Cowboy Who?

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

Welcome to “where are you now?” season at Ask a Manager! Between now and the end of the year, I’ll be running updates from people who had their letters here answered in the past. Here are four updates from past letter-writers.

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

1. Employee says his religion prevents him from using the correct pronouns for trans or non-binary coworkers

I didn’t go into this in my previous letter, but I’ve had to manage this employee pretty closely for other reasons. Unfortunately, very little had been documented over the years, which I realized after being promoted into my current role. HR was made aware of this latest concern. Because we did not have evidence of this being more than a hypothetical situation at that point (not directly refusing to use an actual employee’s pronouns), we made plans to address if it came up in the future.

Not long after I wrote my letter, however, we had an incident of unrelated negative behavior directed at another employee that resulted in us letting this person go. You can probably imagine that after a long history of poor behavior in other ways, team morale was quite low (I must have read every letter you have for similar situations!) which helped bolster the documentation we had on file to make that decision.

We did have some good come from this — our HR department realized that we did not have adequate training in place for covering expectations around pronoun usage and we have now made changes to address this at an organizational level.

So, not quite the most exciting update, but my team is a lot happier and I am a lot less stressed from managing a difficult employee.

2. I don’t want to do a department overnight (#3 at the link)

Thank you for your advice! I ended up not having to go on the overnight portion of the retreat this year since I’d recently had a baby. The daytime activities I attended were okay, pretty run of the mill company bonding stuff.

I don’t fully trust our director to react well to any critical feedback, so I expressed my feelings to several reasonable folks higher up than me who he respects (also men, shockingly enough). I think a bunch of coworkers felt similarly because next year the retreat will be in town and only for the day. That works for me! It’s tiresome having to dance around issues with my boss, but it seems like the only way to make any changes happen. I’m currently job searching so hopefully a more functional and direct workplace is in my future.

3. A kid is making our customers uncomfortable (#2 at the link)

The advice was excellent but funnily enough after you gave it the kid stopped coming to the store. I don’t know if their family moved but we haven’t seen them in months.

I was able to use some of the advice given to assist with another customer, a young man who would spend hours talking to my booksellers, preventing them from doing their jobs. The booksellers were too polite to tell him to stop and told me he was harmless. He also did overtly hit on one of them in front of me and ask for her number, prompting me to make up an excuse to get her off the sales floor so I could talk to him.
I talked to him about the difference between a friendly customer service persona and an actual friend. And that the booksellers are required to be polite and attentive as part of their job but they had other tasks to do as well. It seemed to go well, and he hasn’t been a problem since.

Unlike the child in the original question, he wasn’t hassling customers and while he was young he wasn’t a child. But the advice about establishing boundaries and how to take a firm but kind tone was still very helpful.

4. I saw an email with harsh feedback about me as a job candidate

It’s been over a decade, but I’m back with an update!

Right around the time that you published my question, I received very gracious emails from both the hiring manager and the email writer in question acknowledging and apologizing for the mistake, but confirming that they would not be moving forward with my application. The email from the email writer was contrite and kind, and specifically apologized for how it must have felt to receive an unexpectedly critical email during a vulnerable time.

Due to your advice and the advice of the comment section, I responded with what I hope was equal grace. I thanked him for his candid criticism, and did try to proactively address the problems in my resume that he pointed out in his email in subsequent applications. I’ve now been in hiring roles at subsequent jobs and have occasionally thought about how uncomfortable the behind-the-scenes conversations that led to those emails must have been. I’ve also become (even more) obsessive about checking my “To:” lines before hitting send.

Because it’s been so long, I feel comfortable providing additional context that I’m a lawyer and was applying for a job in Big Law shortly after graduating law school without the traditional bona fides those sorts of firms look for. It wouldn’t have been unheard of for someone with my background to at least get a courtesy interview, but it would have required someone pulling my application out of the pile — hence my then-boyfriend’s request. 2013 was a rotten time to be a newly-minted lawyer, and I think this email hurt more than it would have ordinarily because it came on the tail of many other more impersonal rejections. I stuck with it, and a decade later I can report that I’m very happy in a role my 2013 self never would have dreamed I would be recruited for.

