly happy about it.
sharing this as a way of saying that andy cohen is a villain and bad person and should be described as a misogynist in daily conversation because of how much he exploits all of these women
For the past month, former Real Housewives of New York cast member Bethenny Frankel has been calling for reality stars to unionize and join actors in the ongoing SAG-AFTRA strikes — because hey, there’s some seriously unethical behavior happening in that industry, and they’re not getting residuals, either.
On Thursday, SAG-AFTRA responded to a letter written by attorneys representing Frankel and several reality show performers who chose to remain anonymous about the compensation and exploitation issues on these shows with a statement saying that they are on her side and ready to work with reality show performers who do want to unionize.
“We stand ready to assist Bethenny Frankel, Bryan Freedman, and Mark Geragos along with reality performers and our members in the fight and are tired of studios and production companies trying to circumvent the Union in order to exploit the talent that they rely upon to make their product,” the Union said in an official statement this week. “We encourage any reality performers and/or members to reach out to SAG-AFTRA’s Entertainment Contracts Department so that we may work together toward the protection of the reality performers ending the exploitative practices that have developed in this area and to engage in a new path to Union coverage.”
Frankel first started pushing for unionization in an Instagram post in which she was talking about how reality show performers should be striking in solidarity with the actors and writers, pointing out that reality shows have been historically used to lessen the blow of these strikes and to ensure that people still have something to watch.
She also noted that she only received about $7,000 for her first season of RHONY and has never received any residuals, despite the fact that people (me) are constantly rewatching and streaming that season, that show and other shows, notably The Hills and Jersey Shore.
Bethenny Frankel on Instagram: “I’m well aware that unscripted talent aka “reality stars” should have a union or simply be treated fairly and valued. And the mentality that we were nobodies and that these streamers and networks have given us platforms and that we can capitalize on them is also moronic. From @snooki to @laurenconrad to @kaitlynbristowe to myself, reality tv has generated millions of dollars and entertained people GLOBALLY and my name and likeness and content are used for years to come for free on episodes where I was paid peanuts for my work. Critics will say that actors have “talent” which is what studios pay for: in fact, studios pay for advertisers and advertisers pay for the purchasers of the household aka women. And what gets women? Reality tv. Just because talent signs their life away doesn’t make exploitation correct. Reality stars should also stop shooting network and streaming content until their free content is taking down. We also deserve residuals. If a network or streamer is currently making money on me telling someone to GO TO SLEEP then maybe I should be compensated. And maybe I’m the one who needs to GET A HOBBY and maybe this will be it. #residuals#realitytv#sagaftrastrike#wgastrike#entertainmentindustry”
August 12, 2023
Not only are she and the Housewives not getting residuals, but they are required to pay Bravo a portion of the proceeds of any business they start while on the show. This is often referred to as the “Bethenny Clause” as the network started including it in contracts after Frankel sold part of her SkinnyGirl company for $100 million. “People should never sign that,” she told Salon.
The differing contracts and pay structures also causes tension between castmates. Part of the reason Real Housewives of New York: Legacy never got off the ground was because former Housewife Jill Zarin (Team Jill) wanted to get paid the same as everyone else on the show. She told Frankel in their one-hour YouTube reunion recently that this was just about respect and that she would have taken a dollar if everyone else was paid a dollar. Still, many responded to that as if she were acting like a diva instead of just wanting things to be fair. (Once again, Team Jill)
Deliberate attempts to manufacture mental instability by plying cast members with alcohol while depriving them of food and sleep.
Denying mental health treatment to cast members displaying obvious and alarming signs of mental deterioration.
Exploiting minors for uncompensated and sometimes long-term appearances on NBC reality TV shows.
Distributing and/or condoning the distribution of nonconsensual pornography.
Covering up acts of sexual violence.
Refusing to allow cast members the freedom to leave their shows, even under dire circumstances.”
I mean, anyone who watches these shows knows that many of these things are just very obviously true. There is a very famous episode of RHONY, traditionally referred to as “Scary Island,” in which model and Housewife Kelly Bensimon goes directly off the deep end, accusing Bethenny of plotting to kill her, telling castmember Alex McCord that she was “channeling the devil” and saying completely random and unrelated things that made no sense.
Still wondering what this was supposed to mean
Bensimon literally did say that she hadn’t slept and it was clear that she was, you know, not well.
Sleep deprivation of reality performers has been in the spotlight lately with several castmates from Netflix’s Love Is Blind filing a lawsuit against producers they say deliberately deprived them of sleep, didn’t give them enough to eat and then purposely filmed them while they were tired, drunk and hungry. Sleep deprivation has also been an issue for contestants on shows like Project Runway and Top Chef.
Frankel isn’t the only Housewife to say that producers pushed them to drink in hopes of stirring up drama, and this has been an issue for performers on other shows as well. The Bachelor has been accused for years of giving contestants too much to drink.
Nene Leakes of Real Housewives of Atlanta, likely the most famous Housewife in Bravo history, previously accused the network of racial discrimination as well.
Predictably, many are accusing Frankel of biting the hand that fed her, but she’s not wrong. At all. And the fact is, she’s made more money off of being a Housewife than any of them, so she could absolutely just say “I got mine, fuck you,” but she wants things to be better for other people and good for her. That seems to be Kandi Burruss of Real Housewives of Atlanta’s take, which I do not find remotely surprising given that she doesn’t think she should have to pay her employees Atlanta’s $15-an-hour minimum wage and that she is still standing by not saying anything to Marlo when her nephew, who worked at Kandi’s restaurant, was murdered.
