it’s always funny when someone comments on eurodance like “why don’t they make music like this anymore” because they DO and it’s one of the most creatively stagnant genres on earth (spoken with love in my heart for it)
all you need to make eurodance is one female vocalist (mediocre-to-incredible), one male vocalist who Cannot sing but can say shit like “I’m a sex king man with a party plan / international nation hand in hand” in a deep voice, and an apartment somewhere in italy
It’s “where are you now?” month at Ask a Manager, and all December I’m running updates from people who had their letters here answered in the past. Here are four updates from past letter-writers.
So, I really appreciated the commenter’s perspectives about the opportunity costs involved – in finding a nanny during COVID and finding trusted, qualified childcare in general. I also appreciated your feedback about jumping to termination without really HAVING this conversation.
I had a conversation with her where I said, essentially, that the focus on our food choices felt uncomfortable for me. She was honestly very vulnerable in sharing that she was able to lose so much weight by simply never giving herself access to any treats and being in our home was very disorienting to her. She definitely had some fears that she was projecting, and I probably also had some insecurities that didn’t mix well there. After talking, she definitely was able to reflect and see how this came across, and we talked about shared expectations around food. I mentioned that I would be happy to keep any treats she found inordinately distracting out of line-of-sight and away from the foods she and the baby were accessing. I also mentioned that I would always include her in our grocery and meal planning and make sure we had options that were appealing to her and fit her goals, per your recommended script. We also talked about food/body/diet talk around the baby as she became more verbal and she really seemed to understand. We also talked about photos taken in our home and parameters for sharing them, as well as just discussing our family with anyone else. It did turn out that the photos she took were so she could investigate how they fit into her diet, something she didn’t want to spend time doing at work. I have not seen her do that again.
We don’t always execute this perfectly, but I think that conversation set a good baseline and we can return to those mutually agreeable principles whenever this is out of alignment. She’s been an amazing nanny and I would hate to have made a hasty decision based on behavior I didn’t fully understand. Things are going really well! So thankful for your support and perspective as well as the readers’.
Thank you so much for answering my query and helping steer me away from the dark side.
I did indeed end up leaving all my copious handover notes when I left my firm.
It’s 4 months since I resgined now, 3 since I left, and they still haven’t replaced me. There was an advert for a junior version of my role on thier site for a couple of weeks, but it’s gone now, without being filled.
I mentioned the probability of an HR admin being saddled with my work, that was because a new HR ‘Guru’ had been bought in and given a dotted line above me in the weeks before I left. This person has now added 2 new people to thier team and there are another 3 advertised – not replacing people, all just additional bodies. That would make over 40 people in HR for a 600 person firm. I suspect they may have spent my wage on an HR body. Since I left a few of the fee earners who I worked closest with have left or retired. I’ve been told it’s because I left/wasn’t replaced.
On my last day they did make me go into the office, which freaked me out a little re covid, but it was the end of summer downswing and I know all my colleagues were jabbed. Everyone was lovely and the new HR Boss said if I ever wanted to go back they would have a place for me. It was surprising and really touching.
My new role is proving interesting. The firm is tiny, disorganised and full of unhidden competition between the various partners. It’s also a new subject for me and much wider responsibility (fewer people, more hats?) so I’m finding it exciting like the wild west! It is also still more money for less time. I had to call a meeting with my new manager this week as there hadn’t been any kind of check in since I started, apparently I’m doing well. I am still happy with my decision to leave and hope the notes may come in handy for some one one day : )
I took your (and most of the commenters’) advice about forcing my coworker to figure things out on her own instead of relying on me to do the work for her. I’d already set up an admin wiki page where we can all share resources, office protocols, etc., so I just added a section with links to MS Office tutorials and help files. Then every time she whined for help, I’d just tell her I was swamped at the moment, but I was sure she could find the answer on our wiki page.
Three months later she applied for and received a lateral transfer to the head office.
I’ve since learned that not one of the four managers she supported were happy with her, and that she’d received numerous complaints from other departments we work with. I’m annoyed that the way they handled it was to unload her on a different department. I figure she’ll get a different lateral transfer in a couple of years, then another, and another, until her reputation has spread enough that the last group is stuck with her until she retires.