As an added, non-employment update, I broke up with the boyfriend in question after this entire incident. His response to my hurt feelings — which can be summarized as “well, what did you think would happen when you applied to this job I suggested you should apply for but you are clearly not good enough for?” — was confirmation that he wasn’t the right partner for me. Another silver lining!

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

It’s four answers to four questions. Here we go…

But first, a quick announcement: Due to the quantity of updates we have, posts on Wednesday will publish at 11 am, 12:15 pm, 1:15 pm, 2:15 pm, 3:30 pm, 5 pm, and 6 pm (all times Eastern).

1. My coworker asked me to stop dressing professionally

Your letter last month about coworkers complaining that someone is violating the dress code but they aren’t reminded me of a situation a few years ago that I’m wondering if I could have handled differently.

When I started a new job, I was working with a woman, Cornelia. Our roles were very similar and we often ended up working together and co-presenting to small groups. We were the same age but generally had different lifestyles, personalities, and styles. For example, she was single, lived alone, did not have children, and generally wore jeans, band t-shirts, and cardigans (I promise this is important later). I am married, have two children, and generally wear business casual things to the office. Sometimes I mix it up with dresses, and I participate in casual Fridays with jeans and company t-shirts/polos. I do dress business casual, but certainly no one had ever mistaken me for a higher up/admin.

Once, after we finished presenting together, Cornelia asked me if I could stop dressing so nicely, because it made her look bad. In the moment, I think I was so shocked that I kind of looked at her funny and said, “Oh, I’m comfortable and I’m not going to go out and buy a whole other casual wardrobe.” I had never heard anyone make a comment about her clothing choices or imply that she wasn’t professional because of them. A few months later, Cornelia ended up getting a different job at another company, and I never said anything to anyone else about it.

But it made me start second-guessing my outfit choices, especially on days I presented with her. I started looking at other people’s clothing choices more carefully and ultimately decided that I could be perceived as landing on the more professional/dressier side of the office spectrum, but I was okay with that because this is how I’m comfortable. I don’t feel confident or like I do my best work in jeans and t-shirts every day. Plus, I really enjoy putting outfits together and getting ready in the morning, it’s a form of self-care for me. I guess I’m just wondering if I handled this the right way, or if there was something else you would have done in the situation.

You handled it perfectly! You shut it down with a firm no.

That said, I can kind of see where Cornelia was coming from. Because you were co-presenters, she might have worried that the two of you looked visually out of sync to your audiences. Normally the solution to that wouldn’t necessarily be that you needed to dress down — it could just as easily be that she needed to dress up more — but if she was was solidly within your office’s dress code and you were more formal than most people, I could see her thinking it was reasonable to ask you to be the one to change.

That said, this wasn’t a situation where one of you was presenting in sweats while the other was in a suit. Jeans, a t-shirt, and a cardigan aren’t that out of sync with your business casual outfits, so Cornelia may have been overthinking it.

2. Senior colleague forwards emails with no context

Not my direct supervisor, but a C-Level employee at my company is known for flinging emails like a gorilla flings poo. He will often forward emails without context, requiring me to sift through multiple messages to discern the purpose/task. I find it challenging to understand the intended action or request buried within the email chain.

How can I get him to include his request at the top? Replying with “is there a task for me here or is this an FYI?” feels too passive aggressive, nor has it seemed to change his email etiquette. I report to the CFO and he’s the COO.

It really depends on the internal politics, what your relationship with him is like, and how open he is to hearing pushback. In some cases you could say, “When you forward messages, would you mind indicating whether it’s an FYI or you want me to take action? It’s not always clear.” In other cases that would go over badly — so you’ve got to know the players and the politics.

3. Adult toy ads on a website I use for work

I’m an early career software engineer working at a huge company with a relatively conservative culture. I often rely on articles and documentation from various websites, but I’m having a serious problem with one I use very frequently. Ads keep appearing for a popular sex toy company! It goes without saying that I’ve never browsed anything of a remotely sexual nature on my work laptop, so I have no idea why this is happening. There’s no way to install an ad blocker, and I need to use this particular website for my projects.

I live in fear that my boss will walk behind me while I’m working on something and see ads for vibrators! We certainly don’t have the kind of rapport where I could laugh it off (after all, does anyone have that kind of rapport with their boss?). I have no idea how to ask IT about this problem as it’s pretty embarrassing. What should I do?

