Many years ago, at a large law firm, the ice-breaker at our company retreat was to find all the other people wearing the same color underwear as you (no, I’m not making this up). The managing partner was wandering around the room saying, “Plaid? Anyone plaid?” while the rest of us just huddled in a large group and claimed white (at least nobody threatened to check us).
2. The mushrooms
Every week at our staff meeting a different person leads the agenda and asks the ice-breaker. A couple weeks ago it was a very high level person who said, “I was just reading an amazing article about hallucinogens. Have any of you ever done magic mushrooms?”
3. The skipping competition
The mid-year meeting we had last week started with a skipping competition. Yes, we had to skip across the room and were judged on how well we skipped. The person who won did some weird TikTok skip I knew nothing about.
4. The feet
We had to take off our shoes, hold hands while face to face with a colleague, and try to touch each others’ feet with our feet. It was horrific.
5. The dancing
As a facilitator, I’ve used ice-breakers every time I’ve opened a session, some (obviously) to better reception than others. For one session, my (high-energy) co-facilitator said they wanted to open the session with a new ice-breaker they’d found. I knew they’d facilitated often and knew roughly the right things to do…until apparently they lost their mind?
They played music and insisted that each attendee do a short dance! And that the NEXT person do that dance and a bit of their own until the last person did everyone’s dance?! Aw HELL no!
Cue the embarrassed facilitator (me) interrupting and going, “Of COURSE they’re joking! Let’s do *insert innocuous intros ice-breaker here* instead.” And dealing with a highly insulted co-facilitator at the break. Eye-roll.
6. The IQ tests
I’m not sure it was intended as an ice-breaker, but it was definitely ice-breaker-adjacent. We had a team meeting to meet our new boss, an external hire. Grandboss basically said “here’s Bob” and left the room.
Bob told us that the reason they had to hire outside the company was OBVIOUSLY because he’s smarter than the rest of us. There was an audible scoff when Bob mentioned he was in Mensa, which made him so mad that he decided we’d all take the same online IQ test, right here right now, so he could prove it.
So all 8 of us took out our laptops and went to the site he used and we all took the same IQ test. He turned around his laptop to show us his IQ score and said we’d go around the table and tell him our name, what we did, a fun fact, and then turn our laptop around to show our IQ score.
I got to go first. My fun fact was “IQ tests are racist,” and my score was 28 points higher than Bob’s. The next person’s fun fact was “I’m in Mensa” and his score was higher than mine. The rest of the team kept to IQ-related or Mensa-related fun facts – the word eugenics got mentioned several times.
Bob had the lowest score in the room.
He spent the next two years making us pay for his not knowing he was hired to manage a team commonly referred to as “the geniuses.” We did not have a going-away party when he left.
7. The pictures
This isn’t as bad as any of the examples, but in one Zoom meeting, we were instructed to set our Zoom to Gallery mode and then draw the person we saw to the left of our own picture. Then people would guess who you drew. But they didn’t think about the fact that Zoom makes the first person to join the picture in the upper left, and then your own picture next to that, then other people’s pictures, so we all drew the same person.
8. The pen
We were once told to imagine a pen was sticking out of our belly buttons and then “write” our name in the air in front of us. I never liked ice-breakers before this, but I hated them after.
9. The animal
Not a terrible ice-breaker, but this guy’s answer led to several calls to HR, made as soon as the event ended. People were going around the table saying what animal they’d be if they could be any animal, and why. This man, who wasn’t even supposed to be at this event as it was not his team’s, and who had crashed it because it was in the breakroom and there was food, goes “I would be a pig, because a pig’s orgasm is 30 minutes long.”
Instant office legend, but not in a good way.
10. The first kiss
I hate icebreakers. The worst one was when we had to go around and say about our first kiss? In a work context? It was so odd.
11. The bad judgment
I attended a very senior team meeting at a nonprofit I worked at (which I have dozens of terrrible stories about…). My CEO was in charge of the ice-breaker, and she bought a quiz she had purchased from Pop Bitch called “Enid Blyton or Erotica.” It was the most embarassing thing I have ever sat through – trying to choose if titles like The Naughtiest Girl In School, The Adventures Of Mr Tootsie Pole, and Granny’s Lovely Necklace were 1950’s childrens books or porn.
12. The violation
Years ago, I was in my first professional role with a new team, and the entire team was new to each other (the team had just been created and we were all outside hires). The leader invited an outside person to facilitate ice-breakers with us. One of the first few involved standing back-to-back with another person, bending over (so that your butts were touching) and shaking hands between your legs while upside down. Want to talk about awkward amounts and kinds of physical touching with someone you only know on a professional level?? Needless to say this set the tone for far too much oversharing of information in the next few years with this team that was “like a family.”
A Wimbledon umpire had to ask fans to not uncork champagne bottles while players are serving after a spectator interrupted the third-round match between Russians Anastasia Potapova and Mirra Andreeva by popping open a bottle. What do you think?
This post was written by Alison Green and published on Ask a Manager.
Two letters, one theme:
1. My company won’t let me use the name I go by in our directory
I just started a new job. When I applied, I filled in my legal name and my preferred name. I go by a shortened version of my middle name — let’s say “Beth.” I have never gone by my legal first name, “Jane,” and no one would recognize me by it professionally.
On my first day, I immediately noticed that every system at my office referred to me as Jane Watson. I immediately updated the HR system with my preferred name so that people could, for example, find me in Outlook. However, in the company directory, I’m still listed as Jane Watson. If you scroll over, “Beth Watson” is listed as an alternate name. HR told me there is no way to change a legal name in the company directory.
I find this bizarre. I can see requiring use of my legal name for certain systems (e.g., payroll), but why would it be necessary for a system where the point is to be able to find colleagues? Additionally, while this is a relatively small matter for me — I mostly just find the use of Jane annoying — it could be deeply frustrating for others who go by a name other than their legal one but have not officially changed it.
Since I’m very new, I won’t push back on this rule for the time being, but if I have more capital in the future, is it worth escalating?