Her replacement is also not super technically skilled, but she’s asking the right questions, and knows how to use Google. 110% improvement. After just a couple of months, she’s already more effective than my former cubemate.
Thank you so much! I read your response and many of the comments as soon as I received your email. It was very helpful. I needed the sanity check that insisting on not traveling to this retreat was a reasonable position to take.
Ultimately, I was offered this job. The only aspect of the offer I wanted to negotiate was the required in-person participation at this retreat in December. After making my position clear, this organization (a nonprofit in fact!) ghosted my references after scheduling times to talk on the phone. Only after I followed up with the hiring manager directly to see what was going on was I informed that the job offer had already been withdrawn. I am certainly glad that this bizarre disagreement over this retreat came up – I likely avoided a lot of heartache over a job at a place with some pretty questionable professional ethical standards. And, for future interviews, I’m now planning on asking some generic questions about how prospective employers have responded to the pandemic. Evidently I can’t assume anything on that front.
Thank you again – your advice has consistently been very helpful, and I’m glad I was able to hear from you and your readers on this particular situation. I feel good about how it turned out and learned a good lesson for the future.
Scott has done it again, this week bringing us a box that clearly took a lot of thought to create: The Ventit Box. It has a unique series of slats and vents that allow steam to escape without cooling down the pizza and, well, it will be interesting to see if it is affordable enough to get traction in this ever-growing pizza-to-go world. This box led us into an ever-green conversation about how to properly re-heat a pizza, or a slice of pizza, without ruining it. You’ll find our thoughts on this universal question on this week’s edition of Pizza Box of the Week.
Hey there. Just a quick note to let you know where I’ve been the last several days.
Basically, I was in Lower Back Pain Town. I’ve had problems with lower back pain, off and on, for several years now. Late last Wednesday night it was on in a big way. I strained something or had some sort of muscle spasm that caused such intense pain in my back I had to go to the emergency room. In gym shorts and sandals, because I wasn’t able to put on regular pants or shoes.
Luckily it just seems to be a muscle thing and not a slipped disc, and I’m doing a lot better now, though the muscle relaxant they gave me makes me a little spacey and a lot sleepy. Hence the lack of posts for the last few days. I’m going to try to get back to regular posting today.
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4. I mean, there is no way any intelligent human could believe it’s a thing.
5. One reason why it’s not real is because it doesn’t exist.
6. Another reason why it’s not real is because it would be the only lobby in the world agitating, without any organized sources of financial support, to create circumstances that earn its members less money and threaten to render them obsolete entirely.
7. Individuals earn more money in a shadow economy/black market because of the high risk involved. When an activity is legal and de-stimgatized, many more people participate. Competition goes up, prices go down.
8. Sex workers rely on management (understood to the public exclusively as ”pimps”) in a large part to protect them from LE, and also customers, while working in a system designed to keep them vulnerable. If that system is dismantled, there are fewer compelling reasons to give another person part of their earnings. (Though agencies/agents exist across all forms of service work, and still would for sex work. It is not more inherently exploitative or amoral to operate under these labor conditions than it is any other. No one is concerned about the “pimping out” of writers, actors, ad creators, temps, etc.)
9. The notion of “the pimp lobby” conveniently utilizes existing perceptions of sex workers as greedy and amoral. Few people bother to think through the previous points which are, let’s face it, obvious, because they find it easy to believe a handful of depraved, avaricious whores are willing to fight against the better interests of other sex working women around the world who, if anti-prositution idealogues are to be believed, are desperate for more police intervention in their lives, more laws targeting them, more obstacles to safely earning a living, and ever-increasing social opprobrium and public shaming.