IT has dealt with much worse! But it doesn’t sound like this is something they’d be able to stop anyway unless they’re willing to let you install an ad blocker.

Personally, I’d just say to your boss, “Just FYI, I regularly have to use SiteName to research X and it has really unsafe-for-work ads on it. I wanted to preemptively mention it in case anyone ever wonders about it.”

If the ads are obviously out of sync with the content of the website, you might also consider reporting it to the site. Websites are generally able to block ads by category (and adult products are definitely a category) but sometimes those blocks fail and they might appreciate the heads-up.

4. Why shouldn’t you say where you’re going when you resign?

I have universally heard that you are not supposed to tell your current work what your next job is when you are resigning. Although I have heard this from everyone, I have not heard a compelling, specific reason why this is so. Is it just that where you are going should be on a need-to-know basis, or is there some specific concern that people have when declining to provide this information?

I’m surprised you’ve heard this so much! Most people don’t hide where they’re going when they resign, unless they have a specific reason to — like if you’re going to a competitor and don’t want your employer to know right away, or if you have reason to believe your old employer will try to cause problems for you with the new employer. It’s very normal, though, for people to ask what you’ll be doing next when you leave, and most people will answer unless there’s some specific (and generally unusual) reason they don’t want to.

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The frustrating thing is when she's trying to get her crack but it's at the bottom of the purse under the boxes of tissues, pocket bible, and coupon books.

Today's News:

Sorry for the missed updates, but I am at last home! For those who missed the book tour, you can still get signed copies here.

For the first time ever, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency’s longtime columnist Rowdy Geirsson has translated his extensive archival research of anonymously recorded, authentic Norse lore into English. This new scholarly edition of The Impudent Edda comes with extensive footnotes and photos and offers readers a highly accessible yet deeply poetic rendition of fun and classic tales ranging from Odin’s unprovoked murder of an ancient witch, to Freyja’s voluntary experiment as a prostitute among lecherous dwarves, to Thor’s drunken and petty act of larceny on the eve of Ragnarök, the final world-shattering battle of the gods.

Presented below is an exclusive excerpt from The Impudent Edda about Odin’s highly erratic creation of the Solar System, which follows the initial emergence of divine life from the cosmological abyss and the subsequent slaying of the primordial giant known as Ymir.

MIDDLE-EARTH IS JUST AN EYELASH ON THE CELESTIAL GALLOWS POLE

All right, so now what we got is this situation where Odin’s got a dead fucking giant’s corpse on his hands, and it’s starting to rot and stink up Yggdrasil,¹ and so he’s like, you know, “Fuck this thing, it fucking stinks. What the fuck do I do with it now? It’s fucking huge and I don’t even know how to dispose of it properly on account of the fact that I haven’t even created any waste disposal services yet.”

Because, you know, you got to remember that at this point in time, there’s still no fucking earth. All that there is in the entire fucking universe at this point in time is a creepy world tree used for hanging people, a big fucking fire pit, some melting ice, a big magical cow, and Ymir’s dead fucking body.² But Odin, he’s a pretty clever guy, and so what he does is he goes, and he takes Ymir’s corpse, and he rips it to shreds, and then he starts using its dismembered parts to terraform the entire fucking planet.

So, for example, you got Ymir’s flesh becoming the ground we walk on, and his blood becoming the seas and the lakes, and his bones becoming the mountains, and his skull becoming the sky, and so on and so forth. And Odin, he’s like a fucking ravished madman. He doesn’t spare a single fucking part of the dead giant’s body! He uses every fucking part of the corpse even including the eyelashes, which he uses to construct a fortress to keep the frost giants out, and this fortress, it ends up getting called Middle-Earth for I don’t know the fuck why, but Tolkien must have thought it was pretty cool back when he started hallucinating about hobbits and shit in the trenches of World War I.

But anyway, so now Odin’s done with creating Middle-Earth and all, but the thing is, Middle-Earth, it’s feeling pretty lonely because it don’t got no fucking people living in it yet. So what Odin does is he and his brothers go, and they take the Blue Line out to Wonderland³ because they’re a bunch of fucking gambling addicts, and they want to bet on the race dogs since the track was still open back then⁴ and after they blow all their cash on the wrong fucking greyhound, they decide to go for a walk on the beach, and so there they are, walking along when they find some fucking driftwood that the tide’s washed up, and they think to themselves, “Hey, you know what, these pieces of driftwood, they’d make some nice fucking people if we was to turn them into people.”