"I myself wouldn't not be a part of that. It wouldn't make any sense for me to be a part of that. To me, if I'm working with somebody, and I feel like they're not doing something that they should be doing, I address it right then,” Burruss told Entertainment Tonight. "I don't feel like you should wait for after. You are not gonna check with them no more, and then come back and try to go for their throat. That's just how I feel."
"So me, any problems or thoughts or concerns I've had, I've said them. I speak up, you can tell I speak up." she added.
Whatever anyone thinks of reality television and those that appear on it, these people make unbelievable amounts of money for these networks, often receive minimal payment, sometimes no payment at all (as is the case with The Bachelor) and occasionally ruin their own lives in the process. They deserve fair compensation, like any other workers.
It’s also, as Frankel has noted, something that will help the whole industry. If networks can’t rely on reality shows to more or less scab during SAG-AFTRA strikes, writers and actors will benefit as well.
Personally, I can’t wait to see the industry get unionized, least of all because it will make me feel less gross for binging Housewives as often as I do.
OPEN THREAD!
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great poop question if you click through (open in incognito to bypass paywall)
This post was written by Alison Green and published on Ask a Manager.
A reader writes:
My team employs several part-time remote employees who conduct field research and submit data summaries back to us so that we can report out to our clients. Recently one of them has fallen out of communication before finishing his work — he completed the required field visits but has not turned in the required data. He is now over a month past due and in the last couple weeks has stopped responding to us via any communication method. We are running out of time and if he does not get us the data, we will have to redo the work on an extremely tight timeline. This will look bad to our clients, who will know something went very wrong and who will consider having to redo the visits a burden.
We have tried every type of outreach I can think of, offered additional assistance and empathy, and said that if he can just hand over the raw data we’d be happy to pay him for the time he took to conduct the visits and finish up the rest of the work for him. We’re getting no response back to any of this and don’t know if he’s just avoiding us or having some kind of crisis. Would it be crossing a line to reach out to other members of the field team who he may have a relationship with? Do we have any recourse here, or do we just have to eat the lost time and money and redo the work?
I answer this question — and two others — over at Inc. today, where I’m revisiting letters that have been buried in the archives here from years ago (and sometimes updating/expanding my answers to them). You can read it here.
Other questions I’m answering there today include:
My coworker pounds on the door while I’m in the bathroom
Parking space shuffles are taking up too much time
This was my pick for the Oscar, you should really do yourself a favor and watch this all the way through
This is just beautiful. This short animated film by João Gonzalez starts off slow but really pays off in the end. Ice Merchants was nominated for a 2023 Academy Award. Here's an interview with Gonzalez at Director's Notes.
#3 is a poop one so it's an autoshare, but #1 really sent a shiver down my spine
This post was written by Alison Green and published on Ask a Manager.
It’s five answers to five questions. Here we go…
1. My boss uses therapy to analyze all our interactions
I’m a new therapist two months into the job, and I have noticed that my clinical supervisor has a tendency to analyze me to my face when I have a question she wasn’t anticipating, when we disagree on a non-clinical issue or are attempting to solve a workplace issue. She is also my direct managerial supervisor, so I think something is coming up from the dual relationship.
To give examples, she will say things like, “I don’t know what’s in your story to make you think that [insert really common workplace norm/expectation].” “It seems your mind is imagining scenarios that are making you fearful” [about a legitimate, common workplace question that wasn’t accounted for in the employee handbook and she later agreed to include because “I’ve learned from couples work that sometimes the way to get the other person to work with me is to humor their unreasonable request, even though it shouldn’t take that.”] There is a lot more, like opening a salary/benefits discussion a few months ago stating “from my view it seems you have been having ‘racing thoughts’” — because I had sent her a simple, bullet-point list of questions, as she had no information on my benefits and I was due to start in less than a week. Telling me I “have a paranoid part” when in our initial interview discussion I learned they weren’t sure if they had funding for the position, but they wanted me to accept the offer on good faith they would secure a grant — that they had been rejected for the previous year. (I waited until they got the grant to accept.)
It seems anything I do can and will be analyzed. I just want to know — is this normal? It makes me really uncomfortable and angry to have someone question “my story,” when I just have a question about PTO. There are three other employees at my level and one other full LPC in the practice, but the other LPC’s schedule is too full, which is why I’m with the clinical supervisor I have for management.
I want to say something, but I know that some amount of therapizing during the clinical part of supervision is normal (example: “what came up for you when your client said XYZ?”). Ironically she is an incredible clinical supervisor, so it also worries me that I’m damaging our relationship when I push back. Recently when discussing a major part of my contract that was left out, we got into a tense back and forth because I wanted it in writing and she wanted me to “use your knowledge of me and trust me to honor this, let that guide you, not your fear of workplace power dynamics.”
No, this isn’t normal. It’s bad management — she should be focusing on behaviors, concrete actions, and outcomes, not whatever she imagines you’re feeling — and she’s not your therapist, she’s your manager. As your boss, she shouldn’t be assessing you through a therapeutic lens at all (and you’re undoubtedly right that her dual role is contributing to the issue). Frankly, some of it sounds … abusive is too strong a word here, but manipulative? Gaslighty? She’s weaponizing the language of therapy to avoid dealing with very basic employment issues.
It might not be intentional — maybe this is the lens through which she sees everything in life — but it’s making her a terrible manager and colleague.
