SAN FRANCISCO—In an effort to bring more reliability to their ride-sharing services, Uber reportedly unveiled a new feature this week that lets users remotely detonate a ride that is running late. “We all know how frustrating it can be when you’re looking at the app, the driver doesn’t seem to be making any progress,…
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It really only gets good in the 4th edition.
Like an increasing number of national parks in the United States, Mount Vesuvius has begun rationing access with a quota system. The system has had some problems.
(Image credit: Keystone/Getty Images)
This post was written by Alison Green and published on Ask a Manager.
A reader writes:
I received a promotion last month after several stressful years. The money will be life-changing. I’m working out of a different office much closer to home, I’ll be doing work I care about, and I’ll have more time with my family.
The company filled an open role at my new location just before I was promoted; I didn’t participate in the hiring process for this person. I did not know they hired the parent of my child’s bully. This isn’t just a few meetings with the principal kind of bully situation. We almost lost our child because of “Timmy.” We moved our child and their siblings to a different school, then we sold our home and moved to the other side of the county. We had to involve the police at one point, resulting in being granted a restraining order against Timmy, who is now finally facing other legal consequences for his behavior. Both kids are still quite young, so I’m still shocked at the cruel and awful things I witnessed my child go through at the hands of a peer, feeling helpless and out of control while we begged the school and his parents to intervene.
Our family life is finally settling down and this new work opportunity felt like a new start for us after the pain and fear we’ve gone through. My child is finally beginning to heal and get their life and joy back. We’re all in treatment as a family and individually to help recover from all of this.
The company hired Timmy’s mother, “Jane,” to fill this role, and I will be managing her. My first day meeting the team, she went pale when she saw me. I’m sure I probably did the same.
I know everyone else on this team and have great rapport with them. I don’t communicate with Jane unless I have to and it’s in writing.
What should I do? I’m not quitting and I’m not taking a demotion. Should I meet with Jane and HR to discuss this and set expectations? That feels like I’m betraying my child and my family, but professionally I know it’s an option. Do I ignore it and hope she’s so uncomfortable she quits? Should I ask HR about offering her a transfer? At a certain point in the last year, she behaved just about as badly as her child did, and the judge considered including her in the restraining order, but was instead issued a warning on the record.I checked and the two of us working together isn’t a violation of the restraining order, but it does open up the possibility.
I’m just so stunned I don’t know what to do. We don’t speak or interact unless we have to and some team members and a few of my colleagues in management have noticed but not said much about it. I’m at such a loss, I have no idea how to handle this.
First, what an awful situation. I’m so sorry your child and your family went through that, and I’m glad everyone is starting to heal from it.
It must be horrible to have the situation rear back up in your life in this unexpected way, in a place where you never expected to encounter it.
But you’ve got to talk to HR about it. Because you’re Jane’s manager, it’s a significant conflict of interest, and it would be a big deal if they find out about it at some point and you never disclosed it. And the chances of them finding out are pretty high, since if Jane starts to feel like you’re penalizing her professionally, it would make sense for her to tell HR the personal history to try to protect herself. But even if she doesn’t, it sounds like people are already noticing that you’re freezing her out — and without knowing the back story, that’s going to reflect badly on you as a manager. (For that matter, with knowing the back story, it’s going to reflect badly on you as a manager, because you really can’t do that. From the company’s standpoint, part of the job you’ve been hired to do is to be a fair and effective manager to everyone you supervise, regardless of how you feel about them personally and even if you dislike them for deeply justified reasons.)
I don’t know where that conversation will lead. If it’s possible for them to move Jane to a different position under a different manager, that would be the easiest and most obvious solution — and if there’s a way for them to do that, that’s the most likely outcome. If that’s not possible, there might be other workarounds to limit the impact of the personal history on your team’s work. It’s unlikely that you’ll be pushed to quit or to take a demotion, but you might be told that you need to find a way to manage her the same way you’d manage any other employee (which undoubtedly would be tough, but professionally you really would be obligated to do that if you’re in a position of professional power over her). Frankly, if I were in Jane’s shoes, I’d be actively looking for another job — since even if your company insists that you manage her fairly, I’d assume you were never going to be my champion (and understandably so) and that it would affect me professionally regardless — so she might leave on her own sooner rather than later. But you can’t count on that meanwhile; you’ve got to disclose the situation to your company.