Revere Beach in Revere, Massachusetts, where Odin and his brothers created the very first man and woman in the world from soggy flotsam and jetsam, according to the poet of The Impudent Edda.

And so they went and they turned the driftwood into people and they put them in Middle-Earth, and the people, you know, they didn’t have birth control back then, and so here we are today.

But for themselves, Odin and his brothers, they also created Asgard, you know, the fucking stronghold of the gods or whatever, which also just so happens to be located pretty much right next to MIT, but it’s also way up high in the sky, too, which is a real mind-fuck if you think about it for too long.⁵

So now at this point, I guess I ought to tell you that Odin’s brothers pretty much stop figuring into the story.⁶ They were never very cool in the first place, and all they do is proceed to spend the rest of their lives just sitting around at home watching reruns on HBO and Netflix whereas Odin gets out and does things like murder people and write poetry.

But anyway, getting back to the sun and the stars and the moon and all that shit, the thing you got to realize is, it’s just a bunch of poor fucking people up there running around in circles in the sky. For whatever reason, Odin, he’d get into one of his fucking moods, and he’d take it out on these poor bastards by kicking them out of Middle-Earth and putting them up in a chariot in the fucking sky to go round and round and round in fucking circles till the end of fucking time when everyone dies a horrible death in a huge fucking fire. And to make matters worse, these poor bastards, they all got these sick-ass demon wolves chasing after them the whole time, and so when the entire fucking universe finally gets destroyed at the end of time, these fucking wolves are going to swallow everything they can fucking get their mouths on, which means that both the sun and the moon are going to disappear like a jelly donut in a cop’s car in the parking lot of the nearest Dunkies.⁷ But also, these wolves, their mom’s a nasty fucking ogress who lives out in Iron Wood.⁸

I’m not entirely sure what the point of knowing that even fucking is.

The Impudent Edda may be purchased here, and two beer-and-book-signing events are fated to happen in early December at Navigation Brewing Company in Lowell, Massachusetts, and Sacred Profane Brewing in Biddeford, Maine.

¹ Yggdrasil is the term given by the Norse to the high-energy interstellar structure that corresponds to our more modern scientific concept of the universe. As identified in the “Old Norse Astrophysics” section of The Impudent Edda’s introductory material, the word “Yggdrasil” literally means “Gallows Pole,” which is an artful reference to Odin’s self-sacrifice (or reckless suicide, to use the parlance of The Impudent Edda’s anonymous poet) via hanging.

² This list excludes the other cosmic entities that afflict Yggdrasil as described in “Old Norse Astrophysics,” but it is implicitly understood that the anonymous poet is aware of them and has simply chosen to focus on the near space region of the atmosphere at this juncture of his Edda.

For readers who are not familiar with the term “Edda,” it is simply the title given to the main sources of Norse mythology: The Poetic Edda, The Prose Edda, and now, The Impudent Edda. While The Poetic Edda and The Prose Edda were both recorded in written form in thirteenth-century Iceland as a sort of culmination of that country’s long tradition of oral storytelling, The Impudent Edda was instead recorded on June 12, 2019, in the form of an anonymous voice recording on a mobile telephone device. It was later found abandoned in an alleyway behind a dive bar next to a puddle of piss in Boston’s famously angry Celtic neighborhood colloquially known as “Southie.” Since then, The Impudent Edda has come to be regarded as the most important find relating to Norse mythology and ancient Scandinavian spiritual beliefs since the exhumation of the Oseberg Ship in 1904-1905, although not without some contention, which the new translation’s introduction describes in further detail.

³ The Blue Line is one of the lines of Boston’s notorious subterranean transit system known as the T (the iconography of which was ripped off from Stockholm). The Wonderland T station lies just north of Boston in the coastal city of Revere. The poet’s implication that the Blue Line (which was built by the human residents of Middle-Earth) existed prior to the creation of the first man and woman highlights the incongruity of Old Norse thought regarding the space-time continuum. Many instances of such incongruity are found throughout all of the Eddas.