2. Employer thinks I accepted a job they never offered me
I sent out applications for two jobs, and I only intended on choosing the better of the two since I’m not in a place where I can work two jobs. Job A was first, and it went so smoothly I thought I was dreaming. I got along with everyone and the store manager went into detail about what would be expected of me should I be hired and my hourly pay. She was open about my benefits, how many hours I’d be working, the work environment, training, and potential room for growth. I left feeling great, but kept my options open just in case.
During the interview with Job B, the manager vaguely told me I would be working very, very long shifts. This was a major reason I left my previous job of three years, and I respectfully let her know that I wasn’t interested anything similar. In addition, the manager spent most of the time talking about how frustrating her younger employees were and how everyone kept disobeying her. She didn’t mention benefits, weekly schedules, or even pay rate. It felt like I was there to listen to her complain about her current employees. The same day she wanted me to consent to a background check, which I did, and ran it on the spot. No interview did this before with me and it made me feel very uneasy. Nowhere in the application did it said “urgently hiring” or that they were hiring on the spot. It came across as being very pushy.
Not even a full 24 hours after the interview, Job B calls me back, but not for a offer. I was being asked to work because someone called in. I wasn’t given any training, I still didn’t know the hourly pay or benefits, and most of all I never accepted a job offer from them because I was never given one.
I’m concerned that Job B is assuming that because I showed up to the interview, this meant I wanted to work for them right away. But the only thing I consented to is a background check and nothing more. I didn’t even complete any onboarding paperwork and Job B has been trying to get me to work hours that told her I did not and could not work anyway. Job A didn’t go about it this way; I received an offer from them that I happily accepted.
How do I decline a job offer that I wasn’t given? Should I decline the assumed “job offer” as normal or should I politely tell Job B that there are some assumptions that are being made? Does this sound odd or am I overreacting?
Is this retail? It sounds a lot like retail, where there’s sometimes a strange assumption that if you interview, you’ve as good as accepted the offer.
Call Job B back and say, “I appreciate the offer but I’ve decided to accept a different job. Thanks for talking with me, and all the best with your hiring.”
If you were still open to considering Job B but wanted more info first — which isn’t your situation — you could say, “Before I could accept the offer, I’d need more information about the pay rate, schedule, and benefits. Could we go over that now, or schedule a call to do it later?”
3. Bathroom etiquette
Your recent article about angry notes in workplaces made me think of an office I worked in a few years ago, and I’d be interested to get your take on it.
At the time I was going through an IBS flare-up. Nothing super serious, but it meant that I was using the toilet quite frequently. A few weeks after I started, a note popped up in the office bathroom I’d been using. From memory I think there was a little poem about “using the brush after you flush”! I don’t know for sure that it was targeted at me, but given the timing I think it probably was a result of my use of the bathroom, even if the person who put it up didn’t know I was the culprit.
At the time I was quite embarrassed but also a little annoyed. I was already spending more time in the bathroom than I would have liked, and wasn’t always able to take extra time to ensure that the inside of the bowl was pristine before I rushed back to my desk. So, was I out of order here?
You’ll find two camps on this: the camp that feels toilets will sometimes show they’ve been used for the purpose they’re intended for, and the camp that feels you need to take 15 extra seconds to remove that evidence when the toilet is shared with others.
Personally, I’m in the second camp — if it’s a shared bathroom, you should leave it in the condition you found it in. I don’t think you were outrageously rude and you don’t need to feel shame or anything like that, but in general you should take the 15 seconds to leave things just as clean for the next person.
4. My former coworker listed me as her manager
I had something weird happen the other day. I received a call from a company saying that Katie, my coworker when I worked retail, had listed me as her manager and they wanted to know about her work ethic, etc.
Katie was a seasonal worker and I was a part-timer. I was never Katie’s manager. I would have been considered a senior coworker because I had been there longer but I had no managerial power over her. She was seasonal so never got a performance review (performance reviews were for people who worked in the company for a year). The only manager thing I really did was tell her stuff like:“Hey, Boss says we need to move this. Can you help me with that?” Or “Hey, why don’t you go straighten up that part of the floor?” I usually worked the night shift as did Katie and our actual manager usually worked the day shift. I acknowledge that I may have seemed like a manager to Katie but she never told me she was putting me down as a reference and, in fact, we never spoke after the season we worked together.
I was honest with the caller saying that we had been coworkers and I was not her manager but she’d been a good coworker for the short time we worked together. I have no idea if she got the job. But, like, what would be the best way to handle this?
You handled it correctly: you were honest about your role relative to hers and how long you worked together, and you gave an honest assessment within that context. Ideally you would have included something like, “Our manager usually worked a different shift from us and I’d been there longer than Katie, so that might be why she put me down” but it’s not a huge deal that you didn’t; it’s not your job to explain why Katie picked the references she did (and I imagine you were caught off-guard anyway since she didn’t check in with you before listing you).
If you want, you can contact Katie and tell her you got a reference call for her and that they mistakenly thought you were her manager … but you’re not obligated to do that. (She should have contacted you first to tell you she was listing you as a reference, but not everyone knows to do that. It’s the kind of thing that can feel obvious when you have more experience, but doesn’t feel obvious when you don’t.)
5. Not paying people who don’t submit a timesheet on time
I am a supervisor at a multinational consulting firm in the U.S. The majority of our staff are also on billable hours and required (as per industry standard) to submit timesheets on a weekly basis.
The finance department will chase late timesheets for a couple days but have threatened to not pay people for submitting a timesheet in a timely enough manner. This just happened to one of my staff — her paycheck was short a week’s time and while finance did pay her for that time, it was late. (I was out of the country for this week and not available.) We both think this appears to violate the Fair Labor Standards Act. Does it, and if so, how should we approach getting the company to resolve the practice? We definitely have some growing pains but this isn’t a small company nor a young one.
