Cowboy Who?

This post was written by Alison Green and published on Ask a Manager.

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.

Remember the letter-writer whose HR team gave them a list of holidays that aren’t traditionally days off and asked them to vote on which would be their “Diversity Day” that year? Last year they got Diwali off and this year they got Yom Kippur. Here’s the update.

Armed with your assurances that voting on a “Diversity Day” was indeed distasteful and disrespectful, I sent some anonymous feedback to HR outlining my concerns. Apparently I was one of several people who complained because they did away with voting!

Unfortunately, now HR will just unilaterally choose a “Diversity Day” while “taking current world events into account if possible”. When someone pushed back and said that didn’t seem much different than voting and why were they not just giving everyone a floating holiday, HR doubled down and said they wanted to “honor the customs and beliefs of different cultures by pausing work for everyone in the company and a floating holiday would not have the same impact.”

Anyway, next year’s Diversity Day is Women’s Equality Day, at the end of August. To my knowledge this was not announced in any way, it was just quietly added to next year’s calendar.

I foresee this going at least slightly wrong at some point, but I guess we’ll see. I’m slightly baffled at how attached they apparently are to this idea given that our HR leadership and company level leadership have changed since this was originally implemented.

Full story.

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George Santos, who was expelled from Congress last week for misuse of campaign funds, is now available on Cameo, where the self-described “former congressional ‘icon’” can be hired for $350 to send a quippy greeting to anyone interested in helping offset his legal fees. What do you think?

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Above: One of very few surviving photos of the San Marcos gambusia

No one has reported seeing a San Marcos gambusia fish since Michael Jackson’s “Beat It” was at the top of the musical charts. This fall, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) decided that was long enough to wait to declare the 2-inch mosquito-eater officially extinct.

Getting a species declared extinct, it turns out, is tough. In Texas and nationwide, there are many plant and animal species that haven’t been seen in decades but still have not been delisted.

Extinction questions involve a lot of science and, often, a lot of human emotions—especially when someone sights a plant or animal that was thought to be extinct. “You have these very hardened researchers literally shaking or breaking down into tears,” said Tania Homayoun, an ornithologist with the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department (TPWD). “There’s a lot wrapped up in it when you let yourself process what that means, to be in the presence of something that is almost gone from the planet.”

An extinction decision means that federal and state protections and conservation funding are removed for the species, so it’s done with great caution. Reported sightings of species that had been missing for a long time are hard to verify, but they can be enough to keep a species from being “delisted” as extinct.

One reason for the hesitancy to declare a species extinct is that there isn’t enough funding to frequently sample—find and count—the species. In Texas, 1,300 species have been designated as “rare or in danger of declining,” and an additional 240 are listed as endangered or threatened. In many cases, especially with plants, conservation experts trying to find rare or endangered species may be relying on sightings from years ago, before GPS coordinates were available. They often need to go onto private land, perhaps at certain times of the year, to find and count a plant species, and they don’t always get permission to do it.

A plant “may only occur on one specific type of limestone … at the edge of a seep. … They may only come up after three inches of rain in July,” said Michael Eason, the botanist in charge of the rare plant collection at the San Antonio Botanical Gardens. “A lot of these places are really difficult to get to.” Even Big Bend National Park, which many people consider remote, rough, and inaccessible, is easier to navigate than some of the places researchers need to access on private land. For most of the landowners he works with, Eason said, it’s a source of pride to find out their property harbors rare plants. “Just them knowing that they have that on their property allows them to protect those areas.”

Unsurprisingly, Texas agencies focus first on endangered or threatened species that are endemic to Texas—that is, only found here.

In the case of the tiny San Marcos gambusia, University of Texas at Austin ichthyologist Robert Edwards began studying the little fish almost as soon as it was scientifically described in 1969. Even then, it was threatened by dropping water levels, pollution, and manmade changes to its environment. And it prospered only in a narrow range of water temperatures. He successfully bred it in his lab in the late 1970s. But when he sent that batch to a New Mexico fishery that specialized in breeding endangered species, the gambusia died during their first too-cold winter. After that, Edwards went back to the San Marcos River and found three males and one female of that species but could never get them to reproduce. By 1983, the San Marcos gambusia appeared to be gone.

