Harris talked about reproductive rights to a stadium full of supporters in Houston. In Austin, Trump stumped to supporters and reporters at a private jet terminal and appeared on Joe Rogan’s podcast.
A Bexar County election worker was assaulted Thursday, officials said. In Tarrant County, officials encouraged voters to review their ballots before voting.
Earlier this month, just weeks after opening its newest exhibition, Cowboy, which examines myths and stereotypes around the idea of the cowboy, the Amon Carter Museum of American Art (the Carter) in Fort Worth temporarily closed the show and canceled some related, planned programming due to “mature content.”
While the Carter has declined an opportunity to share the timeline of its decisions, on Sunday, October 6, its website said the exhibition was temporarily closed and did not provide additional details. Visitors to the exhibition encountered a sign indicating the show’s closure, and they also did not receive an explanation about why it was closed or when it would reopen. Last week, the Fort Worth Report noted that the exhibition has since reopened with a sign at its entrance that warns of “mature content” and provides a QR code for visitors to preview the exhibition.
“Cowboy” at the Amon Carter Museum of American Art, October 2024.
When asked about the circumstances that led up to the closure, the decision to reopen with a mature content sign, the museum’s definition of “mature content,” and other pertinent details, a museum spokesperson did not directly respond to the questions posed by Glasstire. Instead, the museum provided the following statement:
“We received some feedback about the exhibition’s content and needed time to evaluate and get aligned on messaging for visitors. The Carter welcomes audiences who bring different perspectives and backgrounds, and we wanted to give visitors a chance to preview the works before entering the exhibition, so we added signage outside the exhibition entrance with a link to the exhibition checklist. The exhibition itself has not changed. We always try to consider the needs of our community, and these adjustments acknowledge their feedback.”
Two works from Laurel Nakadate’s “Lucky Tiger” series. On view at the Amon Carter Museum of American Art in “Cowboy.”
Drawings from Matthew J. Mahoney’s “In the Wake of John Joel Glanton.” On view at the Amon Carter Museum of American Art in “Cowboy.”
Because the museum has not provided information about which artworks were deemed “mature,” it is impossible to point to a specific work that brought about the closure. However, a walk through the exhibition leaves a few options, including photographs from Laurel Nakadate’s Lucky Tiger series, which depict a scantily clad, and in one image bare-breasted woman; drawings from Matthew J. Mahoney’s In the Wake of John Joel Glanton, which shows a character from the Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian in various stages of dying; and rafa esparza’s Sueños Norteños installation, which depicts two men fully-clothed in western gear dancing at a dancehall and kissing.
rafa esparza in collaboration with Fabian Guerrero with leatherwork by Yomahra Gonzales, “Querias Norte.” On view at the Amon Carter Museum of American Art in “Cowboy.”
Augustus Saint-Gaudens, “Diana,” 1894, cement and plaster, 79 1/2 x 50 1/2 x 24 inches. Amon Carter Museum of American Art
The mature content sign now prefacing the exhibition is unusual for the Carter, a museum that has works containing similar subject matters in its permanent collection. In a prominent downstairs location the Carter displays a fully nude sculpture of a woman, Diana by Augustus Saint–Gaudens, and in an upstairs gallery there is a small bronze of a similar figure by the artist. The museum also prominently displays works alluding to and featuring violence, like Frederic Remington’s A Dash for the Timber, which depicts cowboys on horseback shooting at a group of Indigenous people riding behind them. In another upstairs gallery, Thomas Eakins’ Swimming shows a scene of six fully nude men swimming together, though the viewer sees only their backsides. None of these works are accompanied by a mature content sign.
A school group gathered near Frederic Remington’s “A Dash for the Timbers” at the Amon Carter Museum of American Art.
Thomas Eakins, “Swimming,” 1885, oil on canvas, 27 3/8 x 36 3/8 inches.
Beyond adding the content warning sign to the exhibition, the Carter has quietly canceled programming around the show, including educational events geared toward families and public tours. While the museum has not confirmed this, past iterations of the Carter’s website available via The Wayback Machine, an internet archive, show that at one point the programming included events for homeschool audiences, toddlers, and regular guided tours open to the public.
Screenshot of a section of the Amon Carter Museum of American Art’s webpage for the “Cowboy” exhibition noting past and upcoming events. October 23, 2024.
Screenshot of a section of the Amon Carter Museum of American Art’s webpage for the “Cowboy” exhibition noting past and upcoming events. October 8, 2024. Image sourced from The Wayback Machine.
Screenshot of a section of the Amon Carter Museum of American Art’s webpage for the “Cowboy” exhibition noting past and upcoming events. October 4, 2024. Image sourced from The Wayback Machine.
Some of these programs have been altered while others have been completely canceled. The original description of the homeschool workshop included the Cowboy exhibition and the event was listed on the exhibition’s webpage. However, now the workshop does not include the exhibition as part of the event and the program has been removed from the Cowboy page. The guided tours seem to have been completely removed.
Additionally, though the museum previously highlighted the Cowboy exhibition in the banner of its main page, as it typically does for all current exhibitions, as of this publishing the banner has changed to exclude a slide for the show. Similarly, it seems that the museum is pulling back from its citywide billboard advertisements for the exhibition. Billboards in Fort Worth that almost exclusively depict Carter advertisements throughout the run of the museum’s shows, and which once promoted the Cowboy exhibition, now have ads for other companies.
Glasstire also reached out to the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA) Denver, the organizing museum for this traveling exhibition. A spokesperson declined to respond to questions regarding whether the Carter was in contact with the MCA Denver about its decision, but shared that it did not have a mature content sign as part of its installation of the exhibition.
It is noteworthy that since the 1990s, there has been a push in the U.S. Congress by the Republican Party to defund the arts, in part as a response to LGBTQ artists. While the Carter has not censored or changed the show in any way, it is hard to pin down what the museum deems to be mature content, since it has not provided the public with a definition. The only content in the Cowboy show that does not have an exact comparison currently on view in the museum’s permanent collection is rafa esparza’s installation that includes a depiction of romantic affection between two men.
Though other big Texas cities, (Dallas, Austin, San Antonio, Houston, and El Paso) tend to lean more liberal, Fort Worth, and Tarrant County as a whole, is more conservative. Museums in the city, such as the Kimbell Art Museum and the Sid Richardson Museum, both of which are privately funded organizations, often present exhibitions with a focus on a more traditional art canon. The outlier tends to be The Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, which has shown more controversial exhibitions, highlighting artists who are often underrepresented or historically excluded from the art world. The Carter, originally named the Amon Carter Museum of Western Art, was founded to present the collection of Fort Worth businessman Amon G. Carter, Sr., which predominantly focused on paintings and sculptures by Frederic Remington and Charles M. Russell.
This is the full recording of 4 minecraft bots controlled by different AI language models attempting to survive for 10 days. The participants are chatgpt, claude, gemini, and llama. They don't do very well, but it is interesting nonetheless. They really really really like collecting wood.