2. Company won’t allow any name changes, ever, for anyone
My girlfriend works at a very large, multinational corporation. She’s also a trans woman and is known by Trisha LastName everywhere but her work, for this reason:
HR told her, officially, that she cannot change the email address that she was given when she was hired, which for her is Richard.LastName@company.com. They have this policy for everyone, even people who get married and change their last names.
She asked HR if there was any way to change the email address. They responded that she could do that if she were to voluntarily be put into the system as if she were a new hire — no vacation accrual, no 401k vesting, salary reset, everything. She has been at her position for 5+ years.
They said most people simply change their display name in the system and live with their old name being their email address. However, we live in a very conservative area where she’s worried about facing hostility or violence because of the mismatched email/name. This can’t be legal, can it?
Bizarrely, this is a thing in some companies. It should not be a thing — it’s a ridiculous and in some cases deeply upsetting practice — but it is in fact a thing with some particularly foolish employers.
An electronic system that doesn’t “allow” for name changes or preferred names is a terrible system. As evidenced by all the many, many companies that handle name variations just fine — for people marrying or divorcing, for trans people, for people who change their names for myriad reasons — it’s eminently doable. Decent companies that are saddled with computer systems that make it difficult find workarounds; they don’t simply decree that you’ll need to be listed forevermore as a name you don’t actually use.
Systems are supposed to exist to serve people, not the other way around.
Moreover, since we have laws both federally and at the state/city level regarding gender identity, refusing to allow an employee to change their name during their employment could lead to a discrimination claim. And in at least some places, it’s outright illegal: In California, for example, employers are required to identify employees by their preferred names (with an exception for documents where a legal name is legally mandated).
People working at companies in jurisdictions without that protection should point out to their employers that the practice disproportionately impacts marginalized populations — certainly trans people but also women, who are significantly more likely to change their names upon marriage — and that these systems are designed for cisgender male users and ignore a sizable portion of workers.
This post was written by Alison Green and published on Ask a Manager.
It’s five answers to five questions. Here we go…
1. My boss uses therapy to analyze all our interactions
I’m a new therapist two months into the job, and I have noticed that my clinical supervisor has a tendency to analyze me to my face when I have a question she wasn’t anticipating, when we disagree on a non-clinical issue or are attempting to solve a workplace issue. She is also my direct managerial supervisor, so I think something is coming up from the dual relationship.
To give examples, she will say things like, “I don’t know what’s in your story to make you think that [insert really common workplace norm/expectation].” “It seems your mind is imagining scenarios that are making you fearful” [about a legitimate, common workplace question that wasn’t accounted for in the employee handbook and she later agreed to include because “I’ve learned from couples work that sometimes the way to get the other person to work with me is to humor their unreasonable request, even though it shouldn’t take that.”] There is a lot more, like opening a salary/benefits discussion a few months ago stating “from my view it seems you have been having ‘racing thoughts’” — because I had sent her a simple, bullet-point list of questions, as she had no information on my benefits and I was due to start in less than a week. Telling me I “have a paranoid part” when in our initial interview discussion I learned they weren’t sure if they had funding for the position, but they wanted me to accept the offer on good faith they would secure a grant — that they had been rejected for the previous year. (I waited until they got the grant to accept.)
It seems anything I do can and will be analyzed. I just want to know — is this normal? It makes me really uncomfortable and angry to have someone question “my story,” when I just have a question about PTO. There are three other employees at my level and one other full LPC in the practice, but the other LPC’s schedule is too full, which is why I’m with the clinical supervisor I have for management.
I want to say something, but I know that some amount of therapizing during the clinical part of supervision is normal (example: “what came up for you when your client said XYZ?”). Ironically she is an incredible clinical supervisor, so it also worries me that I’m damaging our relationship when I push back. Recently when discussing a major part of my contract that was left out, we got into a tense back and forth because I wanted it in writing and she wanted me to “use your knowledge of me and trust me to honor this, let that guide you, not your fear of workplace power dynamics.”
No, this isn’t normal. It’s bad management — she should be focusing on behaviors, concrete actions, and outcomes, not whatever she imagines you’re feeling — and she’s not your therapist, she’s your manager. As your boss, she shouldn’t be assessing you through a therapeutic lens at all (and you’re undoubtedly right that her dual role is contributing to the issue). Frankly, some of it sounds … abusive is too strong a word here, but manipulative? Gaslighty? She’s weaponizing the language of therapy to avoid dealing with very basic employment issues.
It might not be intentional — maybe this is the lens through which she sees everything in life — but it’s making her a terrible manager and colleague.
2. Employer thinks I accepted a job they never offered me
I sent out applications for two jobs, and I only intended on choosing the better of the two since I’m not in a place where I can work two jobs. Job A was first, and it went so smoothly I thought I was dreaming. I got along with everyone and the store manager went into detail about what would be expected of me should I be hired and my hourly pay. She was open about my benefits, how many hours I’d be working, the work environment, training, and potential room for growth. I left feeling great, but kept my options open just in case.
During the interview with Job B, the manager vaguely told me I would be working very, very long shifts. This was a major reason I left my previous job of three years, and I respectfully let her know that I wasn’t interested anything similar. In addition, the manager spent most of the time talking about how frustrating her younger employees were and how everyone kept disobeying her. She didn’t mention benefits, weekly schedules, or even pay rate. It felt like I was there to listen to her complain about her current employees. The same day she wanted me to consent to a background check, which I did, and ran it on the spot. No interview did this before with me and it made me feel very uneasy. Nowhere in the application did it said “urgently hiring” or that they were hiring on the spot. It came across as being very pushy.
Not even a full 24 hours after the interview, Job B calls me back, but not for a offer. I was being asked to work because someone called in. I wasn’t given any training, I still didn’t know the hourly pay or benefits, and most of all I never accepted a job offer from them because I was never given one.
I’m concerned that Job B is assuming that because I showed up to the interview, this meant I wanted to work for them right away. But the only thing I consented to is a background check and nothing more. I didn’t even complete any onboarding paperwork and Job B has been trying to get me to work hours that told her I did not and could not work anyway. Job A didn’t go about it this way; I received an offer from them that I happily accepted.