The unique San Marcos River ecosystem and its plants and animals have been well studied, particularly since the 2012 founding of The Meadows Center for Water and the Environment. But with Texas’ 191,000 miles of waterways, sometimes there is no way to say for sure that certain species no longer exist in the wild.

Reported sightings of a species that may be close to extinction or have even been declared extinct make for drama in the conservationist world—and sometimes beyond it. The hunt for the ivory-billed woodpecker, whose range included Texas, has been the subject of at least two books, a documentary, and a comedic film.

Petitions have been filed for years with FWS to delist the ivory-billed woodpecker due to extinction. The bird requires an old-growth bottomland riparian habitat—the more isolated and swampier a forest, the better—making it hard to lay eyes on. The last confirmed sighting of the bird was in Louisiana in 1944—and it was listed in 1967 as endangered, but it still has not been declared extinct.

“One of the last photos that was taken was a female at her roost site, and in the background is the forest that has been clear-cut around her,” Homayoun, the TPWD ornithologist, said. Since then, qualified scientists and birders have reported multiple unverifiable sightings, by ear or by sight. “How do you make a decision about what the status of this bird is when even the people who are the experts can’t necessarily agree on the evidence that’s being put forward for its very existence?”

Another bird high on the “missing” list in Texas is the Eskimo curlew. The bird used to migrate in flocks through Texas but when prairie habitat vanished, so did the Rocky Mountain grasshopper, the curlews’ favorite food on its northward migration from Argentina to northwestern Canada. Homayoun said there are likely fewer than 50 Eskimo curlews left, but occasional reports of sightings still come in, so the species remains “endangered.”

Victor Emanuel, a famous birder referred to by Texas Monthly as the “Birdman of Texas,” recounted what it was like to see an Eskimo curlew in a plowed field on Galveston Island in 1963 when it hadn’t been sighted since 1945. “For a birdwatcher to see a bird that’s extinct, is not quite like seeing a dinosaur, but is like seeing something from way time past,” he said.

The loss of a single species may seem a small matter in a state with an estimated 76,000 species of flora and fauna. But Homayoun said that in the bigger picture, even the small and unloved species count, like the grasshoppers, whose fate may in turn have doomed the Eskimo curlew.

“Every time we lose a species, we lose so much. We lose so many stories,” she said. The bird she misses the most is one that even her parents never had a chance to see or hear. It’s the Carolina parakeet that lived in the southeastern United States, where Homayoun grew up. The bird with a bright green body and yellow and red head died out in 1918 for several reasons, including the market for its feathers, sought after for use in women’s hats.

“I look back, and I think I should have had that experience of watching and hearing those birds through my childhood,” she said. “None of us that are here had that experience.”

The post Going Extinct in Texas appeared first on The Texas Observer.

Above: Former Republican State Representative Jonathan Stickland laughs during a 2015 debate on the House floor.

The Texas GOP’s full-on embrace of extremism continues unabated.

Over the weekend, a majority of the Texas State Republican Executive Committee (SREC) voted to remove language from a resolution affirming support for Israel that would have prohibited party associations with people and groups “known to espouse or tolerate antisemitism, pro-Nazi sympathies or Holocaust denial.” Members of the state party committee—who are elected by party delegates—voted 31-29 to remove that language. About half the committee also tried to block a public record of the vote. 

The proposed ban on associating with such extremists came during the first quarterly meeting since Hitler admirer and antisemitic far-right activist Nick Fuentes was caught on camera in October while visiting the Fort Worth offices of former state representative and prominent right-wing operative Jonathan Stickland, which the Texas Tribune exposed. GOP chair Matt Rinaldi, who has helped transform the state party into a far-right elephant gun to hunt down suspected RINOs, was also photographed entering the same building while Fuentes was there, but denied meeting with him. 