Timestamps (0:00) Update (3:39) The Box (7:40) Day 0 (18:55) Wood and Iron (36:16) The Village (50:40) Monster Hunters (1:03:55) Life and Death (1:23:20) The End
TRAVERSE CITY, MI—In an effort to reach out to swing voters crucial to his reelection bid, former President Donald Trump reportedly attempted to soften his image Friday by distributing airbrushed JCPenney beauty shots of himself at a campaign rally. “Here you go, these are nice glossies of the president we took at the JCPenney Portrait Studio—he looks great, huh?” said senior advisor Corey Lewandowski, who spent the event passing out 8-by-10 and wallet-sized photos that were taken during a 30-minute session last week and that feature the Republican candidate in soft lighting with a coquettish expression on his face. “It was the photographer’s idea to have one with him in jeans and a matching denim jacket. Kind of silly, but we think it shows off a gentler side of him that most people don’t ever see. We also have this great one where he’s holding a hand to his chin in a pensive pose and has a sweater tied around his shoulders. Really sharp, right? And it didn’t break the bank, either.” At press time, reports confirmed the campaign had further targeted suburban moms with a holiday photo of Trump’s senior staff in matching striped shirts in front of a roaring fire.
Studies have linked chronic loneliness with a variety of harmful health conditions, from cardiovascular disease to anxiety. The Onion takes a look at the key statistics behind what the surgeon general has described as a loneliness epidemic.
83 Million: Dogs purchased to try and fix this
741,000: Number of Americans who listed their profession on the 2020 Census as “lonesome cowboy”
2: Lifetime opportunities to make new friends after college
0: Lips at the opposite end of that long spaghetti strand you’re slurping
65%: Men who report feeling lonely after murdering their spouse
1: Son of your mom’s hairdresser who is also interested in that video game stuff
21,000: Pigeons in the park who have been eating good lately
13: Days before your neighbor will notice the smell of your rotting corpse
92%: Decline in the use of two-person, hand-pumped rail cars
$1,800: Cost to purchase a pal off the dark web
0: Other people out there who can relate to exactly how you’re feeling
Keeping a suspense file gives you superpowers (permalink)
Two decades ago, I was part of a group of nerds who got really interested in how each other managed to do what we did. The effort was kicked off by Danny O'Brien, who called it "Lifehacking" and I played a small role in getting that term popularized:
While we were all devoted to sharing tips and tricks from our own lives, many of us converged on an outside expert, David Allen, and his bestselling book "Getting Things Done" (GTD, to those in the know):
GTD is a collection of relatively simple tactics for coping with, prioritizing, and organizing the things you want to do. Many of the methods relate to organizing your own projects, using a handful of context-based to-do lists (e.g. a list of things to do at the office, at home, while waiting in line, etc). These lists consist of simple tasks. Those tasks are, in turn, derived from another list, of "projects" – things that require more than one task, which can be anything from planning dinner to writing a novel to helping your kid apply to university.
The point of all this list-making isn't to do everything on the lists. While these lists do help you remember what to do next, what they're really good for is deciding what not to do – at all. The promise of GTD is that it will help you consciously choose not to do some of the things you set out to accomplish. This is in contrast to how most of us operate: we have a bunch of things we want to do, and we end up doing the things that are easiest, or at top of mind, even if they're not the most important things.
GTD recognizes that you can be very "productive" (in the sense of getting many things done) and still not do the things that you really wanted to do. You know what this is like: you finish a Sunday with an organized sock-drawer, all your pennies neatly rolled, the trash-can in your car emptied…and no work at all on that novel you're hoping to write.
You can't do everything, but you can control what you don't do, rather than just defaulting into completing a string of trivial, meaningless tasks and leaving the big stuff on the sidelines. Organizing your own tasks and projects is a hugely powerful habit, and one that's made a world of difference to my personal and professional life.
But while good to-do lists can take you very far in life, they have a hard limit: other people. Almost every ambitious thing you want to do involves someone else's contribution. Even the most solitary of projects can be derailed if your tax accountant misses a key email and you end up getting audited or paying a huge penalty.
That's where the other kind of GTD list comes in: the list of things you're waiting for from other people. I used to be assiduous in maintaining this list, but then the pandemic struck and no one was meeting any of their commitments, and I just gave up on it, and never went back…until about a month ago. Returning to these lists (they're sometimes called "suspense files") made me realize how many of the problems – some hugely consequential – in my life could have been avoided if I'd just gone back to this habit earlier.
My suspense file is literally just some lines partway down a text file that lives on my desktop called todo.txt that has all my to-dos as well. Here's some sample entries from my suspense file:
WAITING EMAIL Sean about ENSHITTIIFCATION manuscript deadline 10/24/24
WAITING EMAIL Russ about missing royalty statement 10/12/24
WAITING EMAIL Alice about Christmas vacation hotel 10/8/24 10/20/24
WAITING EMAIL Ted about Sacramento event 8/12/24 9/5/24 10/5/24 10/20/24
WAITING CALL LA County about mosquito abatement 10/25/24
WAITING CALL School attendance officer about London trip 10/18/24
WAITING MONEY EFF reimbusement for taxi to staff retreat $34.98 10/7/24
WAITING SHIPMENT New Neal Stephenson novel from Bookshop.org 10/23/24
This is as simple as things could possibly be! I literally just type "WAITING," then a space, then the category of thing I'm waiting for, then a few specifics, then the date. When I follow up on an item, I add the date of the followup to the end of the line. If I get some details that I might need to reference later (say, a tracking code for a shipment, or a date for an event I'm trying to organize), I'll add that, too, as it comes up. Creating a new entry on this list takes 10-25 seconds. When someone gets back to me, I just delete that line.
That is literally it.
Every day, or sometimes a couple of times a day, I will just run my eyes up and down this list and see if there's anything that's unreasonably overdue, and then I'll send a reminder or make a followup call. In the example above, you can see that I've been chasing Ted about Sacramento for months now (this is a fake entry – no plans to go to Sacto at the moment, sorry):
WAITING EMAIL Ted about Sacramento event 8/12/24 9/5/24 10/5/24 10/20/24
So now I've emailed Ted four times. Maybe my email's going to his spam, and so I could try emailing a friend of Ted and ask them to check whether he's getting my messages. But maybe Ted's trying to send me a message here – he's just not interested in doing the event after all. Or maybe Ted is available, but he's so snowed under that he's in danger of fumbling it, and I need to bring in some help if I want it to happen.
All of these are possibilities, and the fact that I'm tracking this means that I now get to make an active decision: cancel the gig or double down on making sure it happens. Without this list, the gig would just die by default, forgotten by both of us. Maybe that's OK, but I can't tell you how many times I've run into someone who said, "Dammit, I just remembered I was supposed to email you about getting that thing done and I dropped the ball. Shit! I really was looking forward to that. Is it too late now?" Often it is too late. Even if it's not, the work of picking up the pieces and starting over is much more than just following through on the original plan.
Restarting my suspense file made me realize how many of the (often expensive or painful) fumbles I've had since the pandemic were the result of me not noticing that someone else hadn't gotten back to me. In essence, a suspense file is a way for me to manage other people's to-do lists.
Let me unpack that. By "managing other people's to-do lists," I don't mean that I'm deciding for other people what they will and won't do (that would be both weird and gross). I mean that I'm making sure that if someone else fails to do something we were planning together, it's because they decided not to do it, not because they forgot. As GTD teaches us, the real point of a to-do list isn't just helping us remember what to do – it's helping us choose what we're not going to do.