⁴ Here, and throughout the story of the world’s creation in general, The Impudent Edda adheres more closely to the tradition of The Prose Edda than that of The Poetic Edda, but deviates from both. According to the poet of The Impudent Edda, Odin and his brothers rode the Blue Line of Boston’s public transportation network to the site of the former Wonderland Greyhound Park in Revere, Massachusetts, which closed in 2010 after the state instituted a ban on greyhound racing. This depiction deviates from both of the Elder Eddas, in which, despite their own inherent differences, the scene is consistently portrayed in a much more naturalistic setting devoid of any urban development. Additionally, the Elder Eddas allude to actual ash and elm trees as the progenitors of the human race, rather than soggy pieces of driftwood permeated with countless noxious contaminants from Massachusetts Bay’s dirty water.

⁵ The poet here seems to be conflating the home of the gods with a former upscale Irish pub located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, that shared the same name (it went out of business in the wake of the 2020 pandemic). A recurring apparent lack of sobriety impacts certain details throughout the recording of The Impudent Edda.

⁶ This sentence is an example of a typical convention frequently found in Old Norse literature that rather bluntly informs the reader that certain characters have played out their roles and will not be reappearing again for the duration of the work.

⁷ A colloquialism for Dunkin’ Donuts, which is something of a cultural institution in Boston. The Impudent Edda was coincidentally recorded the same year that a misguided rebranding initiative formally removed “Donuts” from the chain’s official name.

⁸ The Impudent Edda’s explanation of the Solar System, near-space atmosphere, seasons, and general passage of time is much abbreviated in comparison to the Elder Eddas but closely correlated. In each of the three Eddas, the description of the Old Norse astrophysical framework introduces advanced archaic complexities relating to these concepts. While it is not necessary to fully delve into each and every near-space aberration, the general relationship between the sun and the earth serves as a good, basic example to help illustrate the conceptual incongruities for the reader.

As anyone with a basic elementary-level education knows, the sun is a G-type main-sequence star that burns brightly at the center of our Solar System while the earth orbits around it, along with the eight or nine other planetary bodies that compose the Solar System (depending on whether one agrees or disagrees with the International Astronomical Union’s declassification of Pluto as a planet or not). However, according to the ancient Norse system, the earth does not orbit the sun, nor does it rotate about its polar axis as explained by the laws of gravitational force. Norse astrophysics quite simply does not even consider earth to be a planet at all (the entire concept being completely foreign) but rather a quasi-dimensional moment in the space-time continuum of the great interstellar world tree structure, Yggdrasil. As for the sun, it is chased across the sky by a cold-hearted space wolf that ruthlessly attempts to eat it each and every day, since wolves have always been known since time immemorial to be very vicious and hungry animals.

EDMONTON – Alberta Premier Danielle Smith responded to criticism over her use of the Sovereignty Act to try to disqualify federal clean energy regulations that aren’t in place yet by saying she consulted with the provinces Precogs and they assured her the regulations will be unconstitutional. “The system is very scientific,” said Smith. “Every time […]

The post Danielle Smith unveils Sovereignty Act Precogs able to tell when federal laws are unconstitutional before they pass appeared first on The Beaverton.

YOUR CITY – Great news! The city with skyrocketing rent prices, barely functional public transportation, and overcrowded hospitals just opened up a funky new upstairs food court with low lighting where you can grab a chicken parm sandwich for $48. Yup. They also don’t accept cash. “It’s called ZoneOut Market and you can thank us […]

The post Awesome: Your city just opened up a funky new food court where every meal costs 40 dollars appeared first on The Beaverton.

The Merriam-Webster dictionary named the word “authentic” as its 2023 word of the year, with the word being among the year’s most searched and many contrasting its definition with the rise of AI usage in everyday life. What do you think?

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HOUSTON, TX—Taking accountability for a massive spill in the Gulf of Mexico, BP released a statement Wednesday apologizing for thinking that oil would look as cool spilled into the ocean as it does in puddles. “We thought the light would hit it and make it all cool and iridescent like it does on the side of the…

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JACKSON, MI—With camouflage-clad members gathered in corner booths and at high-tops throughout the restaurant, sources confirmed Wednesday that every table at a local Applebee’s was populated by a different militia. “Yeah, so those are the Boogaloo Boys at table 3, Michigan Home Guard over near the door, and then…

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On Tuesday, lawyers for the state of Texas and for the Center for Reproductive Rights are both expected to argue before all nine justices of the Texas Supreme Court. No decision is expected Tuesday, but there are a few possible outcomes, court watchers say.