At the time, Stickland was president of Defend Texas Liberty (DTL), a super PAC operating as the latest iteration of the far-right political machine financed by the Christian nationalist billionaires Tim Dunn and Farris Wilks. 

The meeting with Fuentes prompted growing calls from others in the Texas Republican Party—led by House Speaker Dade Phelan—to condemn DTL and its supporters. Phelan also called on Dan Patrick, whose campaign received $3 million from the PAC earlier this year, to return the money and condemn his benefactors. Patrick declined, instead issuing a statement that claimed Dunn had described the meeting as a “serious blunder.” 

Dunn is the same guy who also reportedly said that he believes only Christians should hold leadership positions in Texas government, and pumped millions of dollars into a political crusade to take down moderate Republican House Speaker Joe Straus—who is Jewish—and Straus’s allies. (Straus left office in 2019. His successor, Dennis Bonnen, resigned after a secret recording scandal orchestrated by Dunn’s Empower Texans. Since helming the House, Phelan has become the far right’s top target.)

The proposed language that would have banned party association with Nazis, antisemites, and Holocaust deniers was a watered-down version of prior proposals from party leaders who previously sought to officially cut ties with DTL, the Tribune reported. 

Yet that even more general language was still unacceptable to far-right conservatives who lobbied against its inclusion, with some saying it was too vague and others likening it to the tactics of Marxist communists, complaining that it would just play into the hands of anti-conservative enemies. As one member said, “It could put you on a slippery slope.” (In contrast, conservatives have generally papered over concerns about vague language when it comes to their priority policies of bans on abortion, drag shows, transgender healthcare for youth, “critical race theory” curricula, and DEI.)

State Senator Bob Hall, a top ally of the Dunn machine, showed up at the party meeting to push against the resolution language. In an interview with the Tribune, Hall said meeting with Fuentes did not prove Stickland was antisemitic. ​​“I’ve had meetings with transgenders, gays and lesbians,” Hall said. “Does that make me a transgender, gay or a lesbian?”

This is all, of course, part of an escalating proxy war between the state’s top Republican leaders—including Phelan, Patrick, and Attorney General Ken Paxton. The speaker and lieutenant governor have been at each other’s throats for the past two years over their respective handling of the party’s legislative agenda. And Paxton—who owes his political career in large part to Dunn and Co.—has gone to war with the House ever since members voted to impeach him on 20 charges, including alleged bribery and abuse of office, of which the Senate acquitted him in September. 

Phelan issued a statement Sunday calling the SREC’s vote “despicable.”

He continued, “@TexasGOP/SREC can’t even bring themselves to denounce neo-Nazis and Holocaust deniers or cut ties with their top donor who brought them to the dance. There is a moral, anti-Semitic rot festering within the fringes of BOTH parties that must be stopped.” 

The SREC’s failure to call for the explicit disassociation from Nazis and the like sparked criticism (albeit more tepid) from even Dan Patrick, later Sunday evening. “This language should have been adopted—because I know that is our position as a Party. I am confident that the SREC will correct this at their next meeting—not affirming this language is totally unacceptable to me,” Patrick said in his statement. “I, and the overwhelming majority of Republicans in Texas, do not tolerate antisemites, and those who deny the Holocaust, praise Hitler or the Nazi regime.” 

(On this matter, Governor Greg Abbott is probably still holding a wet finger in the air).

Paxton had nothing to say publicly about the party’s anti-Nazi opt-out, but was quick to tweet his response to the news that the SREC had unanimously voted to censure Republican state Representative Andrew Murr, who led the House impeachment investigation of Paxton. 

“Well done, Texas GOP,” he said. 

The post Texas GOP Rejects Ban on Association with Nazis appeared first on The Texas Observer.

Above: State Senator and Houston mayoral candidate John Whitmire shaking hands with a supporter as he arrived for an election watch party.