This is not an imposition, it's a kindness. The point of a suspense file isn't to nag others into living up to their commitments, it's to form a network of support among collaborators where we all help one another make those conscious choices about what we're not going to do, rather than having the stuff we really value slip away because we forgot about it.
I have frequent collaborators whom I know to be incapable of juggling too many things at once, and my suspense file has helped me hone my sense of when it would be appropriate to ask them if they want to do something together and when to leave them be. The suspense file helps me dial in how much I rely on each person in my life (relying on someone isn't the same as valuing them – and indeed, one way to value someone is to only rely on them for things they're able to do, rather than putting them in a position of feeling bad for failing you).
Lifehacking gets a bad rap, and justifiably so. Many of the tips that traffick as "lifehacks" are trivial or stupid or both. What's more, too much lifehacking can paint you into a corner where you've hacked any flexibility out of your life:
But ever since Danny coined the term "lifehack," back in 2004, I've been cultivating daily habits that have let me live the life I wanted to live, accomplishing the things I wanted to accomplish. I figured out how to turn daily writing into a habit and now I've written more than 30 books:
A daily habit of opening a huge, ever-tweaked collection of tabs has made me smarter about the news, helped me keep tabs on my friends, helped me find fraudsters who were trying to steal my identity, and ensured that all those Kickstarter rewards and other long-delayed, erratic shipments didn't slip through the cracks:
Daily habits are superpowers. Once something is a habit, you get it for free. GTD turns on decomposing big, daunting projects into bite-sized, trackable tasks. I have a bunch of spaces around the house – my office, my closet, the junk sheds down the side of the house, our tiki bar – that I used to clean out once or twice a year. Each one was all-day, sweaty, dirty job, and for most of the year, all of those spaces were a dusty, disorganized mess.
A month ago, I added a new daily task: spend five minutes cleaning one space. I did the bar first, and after two weeks, I'd taken down every tchotchke and bottle and polished it, reorganizing the undercounter spaces where things pile up:
Now I'm working through my office. Ever day, I'm dusting a bookshelf and combing through it for discards to stick in our Little Free Library. Takes less than five minutes most day, and I'll be done in about three weeks, when I'll move on to my closet, then the side of the house, and then back to the bar. A daily short break where I get away from my computer and make my living and working environments nicer is a wonderful habit to cultivate.
I'm 53 years old now. I was 33 when I started following Getting Things Done. In that time, I've gotten a lot done, but what's even more relevant is that I got a lot of things not done, too – things that I consciously chose not to abandon. Figuring out what you want to do, and then keeping it on track – in manageable, healthy, daily rhythms that bring along the other people you rely on – may not be the whole secret to a fulfilled life, but it's certainly a part of it.
"Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com
"Attack Surface": The third Little Brother novel, a standalone technothriller for adults. The Washington Post called it "a political cyberthriller, vigorous, bold and savvy about the limits of revolution and resistance." Order signed, personalized copies from Dark Delicacies https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1840/Available_Now%3A_Attack_Surface.html
This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net.
Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution.
Consumer advocacy group Public Knowledge today hailed a decision by the US Copyright Office to "grant an exemption specifically allowing for repair of retail-level food preparation equipment—including soft serve ice cream machines similar to those available at McDonald's."
The group, which teamed with iFixit to request the exemption last year, said the government ruling will "free the McFlurry." Public Knowledge Senior Policy Counsel Meredith Rose called the decision a victory for "franchise owners, independent repair shops, and anyone who's had to bribe their kids with a chilly treat on lengthy road trips."
The change should "spark a flurry of third-party repair activity and enable businesses to better serve their customers," Rose said. "While we are disappointed that the Register recommended a narrower exemption than we had proposed, this does not soften our enthusiasm. We will continue to chip away at half-baked laws blocking the right to repair, sprinkling consumer victories as we go. Today's win may not be parfait, but it's still pretty sweet."
- Elizabeth Anderson, “The Epistemology of Democracy,” in Episteme - Erica Benner, “What The West Forgot About Democracy,” in Democracy - James Broughel, “TikTok is A Beacon of Democracy in the Social Media Landscape,” in Forbes - Carol Cadwalladr, “Inciting Rioters in Britain was a test run for Elon Musk. Just see what he plans for America,” in The Guardian - Chung-hong Chan & King-wa Fu, “The Relationship Between Cyberbalkanization and Opinion Polarisation...” in Journal of Computer Mediated Communication - Nic Cheeseman et al., “Social Media Disruption: Nigeria's WhatsApp Politics,” in Journal of Democracy - Dan Davies, The Unaccountability Machine - Ronald Deibert, “The Road to Digital Unfreedom: Three Painful Truths About Social Media,” in Journal of Democracy - Gil Duran, “Where J.D. Vance Gets His Weird, Terrifying Techno-Authoritatian Ideas,” in The New Republic - Federico Finchelstein, The Wannabe Fascists - Klint Finley, “Geeks for Monarchy: The Rise of Neoreactionaries,” in Tech Crunch - Francis Fukuyama, “Making the Internet Safe for Democracy,” in Journal of Democracy - Francis Fukuyama et al., “Middleware for Dominant Digital Platforms: A Technological Solution to a Threat to Democracy,” Stanford Cyber Policy Center - Lia Haberman, “Inside The First White House Creator Economy Conference,” ICYMI - Fredrick Hayek, Law, Legislation, and Liberty - Shaun Heap et al., The Theory of Choice: A Critical Guide - John Herrman, “TikTok is Shaping Politics, But How?” in The New York Times - Adel Iskandar, “Egyptian Youth’s Dissent,” in Journal of Democracy - Kaja Kallas, “On Democracy,” in Democracy - Garry Kasparov, “Trump, Putin, and the Dangers of Fake News,” in The Parallax View - Daphne Keller, “The Future of Platform Power: Making Middleware Work,” in Journal of Democracy - Gary King, Jennifer Pan, & Margaret Roberts, “How the Chinese government fabricates social media posts for strategic distraction, not engaged argument,” in American Political Science Review - Aynne Kokas, “Why TikTok is A Threat to Democracy,” in Journal of Democracy - Rachel Leingang, “Elon’s Politics: how Musk became a driver of elections misinformation,” in The Guardian - Noam Lupu, Mariana Ramírez Bustamante, & Elizabeth Zechmeister, “Social Media Disruption: Messaging Mistrust in Latin America,” in Journal of Democracy - Ahmed Maati et al., “Information, Doubt, and Democracy: How Digitisation Spurs Democratic Decay,” in Democratization - Sapna Maheswari, “Love, Hate, or Fear It: TikTok Has Changed America,” in The New York Times - Nathalie Maréchal, “The Future of Platform Power: Fixing The Business Model,” in Journal of Democracy - Colleen McClain, Monica Anderson, & Risa Gelles-Watnick, “How Americans Navigate Politics on TikTok, X, Facebook and Instagram,” in Pew Research - Joseph Medina, The Epistemology of Resistance - Cade Metz, “Silicon Valley’s Safe Space,” in The New York Times - Carl Miller, “Directing Responses Against Illicit Influence Operations” - An Xiao Mina, Memes to Movements - Never Post, “Memeing the News” - Erik Nisbet & Olga Kamenchuk, “Russian News Media, Digital Media, Informational Learned Helplessness, and Belief in COVID-19 Misinformation,” in International Journal of Public Opinion Research - Whitney Phillips, “Putting the Folklore in Fake News,” in Culture Digitally - Adela Raz, “Why Democracy Failed in Afghanistan,” in Democracy - Ben Rhodes, “American Descent,” in The New York Review of Books - John Samples, “Social Media and the Appearance of Corruption,” American Enterprise Institute - Robert Smith, Rage Inside the Machine - Tante, “AI and Democracy” - Tante, “Inevitable” - Tante, “Liberty, an iPhone, and the Refusal to Think Politically” - TrashFuture, “The Sulla of Suburbia” - Joshua Tucker et al., “From Liberation to Turmoil: Social Media and Democracy,” in Journal of Democracy - Zeynep Tufekci, “Capabilities of Movements and Affordances of Digital Media: Paradoxes of Empowerment” - Peter Paul Verbeek, Moralising Technology - Silvio Waisbord, “Why Populism is Troubling for Democratic Communication,” in Communication, Culture, and Critique - Yuan Yang, “Why We Should Join Things,” in Democracy - Shoshana Zuboff, “Big Other: Surveillance Capitalism and the Prospects of an Information Civilization,” in Journal of Information Technology
Former President Trump has on multiple occasions praised Adolf Hitler according to John Kelly, his longest-serving White House chief of staff who, in a series of audio interviews, claimed Trump met the definition of a fascist and raised concerns that he would rule like a dictator if elected next month. What do you think?