Logistically it is critical that staff submit their time in a timely manner for our billing and client budgeting, but that’s a separate issue here.
Yes, this is illegal — under both the FLSA and your state’s laws. Your state will specify how quickly employees need to be paid — usually worded as “within X weeks of the work being performed.” Employers are obligated to pay employees within that time period regardless of whether a timesheet was submitted late and even if it wasn’t submitted at all. Google your state name and “paycheck law” to find out the law for your state specifically. Once you have that info, send it to whoever manages the finance person who’s doing this with a note saying, “This violates state law and we legally cannot do it.”
I’m sympathetic to the finance team’s struggle — getting people to turn in timesheets on time is a pain — but they can’t withhold paychecks as a tool to make it happen.
Beyonce’s bidet is for sale on eBay. The ‘Formation’ singer and her husband Jay-Z rented a mansion in the Holmby Hills area of Los Angeles, California, back in 2015, and when their year-long lease was up and they moved out, the owner sold the property and the people who bought it wanted to carry out a complete renovation. According to TMZ, the new owners passed on a number of fixtures and fittings to Eric’s Architectural Salvage LA in 2017, and the company has now put a number of items from the abode, including the bidet – which has an asking price of $2,400 – exterior lights, window frame a h…
A beautiful snow leopard triggers my camera trap high up in the Indian Himalayas. I captured this image during a 3-year DSLR camera trap project in the Ladakh region in northern India. The mystery surrounding the snow leopard always fascinated me. They are some of the most difficult large cats to photograph in the wild. Not only because of their incredible stealth, but also because of the remote environment they live in.
My short update is that he 100% tried to fire me. The long update is complicated but this month has been unbelievable.
Just after my question was posted, my boss “Katie” met with me and told me she was aware of the situation and didn’t agree with how the CEO and HR had been handling it in regard to the nepotism training. I told her my only plan was to forget about it for the time being and she supported that. She told me to come to her if anything changed.
Things were quiet for a week until a major project I was working on was deleted from the company drive. It was a coincidence that I had backed it up on a USB. Katie was suspicious about my project getting deleted and told me to save everything to an external drive and my hardware, and sure enough, the project got deleted again. After that, anything I put on our work servers was getting deleted within hours, as well as any correspondence with clients or my team members. I started sending all my work communication and attachments to Katie and duplicating them on a USB that Katie kept locked in her office. It was like a James Bond movie.
After a mid-month project meeting where I showed up with all my work on a USB drive HR pulled me in because “an anonymous concern” was raised about me “hiding” my work from my colleagues and tried to write me up. Katie must have known something like this was coming because she handled it and BCCd me on all her correspondence with HR and the executive team outlining her concerns about the CEO’s and HR’s behavior regarding the DNA results and that she believed someone was remotely accessing my work computer to delete things. The company VP was horrified. Up until this point, I didn’t know CEBro wasn’t the owner of the company.
Katie and I had a call with the VP that day, who assured me that the owners were being made aware of the situation and that my job was not in jeopardy. The VP also apologized for the write-up attempt and the fact someone was obviously remotely accessing my work hardware. That was on a Friday, and my attempted firing was the following Monday.
CEBro’s mom contacted Dad on the homefront as all this was happening at work. I won’t get into what was said but the gist is Dad was set up as an unwitting donor for a childless couple. As a family we decided to support Dad and just drop it because we didn’t ask for the complete Jerry Springer package, we just wanted to know what part of Ireland Grandma was from.
The Monday after Dad spoke to CEBro’s mother, I was walking through the lobby when HR literally ambushed me and loudly fired me in front of a client and like twenty of my colleagues. Security escorted me out in front of my friends and colleagues who had no idea what was happening so that was pretty dark and humiliating. Katie stopped me on the way to my car and brought me back in for a video call with her, the VP, and the owners of the company. I explained what had happened since I got my DNA results back, the nepotism training, and editing as much of the personal stuff as I could for my Dad’s sake but the whole thing was humiliating. I was unfired but asked to turn in my badge, as both CEBro and I were suspended pending a full investigation by the owners and their lawyer. I was suspended with pay, which HR vehemently protested against. The suspension lasted a week and I had planned to spend that time looking for another job but I just didn’t have it in me.
CEBro did not return after the suspension. I was offered my job back with an apology but I opted not to go back either and have been freelancing and taking some downtime because the last month has sucked. I did accept a generous severance package, so at least they tried to do the right thing.
While some of this sounds flippant, there have been a lot of tears and stress and freaking out because this was a LOT. I don’t like being under a microscope at work or feeling like I’m “in trouble” so it was really increasing a lot of anxiety. I was also hurt because I loved that job and my team and being marched out by security felt awful. Dad feels guilty this turned into me almost losing my job, but none of this is his fault at all. In all of this, I have to say the people I resent the most in this situation were the two goblins in HR who knew they were doing the wrong thing every step of the way and openly enjoyed the drama of it all. Rumors have reached me that both the people in HR are connected with CEBro in some way — like former college friends or exes or something. I wish them the future they deserve.
My dad gave the whole family DNA ancestry kits for the holidays, and it turns out the CEO of the company I work for is my half-brother.
Dad’s not the kind of guy to gift everyone DNA kits as a way of telling us he had a secret love child, so I don’t think he knew he had another kid. We’re all grown-ups and know where babies come from and that things aren’t always what we expect, so I have a feeling this is a shock to everyone. The CEO’s company bio says he’s a “proud Texan, born and raised.” Dad was stationed in Texas ten years before he met and married my mother. The timeline all fits and so do the genes, I guess.