On December 9, the next mayor of America’s fourth-most populous city will be decided. With the initial round of the Houston mayoral election failing to determine a clear victor among 18 contenders, candidates Sheila Jackson Lee, 73, and John Whitmire, 74, veterans who’ve racked up decades in federal and state political office respectively, are poised to go head-to-head in a runoff. 

Houston is a young city and both candidates campaigned on local campuses. (Whitmire earned his undergraduate degree at the University of Houston; Jackson Lee attended Yale.) But despite the immense amount of money and power at stake, few Houstonians under 30 seem to be discussing the race. Indeed, many college students the Texas Observer recently interviewed were unaware that a major election was even happening. 

“Houston is growing younger but the candidates and the voters in the Bayou city aren’t,” said University of Houston political science professor Brandon Rottinghaus. “Despite significant spending from several candidates, they just haven’t moved voters to come out in big numbers.”

The University of Houston students who are politically active say that doesn’t mean youth are apathetic. Instead, they point out that Whitmire and Jackson Lee bring political baggage to the race. Both are relatively controversial (and unexciting) candidates, students say. (Whitmire has been accused of mixing personal and political business and ethical lapses; Jackson Lee has been panned as a bully, appearing in a leaked recording yelling epithets at her staff). 

Campus political activists also object to barriers that seem to discourage students from voting, like a recent decision to move a voting precinct off campus.  

“It’s not even really active disenfranchisement, it’s just incompetence,” said senior Ryan Camp, a political science major. “It might not be too much of a hassle for some, but every barrier [decreases] turnout to some degree.”  

Camp is a member of the University of Houston Democrats, one of several groups on campus that’s been making efforts to help students get connected to local politics. Groups like UH Dems organize voter drives, bring candidates on campus, and provide voter guides on election day.

The mayoral candidates have also put a significant amount of effort into courting the student vote. Stickers touting Whitmire’s status as a UH alumnus litter the campus, and both candidates (as well as other mayoral contenders) made their presence known at student events during the fall semester.

Whitmire, a state legislator for five decades, massively oustpent Jackson Lee, a member of the U.S. House of Representatives since 1995. Despite a significant amount of time and money poured into influencing the youth vote, student attitudes toward the candidates remained mixed. Many students remained uninterested; some became actively frustrated with their choices.

“I feel like neither of the main candidates should’ve been chosen in the first place,” senior Sameer Abdulmajeed said. “Sheila Jackson Lee mistreats her staffers, and as for Whitmire, why are we electing another old white man to be mayor in such a diverse city?”

Abdulmajeed and other organizers said that their frustrations with candidates go beyond policy. He said that nearly every mayoral candidate in the initial crowded Houston race had alienated themselves from students during recent on-campus visits, describing interactions that ranged from simply out of touch to actively hostile.

Other students recalled how Jackson Lee arrived late to a March 2023 vigil held after one student tragically took their life on campus. By the time she arrived, the venue was nearly empty, and Lee asked staffers to pose as if they were part of a crowd for the media. 

This anecdote, while bizarre, parallels an older account of Jackson Lee’s alleged history of using tragic events for political gain. In a 1997 Houston Press article, one of Lee’s former aides alleged that she staged a memorial for Commerce Secretary Ron Brown, who died in a plane crash, to curry political favor. That article repeats allegations that Lee mistreats her staff. Longtime political writer Tim Fleck quoted one young Black staffer as saying, “She treats everybody like her slaves. To give you an idea of what I thought my [time] with Sheila was like, it was a slave plantation, and she was the master.” 

Lee’s odd behavior seems to have contributed to her failure to get as many campaign contributions or votes as Whitmire, according to recent polls and local pundits. Interviews suggest they also made her unpopular amongst students. 

But Whitmire has not fared much better. He failed to show up to a candidate forum at the University of Houston that featured Jackson Lee and four other candidates and a crowd of 100 students. Neither he nor Jackson Lee have been able to budge young voters.