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

Welcome to “where are you now?” season at Ask a Manager! Between now and the end of the year, I’ll be running updates from people who had their letters here answered in the past. Here are four updates from past letter-writers.

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

1. My husband doesn’t want to play my coworker’s wedding (#2 at the link)

I left it up to my husband about whether to reply to my coworker, Jane, saying he was available for her wedding. We planned to raise the prices for next wedding season regardless, so after much thought, he responded with a quote and she accepted. My husband told me to ignore all emails from her and he’d handle it himself.

I cannot even begin to tell you the sighs my husband made anytime he opened an email from her. Most of the emails to him were just chit-chat, nothing to do with wedding planning. It was getting to the point where my husband wouldn’t even respond to emails unless they had a question that he needed to answer.

For some context, most couples book a band about a year out. There’s 5-10 emails in the initial booking, but then we crack down on the bulk of the stuff we need from them 2-3 months before. So over the course of a year, we receive about 40-50 emails from one couple. Jane sent my husband 109 (yes I counted) emails between February 2023 until September 2023.

Now that brings us to a few weeks ago. My husband got a call from the father of the groom (the person financing this wedding) who said that my husband’s services were no longer needed and forfeited the deposit. My husband (not very sly at all) asked why, thinking maybe the price was the reason. Nope. Jane apparently has been cheating on her fiancé with someone at my work, and the fiancé called it off.

I saw Jane at work a few days later and she seemed fine, though even now I wonder which of our coworkers she has been a seeing on the side.

2. My office argued for 5 months about whether I could have an ergonomic chair

Your advice was great and definitely helped me! I’m happy to say that I received the chair I needed in early June, which was right after you published my story. As uneventful as this sounds, the chair is everything I could ask for, and I’m so grateful that I can come to the office and not be in pain. They put a small sign on the back asking people not to use or move it, and so far I haven’t had any issues.

I didn’t have a meeting with HR, but word got around about my “chair gate” situation, and everyone was pretty floored and also thought the whole ordeal was ridiculous.

3. My team lead spends hours venting to us — but tells our boss he’s training us (#2 at the link)

I did take your advice! I met with my supervisor and informed her what was going on with Henry. While she was somewhat shocked, she told me that he had a habit of cold calling and venting. She advised me to stop answering Henry’s cold calls, block off my calendar with my activities, and to directly email him when he had any questions. It worked wonderfully. I’m also no longer working directly with Henry since that project.

Thank you for the advice!

4. Our new CEO keeps talking about diet and exercise

Most of the feedback I received was there’s not a lot you can do and raise it when you can. So … I quit. I made sure that I brought this reason up in my exit interview.

This wasn’t the only reason I quit, but it was one of many things that made me feel like I didn’t belong in my company anymore. What I didn’t disclose in my initial email was that during the pandemic, like many of us, I gained a lot of weight (about 80 pounds). Part of that was due to the stress of my job and everything that was going on. I felt terrible enough about myself. What I decided was that I didn’t need a skinny rich man lecturing me — someone with the metabolism of a middle-aged woman with a once-skinny body destroyed by multiple pregnancies, who was stress-eating and popping SSRIs due to his dysfunctional company — about getting a trainer, eating organic, and making time for self-care.

My new job is awesome. They provide real health benefits. We have affordable health insurance that includes coverage of weight loss medication (I’m down to my pre-pandemic weight), medical care onsite, mental health services to deal with stress, a great gym with exercises classes during the day that we’re encouraged to take, a cafeteria with many healthy and unhealthy options (without judgment), and other great services. Most importantly, how much people weigh is not a priority for our CEO. He is focused on running our business. The people on my team are all shapes and sizes, and their value has nothing to do with what they weigh. I feel really good about myself right now and rather than worry if I’m too fat, I can focus on excelling at my job.

I’ve heard that the culture at my old company is still the same. Lots of weird pressure to be skinny with no concrete ways to do it except guilt and humiliation. One of my former coworkers recently saw a picture of me and jokingly said, “You’re so skinny (CEO) would be so proud!”