“I bet now the woke media is going to somehow paint Hitler as a bad guy.”
Gustavo Terranova, Systems Analyst
“I don’t see how Hitler comes back from this.”
Doris O’Leary, Crumb Sweeper
“How could Kamala Harris let something like this happen?”
Imagine my surprise when I opened the blog today to find you had re-released my letter! I felt an update was owed to the commentariat.
I can’t tell you how much I appreciated your advice on this peculiar situation. It was a much-needed grounding and reminder of what “normal” should look like. While I was not able to participate when the post was originally published, I did read every single comment!
Your point about questionable judgement was SPOT on.
“Scott” was indeed a younger employee and deeply convinced of the superiority of his own intellect and gender. He had a 5-, 10-, and 15-year life plan with ambitious goals. Unfortunately, this was coupled with no more sense than God gave a goose. His previous work experience in an unrelated field left him the impression that it was absolutely reasonable to deeply examine the people around him but then “verify” his findings through research.
As part of his 5-year plan, he was applying for many roles within the company in search of advancement, despite not having relevant experience nor demonstrating development in any key skill areas. As mentioned in my letter, I was hired on in a line-level position and then promoted to a management position within a couple of months. In that industry, career advancement is often tied to re-assignment in diverse geographic locations (going where the work is) and arriving at a new location is accompanied by sharing bona fides with the team to build connections. Imagine you’ve worked for 20 years for the same company, but have moved eight times and never worked in the same place/with the same team more than two years in a row. I had spent a great deal of time grabbing opportunities as they arose, living out of suitcases, and working far, far too much. I had garnered some nice accolades in some faintly glamorous locales, but anyone who has done it knows that the luster is surface-level only.
Scott was intensely interested in my career experience and how I progressed in the field. Coupled with his desire for promotion and deeply flawed perceptions around reasonable follow-up, this led to the rather extraordinary situation I wrote in about.
Armed with the knowledge that Scott was about as intuitive as a pile of bricks, I was planning a follow-up conversation the next time we worked together. He beat me to the punch when he asked me AGAIN about the information he had found as soon as I approached his desk. This time with a copy of my booking photo pulled up on his screen. (!!!!) I reacted much more decisively this time, telling him to close the browsing window immediately and pulling him into the office for a one-on-one conversation.
Looking back, I think I used your phrasing almost verbatim around work boundaries and everyone deserving privacy. Scott was mostly confused by this response. In his view, it was perfectly reasonable to look for deeper information about almost anyone. His rationale behind asking me about what he’d found was he “wanted to alert me this information was out there.” I told him it was unacceptable behavior and demonstrated incredibly poor judgement that he’d dig this far into any colleague, much less his manager. Then to bring it up multiple times! The company completed background checks for every employee. If they had proceeded with the hire, one would assume that nothing relevant was in the report! I also let him know this was such an egregious situation, we would be documenting both conversations and issuing a write-up, and this endangered his future with the company.
After distance from the situation, I genuinely believe Scott was an incredibly intelligent person demonstrating that anyone can be an absolute idiot.
Did I document the situation in detail? Absolutely.
Did I discuss this with HR and my boss? Absolutely and she was ready to fire Scott. HR was flabbergasted and incredibly helpful in their handling of the situation. My documentation plan was supported with the agreement that Scott was on his on his final chance.
Did Scott get promoted into another position? Not while I was there.
After this incident, he did demonstrate an earnest desire to improve as a team member and make amends. We parted on decent terms. I actually wound up suggesting he read AAM regularly!
Unfortunately, my industry was one devastated by the pandemic. I wrote the letter in mid-2019. By March of 2020, almost my entire professional network was either unemployed or being overworked as skeleton staff. Driven by necessity, I grabbed a copy of Alison’s book How To Get A Job and, after giving some serious consideration about what I’d like out of my work moving forward, I re-tooled my resume and got to hunting.
I’ve successfully transitioned to a new, very different industry and landed a position with a great company. It offers a much better work-life balance and more reasonable employee culture. While I do sometimes miss my old career, my situation is much improved and I have been quite happy to be settled down.
I have no idea where Scott has landed but I wish him well. I will NOT be googling him.
This post was written by Alison Green and published on Ask a Manager.
A reader writes:
This is a low-stakes question, but I’m curious if anyone else is bothered by open-office floor plans (or otherwise very visible work spaces) and if so, any tips on how to deal with feeling strangely “on display” at all times?
I work a non-customer-facing office job. I haven’t worked a true customer service job since I worked restaurant jobs in college, and I remember feeling terribly drained at the end of a shift with sore facial muscles from smiling all day at strangers. (I say that just to say I don’t know how people do it; customer service workers have my utmost respect!)
More recently, at my last job my desk happened to be in the middle of a large room and visible via an interior window to a busy hallway, and also visible to another hallway behind me. We had no break room so I’d eat at my desk and had many moments where I’d be stuffing my face while accidently making eye contact with those walking by. It wasn’t just the eating that was awkward — I’d really prefer to blow my nose (allergies, yay), or make a weird face at my computer on occasion, or stand up for a quick stretch without an audience of people walking by and sometimes stopping to stare or ask me what I’m doing. I had a micromanaging boss then who pressured me to not eat at my desk and to look professional at all times (aka, always smiling) since I was so visible — seems easy for her to say when she had an office with a door, and my job was not a front desk manager or receptionist so I wasn’t expecting to be “on” in that way, it was just the way the room was set up. I asked to move desks because I found the pressure to smile 24/7 to be too distracting but was brushed off. It was a strange environment, mostly because of my boss’s smiling thing and also partly because I personally didn’t love working inside a fishbowl.