Indeed, the most common complaint about both candidates amongst young voters seemed to be their age. While the median age in Houston sits at 34.2, below the national average, Whitmire and Lee more than twice that: 74 and 73, respectively. 

While age doesn’t inherently decide whether someone is capable of governing, some younger voters have expressed concern about the trend of older politicians taking power despite proving unpopular with a young and growing city. 

To Evan Mintz, a Houston journalist and former deputy opinion editor for the Houston Chronicle, young voters and media institutions alike should pay attention to the race. He noted that few, if any, media outlets covered Jackson Lee’s questionable leadership or Whitmire’s past corruption allegations. “There’s been extensive coverage of both these candidates in the past and contemporary media outlets have just glossed over much of it,” Mintz said. “Houston needs big picture leadership now more than ever, and young people’s views aren’t going to matter if they don’t vote.”

The post Houston Mayoral Candidates Inspire Yawns As Run-Off Election Looms appeared first on The Texas Observer.

Before getting into the forecast this morning, I wanted to share a couple of observations about Houston’s weather of late. Let’s start with the acorns. Oh, the acorns. They’re still falling. I went back and checked this morning, and I first wrote about the mast year for acorns we’re experiencing back on November 2. That’s five weeks ago, and they were already thick as thieves by that point. If there’s a naturalist, arborist, or other expert out there who can quantify this year’s acorn crop I’d love to hear about it. I just can’t believe they’re still falling. Will they ever stop?

The other thing one cannot really miss, if you’re outdoors during the early evening hours, is the grand sunsets we’ve been experiencing. Matt has been noticing them too, and says that they’re due to a thin layer of cirrus clouds. These are the wispy clouds high in the atmosphere, which are formed entirely of ice crystals, and often indicate the presence of the jet stream. You can see these clouds in the lovely photos below, sent in by readers. In the case of our recent sunsets, there are enough of these clouds to produce vivid colors by scattering some light, but not so many that they block out too much of the Sun’s last, dying rays. We’re likely to see more such sunsets this winter with an active jet streak.

Alright, on to the forecast, which is somewhat of a mixed bag with a lot of people undoubtedly having pre-holiday plans this weekend.

Wednesday

Today should be a pleasant and mostly sunny winter day. Look for highs in the mid-60s, with light easterly winds. Those winds will begin to turn southeasterly tonight as high pressure near Texas shifts further to the east. We should still see one more cool night, however, as lows drop into the upper 40s for most of the Houston metro area, and lower 50s closer to the coast.

Thursday

Southerly winds should become more pronounced on Thursday, and we’ll start to see some moisture return to the atmosphere. This may result in a few clouds as highs nudge up to around 70 degrees. With a warmer, southerly flow in place lows on Thursday night will probably only drop to around 60 degrees. A few very light, scattered showers may be possible overnight.

Friday

This will be a warmer and more humid day, with highs in the mid-70s and a mix of sunshine and clouds. Some very light showers will again be possible due to the atmospheric moisture, but I expect them to be rather scattered. Temperatures on Friday night will be downright warm, only falling into the upper 60s for most of the region.

Saturday

Like many of you, probably, my family has some outdoor plans during the daytime on Saturday and the timing of a front is not making for easy planning. While there’s still not great consistency, the forecast models are trending slightly later with the frontal passage, probably putting it some time during the afternoon hours. So here’s what I think I know. Saturday morning will start out warm and muggy, and much of Houston may get into the mid- or upper-70s. At some point we’re going to see a storm system, perhaps an intact line of storms, perhaps a broken line. I don’t feel confident yet in saying whether this will occur during the late-morning or afternoon hours yet. But by or before sunset these storms should clear the area, with much drier and colder air moving in. I’m not concerned about rainfall accumulations, as I expect most areas to receive perhaps 0.5 inch or less, but we can’t dismiss the possibility of some of these daytime thunderstorms becoming severe due to the somewhat unstable air mass. Our confidence in the forecast will increase during the next day or two as we get within the realm of higher-resolution modeling.