None of my siblings have initiated contact and neither has Dad.
I’ve met the CEO a few times but he works out of the corporate headquarters across the country from the smaller division where I work. About a week after I got my results, an email went out from the head of HR stating that all staff had to take a refresher training on nepotism. The training also included a new clause that said something like “staff are not entitled to privileges personal or professional if familial relation by genes or marriage to executive or management staff is known or unknown or discovered during employment.” Other than being clunky verbiage, I felt like it was aimed at me. I found out no other branch had to retake the nepotism training and the email only came to our office. My manager later pulled me in personally to ask if I had any questions about the policy. She was vague and uncomfortable, and I said I wanted to know why nobody else was brought in 1:1 to talk about the policy and why no other branch had to do the training. She just kind of ignored the question and said she was just following instructions, so now I think this was aimed at me.
I’m happy to drop the whole thing. I’m sure he feels as uncomfortable as I do about this, but to weaponize HR and make my coworkers waste a whole day on mandatory training just to put up a boundary seems messed up. A simple personal email of “Hey, I saw this. I don’t know what to make of it. Please give me space and don’t bring it to work” would have sufficed. Even ignoring it would have been fine by me too since I wasn’t sure I wanted to be the one to initiate a conversation about this without having talked to my dad first. Dad has gotten his results back, obviously, and he’s avoiding the conversation. This is a big elephant in the room made a little harder by the fact that I work for this guy.
What bothers me the most is that weaponizing HR with the intent to make sure I know not to ask for perks feels messed up. I’ve been with the company for five years and have a great reputation. At least I did. What do I do?
I wrote back to this letter-writer and asked, “To make sure I understand, would the CEO have been alerted to these results too, and been able to see your name and connected it to you? Is the company small enough that he’d even make that connection?
Yeah, the company is about 200 full-time employees mostly in our two states. He follows a lot of employees on LinkedIn and I’m in a marketing role so my team is in touch with corporate a lot. I’ve only met him in person a few times, but some projects bring me in close proximity to him and his direct staff. The DNA test has an app, and you get notifications regularly via email and I think push notifications on your phone if you opt-in. I have no way of knowing what he opted into, so I assumed he didn’t know until the weird training.
He has now blocked me on LinkedIn and all social media, and has blocked all my siblings and my parents. I think the jig is up. How do I make sure my job is secure?
Oh no. What a situation.
And what a reaction from the CEO! I mean, yes, this is awkward, but to handle it via a nepotism training targeting only your office and pointedly remind you that you’re not entitled to any special privileges (including “if a familial relation … is discovered during employment”?!) and then having your manager do that weird one-on-one meeting with you to make sure you didn’t have questions?
As if you were about to start demanding a raise and a promotion and your own private bathroom because you share a father. Without even talking to you first.
I don’t want to come down too hard on him because he’s obviously freaking out (and who knows, he might be reeling from learning someone he thought was his father is not his father and maybe he sees you as the walking embodiment of that) … but this is a bit bananas.
I think you’ve got two options. The first is to ignore it. Demonstrate through your very pointed lack of response and lack of requests for special treatment that nothing has changed on your side at work. Figure that maybe his frenzy of self-protective activity will die down in the next few weeks as he adjusts to the news.
The other option is to send him a note that says something like, “I want you to know this isn’t something I plan to follow up on in any way and as far as I’m concerned, it’s your private business. Please don’t worry about it coming up at work.”
The tricky thing, of course, is that a note could make things worse — now you’re confirming you got the news too and you are speaking of it, which can upset people who are working hard to forge boundaries against ever discussing a thing. Or it could make things better — if he’s been worried that you’re going to show up in his office wanting to bond as siblings or that you’ll gossip about the situation at the office, here’s assurance that you’re not. It could set him at ease. There’s no knowing.
The flip side of that is that if you ignore the whole thing, there’s no guarantee that will set him at ease either. He could remain horribly uncomfortable and look for opportunities to push you out, or might hold you back professionally. (Like if you’re up for a promotion that would have you working more closely with him, will he squash that? Will he subtly discourage others from working with you? Reveal a discomfort when your name comes up which makes other people assume there’s something unsavory about you?)
He seems so freaked out right now that personally I’d go the note route; I’d just feel better having said something. But that’s not necessarily the right course of action.
In theory, a third option could be to talk to HR and tell them you’re worried about repercussions to the CEO’s discovery. Interestingly, there’s a law that could be in play here — the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act (GINA), which prohibits employers from discriminating on the basis of genetic information, including info about an employee’s genetic tests or the genetic test of a family member. GINA would make it illegal for the CEO to fire you based on what he’s learned. HR would presumably care about that. In reality, though, if the CEO wants you gone for personal reasons, it’s probably going to happen at some point — and even if it doesn’t, there are still ways for his discomfort to harm your career, even if he doesn’t intend it to (see examples above).
Honestly, and I’m sorry to say it, I’d start putting out feelers at other companies. I’m not saying to quit tomorrow — you can give this some time and see how it plays out — but you’ve been there five years, it’s not an unreasonable time to start looking around anyway, and it wouldn’t hurt to have already done some groundwork if you do realize at some point that you’re better off moving on.
I have a question about something that happened to me a number of years ago. From time to time, I remember everything that went down and I wonder to myself if I reacted the right way or how things could have been different.