WASHINGTON—Staring down a likely expulsion from the House of Representatives, Rep. George Santos (R-NY) told reporters “I am just a little girl trapped at the bottom of a well” on Monday. “I was trying to get my beloved dolly Mildred back, but when I leaned over, I fell in too,” the embattled congressman said from his…

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BOCA RATON, FL—Letting out several deep moans as she remarked upon the terrible winter storm battering the Midwest, local mom Carrie Whittacker, currently on vacation in southern Florida, reportedly took an almost pornographic pleasure Monday in missing the bad weather back home. “Oh my, they’re really getting…

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According to a new survey from Deloitte, shoppers plan to spend an average of $567 between Black Friday and Cyber Monday this year, with 40% reporting that they’re hitting the sales to try to get around rising prices. What do you think?

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A private legal battle between the members of pop duo Hall & Oates has led to Daryl Hall filing an undisclosed complaint against bandmate John Oates, resulting in a restraining order that will go into effect against Oates on Nov. 30. What do you think?

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300 rooms, all filled with old people.

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WASHINGTON—Following an investigation into the candidate’s lackluster poll numbers, President Biden’s campaign has traced the source of the Democratic incumbent’s troubles to a really scratchy blanket that makes it hard for him to sleep, according to a copy of an internal memo obtained Tuesday by reporters. “All of…

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New Cyanide and Happiness Comic

Seldom observed in the wild, the 90s office chairs’ lengthy and complex mating ritual begins.

A choice was made that day ...

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

It’s four answers to four questions. Here we go…

1. Do we offer enough sick leave?

My husband and I work at a growing family company that has expanded from the two of us in 2020 to now seven employees. As we’ve grown, I’ve become the default HR director and I’m learning as I go. I am facing a situation where I have employees using a lot more sick time this year than I have ever paid out in the past.

When you begin working at our office, you are allotted two weeks vacation and one week of sick time. You must earn it over the 12 months of the year. I have two employees already in the negative and they won’t catch up until they start earning sick time for the next calendar year. They both just began this summer. The sick time excuses do not seem out of line, but I struggle what to do about pay with them both being in the negative.

Do I need to adjust my policy upwards and allow for 10 days a year sick time? I’m not necessarily against it. I do feel like we give a lot of other “free time” that isn’t allocated in these vacation times. We get 13 holidays a year and only work skeleton crew (one person per day) the week of 4th of July and between Christmas and New Years. We also close two hours early on Fridays between Memorial Day and Labor Day.

That amount of sick time is very low! (The average for full-time positions in the U.S. is eight sick days a year.) And your vacation time is on the low side too.  While you do provide other great benefits, none of those help people who need more than five sick days a year — which is a lot of people. For example, anyone who gets Covid or a bad flu will knock out their full allotment of sick leave in one go and have none left for anything else. And people with kids or chronic illnesses will be very poorly served by that policy; they’ll end up using vacation time for sick days and not being able to take actual vacation. I’d say at a minimum you should double your sick leave.

2. Working with a bad employee who you’ve been told to let fail

Almost two years ago, my partner was promoted to team project lead at a large tech company. He was still relatively new, but was promoted quickly because he works well with people. Around the same time, an engineer was assigned to his team who was brand new to the company and fell through the cracks in terms of training and mentorship. My partner only handles the technical aspect of the team, while other folks handle the people management, but my partner found himself spending 3-4 hours every few days helping this new engineer get up to speed. This even included explaining how to cut and paste (they work for a major tech company and both hold PhDs). After two years, he is still not up to speed, despite my partner spending a great deal of time and effort training him. He routinely makes very basic mistakes and seemingly doesn’t know how much of their tech operates.

Once it became clear that there were larger issues with this engineer, my partner brought it up to their boss and his grandboss. One year later, nothing has changed. My partner is completely burnt out and feels that he spends most of his energy managing this one team member (which he shouldn’t even be doing, he’s the technical lead). He went from excited to do work to absolutely dreading it. He’s asked to be moved several times, but he’s the sole person on many projects and has been told he’s “too critical” to move. Their manager directed him to let the crappy engineer fail, but this would mean delays in production and damage to the team’s reputation to both internal and external stakeholders.