Now the concept of highly visible workspaces has become a fascination of mine. I’m at a new job and have a cubicle so it’s less of an issue (though I still feel a little awkward if I need a stretch break). My new colleagues with offices have fully glass doors/walls. (It is not at all soundproof but that’s a different issue.) Is it only me that would feel uncomfortable and distracted in a highly visible office? How do people deal? Maybe it does work well for some people?
It is definitely not only you! Loads of people dislike highly visible workspaces.
Generally, people do adjust at least to some degree, and there are a lot of of workplaces where visibility and lack of privacy is built into the model (think, for example, of newsrooms, call centers, factories, etc.). Usually people function by mentally assuming a sort of cloak of invisibility around some activities, or just get used to it and don’t think about it much after a while. But some people don’t adjust and are never quite comfortable with it.
Sometimes there are physical changes you can make to your work area that will ameliorate it a bit, like tweaking the direction your computer faces, strategically blocking passer-bys’ view with some files, or agreeing with your coworkers on a “do not disturb” signal.
But your set-up was made worse for two reasons: the lack of any break room, so you had to do everything at your desk, and the smile-obsessed boss. Either of those would make the situation worse, but the boss in particular was ridiculous. Expecting someone to smile through the entire workday (and not just when, for example, a client approaches them) is bizarre and out of touch with the reality of human faces and displayed some really weird priorities.
BALTIMORE—In what astronomers called an alarming yet compelling observation, NASA officials announced Thursday the discovery of potential life on Mars after a giant eyeball in the middle of the planet looked directly into the James Webb Space Telescope. “We are excited to share telescopic evidence of a colossal, audibly blinking eyeball on the surface of Mars, a finding that suggests extraterrestrial life may be present,” said NASA administrator Bill Nelson, explaining that visual signals from the Martian eyeball, dubbed Olympus Peeper, were first picked up when its large batty eyelashes were fluttering in the direction of their telescope’s sensor. “Further analysis is required to determine whether its unbroken eye contact was a threat, curiosity, or perhaps even flirtation.” At press time, NASA had reportedly delayed any plans to launch a mission to Mars after the planet began rapidly heading toward Earth.
SPOKANE, WA—Stressing that the best move would be to just shave the whole thing off, sources confirmed Thursday that area man Stephen Blanchet’s shitty beard had barely any frolicsome woodland creatures living in it. “You can tell Stephen’s proud of his so-called beard, but there are hardly any chickadees popping out to chirp a happy tune or chipmunks scurrying through in a mirthful game of chase,” said coworker Sarah Tillotson, adding that while a cheeky screech owl would occasionally pop out when Blanchet was eating to playfully nab a bite for itself, one jovial bird of prey simply wasn’t enough to make the beard work. “Some days there’s a vole in there, but it’s depressing and lethargic instead of clumsy and excitable, like you’d hope. I think it’s gonna die, if it hasn’t already. And the baby raccoon that lives in his beard is a complete asshole and not whimsical at all. Rabid little fucker hissed at me once. I’m sorry if this sounds mean, but some guys just don’t have the genetics to grow facial hair harboring a joyous menagerie of frisky forest critters, and Stephen’s one of them.” After overhearing his coworker’s disparaging remarks, Blanchet was reportedly spotted trying to improve his beard’s appearance with a chipper family of hummingbirds.
Elon Musk, one of the Trump campaign’ most powerful donors, recently announced he will give away $1 million daily to swing state voters who sign his PAC’s petition. Here are all of the other ways the billionaire is working to get Trump elected.
Arming Secret Service with katanas: The woke mind virus is no match for the assassin’s blade.
Spawning: It’s unclear if Musk’s humanoid spawn will be eligible to vote, but if they can they will be a significant portion of the electorate.
Buying a MAGA hat: That’s $40 right there.
Giving Eric Trump the name of his hair transplant guy: His name is Doğan, and the döner kebab place next door makes the 13-hour plane ride totally worth it.
Loaning Trump his Grimes: It’s better to have a Grimes and not need it, than need a Grimes and not have it.
Announcing mandatory Tesla software update: On Nov. 5, all Teslas are set to self-drive their owners to a polling place in Lackawanna County, PA regardless of their home state.
Securing the lonely weirdo vote: As sweaty incels go, so goes the nation.
CINCINNATI—Moments after he frantically nailed two-by-fours across the closed door of the bedroom he shares with his wife, vice presidential candidate JD Vance issued a dire warning Wednesday, alerting the public that millions of women may vote under the influence of menstrual madness. “If they are permitted to cast ballots, then we risk allowing the next president of the United States to be chosen by this crimson menace,” said the Ohio senator, who before boarding up a bedroom window slid a metal tray with a cup of pills, ginger root, a wooden cross, and a Bible to Usha Vance, the mother of his three children. “Simply being in the presence of menstrual fluid can cause anyone—man, woman, or child—to lose their grip on sanity. All women of breeding age must be kept at least 500 feet away from polling sites to prevent a complete derangement of the American electorate. This is code red!” Vance added that as soon as Election Day was over, it would once more be safe to allow women outdoors to engage in tasks such as grocery shopping and taking the kids to and from school.
Former Abercrombie & Fitch CEO Mike Jeffries, his romantic partner, and a third man were arrested on charges of luring men into drug-laced, outlandish, and coercive sex parties by dangling the promise of modeling for the retailer’s once-defining bare-chested ads. What do you think?
“That’s the same way I ended up working at Wetzel’s Pretzels.”
Dave Boido, Checklist Provider
“I’ll never shop there again without a really good promo code.”
Moriah Cosper, Entrepreneur
“But the sex objects I leered at always looked so happy.”
Today, I want to talk about transformation. As mayor, I promise I will turn into a beast of policy and transform this town overnight into something we don’t even recognize. I want everyone to wake up the day after I’m sworn in and say, “What the hell happened last night? Gerald, what happened to your face?” Oh yes. Gerald’s face will be bloody—bloody surprised at how much better his life got last night, that is.
As citizens of North Harbor, I know you haven’t had it easy lately. I’ve heard the same worries from voters all across this town. Why is nobody doing anything about our favorite clothes that rip off our bodies at the sight of the moon? Why is nobody picking them up, folding them, and neatly bringing them back to us? Why, just the other day, I saw Stanley’s favorite “Dental Association Convention 2018” T-shirt near where those two hikers went missing, and I thought to myself, “Stanley must want that shirt back.” It is outrageous that no other candidate in this race has had the guts to speak out about this unspeakable town crisis.
Listen, folks, this town has gone on for far too long with just one full moon per month. As mayor, I vow to increase the amount of full moons to two per week. Now, I know some people would say that’s “scientifically impossible.” But I think those people are reading too much science and not enough about the real issues facing the real people of this town. And for those who think I’m saying this just for the werewolves, that couldn’t be farther from the truth. I’m just passionate about the tides.
Yes, our town’s had its fair share of bad luck recently. The old steel mill closed its doors. The only place left in town to buy groceries is Microplastic Mart. The middle school gymnasium is now a Bite Wound Emergency Center. Times have been challenging, sure, but we all need to come together. We must stop complaining about “late-night howling” and “blood-stained sidewalks” and focus on the hairy work of returning our town to its past glory.