Sunday

Overnight lows will drop into the 40s heading into Sunday morning, with gusty conditions. Wake-up temperatures on Sunday morning will “feel” like they’re in the 30s due to these winds. So bundle up if you’re going to be out and about. Sunday’s high temperatures will likely only reach the upper 50s even with lots of sunshine. Absolute temperatures on Monday morning will be even colder, probably down to around 40 degrees in Houston. But with less wind they’ll be more tolerable.

Next week

Pretty much all of next week should remain on the chilly side, with highs in the 60s and lows in the 40s. There’s no sign of a warm-up in the near term, friends. Maybe don an ugly Christmas sweater early?

This post was written by Alison Green and published on Ask a Manager.

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.

There will be more posts than usual this week, so keep checking back throughout the day.

Remember the letter-writer whose coworker lied about sexual harassment because he didn’t like their new boss? Here’s the update.

I just wanted to express my gratitude for your advice and that of the commenters — it really helped me a lot. As some readers guessed, I’m a young woman, the first in my family to land a “good” office job. So, some of the things people consider normal are new to me.

Horace used to be my old boss, and he said that in any situations involving coworkers, it should be dealt with directly with the manager. HR was for more significant issues. He emphasized that if we kept bothering HR with gossip about what colleagues did or didn’t do, our name would be the one HR remembered if someone had to be let go. It’s not a valid excuse, I know, but I was afraid of going to HR and ending up getting fired for it.

But thanks to you and your readers, I went to HR right after my question was posted and followed the advice of only stating the facts. I said things like, “Tom said X and Y in the meeting room around X o’clock on Y day.” I left out things like, “I think Tom is trying to get the new manager fired to take his position.” This helped with the feeling that I was talking behind a colleague’s back.

The next day, Tom accused the friend of “snitching” on the conversation to HR. Our office is an open space, and the only separate room is the manager’s. So, the argument was heard by everyone (and I think that’s why Tom didn’t see me on the day of the conversation). Tom said he had praised the efficiency of HR and victim protection, the friend responded, and the conversation escalated to the point where a manager from another department appeared and took both of them to HR. Information about the complaint was supposed to be confidential during the investigation, but after the argument, everyone knew.

Arthur returned the following week, but he was completely changed. No more laughter and jokes. He only spoke with the team when absolutely necessary and always in a serious tone. His office door was never closed again, and he made an effort to avoid physical contact with anyone. It was painful to see the change. I tried talking to him, but he avoided any kind of personal conversation. A few weeks later, he announced that he was being transferred to another branch of the company. I managed to speak with him before he left, and he said he no longer felt comfortable working here, even though people showed support. He preferred to distance himself from the situation.

After Arthur left, our team was dissolved, and we were reassigned to another team. The new manager of Tom’s team has been with the company for many years and is very well-liked; it will be challenging to accuse her of anything. My new manager seems okay, and Arthur seems to be doing better in the other branch than he was here.

I know it’s not the update everyone was expecting.

Update to the update:

I honestly thought that would be the last update, but something unexpected happened!

I live in a country where paid sick days shorter than a week should be covered by the employer if the employee provides a medical certificate. Tom was selling fake medical certificates within the company and got caught. Since it’s considered a crime here, Tom was fired on the spot (along with some friends who bought the certificates) and could face criminal charges.

I’m not sure if they discovered the forgery while investigating the complaint against Arthur, but at least Tom was fired without a chance of getting a good reference.

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We too have our seasons, Frosty.

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Suddenly regretting that the paw isn't throwing the goat in the last panel.

The code name for the effort to port Windows from 32-bit to 64-bit was Sundown. Although the intended target was Intel’s Itanium architecture, the initial effort was to port 32-bit Windows to the 64-bit Alpha AXP. At the time, Itanium chips existed only in simulators. but Alpha AXP chips had been in production for years, and there was a glut of unused Alpha AXP systems among Microsoft Windows developers.