How do I decline a job offer that I wasn’t given? Should I decline the assumed “job offer” as normal or should I politely tell Job B that there are some assumptions that are being made? Does this sound odd or am I overreacting?
Is this retail? It sounds a lot like retail, where there’s sometimes a strange assumption that if you interview, you’ve as good as accepted the offer.
Call Job B back and say, “I appreciate the offer but I’ve decided to accept a different job. Thanks for talking with me, and all the best with your hiring.”
If you were still open to considering Job B but wanted more info first — which isn’t your situation — you could say, “Before I could accept the offer, I’d need more information about the pay rate, schedule, and benefits. Could we go over that now, or schedule a call to do it later?”
3. Bathroom etiquette
Your recent article about angry notes in workplaces made me think of an office I worked in a few years ago, and I’d be interested to get your take on it.
At the time I was going through an IBS flare-up. Nothing super serious, but it meant that I was using the toilet quite frequently. A few weeks after I started, a note popped up in the office bathroom I’d been using. From memory I think there was a little poem about “using the brush after you flush”! I don’t know for sure that it was targeted at me, but given the timing I think it probably was a result of my use of the bathroom, even if the person who put it up didn’t know I was the culprit.
At the time I was quite embarrassed but also a little annoyed. I was already spending more time in the bathroom than I would have liked, and wasn’t always able to take extra time to ensure that the inside of the bowl was pristine before I rushed back to my desk. So, was I out of order here?
You’ll find two camps on this: the camp that feels toilets will sometimes show they’ve been used for the purpose they’re intended for, and the camp that feels you need to take 15 extra seconds to remove that evidence when the toilet is shared with others.
Personally, I’m in the second camp — if it’s a shared bathroom, you should leave it in the condition you found it in. I don’t think you were outrageously rude and you don’t need to feel shame or anything like that, but in general you should take the 15 seconds to leave things just as clean for the next person.
4. My former coworker listed me as her manager
I had something weird happen the other day. I received a call from a company saying that Katie, my coworker when I worked retail, had listed me as her manager and they wanted to know about her work ethic, etc.
Katie was a seasonal worker and I was a part-timer. I was never Katie’s manager. I would have been considered a senior coworker because I had been there longer but I had no managerial power over her. She was seasonal so never got a performance review (performance reviews were for people who worked in the company for a year). The only manager thing I really did was tell her stuff like:“Hey, Boss says we need to move this. Can you help me with that?” Or “Hey, why don’t you go straighten up that part of the floor?” I usually worked the night shift as did Katie and our actual manager usually worked the day shift. I acknowledge that I may have seemed like a manager to Katie but she never told me she was putting me down as a reference and, in fact, we never spoke after the season we worked together.
I was honest with the caller saying that we had been coworkers and I was not her manager but she’d been a good coworker for the short time we worked together. I have no idea if she got the job. But, like, what would be the best way to handle this?
You handled it correctly: you were honest about your role relative to hers and how long you worked together, and you gave an honest assessment within that context. Ideally you would have included something like, “Our manager usually worked a different shift from us and I’d been there longer than Katie, so that might be why she put me down” but it’s not a huge deal that you didn’t; it’s not your job to explain why Katie picked the references she did (and I imagine you were caught off-guard anyway since she didn’t check in with you before listing you).
If you want, you can contact Katie and tell her you got a reference call for her and that they mistakenly thought you were her manager … but you’re not obligated to do that. (She should have contacted you first to tell you she was listing you as a reference, but not everyone knows to do that. It’s the kind of thing that can feel obvious when you have more experience, but doesn’t feel obvious when you don’t.)
5. Not paying people who don’t submit a timesheet on time
I am a supervisor at a multinational consulting firm in the U.S. The majority of our staff are also on billable hours and required (as per industry standard) to submit timesheets on a weekly basis.
The finance department will chase late timesheets for a couple days but have threatened to not pay people for submitting a timesheet in a timely enough manner. This just happened to one of my staff — her paycheck was short a week’s time and while finance did pay her for that time, it was late. (I was out of the country for this week and not available.) We both think this appears to violate the Fair Labor Standards Act. Does it, and if so, how should we approach getting the company to resolve the practice? We definitely have some growing pains but this isn’t a small company nor a young one.
Logistically it is critical that staff submit their time in a timely manner for our billing and client budgeting, but that’s a separate issue here.
Yes, this is illegal — under both the FLSA and your state’s laws. Your state will specify how quickly employees need to be paid — usually worded as “within X weeks of the work being performed.” Employers are obligated to pay employees within that time period regardless of whether a timesheet was submitted late and even if it wasn’t submitted at all. Google your state name and “paycheck law” to find out the law for your state specifically. Once you have that info, send it to whoever manages the finance person who’s doing this with a note saying, “This violates state law and we legally cannot do it.”
I’m sympathetic to the finance team’s struggle — getting people to turn in timesheets on time is a pain — but they can’t withhold paychecks as a tool to make it happen.
In triple-digit temperatures, drinking water frequently and resting in the shade are minimum safety measures for avoiding injuries and deaths. But they are not applied to every job site.
WASHINGTON—Giggling as they squirmed, sucked their thumbs, and fiddled with their pull-up diapers, the nation’s toddlers held a press conference Wednesday to announce their plans to crawl under the fitting rooms doors at Ross Dress for Less and say hi. “We’re here today to inform you that we will escape our parents’…
Good morning. Our overall pattern remains more or less the same, with high pressure leading to very hot weather for the next week, and quite possibly beyond. Today and Thursday could bring the worst of the weather, with very high dewpoints contributing to the heat.
We see this in the forecast for “wet bulb globe temperatures,” which factor in several variables to provide an overall guidance for how uncomfortable conditions will be. (I discussed these a bit more in depth on Monday) Temperatures for today and Thursday are forecast to be above 90 degrees, which means our weather will be extremely uncomfortable.
An excessive heat warning is in effect for much of the metro area today. (National Weather Service)
Wednesday
There is not much to say beyond the fact that temperatures will reach about 100 degrees, with sunny skies and stifling humidity, and modest southwest winds at about 10 mph. Lows tonight will drop to around 80 degrees.