Finally, we need to get our town budget under control. We could save tens of thousands of dollars a year if we did one simple thing my opponents are too scared to do: Fire Van Wolfberg, the Werewolf Hunter. All he’s done is tell us that there are “Too many werewolves to count” and “Well, that’s not how I’d put it, but yes, they would be a sizable voting block.” If he’s so good, why do more and more people keep showing up at the Bite Wound Emergency Center? Everyone knows the only way to stop more people from going to the Bite Wound Emergency Center is to close it.
Now, let’s go win this thing. Thank you, and God bless North Harbor. And also, just to cover my bases, let’s ban garlic while we’re at it.
Our friends at 270 Reasons are gathering a polyphonic orchestra of brilliant writers, teachers, doctors, filmmakers, artists, and citizens of all kinds to weigh in about their plans to vote this November. These opinion essays run the gamut from advocacy for basic human rights to acutely personal mini-manifestoes. Read the rest over at 270 Reasons.
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Because Now Is the Time to Fight for Our Planet
The last eighteen months have seen the hottest temperatures in at least the last 125,000 years on our planet. That’s come with fire, flood, storm, drought, and death.
The last eighteen months have also seen—finally—the onset of the renewable energy revolution. We’re now installing a gigawatt of solar panels (about a nuclear power plant’s worth) on this earth every day.
November 5 will play a huge role in which of these trends accelerates fastest.
If Kamala Harris wins, she and Tim Walz will continue the work begun under Joe Biden to build out sun and wind power across the US; the IRA law is already translating into battery factories and offshore wind farms, and that can and should develop unstoppable momentum over the next four years. We live on a planet where pointing a sheet of glass at the sun is now the cheapest way to produce power—those economics, combined with a continuing political shove, would mean that by decade’s end we could break the back of Big Oil’s political power. We won’t stop global warming, but we will at least be able to slow it down.
Or we could choose Donald Trump, who has promised on day one to “stop wind” and “drill, drill, drill.” In fact, he’s said he’ll rule as a “dictator” to make sure that happens. Project 2025 is the playbook for his first year in office, and it involves thwarting every effort in the federal government to deal with climate—including shutting down the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which maintains the thermometers that measure the ever-rising temperature. After that, there’ll be no problem…
The last time he had power, Donald Trump pulled America out of the Paris Agreement—suddenly, the country that has put the most carbon into the atmosphere was the only government on Earth not involved in the effort to slow down the climate crisis. That’s clearly his plan again, and when he succeeds, it will provide cover for every other oligarch on the earth, his buddies in Russia and Riyadh chief among them. And all the while he’ll chortle, as he did with Elon Musk, about how climate change will “create more oceanfront property.”
Eventually, the sun and wind will win out—they’re all but free. But “eventually” doesn’t do us much good. The world’s climate scientists have declared we have to cut emissions in half by 2030 to have any chance of staying on the path we set in Paris just eight years ago. The next presidential inauguration will be in 2029. That means this is the election that matters for our future; we won’t get another try.
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Bill McKibben wrote the first book about climate change, way back in 1989; he’s the founder of Third Act, which organizes Americans over sixty for action on climate and democracy.
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Read more essays (with new ones added every day) at 270reasons.com.
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The arguments here represent the opinion of the authors and not necessarily those of the McSweeney’s Literary Arts Fund.
Excited delirium just won’t go away. No medical association recognizes this condition as factually true. And no cop shop will ever move away from using it as a handy excuse for in-custody killings, at least not until forced to by state legislators.
Excited delirium actually pre-dates its current status as the go-to excuse for cops when they kill someone. Even then, it was questionable. But it really took off when Taser started supplying officers with tasers, which were immediately linked to several in-custody deaths, despite being advertised as a “less-than-lethal” force option. Taser’s lawyers (and supposed medical experts) offered testimony claiming people restrained or electrocuted to death were actually dying of a completely unrelated medical condition.
This was taken as gospel by cops who didn’t want to be held accountable for killing people — especially people who were suffering from mental health issues and, in most cases, were unarmed when multiple officers delivered electric shocks and/or piled on top of their prone bodies until they suffocated.
One of the most infamous murders committed by a cop — the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin — had its own “excited delirium” nexus. Officer Thomas Lane, who watched Chauvin kneel on Floyd’s neck for nine minutes, put on this performance for his body camera as he did nothing to prevent the killing he was witnessing:
I am worried about excited delirium or whatever.
“Or whatever.” And define “worry,” since it clearly didn’t mean offering any medical assistance whatsoever to the person this cop exoneratively declared might be suffering from a medical condition only cited by cops in the aftermath of an in-custody killing.
Four years ago, documents obtained by a public records requester showed the Charlotte-Mecklenburg PD was filling officers’ heads with disinformation — not only claiming “excited delirium” was a legitimate medical condition, but also that people who literally could not breathe due to officers’ restraint tactics were just informing officers of this so-called medical condition when they said they were having difficulty breathing. Listed among the “symptoms” of “excited delirium” were these:
Since then, some things have changed. Officer Chauvin murdered George Floyd and, in an unexpected development, was actually convicted of murder. In a few localities, officials have passed laws forbidding officers or coroners from citing excited delirium as the cause of death.
The last holdouts in the medical profession have finally agreed “excited delirium” is a BS diagnosis, primarily because the only people who ever make this medical conclusion wear badges and have recently killed people, almost all of them unarmed.
But the Rochester, New York Police Department still wants to treat excited delirium as a legitimate medical condition. Of course, that’s only because it gives officers an out when they’ve killed someone and definitely not because anyone on or off the force actually believes it’s anything more than a handy excuse for police brutality.
Training materials obtained by Jenny Wadhwa and uploaded to MuckRock contain the usual excited delirium bullshit, along with a PowerPoint slide [PDF] that says the same thing the Charlotte PD’s training materials say: people saying “I can’t breathe” are just in the (life-threatening) throes of an excited delirium episode:
Also fun to note is that the term “unlimited endurance” is declared a symptom when all it actually means is that the person being restrained managed to tire out some of the out-of-shape cops who responded to the scene. And I’m not just making generalizations about cops, donuts, and the fact that most of them spend most of their hours sitting in cars. It’s a fact: most cops can be worn down by anyone in semi-decent physical shape.
Although the physical requirements of police work suggest the importance of maintaining a healthy weight status, recent research suggests that 40.5% of American police officers are obese3),which is a prevalence rate above the national average of 35.5% for adult men and 35.8% for adult women4)
In this context, “superhuman strength” and “unlimited endurance” should probably just be read as “regular human strength” and “regular human endurance.”
In fact, the so-called “training” is best read as an exhortation to commit violence while providing officers with an exonerative cover story. The slides say it can be triggered by the use of either illegal or legal drugs.
Death usually follows a bizarre behavior episode and/ or use of illegal drugs or prescription medication
In practice, this means literally any chemical substance found in the body during a coroner’s examination can be used to buttress “excited delirium” claims.
It also claims there are four stages in the “excited delirium” progression, with the end result being apparently inevitable.