The code name for the 64-bit Windows project was Sundown.

I hadn’t given the code name much thought. Lots of projects have code names, and you rarely think deeply about the name. It’s just an arbitrary collection of words to identify a project.

It wasn’t until the ship party that I realized that the code name actually meant something. The project lead went on stage to thank everyone for their hard work and congratulate them on a job well done, and then finished the speech by announcing Sun? Down!

It was then that I realized that the code name of “Sundown” was not chosen arbitrarily. It was a jab at Sun Microsystems, who had recently released Solaris 7, a 64-bit operating system built on the UltraSPARC processor. The 64-bit version of Windows was a direct attack against Sun’s early foothold, with the goal of unseating the current leader.

Today, the leading 64-bit operating system is neither Solaris nor Windows. It’s Android: As of 2020, over 80% of adults in the world own a smartphone, over 70% of smartphones are running Android, and nearly 90% of Android devices use ARM64.

The post What was the code name for 64-bit Windows? appeared first on The Old New Thing.

This post was written by Alison Green and published on Ask a Manager.

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.

There will be more posts than usual this week, so keep checking back throughout the day.

Remember the letter-writer whose coworker was putting fake mistakes in the writer’s work so the coworker could tell their boss the writer was bad at her job? Here’s the update.

I do have an update about my manager’s minion intentionally changing my work in order to make it look like I was making mistakes.

I replied back to my manager and cced Julia with a copy of my screenshot and framed it as “there must be an issue with our system because this is what it looked like after I finished it at 2 pm yesterday.” I then told them I would be sending the same email to the entire team and reaching out to IT to ensure everyone was aware to take screenshots and hopefully the issue could be fixed quickly.

Julia approached me after I sent out this communication and asked why I even thought to take screenshots in the first place. I replied that I had noticed a lot of the mistakes she was finding were things I knew I had done correctly so I wanted to see if there was possibly a glitch in the system. I’m sure she didn’t buy this but at least she knows she can’t get away with this behavior any longer now that everyone is taking screenshots.

IT did reply back to the concern and said according to their records, the last action on the record was mine and it wasn’t touched again until Julia updated it. In my brain, this is pretty clear evidence of what Julia is doing but to my manager, this just means the system is glitching and it looks different on Julia’s screen (insert eye roll here).

Julia has ended up getting a promotion on the team (again, eye roll) and I’m looking for a new position because this is clearly a toxic dynamic. Feedback has been provided to Cecilia’s director about her strange relationship with Julia from all of my coworkers and me but nothing has been done to separate them. The most we’ve seen is they’ve stopped posting photos together on social media but the favoritism is still obvious. I would think at the very least Julia would’ve been moved to a different team.

As for my coworkers, Julia has successfully alienated herself from the entire team. Everyone is friendly and professional towards her but she is definitely not getting happy hour invites and sits in Cecilia’s office at lunch. I’m sure she believes she is the victim but I can’t say that I feel the same.

Good luck to everyone out there looking for new positions! It’s rough out there – sending good vibes.

This post was written by Alison Green and published on Ask a Manager.

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.

There will be more posts than usual this week, so keep checking back throughout the day.

Remember the letter-writer whose boss told lies to make their team feel bad for taking time off? Here’s the update.

A few days after my original email, Corrine sent me feedback through email about a task I had worked on; as usual, her tone was needlessly cruel and unhelpful and the “mistake” was not real — essentially, she was mad that I had asked a client for clarification about something rather than just guessing, saying I should have understood what they wanted. She said the client was mad that I had reached out; I told her I would be contacting the client to apologize and let them know Corinne had told me they were upset. She told me this wasn’t necessary but I did it anyway. The client replied and was confused and welcomed me to contact them in the future if they were ever any questions. So once again, Corrine was lying.

This time, I reached out to Corrine via email and let her know about my interaction with the client. She didn’t respond.