Thursday
Conditions will be much the same, although southerly winds may be a little higher, at 10 to 15 mph.
Friday
With the influx of slightly drier air and winds gusting up to 20 mph, conditions might be slightly more tolerable outside. But temperatures will still be really hot, about 100 degrees for much of the region away from the coast.
Wet Bulb Globe Temperatures may moderate slightly heading into the weekend. (Weather Bell).
Saturday and Sunday
Yes, the weekend looks sunny and hot.
Next week
A series of atmospheric disturbances will push through the area later on Sunday and on Monday; and were we not under the influence of high pressure, these are the kinds of systems that would bring us a healthy chance of rain. However, due to generally sinking air over the region, I’d rate the chance of these disturbances at producing rain at about 10 percent. Still, it’s something to watch, as most of the rest of the forecast just looks to be unendingly hot, humid, and rain free.
A few months back we were contacted by Dr Johanna Kerch from the University of Göttingen in Germany looking for some cartoony help.
Dr Kerch wanted a cartoon produced that she could use in her slides as part of her lectures on ice grain recrystallisation and how they deform and re-form into polycrystals. She very kindly sent us some ice core images and a request that there had better be cute faces.
The above took a few versions. For starters the polar bear was once a penguin (wrong continent) and the cute faces weren’t nearly cute enough. But after we googled cute polar bears and brought in a nine-year-old cute face specialist we managed to produce the final version above.
Please do get in touch with Dr Kerch and ask her all about ice crystallisation, I’m sure she’d be more than happy to explain it and why it’s so important!
Also if you’re interested in having a custom cartoon made please do get in touch via our contact page and we’ll see what we can do for you.
UNITED STATES – With the US leg of Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour about to end, economists are haunted because they discovered the ultimate easter egg – that Swifties has been single-handedly preventing a US recession! Taylor Swift fans have been filling in the blank space left by the end of pandemic funding programs through their […]
OceanGate announced it is suspending its commercial and exploration operations nearly three weeks after five people were killed aboard its Titan submersible on a trip to the Titanic shipwreck. What do you think?
If you map environmental factors, race, politics, and other indicators in Houston, you often end up with an arrow shape. What is "the “Houston Arrow” and what does it tell us about resources and policies in our city?
The majority of the Atlantic will remain fairly quiet, but the far north may see a weak system develop by the weekend that could gradually drift toward the Azores.
Happening Now: No worries for most
The Atlantic has some action out there today, but none of the systems at this point looks like a serious threat, and certainly nothing that would threaten any land. There’s a tropical wave in the islands today, bringing some showers and storms. A rather robust wave just emerged off Africa, but it’s already losing some steam.
Several tropical waves and areas of storminess are present across the Atlantic, but the only area that could plausibly develop is near Bermuda and moving east. (College of DuPage)
But the main system we’re watching will come to fruition in the medium range, so we’ll get into that below.
All in all, things are currently quiet from an impacts standpoint.
The medium range (days 6 to 10): Can the North Atlantic do it?
When we look at formation points of northern Atlantic storms throughout history between July 11th and July 20th, one area we generally can usually rule out for storm origin is east of about 55°W longitude. We’re going to be watching exactly that area this week and weekend for potential development.
Click to enlarge the map of storm origin points between July 11th and 20th since the 1800s. The area we are watching for development would be an extreme north and east outlier. (NOAA)
The National Hurricane Center has a 50 percent chance of development over the next week as of this writing. Curious and puzzling are words that come to mind, but when the Atlantic is as warm as it is, I guess this should not come as a shock. Whatever the case, we are watching this disturbance east of Bermuda in particular that will slide eastward over the next few days.
A more zoomed in look at the disturbance in the North Atlantic and its proximity to the Azores and Bermuda. It has about a 50 percent chance of developing over the next several days. (Weathernerds.org)
We can say a couple things about this system, should it develop. First, from the spaghetti plot below, which shows all the European ensemble members, 51 of them run with different tweaks in their starting points (to generate a more realistic spread of potential outcomes), we get a broadly north then east-moving system for several days. The map stops at day 7, and that’s a pretty wide dispersion of outcomes. In time, there’s also some chance the system meanders as far as the Azores, which could lead to eventual impacts there, though I’m not ruling that in just yet. But a fairly broad spectrum of potential track outcomes leads to above average uncertainty over the next 5 to 7 days.
The “spread” in potential outcomes from this system as it meanders around the North Atlantic over the next week or so is rather high, with a lot of possibilities on the table, virtually none a serious threat to land though. (Weathernerds.org)
The other thing you can say is that most modeling does keep this system on the lower end of the intensity spectrum. Wind shear and relatively “cooler” water should eventually take a toll on whatever this is and cap it at a reasonably manageable intensity. Again, if it develops.
A lot of ifs here, but it’s something. Certainly unusual and a curiosity. Thankfully it remains relatively away from land impacts. We’ll see how this goes in the days ahead.
Fantasyland (beyond day 10): Quiet
No sign of anything menacing us in the extended range right now. Modeling continues to non-specifically hint at some more activity in this timeframe, but there’s nothing we can hang our hats on and focus on showing up out there.
This is bad for business, but as usual we’re going to be honest with you here. For the next few days, at least, you really do not need to check the daily forecast here at Space City Weather. We are in a persistent pattern of high-pressure dominated weather that will last for at least the next week, and quite possibly longer. This high anchored over the southwestern United States, is not going anywhere, any time soon.
High pressure will remain anchored over the southwestern United States for awhile. (Weather Bell)
The conditions that we’re going to experience through the middle of July are not atypical, per se, for this month. It is summer in Houston. It is hot. But the heat is going to be tenacious, with daily temperatures 3 to 5 degrees above normal, and without any let up. Every day is going to see high temperatures in the upper 90s to 100 degrees. Lows will barely fall to 80 degrees. And while there is a very slight rain chance this afternoon, overall chances will be 10 percent or less on most days. The entire metro area is under a heat advisory and will remain so for the foreseeable future.