I was about three months in to a new job and really enjoying myself. I worked on a separate floor from the executive office and never really had much opportunity or reason to interact with them, as there were about four levels of hierarchy between us. A few weeks after being hired, I also started casually dating/sleeping with an older man. He had pursued me pretty intently on two different dating apps — this becomes very relevant.
After a few weeks of seeing him, one morning I woke up to find that he was taking selfies that included me sleeping next to him. He tried to brush it off by saying that I looked cute while I was asleep, but after bringing it up a few times over the next few days, he finally relented and told me that he was originally thinking about sending them to his soon-to-be-ex wife (!!!!!) because their divorce was acrimonious and he wanted to taunt her by showing that he was sleeping with someone younger. Ew ew ew.
He assured me that he thought twice and he never sent them, but obviously I immediately ended things. Of course I also instantly launched an FBI-level investigation into his entire history online and managed to find a picture of him and his wife at a charity event.
Imagine my shock when I realized that he was still legally married to the executive director of my division! At that point, I only knew her by name but we had never met. Suddenly everything fell into place — one of the pictures on my dating profiles showed me in front of a window with a very distinctive view from our division’s office. You wouldn’t be able to recognize it unless you had been in that room before, but it would be unmistakable to anyone who had spent time there. He of course recognized it and intentionally pursued his wife’s new employee to get back at her, or try to put her in an awkward situation, or god knows what. I was mortified and ashamed and afraid.
It came out through the grapevine that they had a very messy divorce and that she was extremely embarrassed by how publicly he shared very personal details of the proceedings. She was noticeably emotional on occasion and it was clear that she was very strongly impacted by the whole ordeal. Everyone in the office knew that the topic was to be avoided completely.
I was absolutely terrified about what this would mean for me at the company, but she was a consummate professional in every interaction I eventually had with her. That said, she was very awkward and stilted in every one-on-one conversation we had, in ways that she wasn’t with peers. She was known for being warm and convivial with staff, but when we spoke it felt very halting and like she was being overly cautious with everything she said. She was always quick to end our individual interactions. She never noticeably withheld opportunities or did anything to impact my career, but the relationship was definitely strained and uncomfortable.
It goes without saying, but I never brought up the fact that I had been involved with her then-husband, and of course neither did she. However, I can’t help but to assume he actually did send those pictures to her. Who knows what else he sent, especially since he clearly didn’t see anything wrong with taking pictures of me without me knowing. Again — beyond ew.
I ended up leaving a few years later but our relationship continued to be forced and awkward throughout my time at that company. Looking back now, I have to wonder if there could have been a different outcome. The professional side of me rings alarm bells at the thought of bringing something like that up at work, but now that I’m more mature and am married myself, my heart aches for her and — on a human level — I wish we could have spoken about it.
I guess I wonder if you could see a scenario where it would be appropriate to have that discussion. Woman to woman, I wish I could have reassured her that of course I had no clue that they were married, that I never would have dreamed of going out with him otherwise and that I was absolutely revolted by his actions. It kills me to think that she may have wondered if I knew and didn’t care, or that I may have been pulling some weird Machiavellian stunt to take her down a peg or … I don’t know. I just feel gross and sad for both of us and wish that we could have hashed it out.
Ugh, I’m so sorry. None of this is your fault. You were used and manipulated by someone with a twisted agenda, and it’s unfair that years later you’re still carrying the emotional burden of that.
As for whether you could or should have said something to his wife/your director at the time … you didn’t do anything wrong by not talking to her about it.
Might she have welcomed it? Maybe, but maybe not. It could have gone either way and you had no way of knowing which it would be. It could have brought her an enormous amount of relief, or it could have caused her more turmoil and made things more awkward between the two of you at work. Hell, it could have brought her an enormous amount of relief and still have made things unbearably awkward at work. To have any confidence deciding, you would have needed a knowledge of her as a person that you didn’t have.
Talking to her might have completely cleared the air; she might have been grateful for your candor and relaxed around you entirely. In the most extreme good outcome, it could have even made you professionally close. Or you could have talked to her and the awkwardness could have been too much and she could have ended up acting out of pain or discomfort in ways that harmed you professionally at that company, even if inadvertently on her part.
One of the many, many things wrong with what this man did to both of you is that he put on you the burden of needing to figure out the answer to this unknowable dilemma: Do you speak up because it will clear the air and is the right thing to do? Or will that make it worse? And which path is least likely to harm your career? Will you career be affected either way? What is safest for you? What is right for her? Those aren’t questions you should be forced to untangle, and trying was an impossible task.
So I don’t have an answer for you, because I think there is no real answer. You were put in a position you never asked for and didn’t want, were violated by someone you trusted, and were used to harm someone else without your knowledge or consent. It’s just … all-around awful. It’s okay that you weren’t able to find a way to fix what he did. All of it is on him, even the after-effects, and I hope you will release yourself from agonizing these many years later that you could have done something differently.
It’s “where are you now?” month at Ask a Manager, and for the rest of the year I’ll be running updates from people who had their letters here answered in the past.
There will be more posts than usual this week, so keep checking back throughout the day.
Soon after my letter posted and there was related press coverage, two things happened. The first was that Governor Youngkin’s administration backed way, way off the enforcement of the new telework policy with only my agency. We heard through official channels, but nothing in email, that all employees and supervisors were to “use their best judgment” when July 5 rolled around and to “be flexible and use common sense.” So if an employee struggled to abide by the new telework agreement, that was okay. My friends in multiple other agencies said this was NOT the case in their offices. The second thing is that the Governor’s staff were cracking down on leaks, specifically this one. It’s no a secret that Youngkin decided to run for president soon after he became Governor, and he has been laying the foundation for that since he took office. Leaks are considered a fireable offense so while the Youngkin staff were nice in meetings, they were privately trying to find out who contacted you and other media outlets. They chatted with multiple friends of mine across different agencies, asking specific questions and names of potential leakers.