Elevated body temperature
Agitation
Respiratory arrest
Death
But that does nothing to explain why people only die of “excited delirium” after being tased/restrained/brutalized by cops. No one has ever reported someone just died of “excited delirium” without the application of force by police officers. So, even if we were so careless as to accept the theory of “excited delirium” as a legitimate medical condition, it would be even more careless to immediately discount this outside factor that is present in 100% of excited delirium deaths.
This isn’t training — at least not in the sense those of us in the private sector are used to. What’s being imparted here is a justification for excessive force deployment and a preconceived narrative for in-custody killings. We would be legitimately upset to discover companies are training employees how to dodge regulatory oversight and provide them with immediate plausible deniability for their actions. We should be way more upset that people paid with our tax dollars are literally encouraging police brutality by preemptively providing police officers with a pseudo-scientific explanation for the killings they may decide to commit.
This post was written by Alison Green and published on Ask a Manager.
At the end of each year, I publish a slew of “where are they now” updates from people whose questions I answered here in the past. In past years we’ve had several hundred each December and it’s been magnificent.
If you’ve had your question answered here in the past, please email me an update and let us know how your situation turned out. Did you take the advice? Did you not take the advice? What happened? How’s your situation now? (Don’t post your updates here though; email them to me.)
Note: Your update doesn’t have to be positive or big to be worth submitting. We want to hear them all, even if you don’t think yours is that interesting.
And if there’s anyone you especially want to hear an update from, mention it here and I’ll reach out to those people directly.
This post was written by Alison Green and published on Ask a Manager.
A reader writes:
I started a part-time voluntary position a couple of months ago. There are reporting lines, annual appraisals, etc. just the same as a regular job and it’s in a very niche area which closely matches my field, a rare opportunity! In a lot of ways my new manager is excellent — she’s experienced, committed to career growth of her team, etc. I am excited to work with her! However, I’ve had a few interesting conversations and would like your advice.
First, on three separate occasions, she has said that if I commit fraud one day, she’ll be penalized in her career, go to jail, etc. but that “she’s willing to take that risk to help me achieve my dreams.” These are long conversations so it is not misplaced humor. I went through an extensive background checking process before being accepted for the position and I’ve previously worked in highly sensitive areas that require integrity and reliability. I don’t want to get drawn into justifying my background or intentions, but I do want to resolve what seems to be a concern on her part so that we can move forward.
Secondly, I am excited about what I can bring to this position and have asked how I can support her career or objectives. She had to go through a lot of admin to bring me on board, and I want to return something back to her too. She’s insistent that all she wants is for me to have a good experience and there is nothing I can provide for her in return. (I accept that we are in different life situations and that this may be correct, so my plan is to create opportunities for more junior staff who do not have the same opportunities as the managers.) We’ve had this same conversation several times too and I find her statements awkward because it feels like it is creating an obligation that I can never repay, and that I am being asked to repeatedly express my gratitude.
I respect my manager as a leader and want to work well with her, so I would value some advice. What could be the thought processes and motivations behind a manager making these types of statements? How can I respect and acknowledge her viewpoints and concerns while closing out these types of conversations, especially the ones that question my integrity and reliability?
Well, don’t commit fraud, obviously!
I’m sure you don’t need to be told that, and it’s really odd that she’s brought it up three times. It likely has nothing to do with you — maybe she’s an anxious person, or she heard about that happening to someone else, or who knows what. I doubt it’s that you’re coming across suspiciously!
If she had just said it once, I’d write it off as just a random awkward moment. But bringing it up three separate times is sufficiently weird that you should ask her about it. For example, you could say, “You’ve mentioned several times that if I commit fraud one day, you’d be penalized. Is there something I’ve done that’s worried you about my ethics? It’s so far from anything I’d ever do and I’m concerned I’ve somehow given you the impression you need to worry about that.”
On the second point, about wanting to repay your manager in some way: I think your framing is wrong here. She presumably went through a lot of administrative work to bring you on board because she judged that it would be useful to her and/or the organization to do that, not because she was doing you a favor. That’s how hiring works, even for volunteer positions: both sides benefit, and there’s no debt incurred. (Actually, with volunteer positions, if anything it’s in the other direction; they should be grateful to you.) The only thing you owe her is conscientious work while you’re there. There’s nothing to repay.
I do want to know what’s making you feel that you’re being asked to repeatedly express gratitude. Is that because your manager keeps referring to how much work she had to do to bring you on? Or do you feel like that’s all you can offer if she won’t let you repay her in some other way? If it’s the first option — she keeps seeking out your gratitude — that’s inappropriate and you should internally roll your eyes and ignore it. But if it’s something being internally generated by you, I refer you back to the previous paragraph! You don’t need to repeatedly express gratitude for being hired (and most managers would find it uncomfortable if you did; if yours seems to want it, that’s a problem).
This post was written by Alison Green and published on Ask a Manager.
It’s five answers to five questions. Here we go…
1. Should my employee provide any explanation for her repeated last-minute time off?
One of my employees, Ciera, has been regularly requesting her PTO at the last minute over the past few months. For example, she’ll submit a request over the weekend to have Monday off once or twice per month. Our request form has an optional comment box where Ciera can include a note to me, but she always leaves it empty. I don’t need a specific reason for why she’s requesting the day off, but given the repeated last-minute notice, is it unreasonable of me to want some kind of ballpark explanation for why it’s coming in so late (i.e., her waitlist for an appointment came through, she thought she put in the request earlier and forgot, a family emergency came up, etc.)?
While I can typically accommodate the request, it can sometimes strain our workload when we can’t plan in advance. Without any kind of explanation, these continual last-minute requests are starting to make me question her reliability in a way that I probably wouldn’t if I had some context. Am I off-base feeling this way? I don’t want to appear to be prying into her private life (I don’t need to know what the appointment is for or what the family emergency is), but I would like to come up with a solution that would allow her to request her PTO earlier if possible or at least get a heads up that she has A Thing going on that means these last-minute requests will probably continue and we need to put a plan in place to help us better prep for unexpected absences.
I don’t think you’re off-base. In jobs where coverage is needed or where an unexpected absence will cause a strain on other people, PTO normally comes with some expectation of advance notice unless the person is sick or has an emergency. In many jobs, last-minute requests can still be accommodated, but when it’s happening a lot with no context, it’s reasonable to wonder what’s going on and to want to make sure that you’re both on the same page about how time off is managed.
It’s also reasonable that you’d be more willing to shoulder whatever burden the last-minute requests cause if you understand that they are necessary rather than Ciera just, for example, feeling on Sunday that she’d rather not come in the next day.
The right next step is to talk to her and let her know it puts a strain on the team to accommodate frequent last-minute time-off and ask if she’s able to give you more advance notice. Include something like, “Unless you’re sick or have an unanticipated emergency, it’s easier on the team if we can get more advance notice. Thinking back to your recent time-off requests, does that seem like something you’d be able to do more often?”
She may not realize it matters either way, and just having this conversation might change how she approaches it.
2. Coworker hawks up snot in the kitchen every day
Warning: if the headline didn’t alert you, this is gross.
About six months ago, we returned to the office three days a week. The building is new and there are pretty nice kitchens on each floor with sinks and fridges and places to eat lunch.