Tuesday
Skies will be mostly sunny with high temperatures near or reaching 100 degrees for most of the region away from the coast. Winds will be light, at 5 to 10 mph from the southwest. There is perhaps a 10 or 20 percent chances of showers and thunderstorms this afternoon, but most areas will not see anything resembling rainfall. Lows tonight will be around 80 degrees in Houston.
Wednesday
A similar day, albeit with even lower rain chances. Look for highs in the upper 90s.
Above-normal temperatures are likely to persist through next week. (Pivotal Weather)
Thursday until ???
From Thursday, through the weekend, and at least into the middle of next week we are looking at hot and sunny weather, driven persistent high pressure. This means mostly sunny skies, highs near 100 degrees, and warm, humid nights. It is possible this pattern breaks somewhat by the middle or end of next week, but I would not hold my breath.
This post was written by Alison Green and published on Ask a Manager.
A reader writes:
I have a situation which I think I would know how to handle as a manager but no idea how to handle as a client.
My son has developmental delays that qualify him for certain therapies. After months of searching, we have finally found a therapy provider that fits our needs. This facility’s owner (there’s no one above her) and head therapist, Jane, is clearly competent, knowledgeable, and friendly. She also gets along very well with our son. However, Jane is an EXTREMELY slow talker. By that, I mean she has trouble gathering her thoughts, takes long pauses between words, and constantly uses fillers (um, ah, y’know, etc.). A sentence which might take you or me five seconds to say will take her 30 seconds. This had made meetings with her interminable (for the record, I have no idea if this is a medical issue).
I generally get the gist of what Jane is trying to say after a few seconds but don’t want to interrupt her because (1) I think that’s rude and (2) what if I don’t really know what she’s trying to say? We’ll eventually have another therapist working with our son along with Jane but, for now, we expect to primarily be working with Jane for the foreseeable future.
We are still in the assessment phase for our son, so our recent meetings with Jane involve a lot of questionnaires to make sure our son is getting the right treatment. The last questionnaire Jane pulled out was about two pages long and should’ve taken 30 minutes max to complete thoroughly. It took us a full hour just to get through the first page. We had to schedule another meeting to complete the second page, which also took a full hour. Jane works a typical 9-5 so my husband and I must take time off or use our lunch hours for these meetings. So far, we have had six of these meetings (which should’ve just been two or three) and there are more to come. At this point, I expect we will just barely scrape by the assessment deadline (or else we’ll have to start this whole process over again).
Jane also needs to work closely with our son’s preschool (who are amazing!) since that’s where he’ll receive most of his therapy. Jane has had a couple meetings with our son’s teachers, which they told me took much longer than they expected.
I am prepared to forge ahead with Jane because (1) her facility really is perfectly in line with what we want for our son, (2) she is a good therapist, and (3) the thought of having to spend months finding and completing this process with a new (probably less fitting) facility fills me with dread, mostly because we’d be wasting valuable time my son could really use in therapy.
If I were Jane’s manager, I would probably address this issue with “radical candor,” but as I am her client, I’m not sure how to approach it. Her sessions with my son are fine because they’re play-based, not dialogue-based. But there will also be continuous check-ins with both my husband and me, and our son’s preschool. I don’t want to frustrate his teachers whenever they must interact with Jane (which will be often) or spend my foreseeable lunch breaks waiting for Jane to finish her sentence. What do I say to her, if anything? Is it better to just grit my teeth and bear it?
Can you address the amount of time your meetings with Jane are taking without getting into the reasons why they’re taking so long? By that I mean, when scheduling meetings, could you say to her, “I will have a hard stop at 3:30 that day — can we get it all done in half an hour?”
Or, if you think she’ll just suggest rescheduling for a day when you’ll have more time, you could address it more broadly: “Our meetings are taking a lot more time than I’d anticipated. We of course want to get you what you need, but we’re having to schedule extra, unanticipated meetings because we’re running so long. Is there a way to streamline the meetings to make it more possible for us to juggle them with our jobs and other commitments?” Maybe you could add, “If we’re able to answer some of this over email, that might help a lot.”
Try approaching it as collaborative problem-solving — with a tone of “we want to make sure you have what you need, but we’re already stretched thin and it’s butting up against time claimed by our jobs and caring for other family members / can we find a way for our son to work with you that doesn’t endanger our own jobs?”
The danger, of course, is that no matter how you couch it, Jane could tell you this is just the way it needs to be. But I’d argue that’s ultimately a good thing in that it will provide sharper clarity about exactly what working with Jane will look like (and what flexibility is/isn’t available). If that happens, you’d know for sure that this is part of the package of working with her — and then would need to decide whether you’d rather choose Jane with all the endlessly long meetings over switching to someone else with all that that could entail.
This post was written by Alison Green and published on Ask a Manager.
A reader writes:
Your recent post about an intern who wanted rides to work made me think perhaps you might have some insight into my present situation. Unlike similar posts I’ve seen, it’s not the chauffeurs who are asking about the situation, but the manager (me) who sees someone taking horrible advantage of coworkers. I know these people are so compassionate and caring, but they also don’t have the extra funds to be putting the wear and tear and gas on their vehicles.
I have an employee who started working here as a college student, “Jenny.” Jenny didn’t have a driver’s license or vehicle, but the campus housing was less than a quarter mile away, so she walked. However, after she graduated, she moved a few miles farther away and started asking fellow employees to give her rides to work and rides home. People gave her a ride. Jenny also now asks the person giving her a ride to stop at her child’s daycare on the way to and from work to drop off/pick up the child. (She’ll leave the car seat at the daycare during the day.) This has been going on for almost a decade. She still does not have a driver’s license or vehicle and has no intention of getting them, as far as I know.
Employees have actually quit because they didn’t want to continue to give Jenny a ride but felt guilty saying no. Currently, she gets most rides to and from work (and daycare) from three compassionate employees who are very caring and can’t tell her no. One person always gives her a ride home, every single day. Usually Jenny gets a ride to work with one of the other two employees. Sometimes Jenny will ask for (and receive) a ride from someone who is not even working that day. They will drive in (one employee driving 23 miles one way), pick her up, drop her off at work, and drive back home.