July 5 came and went with no fuss. You couldn’t tell the difference between the previous week and start of Youngkin’s new telework agreement.
Regarding the ADA accommodations, there was a lot of intense press scrutiny so the Youngkin administration backed off that matter too. One minute our ADA agreements were being scrutinized, and the next we weren’t required to show or do anything beyond what we had already done. I haven’t heard anything about the ADA since I wrote you.
Regarding the office space challenges, I did what you said. I drafted an email that outlined all the resources my staff required to return to the office. I never heard back, and my agency head hasn’t brought up the subject since the negative press coverage. I consider that a closed matter.
The most concerning detail is that we learned all the telework agreements were going to be printed and signed by hand by the Governor’s Chief of Staff. We asked multiple times about who was going to print them, where this information was going to be stored, and how long the Youngkin administration had to retain this information per FOIA. To this day, none of us got any sort of response. I’m still very concerned that all of my personal health information, which I gave under duress, is sitting in a random office or unlocked storage room somewhere where anyone can read it, copy it, etc. Quite frankly, I’m afraid to ask.
Given the hoopla around requiring a signed telework agreement on July 5, multiple agency employees and a few of my direct reports never got theirs back. Technically, those people are supposed to be working Monday-Friday, full-time in the office, but I decided to honor my direct reports’ telework agreements as if they’d been signed by the Governor’s office. I didn’t want the people on my staff who didn’t have signed agreements being resentful of the others who did. I assumed my decision would fall under the “use your best judgment” directive the Youngkin administration gave us.
While this update may seem like telework screeched to a halt, things are ramping up again. After seeing several empty cubes and offices in our space, high-level managers above me are now insisting that people are not adhering to their telework agreements so anyone who is out of compliance will face official disciplinary action.
Finally, a number of high-level, long-time people quit for a variety of reasons, including the new telework policy rollout and the Governor’s use of state agencies for his presidential ambitions. (We don’t do politics at my agency. One of my coworker’s official government email address is now on multiple GOP campaign mailing lists, and they are furious because they only signed up for official press releases.) I love what I do, and I wanted to retire here, but I’m nearing my breaking point. If I’m forced to participate in ratting out my direct reports over their telework agreements, I don’t know what I’ll do.
I wish I had a better update. Your advice and reader comments were awesome though!
As we approach the season of office potlucks and other meals with coworkers, let’s discuss the many ways they can go wrong … from alarming cuisine to the person who takes an obscenely large share and never contributes anything of their own.
To kick us off, some stories from years past:
• “One of my old workplaces had a cookie baking contest, and the winner used store-bought dough. It became the source of gripes about cheating for years.”
• “I had a coworker who thought any treats were just for him. If breakfast tacos were ordered for my department, we’d usually offer other departments nearby any leftovers. As soon as he heard that leftovers were being offered, he’d go through and get *all* of the ones he wanted (example, all the brisket) and hide them in his desk drawer before the other department could get any. He’d also get in line first or near-first (he volunteered to help with setup), and would take massive amounts of what was there. If some folks didn’t get firsts while he was loading up his second, he’d say folks should have gotten there faster. Management did talk to him, but his answer was that he didn’t care.”
• “Our department used to have a huge holiday potluck every year. One coworker would always bring the same thing every year, a certain stew. But it wasn’t enough that he brought it; he hyped it up. Like, he’d send emails beforehand to the whole department alerting everyone that he was bringing his stew! On the morning of the potluck, he’d let everyone know what time the stew would be arriving! And send a special email thanking everyone that helped him do his job, and the stew was his repayment. It was like he believed the entire potluck revolved around his stew. (It didn’t.) Thing is, I don’t think anyone actually liked the stew. I think the only people who tried it were new people to the department that hadn’t tried it before.”
• “I used to work with an awful guy who used to dig his hand into bowls of catered food at our work lunches. Like pasta salad. it’s one thing to grab a few chips with your hand, but he’d put his dirty ass hand into a BOWL OF MACARONI. he was a total pig and if there was an email that said ‘leftovers from whatever meeting in the kitchen now!’ people would run to make sure they got there before old filthy hands got there because once he was spotted in the kitchen, all food was officially considered contaminated.”
In the comment section, please share your stories of potlucks, cooking competitions, and other office meals gone awry.
robby, gotta get the IRS-CI agents to go through all the potamus hardware stolen during the SEC raid for your half a bitcoin!!
In September of 2012 James Zhong used a hack to steal approximately 50,000 bitcoin from the dark web’s Silk Road. Yesterday the US Attorney announced that just last year they had arrested Zhong and recovered almost all of the stolen bitcoin. Here’s the amazing bit:
On November 9, 2021, pursuant to a judicially authorized premises search warrant (the “Search”), IRS-CI agents recovered approximately 50,491.06251844 Bitcoin of the Crime Proceeds from ZHONG’s Gainesville, Georgia, house. Specifically, law enforcement located 50,491.06251844 Bitcoin of the approximately 53,500 Bitcoin Crime Proceeds (a) in an underground floor safe; and (b) on a single-board computer that was submerged under blankets in a popcorn tin stored in a bathroom closet.