I’m sorry this happened to your family.
This post was written by Alison Green and published on Ask a Manager.
A reader writes:
My company is kind of new to remote work. Covid forced us all home, and hiring developers remotely has been significantly more successful than trying to hire them in-person only. Because of those two factors, the small tech company I work for is now about 40% remote employees located all over the U.S. and Canada.
We have had some growing pains with appreciation and growth for remote employees. I myself am someone who was in office and then moved away to another state to be fully remote. I have been able to grow since I’ve moved away, being promoted to manager and getting an entire new team stood up. Other remote employees have also been able to grow, but we seem to be hard-won exceptions, whereas in-office people get promotions and raises thrown around like candy.
The other issue we have is with employee appreciation. The company regularly has in-office lunches and other kinds of perks for employees who come into the office. Most of these I don’t have a huge problem with. For example, breakfast is purchased for those in the office every Wednesday, with no compensation given to remote employees for that. I get that, I get the perk of not having to drive into the office twice a week (no one is required to be in-office every day). But then there are other things like big holiday parties with catered lunches and swag boxes. Sometimes the company is good about sending things out to remote employees as well, sometimes they aren’t. For example, they usually send remote employees a DoorDash gift card by email when they do catered in-office lunch parties, but they forgot at Christmas. I brought it up a couple of times, but then I just let it go.
The most recent and egregious example was all of the employees in the region where the office is located were invited to go to a theme park for the day. Anyone remote was invited to fly themselves out if they wanted to as well, on their own dime. All of these employees, so roughly half the company, got a day off work, transportation to or parking at the theme park, the ticket to the theme park, and a catered lunch in the theme park. The remote employees worked the whole day and got a gift box of cookies (worth $27 when purchasing one, and I’m sure there was a bulk discount) three days after the trip to the theme park. I was kind of expecting something somewhat equitable, like also getting the day off and a $100 Amazon gift card or something, but nope. So we were all working and watching the in-office employees in the region posting pictures of their company day off to the company Slack channels.
This coupled with some other ridiculous remote work policies (can only work from your home address and nowhere else, and yes they monitor this) has made me pretty angry and sour. I’m wondering if I’m overreacting and there is nothing wrong here or if I’m right to be mad and this is not how other companies are approaching having some remote and some in-office employees. And any strategies for fixing this — I manage a team of seven fully remote employees, only two of whom are anywhere close to the office, which makes it feel really important for me to stand up for my team, not just for me.
Well … I’m not terribly bothered by any of the appreciation perks, including the theme park day.
The thing is, the benefits to working from home are significant if you’re someone who prefers to do that and has chosen it. It’s not just all the stuff that’s been repeated ad nauseam the last few years — doing your laundry while you work, walking your dog at lunch, taking calls in sweatpants with your cat on your lap, having access to your own kitchen, focusing without distracting coworkers, and reclaiming your commute time — but it’s also things like not having to use PTO when your kid is sick or furniture is being delivered or when you’re too under the weather to drag yourself to work but willing to work from your laptop in bed. You also control your own environment, and your time, in ways that in-office workers generally can’t. And that’s before we even get into the ways that in-office workers often end up covering for remote colleagues on things that require a physical office presence.
All of which is to say: Even if you got absolutely nothing every time in-office workers get a perk, you’d still generally be coming out ahead.
Plus, a lot of the perks you described are things that don’t translate well for remote workers. Take that theme park day. That’s not just a perk for the sake of doing something nice for people; it has an actual business purpose. Having people spend time together having fun is a camaraderie-builder, and it’s supposed to pay off in more cooperative, collaborative work relationships. Sending remote employees a gift card wouldn’t achieve that, and giving you the day off wouldn’t either (and if they did offer you that, they’d undoubtedly have some in-office staff saying, “If a day off is an option, I want that instead” — and that’s defeating the whole purpose of what they were trying to organize).