She never offers to pay for gas. She’s asked people to drop her off at the movie theatre where she’s meeting friends. (Presumably the friends give her a ride home.) She has had coworkers drop her off at her kid’s daycare in the morning for a meeting. Then she’ll call her coworkers in a few hours to pick her up and bring her to work.
She does occasionally have other friends give her rides, but it definitely looks to be the majority of time she asks coworkers to pick her up and drop her off and generally drive her around.
I don’t think she’s ever used public transportation (which is mediocre here). Her daily commute is farther than the previous quarter mile, but could still be traversed by walk or bike.
This is the situation I inherited when I became manager about a year ago. I have talked to the employees giving her a ride. Most don’t want to do it, but they are too compassionate to say no. If this is what their conscience is telling them to do, what can I say to that?
Part of the problem is that the majority of this happens before and after work hours. Occasionally, Jenny will ask for a ride to or from an appointment or meeting (during work hours), but most of it is the employees giving her a ride on their own time.
The few times when she does ask for a ride on work hours, well, everyone helps each other out occasionally. How can I forbid an employee from picking her up at her child’s daycare when I just drove out to jump another employee’s stalled vehicle?
She rarely asks me for a ride so it hasn’t been an issue personally. Again, how can I help one employee (with a dead battery) when I won’t on occasion help out another employee?
I hate to see people taken advantage of. I know most of these people don’t have extra financial resources. I have heard some employees say something like “She’ll hate me if I don’t give her a ride.”
Is there anything, as the supervisor, I can or should be doing?
Aggggh. This could all be solved if your employees would stop being so passive about it! If they’d simply tell Jenny they can’t drive her anymore, the problem would be solved.
But they’re not — and since you’re actually losing employees over it, something that shouldn’t need to be your business is becoming your business.
To be clear, there are a lot of ways this could play out that wouldn’t be your business. If Jenny were just asking for occasional rides and people were mildly annoyed but doing it anyway … not really your business. But you’ve had employees quit over it.
I also wouldn’t be surprised if over time, a cultural expectation has built up on your team that driving Jenny around is “what we do here” — and so people who would like to tell Jenny no worry they’re expected to do it anyway. Some of them might worry about how it will affect their relationship with Jenny at work, or even their relationships with other coworkers if their refusal to drive her means someone else feels obligated to drive her in their place. So again: your business.
But I can see why you’re struggling with it, since it’s outside-of-work behavior that your employees are agreeing to. Keep in mind, though, that there are times when behavior outside of work falls into your purview: for example, if an employee kept showing up to outside-work social events and insulting the coworkers who were there, that would be your business because it would affect the dynamics on your team. Or, for an example that’s closer to your situation, what if you had an employee who was constantly nagging coworkers to buy her dinner and they didn’t want to do it but felt obligated to help her out, and some people were starting to resign rather than continue to fund her meals? In both those situations, although the behavior was outside of work, it would be affecting your team dynamics and so you’d have standing to intervene.
There are limits to this, of course. If two of your employees used to be outside-of-work friends and had a falling-out, it wouldn’t be appropriate for you to get involved other than ensuring they were treating each other civilly at work. But when things come into work, they’re your business. And in this case, with people quitting over the situation, that bar has been met.
Ideally, you could just talk to the people driving Jenny and give them your explicit encouragement and permission to turn down her ride requests. But it sounds like you’ve done that and it hasn’t changed anything. Maybe that’s because these employees are people-pleasers or afraid to be assertive, which can become extra potent if it intersects with any feeling of “this is what the team does.” But since talking to them hasn’t worked, I’m hesitant to rely on trying more of that.
Because of that, I think you’ll have to talk to Jenny and say something like: “I need you to figure out transportation to and from work that doesn’t involve relying on your coworkers. I know on your end it must look like people are driving you happily, but what I’m hearing on my end is that people feel pressured to help but would like to stop, and it’s affecting the dynamics on the team. I understand this has been your set-up for a long time, so I don’t expect you to change it overnight, but I do need you to have another system in place one month from now.”
She will probably push back, saying people are happy to do it and they’d say no if they didn’t want to. To that you can say, “Unfortunately, we’ve had people quit over this and I can’t continue having it impact the team that way. You do need to find your own transportation to and from work.”
In theory you should add, “Obviously an occasional ride when you’re in a pinch is fine — we’d all do that for each other. But your coworkers can’t be your default plan for getting here and home.” But given the high danger that Jenny will take that as license to continue to ask for rides most of the time, I’d probably leave it out for now.
After you have that conversation, it’s worth talking to the ride-providing coworkers again, letting them know you’ve had this conversation, and saying you need them to do their part by being clear with Jenny that they can’t continue to drive her.
From there, you’ll need to stay pretty actively involved to make sure that Jenny really does stop leaning on colleagues for constant rides; this is entrenched enough that it’s likely to take fairly active involvement from you (possibly ongoing for a while) to ensure she actually lets up on people.
Is this a weird amount of involvement to have in an employee’s transportation and other employees’ favor-providing? Yes! It absolutely is. But it’s at the point that you’ve lost multiple employees over it, so you’ve got to intervene.
Conservativism is, in other words, the opposite of the rule of law, which is the idea that the law applies equally to all. Many of America's most predictably weird moments live in the tension between the rule of law and the conservative's demand to be protected – but not bound – by the law.
Think of the Republican women of Florida whose full-throated support for the perfomatively cruel and bigoted policies of Ron Desantis turned to howls of outrage when the governor signed a law "overhauling alimony" (for "overhauling," read "eliminating"):
This is real leopards-eating-people's-faces-party stuff, and it's the only source of mirth in an otherwise grim situation.
But out of the culture-war bullshit backfires, none is so sweet and delicious as the religious liberty self-own. You see, under the rule of law, if some special consideration is owed to a group due to religious liberty, that means all religions. Of course, Wilhoit-drunk conservatives imagine that "religious liberty" is a synonym for Christian liberty, and that other groups will never demand the same carve outs.
Remember when Louisiana decided spend tax dollars to fund "religious" schools under a charter school program, only to discover – to their Islamaphobic horror – that this would allow Muslim schools to get public subsidies, too?