10. Sex worker activists take tremendous risks because speaking out often requires IDing themselves as members of a reviled, criminalized class. For them to do this against their own financial interests highlights the sincerity and urgency of their message. This is why anti-prositution rhetoricians can’t afford to acknowledge the truth and instead posit the opposite, contrary to all common sense and practical observation: that there is a well-funded cabal of men embedding anti-women messages about sex work into public and political conversations in order to further their personal profits. Of course, the vast majority of sex worker activists around the world are women. But they are not women who speak with the same institutional authority or financial backing as the non-workers rallying to keep them oppressed.
I am not a big fan of psychic charlatanry, which often preys on people who are in genuine grief. So when I read about psychic fraud Priscilla Kelly Delmaro, arrested in May for second-degree grand larceny, I should have felt smug about her downfall. Delmaro had induced a male client to give her over $700,000 worth of payment and gifts, including a diamond ring and a Rolex – all in exchange for her mystic advice on how to woo a woman, Michelle, who'd made her lack of interest very clear. Technically the diamond was to “protect his energy,” the Rolex was to “go back and cleanse his past,” and some of the money was to build an 80-mile solid gold bridge into the spirit world, but that was the general formula: woman has no interest, man needs to feel hope, Delmaro is willing to provide that hope for a price.
Psychics in New York are supposed to clarify that their services are “for entertainment purposes only,” but Delmaro was clearly advertising concrete results, even if some of them (like the bridge) were also intangible. It was obviously a con, and thus probably a more justified arrest than two-thirds of the ones NYPD made that day.
But that wasn't my first thought when I read this story. My first thought was “how do I get in on this game?”
Here's the part that made me thoughtfully stroke my imaginary beard:
Ms. Delmaro told him the trouble had come from a spirit that was stalking him. She needed $28,000, then $28,000 more. Michelle had grown cold so suddenly, he thought, that the spirit explanation sounded right, and so he paid.
Recall that this was a woman who'd made it explicitly clear that she had no romantic feelings for this fellow. A reasonable person might note Michelle's complete lack of interest and come up with a few more plausible explanations for her coldness than “evil spirits.” But for this guy to follow that thread, he'd have to give up on an article of deeply-held faith: that any woman he wants is rightfully his and just needs to be collected. Much easier to believe in poltergeists, and pay to have them removed.
Believe it or not, I'm not unsympathetic to the man, who must be very lonely. But when I see how desperate he was to have his delusion of entitlement confirmed, when I read that he found “Michelle is influenced by evil spirits” easier to swallow than “Michelle is a human being with preferences and agency,” I find it harder to feel too sorry that someone took him for what he was willing to pay. “Men gonna men,” as the New Yorker's Caitlin Kelly tweeted; they often ignore women's explicit stated opinions, and it's always annoying, so why not get a Rolex out of the deal? The real travesty is that Michelle didn't get a cut. The other travesty is that I didn't think of it first.
In a piece discussing the horrible effects mean bosses have on the health and productivity of people at work, Christine Porath also catalogs a couple of excuses that these bosses use:
I’ve surveyed hundreds of people across organizations spanning more than 17 industries, and asked people why they behaved uncivilly. Over half of them claim it is because they are overloaded, and more than 40 percent say they have no time to be nice.
I may just start asking candidates I interview flat out whether they sometimes feel like they’re too busy to be nice. More generally, it feels like a series of questions about how a candidate handles stress may be really useful. Some ideas:
Tell me about a time when you felt like someone else’s mistake reflected poorly on you.
What do you do when you feel like someone doesn’t feel the same sense of urgency you do about a task?
How do you get a meeting on track when you’re the only person who’s prepared?
How do you handle it when it’s obvious that your boss didn’t read your email?
How do you handle it when a peer/subordinate didn’t read your email?