Ultimately, I think you need to accept that you get a ton of benefits from working from home that in-office staff don’t get … and that conversely, sometimes they’ll get something from being at the office that you don’t get. Even accounting for those differences, I suspect you’d still prefer to be remote. If you realize that you don’t — that those sorts of in-person perks are important to you — then it might not make sense to choose a remote job. But your company can’t make it perfectly equal for you, just like they can’t mirror your remote perks for the in-office staff either.
Now, to be clear, if your employer wrote in for advice, I’d come at this differently. If I were advising them, I’d say it’s smart to find ways to ensure remote employees feel included and like part of the team. That doesn’t mean they shouldn’t do things like the local theme park day or that they need to send you DoorDash every time they do a catered meeting, but it does mean they should be thoughtful about inclusion in general and make sure remote staff isn’t routinely ignored.
That said, it sounds like ultimately your company has bigger problems in its management of remote employees — if remote staff are feeling like they won’t ever be promoted even if they’ve earned it, that’s going to eventually affect things like retention and engagement — and I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s coloring the lens you’re seeing the other stuff through.
This post was written by Alison Green and published on Ask a Manager.
I’m regularly dismayed by how many people — particularly women — tell me they’ve gone their entire careers without ever asking for a raise. They haven’t done it because they feel awkward bringing it up, or aren’t sure how to find an opening to do it, or because they’re afraid they’ll sound greedy or like they’re over-estimating their own worth. Instead, they wait for their employers to offer them salary increases at whatever intervals their company choose to do that, if ever — a strategy that generally leaves people earning far less than if they had overcome their fears and spoken up.
So I am here to tell you: asking for a raise is a totally normal part of having a job! As long as you do it right, you will not look selfish, entitled, or presumptuous (assuming you’re working for a reasonably functional employer) … and you might end up earning significantly more money just by having a conversation that could be as short as five minutes long. I’ve got a guide to how to do it at New York Magazine today.
While there are endless possibilities of trendy hotspots to visit in the U.S. during the summer vacation season, the country has plenty of smaller, lesser-known gems that are equally worth exploring. Here are The Onion’s top 10 most underrated vacation destinations in the United States.
This cozy one-story is tailor-made for the auto enthusiast. Eat, sleep, work, and play either adjacent to or inside a real live car! Ultramodern features include two fully electric doors and motion-activated lighting. Comes with eight free cans of paint!
Did you know there is a scientific research tool called the “Draw-a-scientist test” (DAST) that is used to understand how people perceive scientists?
The DAST has been used to understand what people picture when asked to think about a scientist, with some fascinating results. Think about it for a moment. If you were to doodle a scientist right now, what would you draw? There is no correct answer. Just give it some thought, sketch something and if you feel like it, tag @ErrantScience and share it online.
Unsurprisingly, the results of DAST and early research on children’s perceptions revealed that most imagined scientists as stereotypical or mythical characters. Students typically described scientists as men with messy hair wearing lab coats and glasses, working with lab equipment.
In a 1983 study of 4000 students in kindergarten through grade 5 in the US, only 28 girls drew women scientists. Despite efforts to improve the portrayal of women in science, a 2020 meta-analysis of 30 DAST studies worldwide found that “Students still view scientists as middle-aged Caucasian men who wear white lab coats and work in a laboratory”.
It is possible that few children encounter “real life” scientists, so they rely on media to show them what scientists look like. If I relied on childhood movies to teach me about scientists, I would draw a picture of Doc Brown from Back to the Future (Yes, I’m old. LOL).
Until relatively recently, most television and movie scientists have been men. A notable early exception was Dr. Dana Scully on The X-Files. As the only prominent woman in STEM on primetime television in the early 1990s, Scully became a role model for young women. The Scully Effect is credited with causing an influx of women into STEM.