I eat my lunch earlier than most of my coworkers so I’m often the only person in there. Often, while I’m sitting and reading and eating my lunch, a person from another group whose name I don’t know comes in and performs what I can only describe as the most thorough evacuation of all the mucus in her sinuses and lungs I have ever had the misfortune to observe. For at least five minutes she cycles between deep, liquid throat-clearing and coughing, rich snorty snot-inhaling and sinus-clearing, and spitting the results into the sink or into napkins, which she then throws into the trash. She does this over the counter, next to the coffee mugs and tea, near the office fruit box and snack dispensers, right in there with food and utensils and everything.
It’s one of the most astonishingly disgusting experiences I’ve ever had at work, and I’ve worked at a university where the campus food service catered our meetings.
What can I even do about this? I don’t want to confront her, although she clearly has no self-awareness and isn’t self-conscious about it or she’d go in the bathrooms or outside or something instead of doing her stuff in the kitchen. Also, I’m a tallish man and she is a shortish woman, and I’m not sure how that would look,
Should I take this to HR? Put up a passive-aggressive sign? It’s incredibly gross and she does it almost every time I’m in there eating lunch. Maybe she does it more than once a day, even. Whatever, a shared kitchen isn’t the place to be clearing out ridiculous quantities of snot. Any advice you can offer would be welcome. I didn’t really want to go back to the office in the first place, but this makes it much much worse than I’d anticipated.
From what infernal pit of hell did your coworker ascend? Is there any chance you’re on a reality show and being punked? Because this is disgusting.
The next time it happens, you could just say to her, “Would you mind doing that in the bathroom?” Feel free to add, “There’s food and clean dishes right near you.”
I hear you on feeling weird about the gender dynamics, but she’s doing something truly gross and you’re allowed to ask her to take it to a more appropriate location.
I don’t think it rises to the level of HR … although I also don’t think it would be wildly out of line to ask them to handle it if you really don’t want to speak up yourself, given how unsanitary it is, which affects more people than just the lone unfortunate witness. (This is the kind of thing that makes HR people question their life choices, but that’s not your problem.) Don’t do the sign though, as much I enjoy imaging what it might say; this is something where someone needs to just have a direct conversation with this reprobate.
3. My employer wants to see my family tree
I work for my local county in the Human Resources department. Our county attorney is rewriting some polices, including nepotism, which will be retroactive once approved by the board. For background, I live rurally and my family was an original settler of the area in the 1800’s. The county is the largest employer in our area with over 500 employees. My family on both sides is quite large and the majority of us all still live locally.
I have two family members who work for the county. Both are distant cousins, a father and son in different departments. I didn’t know they were employed by the county when I applied or was hired. Of course, as soon I found out, I disclosed this to my manager. There was no problem mentioned at that time. Now, a year later, the new polices are being developed, and I’m being asked to submit a family tree to show exactly how distant the relationship is. It’s not only distant on the tree, it’s emotionally distant as well. I haven’t spent any real time with these people since I was a small child in the 1990’s. Others in my department seem to not have been asked for a family tree even though they have family employed by the county as well, which is made very clear and openly appear as a very close family relationship. They often discuss weekend plans together, family dinners, etc.
When I’ve asked how family is being defined, my manager isn’t able to give me a straight answer. I’m curious if you’ve heard of this before? How do I navigate potentially being asked to leave my job based on a policy that didn’t exist when I was hired (but I’ve been told will be retroactive, thus affecting my job directly) and doesn’t seem to affect others in my department?
It’s not unreasonable for them to want clarification on the exact relationship, but it’s unreasonable to only require it of you and not of others. Are you sure other people aren’t being asked similar questions? If they’re not, is there anything that could explain the difference in treatment, like that you’re in a position of authority or influence that they’re not in? Or that those relationships are already clear and don’t require more info?
Also, has anyone actually said you could be asked to leave your job over this, as opposed to simply wanting the info so they can put in place any necessary safeguards against conflicts of interest? I would assume it’s likely to be the latter unless something specific has made you think it’s the former.
If you do end up being asked to leave your job over a policy that isn’t applied to others who are similarly situated, you should push back on that — with a union if you have one, or with an attorney if you don’t. That said, government employers are normally fairly risk-averse about applying clear-cut policies to one person and not to others so, again, unless you have reason to think that will happen, there’s a good chance that’s not where this is going.
4. What should I do in meetings with someone on an improvement plan who’s not improving?
I have an employee with performance issues who is basically on an informal PIP because we don’t have enough documentation of the issues to put her on a formal PIP. I’ve clearly laid out my expectations for what she needs to do and by when, and she’s indicated that she understands. I’ve also told her that the consequences of not meeting these goals are that she will be put on a formal PIP. We’ve previously discussed her personal issues that may be contributing, and I’ve repeatedly offered her FMLA, accommodations, and the EAP, which she has not to my knowledge taken advantage of.
What do I do during my weekly check-in meetings with her? There are occasionally things where I need to ask her “did you do X?” but most of the time I am already aware of whether she has completed her tasks or not. Some weeks she’s doing well and meeting the goals, some weeks she’s not, so there’s no sustained improvement yet. It feels weird to go into that meeting like “you didn’t do the thing. Do the thing,” for the 20th time.
HR said we should document her performance and my communication with her through the end of the year in order to have enough info to get a PIP approved. What do I do in weekly meetings for the next three months where we both already know the status?
If you’re not seeing the sustained improvement you told her was needed and you’re having to repeatedly remind her to do things she’s not doing, you should tell HR you’ve seen enough to be ready to move to the formal PIP now rather than dragging this out.
But meanwhile, use the check-in meetings to give feedback on what you’re seeing and to flag that you’re not seeing the needed improvements: “I’m concerned that you haven’t done XYZ. This is an example of what we’ve discussed needed to improve. What happened?” It sounds like you’ll be repeating that a lot, and there’s no way around that.
5. How do I set goals at a job I don’t like?
Last fall, I was laid off from a job I really loved. Earlier this year, I started a new job I’ve always disliked. While the job is technically in the industry and field I want to be in, I’m not using the skills or knowledge I’ve worked hard to amass. I’m passionate about consumers, but we are firmly B2B. My boss isn’t particularly kind, and we’ve butted heads on lots of issues. I’ve continued looking for a new job since day 3, but I’m still here many months later.
Over the summer, my boss was supposed to conduct a mid-year performance review, but he never did. This would have included setting goals for the rest of the year, so those goals have never been set. He mentioned last week that soon, we’d start working on setting goals for 2025. But I can’t for the life of me figure out what good goals are for this job when my goal is to find a different job and get out of here.
What are generic professional goals I could be working towards in this position? Or how can I think about the goals differently to come up with things I’d like to work on?
Don’t think of this as being about goals for you personally; think of it as being about goals for the position, regardless of who’s in it. In other words, it’s about what needs to be done for the work; if you were replaced tomorrow, what would a successful 2025 look like for the person who took over? For example, if you work in online media, you might have goals around increasing click-through rate or adding email subscribers. If you work in finance, it might be about having a clean audit and lowering overhead costs by X%. If you work in IT, it might be implementing a new CMS and resolving the database errors that have been plaguing your team. And so on — they’re goals that anyone could inherit if you leave, and they describe what successful work or progress would look like for the position, not a specific person who happens to be in it.
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