(They could have tried the Quebec gambit, where hijabs and yarmulkes are classed as "religious" and therefore banned for public servants and publicly owned premises, while crosses are treated as "cultural" and therefore exempted – that's some primo Wilhoitism right there)
The Satanic Temple has perfected the art of hoisting religious liberty on its own petard. Are you a state lawmaker hoping to put a giant Ten Commandments on the statehouse lawn? Go ahead, have some religious liberty – just don't be surprised when the Satanic Temple shows up to put a giant statue of Baphomet next to it:
And now we come to Dobbs, and the cowardly, illegitimate Supreme Court's cowardly, illegitimate overturning of Roe v Wade, a move that was immediately followed by "red" states implementing total, or near-total bans on abortion:
These same states are hotbeds of "religious liberty" nonsense. In about a dozen of these states, Jews, Christians, and Satanists are filing "religious liberty" challenges to the abortion ban. In Indiana, the Hoosier Jews For Choice have joined with other religious groups in a class action, to argue that the "religious freedom" law that Mike Pence signed as governor protects their right to an abortion:
Their case builds on precedents from the covid lockdowns, like decisions that said that if secular exceptions to lockdown rules or vaccine mandates existed, then states had to also allow religious exemptions. That opens the door for religious exemptions to abortion bans – if there's a secular rule that permits abortion in the instance of incest or rape, then faith-based exceptions must be permitted, too.
Some of the challenges to abortion rules seek to carve out religious exemptions, but others seek to overturn the abortion rules altogether, because the lawmakers who passed them explicitly justified them in the name of fusing Christian "values" with secular law, a First Amendment no-no.
As Rabbi James Bennett told Politico's Alice Ollstein: "They’re entitled to their interpretation of when life begins, but they’re not entitled to have the exclusive one."
In Florida, a group of Jewish, Buddhist, Episcopalian, Universalists and United Church clerics are challenging the "aiding and abetting" law because it restricts the things they can say from the pulpit – a classic religious liberty gambit.
Kentucky's challenge comes from three Jewish women whose faith holds that life begins "with the first breath." Lead plaintiff Lisa Sobel described how Kentucky's law bars her from seeking IVF treatment, because she could face criminal charges for "discarding non-viable embryos" created during the process.
Then there's the Satanic Temple, in court in Texas, Idaho and Indiana. The Satanists say that abortion is a religious ritual, and argue that the state can't limit their access to it.
These challenges all rest on state religious liberty laws. What will happen when some or all of these reach the Supreme Court? It's a risky gambit. This is the court that upheld Trump's Muslim ban and the right of a Christian baker to refuse to bake a wedding cake for a same-sex couple. It's a court that loves Wilhoit's "in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect."
It's a court that's so Wilhoit-drunk, it's willing to grant religious liberty to bigots who worry about imaginary same-sex couples:
But in the meantime, the bigots and religious maniacs who want to preserve "religious liberty" while banning abortion are walking a fine line. The Becket Fund, which funded the Hobby Lobby case (establishing that religious maniacs can deny health care to their employees if their imaginary friends object), has filed a brief in one case arguing that the religious convictions of people arguing for a right to abortion aren't really sincere in their beliefs:
This is quite a line for Becket to have crossed – religious liberty trufans hate it when courts demand that people seeking religious exemptions prove that their beliefs are sincerely held.
Not only is Becket throwing its opposition to "sincerely held belief" tests under the bus, they're doing so for nothing. Jewish religious texts clearly state that life begins at the first breath, and that the life of a pregnant person takes precedence over the life of the fetus in their uterus.
The kicker in Ollstein's great article comes in the last paragraph, delivered by Columbia Law's Elizabeth Reiner Platt, who runs the Law, Rights, and Religion Project:
The idea of reproductive rights as a religious liberty issue is absolutely not something that came from lawyers. It’s how faith communities themselves have been talking about their approach to reproductive rights for literally decades.
"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
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The Internet Con: A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech, Verso, September 2023
The Lost Cause: a post-Green New Deal eco-topian novel about truth and reconciliation with white nationalist militias, Tor Books, November 2023
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WASHINGTON—In a surprise move with the potential to upend the 2024 presidential race, Joe Biden refused Monday to rule out a third-party run. “It’s clear that the politics in Washington are broken, which is why I can’t exclude the possibility of a third-party run,” said Biden, explaining that in a functioning…
SEATTLE—After gearing up for the online retailer’s annual Prime Day sale and perusing the bargains, savvy internet users reported Tuesday that, due to a glitch, Amazon was now offering a controlling stake in the company for only $24.99. “If you’re an Amazon Prime member, you can log on right now and snag majority…
This once-charming but now dilapidated two-story is surely a metaphor for something, but what? Is it your inner resolve and optimism, which will one day restore this home to its former glory? Or is it just a manifest symbol of your eternal failure? You decide!
This post was written by Alison Green and published on Ask a Manager.
It’s five answers to five questions. Here we go…
1. My assistant won’t stop being “concerned” about my cane
I am a GM at a construction company office. I have a part-time assistant I cannot do without and five field technicians I see once a week or so.
Within the past 18 months, I have developed a need for the occasional use of a cane. I’m seeing a doctor, but sometimes I have to slow down or use a cane to get around.
When I walk to my assistant’s office, with the cane — not making a big deal about it (I don’t wince, sigh, push baby ducks out of the way with my cane, so forth), she sighs and puts on this face like I need a wheelchair and asks how I am, if I need a chair, if I need help at home, if I need need need. I’ve told her many times, “It’s okay, I just need a little assistance with the cane sometimes” or “Well, it’s a little damp out and this works for me.”
Thinking back, she does get a kick out of talking about illness, crazy bruises, sniffles, so forth, but I don’t comment or acknowledge with more than a polite comment. It’s nice she is concerned, but how can I get it across to her that it’s fine and she doesn’t need to keep commenting on it?
“It becomes a much bigger deal when you keep talking about it and I’d prefer that you stop doing that.” And if that doesn’t work, then get even more direct: “I don’t think I’ve been clear enough: Please stop commenting when I use my cane. It’s not the big deal you’re making of it, and it’s distracting to have to keep reassuring you that I’m fine.”