At the time the Bitcoin was worth $3 billion dollars. Lots to think about here. Are they going to give the money back to Silk Road users? Will they burn it? If not isn’t this just seignorage going to the US government? How can you walk by $3 billion in your closet every day and not spend it? What willpower! Why didn’t Zhong move to say Morocco?
It’s the Thursday “ask the readers” question. A reader writes:
I am the sole female Turtle Analyst on my team (job title changed for anonymity, obviously). I’m young and new at the company (just had my two-year anniversary). I use the our database’s coding language daily. Part of my job is collaborating with the Turtle database team. Most of it is complex, intermediate questions, like, “How do I turn Sliders with long tails into Snappers in the Turtle database?” The issue is the department who handles it (six men) think I’m their group therapist.
This week ALONE I’ve heard about dead brothers, failing marriages, sick pets, emotional abuse, and so much more in graphic detail. From all of them. I can’t escape it because I do need to come to these people. My org doesn’t give admin access to anyone outside that team, so I can’t do this myself.
A work session will always start normally. “So, in the Aquatics section of the Turtle database, go to End…” It will somehow transform into, “My dad never loved me as much as his stepkids, but after Marie died…” The work will get done, but not before I’ve learned way too much. I am not sharing anything similar, by the way. Often, I don’t get room to say anything at all!
To give you an example, this is a mishmosh of several conversations, but they all start the same way:
Me: “Thanks for meeting with me about the Turtle conversion table.”
Coworker: “No worries, here’s how you get started…”
*work, until any pause, be it at a loading screen or firing up a new process*
Coworker: “So how are things? Glad that Turtle Lovers project is over, huh?” (It always starts with normal small talk, which is fine! It’s fine to say “I’ve had a crazy week” or “My daughter is home sick.”)
Me: “Yes, that one was a doozy! A bit frustrating, but my team is on the ball.”
Coworker: “Ha, yeah. You know, I was having a hard time lately too.”
Me:*hoping this is about WORK* “Oh yeah?” (I want to note that I don’t even get to respond before they get to the next line.)
Coworker: “Yeah, my dad is in a home. Dementia, you know, so he doesn’t recognize me. My brother is taking care of things down there, but it’s hard not seeing him. My brother was his favorite anyways. Did you know, it was my college graduation, and my dad skipped it because of my brother’s glee club recital? He didn’t ask to see my diploma! How could you do that to your son?! I’m not raising my stepdaughter like that, no sir. But I’m still close with my brother, even if…Oh hey, it loaded! Ok, so now that the Snappers are in…” (I haven’t said a WORD. Truly Shakespearean in his monologue.)
And you know what? My first instinct when this started was to be empathetic. A “wow, that sounds hard. Do you two talk much?” If only I knew this would derail us for 30 minutes! Now I realize I did this to myself, even though I stopped after this kept happening and started telling them to stop.
How do I get out of this? I can’t keep getting hit by random trauma every time I need help. My own nonsense gets set off by this (good thing I’m in actual therapy). And if I tell them bluntly to stop, or even suggest we move on, they either ignore me and carry on, or get huffy and will be slow to help next time. Their admin boss is hands off and rude. Mine is awesome, but he’s often ignored by the admin boss.
I’ve tried a few things:
Redirect to work: “Yes, and I see line 8 is ready, so what do we do with the Softshells?” (This normally gets cut off. They just pretend they didn’t hear me, or speak over me.)
Joking/HR stop: “Lower your voice. We don’t want to have to put you in coaching!” (Which is the only thing HR does when someone is being a problem.)
I haven’t tried “Stop, this is too much” or “It’s really weird you’re telling me this” because, like I said, they will just stop helping if I irritate them. They took a month to help my boss with access because of some perceived slight.
How do I balance this clear advantage (doing things way faster with their access) and not feeling like a garbage dump for emotions (I do NOT need the full list of your hamster’s medications)? I did this to MYSELF, ugh.
I have never heard of this team trauma dumping on anyone but me. Then again, I haven’t told my boss about this yet (the other team’s boss is so removed), so maybe no one else has said anything.
I’m also losing out on workplace connections because I can’t tell whether “I love tulips, how about you?” will turn into, “Ooh, yeah, the ones in Holland are awesome” or “My stepdad threw away the tulips I bought him.” AUGH. What should I do?
HONESTY ZONE: chase sapphire has free doordash+ included in case you didn't know, and i used it to order chick fil a this weekend and i am a bad person for a thousand reasons (but i think chick fil a is *proprotionally* over criticized for its actual impacts over the past ~5 years) but so are you if you are good at credit cards
Is Chase Sapphire a Pareto improvement, or does it also involve redistribution? Here is a new paper on that topic:
We study credit card rewards as an ideal laboratory to quantify the cross-subsidy from naive to sophisticated consumers in retail financial markets. Using granular data on the near universe of credit card accounts in the United States, we find that sophisticated consumers profit from reward credit cards at the expense of naive consumers who lose money both in absolute terms and relative to classic cards. We estimate an aggregate annual cross-subsidy of $15.5 billion. Notably, our results are not driven by income—while sophisticated high-income consumers benefit the most, naive high-income consumers pay the most. Banks lure consumers into the use of reward cards by offering lower interest rates than on comparable classic cards and bank profits are highest for borrowers in the middle of the credit score distribution. We show that credit card rewards transfer wealth from less to more educated, from poorer to richer, from rural to urban, and from high to low minority areas, thereby widening existing spatial disparities.
The authors are Sumit Agarwal, Andrea Presbitero, André F. Silva, and Carlo Wix. I guess I am going to continue using my Sapphire card, are you?