I understand resources are limited, managers have a lot on their plates, and my partner is definitely taking work very personally, but is there reasonable recourse for something like this?

He should take his manager’s advice to let the engineer fail. There’s a good chance his manager is saying that because that’s the only way she can take action (things shouldn’t work that way but sometimes do). In any case, he brought the problem to his manager, she told him how to handle it, and he’s ignoring the solution she gave him. The answer is to follow her instructions!

I get being concerned that it will cause delays in production and damage the team’s reputation, but sometimes that’s the only way this stuff gets addressed, and it doesn’t make sense for him to be more worried about those potential consequences than his manager is. If he wants, he could go back to her one more time and say, “I’m preparing to take your advice and that means XYZ will happen — so I just want to confirm that’s how you want me to proceed.” But after that he should do what she suggested.

3. I’m in HR and an employee asked me out

I’m in HR and an employee asked me on a date. I politely declined, but now I’m wondering if I need to tell my supervisor about it. I don’t have any concerns about sexual harassment or our ability to continue a professional relationship. But because I’m involved in processing this person’s checks and approving their time off and so forth, I’m a little worried that this could turn into a problem if I don’t mention it and it comes up again later (for example, in the form of a complaint from the employee about some other issue that they feel is related to it). At the same time, it doesn’t seem like that big of a deal to me and my preference would be to just forget it and move on.

Should I mention it to my supervisor to be on the safe side, or does it even matter if it’s not related to a current employment issue?

Err on the safe side and mention it so that if it does turn into a problem later, your manager will already have the context. Give her the same caveats you gave here — you don’t feel harassed and have no concerns about your ability to continue a professional relationship — but explain that you’re raising it just in case anything does happen because of it down the road.

4. “How do you do”

I was taught that, when meeting someone new, it’s correct to say, “How do you do.” But no one says that anymore, and I don’t want to come across as an Old when meeting interviewers, especially since I’m over 40. So do I turn my back on Miss Manners’ teachings and say “Nice to meet you”?

Yes. Even Miss Manners seems to accept that “nice to meet you” has mostly replaced “how do you do.”

A gourmet bottle of peppermint-flavored extra Virgin Mary Olive Oil

A box of edible ornaments that are inedible

Twin-size flannel sheet set patterned with twee cartoon Christmas mice drunk on eggnog

An $11.99 festive patterned puffer coat and matching tiny beanie for your $6.99 bottle of wine

A 120-pack of paper party hats that say HAPPY BIRTHDAY, JESUS

A normal cheese grater with BELIEVE in unreadable cursive

A decorative throw pillow stitched with the Stranger Things cast wearing Santa hats

Candy cane clip-on earrings for an adult dog

A Nutcracker advent calendar filled with one weird nut behind each secret door

A long turquoise nightgown featuring a glittery cornucopia

An eighteen-inch snow globe with a figurine of Ellen Degeneres carrying a Santa sack from the ED by Ellen Degeneres Home Collection

A nativity scene and spice rack combo

Two fifty-four-inch woodgrain reindeer mounting each other

A signature white Rae Dunn garbage can profoundly adorned with the words CHRISTMAS GARBAGE.

An oddly small black leather Christmas tree skirt, which is maybe just misplaced from the junior clothing section at the adjoining T.J. Maxx

A gingerbread house kit marked up from $14.99 to $48.99 due to rising housing costs

A ten-foot-wide authentic Christmas sleigh textured with disco ball glass that six people have already injured themselves on

A life-size inflatable waterproof snowman for your shower

A red stemless wine glass featuring an unknown holiday character called “The Grunch”

A package of menorah-shaped pasta from the 2019 Holiday Season

A three-inch artificial poinsettia in a burlap sack from the Martha Stewart Little Collection

A twenty-two-ounce three-wick designer glass jar candle scented as “Cinnamon and Chimney Soot”

A twenty-two-ounce three-wick designer glass jar candle scented as “Damp Cedar and Winter Depression”

A twenty-two-ounce three-wick designer glass jar candle scented as “A Night with Kris Kringle’s Mistress”

A Diet Coke from Taco Bell someone left in the candle aisle

A rustic medium-sized pinecone clearly from the tree outside HomeGoods

A four-pack of mistletoe for your cat

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