I have a feeling both of those are more direct than you’d prefer to be — but you’ve tried a softer version and it’s not getting through so you really do need to spell it out. At some point it’s actually not nice that she’s concerned because she’s ignoring what you’re telling her would actually be helpful in favor of indulging whatever is going on on her end. Either way, though, as her manager, it’s completely reasonable to be direct about something like this … and you might need to keep an eye on whether she’s being similarly aggravating to other people in the office with health conditions too.
2. How do I recover after making a serious mistake?
I am a junior employee in a department of about 20 people. I recently sent an external-facing email with an error that required my senior colleagues to do damage control in a way that could harm their relationship with some of the recipients.
What is the right thing to do when that happens? I apologized when I alerted them to the mistake, but I feel awful. I’m relatively new and I don’t want to be seen as a liability, but I also don’t want to draw further attention to myself by sending everyone a personalized quilt with “I’m sorry” embroidered into every square.
How do I recover in the eyes of my colleagues after screwing up, especially as a newer employee who hasn’t built up much capital? For what it’s worth, my manager is great and helped me handle the problem.
Everyone makes mistakes, especially when they’re junior! That’s normal. What sets good employees apart from less-good employees is how they handle it when it happens. The most important steps are to disclose the mistake as soon as you can, take responsibility for it, and share a plan for how you’ll avoid something similar happening in the future.
Sometimes people are so embarrassed about the mistake that their instinct is to not talk about it; they worry that talking about will just draw more attention to it. But that can backfire, by making it look like you’re not that concerned. Conversely, the person who says, “I realize how serious this was and here’s my plan for making sure it doesn’t happen again” will inspire a lot more trust.
Of course, that that’s likely a conversation you should have with your boss rather than the rest of your coworkers, so they won’t necessarily see that part of it. For them, the way you rebuild trust is by demonstrating conscientiousness going forward. They’ve undoubtedly seen junior employees make mistakes before, they know it happens, and what they’ll be most interested in is any pattern. If you demonstrate a pattern of good work going forward, you should be fine. That said, you could also ask your manager for advice on this — she may be able to suggest specifics that would be helpful in your office.
Regardless, though, no “I’m sorry” quilt necessary!
3. Asking for three days off after a week on the job
My grandson just accepted an entry-level position. Four days later, he learned that my daughter and husband are going on a camping trip for three days only one week after he starts the job. He wants to go. Can he still ask for time off for three days when he didn’t say anything at interview time and acceptance of offer?
He shouldn’t. If he had brought it up as part of his offer negotiations, that would have been fine — but at this point he’s accepted the offer and they’ve been planning around his start date. Asking for three days off that early — at a time when they’ve likely already scheduled training and other activities for him — will look like he’s not taking the commitment he just made to the job particularly seriously.
4. Applying for a job using a resume that isn’t current
Is it acceptable now to apply for a job using a résumé that is not current? I am the executive director of a social services program, and I noticed that we are receiving a lot of applications with résumés that aren’t current. One person we interviewed a couple of weeks ago was asked why her résumé wasn’t up to date – the jobs on the résumé stopped at 2017, but her application indicated she was working as of June 2023 – and the person responded, “Oh, I forgot to update that.”
I didn’t interview the above-mentioned person, as I would not select to interview a person if they submitted a résumé that wasn’t current. But I was wondering if it is not as important nowadays to submit a current résumé if the job application reflects the most current work history? I did some internet research but I didn’t see any information about this topic, which is why I’m emailing you the question.
No, that’s strange! I mean, it’s fine to leave off jobs that don’t strengthen your resume overall, so it would be different if they made a deliberate decision to exclude their most recent job — like if it was in a totally different field and they thought it would detract from their candidacy rather than strengthen it, or if they’d only worked there a few weeks when they applied with you, or it it were otherwise a strategic choice. Also, if you approached the candidate rather than the other way around, it could be fine in some circumstances for the person to say, “I don’t have a current resume since I’m not actively looking but I can send you my last version — be aware that it doesn’t include my current job.”
But if it’s just “I didn’t think to update my resume from several years ago before applying for a job now”? That’s an unusual lack of care about how one is presenting oneself when applying for a job. It’s not a trend, although if you’re really seeing it a lot (like more than twice recently) and these are otherwise good candidates, it’s worth exploring what’s going on. (For example, are you giving people a ridiculously short window to apply? Paying so little that people aren’t willing to put any effort into your application process? Even that wouldn’t normally result in this though, so who knows.)
5. A question about The Office
I was watching old episodes of The Office, and had a question for you inspired by the show. In the episode I watched, Michael Scott (regional manager) was dating Holly Flax (HR rep for his office). In response, Michael’s boss transferred Holly to a different branch that is seven hours away. Is this legal? It seems kind of sketchy that an employee would be transferred because they dated their boss.
Michael wasn’t Holly’s boss; she reported to corporate, not to Michael. (That’s why Michael could never fire Toby, the HR rep Holly replaced.) It’s not outrageous that they’d choose to transfer the relatively new HR person over the long-time regional manager presiding over what was (bizarrely) one of their most profitable branches.
They could be in problematic legal territory if they transferred Holly without having a clear business reason to move her while keeping Michael where he was — and definitely if they always transferred the woman when there was an office affair — but I don’t think either of these was the case here. (Although … a lawyer could probably have an interesting time with the fact that they also fired Jan while Michael was dating her. Hmmm.)
Why is north up? Has north always been up? What used to be up before north was up? Does it matter if a direction other than north is up? And have you ever been on a year five geography trip where you got lost in the woods and wet yourself in front of Mr. Dugdale?
The Stampede is back, and with it the annual pilgrimage of Canadian politicians looking to do some light cowpoke cosplay because pollsters convinced them that Alberta will only vote for people who look like Cowboys, when the truth is Alberta will only vote for people who look like Conservatives. Now obviously none of our politicians […]
OTTAWA – Lo, the heavens tremble and punish man for his hubris with a calamitous wave of scorching heat capable of rendering our souls from our body and casting them into the shadows of the Duat, according to a recent study by Environment Canada. As Canadians across the country deal with a stifling heat wave, […]
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