Luckily, the senior manager decided she wanted to have one-on-one meetings with each of us shortly after this. This is pretty unlike me to go over someone’s head but I was so exhausted with the drama that I let her know everything that had been going on and provided her with screenshots; my coworkers did the same. I told her I wasn’t equipped to deal with this and, frankly, I didn’t feel like I should have to. Thankfully, she is a big supporter of work/life balance so these stories were unnerving to her; at one point she even said that she allows Corrine to leave early and take days off all the time so she has no idea where this behavior is coming from.

In our next meeting, Corrine told us if we ever have an issue with her we need to go to her directly and not the senior manager, which I felt was pretty bold.

Since then, Corrine has softened a bit and hasn’t lied about people needing to work overtime; however, she still lies. Most recently she told us that other teams were complaining about us saying good morning to each other when we are in the office — this just isn’t true. I’ve noticed her behavior is unpredictable and sporadic so I’m not sure if there are things going on in her personal life that she is having trouble separating from her work life but to be blunt, I don’t care as she’s proven to not have any sympathy for her employees when the tables are turned.

Also, our team has changed from exempt to non-exempt within the last few months. I was upset at first but I have to say having the ability to tell Corrine I’m not working past my out time has been amazing.

I am looking for another position within the company right now. I’ve given myself a deadline of the end of December — at that point I will begin looking outside the company.

I hope this update was interesting! It’s been a wild ride. On the bright side, Corrine has provided me with endless bad boss stories to tell at parties.

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NEW YORK—As part of its human resources department’s office-wide mental health initiative, local company Bergamo and Associates reportedly offered its employees a wellness seminar Tuesday that taught them how to practice mindful acceptance of their upcoming pay cuts. “With the constant demands and distractions of the…

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A decade after the release of Grand Theft Auto V, Rockstar released a much-anticipated trailer for the next installment of the fan-favorite series this morning. What do you think?

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WASHINGTON—Urging all 8 billion humans on the planet to brace themselves and hold on for dear life, panicking climate scientists warned reporters Wednesday that Earth was about to go off a huge waterfall. “Okay, we don’t mean to freak anyone out, but right now, the planet and all its inhabitants are floating down a…

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This post was written by Alison Green and published on Ask a Manager.

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.

Remember the letter-writer wondering if they should be worried by how pushy an employer was with a job offer over a holiday weekend? Here’s the update.

Thank you so much for the post and the comments were all very helpful during that process. I have an update for you.

Rather than talking to them on the phone because I was getting red flag vibes, I asked them to send the formal offer based on what we had already discussed so that I could have it in hand for the discussion. They hemmed and hawed for several days, acting as though they could not produce the letter until they talked to me yet again. They finally sent it, and it did not have the salary, the work schedule expectations, or several other things we had already discussed and agreed upon, and also had several expectations added in, such as the start date being less than two weeks out and with me having to move across the country and leave another role. So it was quite clear why they so urgently wanted to speak to me over a holiday weekend. On top of all of this, it was an exploding offer with a firm expiration date on it.

Needless to say, I did not accept the role.

There has been some significant fallout because as I mentioned it’s a very small industry and I have to interface with members of their staff, including my would-be supervisor and other members of their leadership team. They frequently choose not to respond to emails that I send, even if it hurts multiple groups within shared cohorts. Petty, yes. Unexpected, not really.

One of their leadership team asked me to have an aside with them and explain why I chose not to take the job. When I explained that the offer letter didn’t match the verbal offer, and that work-life balance seemed to be an issue, the leader told me I had no idea what I was talking about, couldn’t believe I’d make such accusations, and that we had better stop talking before I ruined my entire career.

Ultimately, I think we can all agree I dodged a major bullet there.

But in happy news, an old workplace knew I was looking and offered me a job. The new executive director there is kind, caring, values work-life balance, gives credit to everyone around her even when the work product was hers, sees the forest for the trees and solves problems without having to be asked/begged. We have very similar personalities and I find that I’m energized and always wanting to find ways to help her accomplish her goals for the organization.

It all worked out in the end.