I’m always looking for ways to identify people with toxic personality traits in interviews. Digging into responses to stress seems like another way to get there.
i specifically chose animals that are (or believed to be) extinct due to human influence: thylacine, great auk, baiji, west african black rhino, golden toad, dodo, passenger pigeon, and quagga. there are many other species i could have included. the plants are also based on extinct species, but i found much less information about extinct plants, unfortunately.
the text doesn’t necessarily relate to each animal or their extinction. it’s all basically the same idea: let’s all be nice to each other, because today, the universe is vast and incomprehensible, we are all suffering, we are all going to die, and we’re all in this together. for today.
i’m busy for a couple weeks with conventions, but after that i’m considering a companion series with ancient extinct animals, so feel free to send me your favorites :)
In your two most recent Fun Sized Advice blurbs, you gave one woman the advice that “if you don’t wanna take it up the ass, don’t fucking take it up the ass,” then you gave another woman the advice that her husband not wanting a vibrator in bed is just a sign of a “small minded man with a fragile ego.” The implication of the first one was that people shouldn’t have to do stuff in bed if they aren’t comfortable, and the implication of the second was that the guy should just put his feelings aside and do it.
Why is it okay for one to be an assertion of consent for things done in the bedroom, and the other is just a small-mind thing?
The implication isn’t that the guy should put his feelings aside and do it. The implication is that he’s a small-minded man with a fragile ego. He still has every right to say no to pleasing his wife with a vibrator, but it’s a bit ridiculous for you to compare that kind of ineffectual selfishness with pressuring your girlfriend into having anal sex against her will.
And just to be clear, if the wife had been complaining that her husband refused to take a vibrator up his own ass, I would have given both women the exact same advice. Instead, she was complaining that her husband refused to use a vibrator on her. Surely you see the difference with regard to issues of consent and bodily autonomy.
Please tell me you’re not confused about the obvious distinction here. Please tell me you’re just a douche playing a game of devil’s advocate with this passive-tense question of false equivalence, and you’re not some self-absorbed narcissist who can only frame an argument from the perspective of your own needs.
“While it is tempting to blame men’s phantom workload on self-aggrandizing delusions, these delusions are socially reinforced when we congratulate men for participating in these duties at all. The woman who leaves work to pick up her kids senses the collective eye roll from her colleagues, while a man doing the same is considered a model citizen. These are not just women’s feelings of being a burden in the workplace: A 2013 study in the Journal of Social Issues found that men are more likely to be granted flexible work schedules by managers when they request them than women are.”
I have no evidence for any of this, other than my own conscience. May God judge me.
James Bond
It is statistically plausible, if not probable, that over the long and varied course of his sexual career, James Bond got pegged at least once. Probably by May Day or Xenia Onatopp, but honestly, you can't always tell just by looking at a woman whether she's pegged somebody. Keep your mind open to the evidence, is all I'm saying. At some point, it was bound to happen; the statistical likelihood of getting pegged cannot remain at 0 forever. If I had to break it down further I would say Daniel Craig's Bond was super chill about it because suave heteroflexibility is kind of his thing, Dalton's Bond weirdly enough did it before having standard-issue heterosexual sex and kind of prefers getting pegged, Brosnan's Bond had never heard of it before doing it and found it a little uncomfortable at first but once he relaxed enough really found the groove, and Connery's Bond did it once but denied having tried it for the rest of his life even though he dreams about it sometimes.
Batman
If I had to guess, I'd say that Keaton's Batman was super game for it, Val Kilmer was creepily excited in the same way he gets creepily excited about every single sex act it is possible to commit, Clooney's Batman loved it and had a campy good time ("it's just another gadget"), and Bale's Batman refused to do it, even though he's secretly gagging for it. None of the Robins have ever done it because he's still kind of self-conscious about his own masculinity.
1. "I'd like you to know that I'm particularly smart. Here are some subjects I consider myself to be very smart about. There is no question."
2. "Can you explain why I didn't understand this presentation?"
3. "This question has two parts, neither of which have anything to do with the other or the subject at hand. Also, this question has four parts."
4. "Can you possibly speak to an area that is outside of your expertise but is secretly in mine, so that when you can't answer it, I can try to hang onto the microphone and answer it for you?"
5. "I've written a book. Why hasn't anyone published it? I will not tell you what this book is about. I have already tried all of the suggestions you are about to offer me, so don't even try it."
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![[10 years later] Man, why are people so comfortable handing Google and Facebook control over our nuclear weapons?](http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/planning.png "[10 years later] Man, why are people so comfortable handing Google and Facebook control over our nuclear weapons?")