Throughout schooling, boys and girls diverge in their levels of interest, confidence, and sense of belonging in science. Those early gender stereotypes about appropriate careers can influence academic and career choices later in life.
In addition to perceptions about what scientists look like, obstacles, including a lack of role models, overt discrimination, unwelcoming social and cultural environments (aka chilly climate), and a tangle of biological, psychological, and external factors contribute to women’s underrepresentation in STEM careers.
It’s not all doom and gloom, as recent efforts to improve women’s representation in STEM are changing the ratio in some areas, such as life sciences and social sciences. But there are still big gaps in many disciplines, including engineering and physics. And as recruitment has improved, other issues have begun to rise to prominence, including the attrition of women from science pathways. While research into reasons for women’s attrition continues, I decided to focus on the other side of the question:
How do women persist in STEM?
In other words, how do some women manage to stay in STEM fields despite the barriers? And most importantly, what can we learn from these women to help others?
So given how important I feel this is, I am examining how women persist in STEM education and careers. My dissertation is based on Self-Determination Theory, which says people tend to experience greater persistence and well-being when their basic needs for autonomy, competence, and relatedness are satisfied.
To explore whether this theory holds up for women persisting in STEM, I am conducting a short online survey and I need to hear from as many voices and experiences as possible!
If you are a woman with an undergraduate degree in STEM, plus at least two more years of school or work experience in a STEM field, you may participate in this study! It won’t bring you fame or fortune, but I will be grateful for your help, and the results of the study might benefit other girls and women in STEM. Participation in the study is voluntary and totally anonymous and we welcome people from all around the world and all backgrounds.
To read all the details and take the survey, click the button below!
And if you know anyone who might be willing to participate, please share this information. If you have any questions or concerns, please contact me at heathersaigo.com.
Thank you!
This post was written by Alison Green and published on Ask a Manager.
It’s five answers to five questions. Here we go…
1. People keep asking why I wear pantyhose
I am an adult woman who doesn’t shave my legs. I don’t like the feeling of shaving, I’m prone to rashes that I feel are more noticeable than the hair, and I hate having stubble. I’m fine with my hairy legs at the beach, but I feel like the leg hair would look unprofessional in an office. At the office, I am always wearing pants or hosiery. I’m a recent grad in my 20’s so my boss let me know that I didn’t have to wear pantyhose if I didn’t want to. The dress code is slightly more formal than business casual. Pantyhose is appropriate, just a bit old-fashioned. My boss and one other woman at the office wear them, but they are both about 60. Even the women in their 30s and 40s don’t wear pantyhose. (The office staff is eight women. The only man who works here is my boss’s retired father who shows up for a few hours two or three days a week.)
When I started, I had the convenient excuse that the office was way too cold and I couldn’t do bare legs. Our office shares a building and we are not the people who own it. The back office was regularly set to 68, sometimes even lower. It was believable and nobody asked further. Now I’m sharing the back with somebody new and she purchased a space heater. I’m not complaining — the office is way more comfortable now — but I am once again being asked why I never have bare legs. It’s not like they are singling me out, talking about clothes is regular small talk in the office. Wearing pantyhose by choice in your 20s is somewhat unusual and it keeps coming up. What should I say?
Option 1: “I like them!” Because you’re allowed to like them. People probably think you’re wearing pantyhose because you feel like you have to, so if you reframe it as something you like, it might take care of those comments.
Option 2: “I don’t shave my legs so I prefer this at work.” There’s no reason you can’t just own it —and if you do, you might hear, “Hell, go with hairy legs if you want to, we don’t care!”
There’s definitely still a thing about women’s body hair, particularly legs and armpits, but it’s starting to change a bit. It would still be A Thing in many offices, but there are an increasing number of offices where it wouldn’t be. And by A Thing, I mean mostly that it could be something people notice, think about, and have feelings about, not necessarily anything more than that. You might care about that or you might not.
In any case, you need to know your office to judge how much of a thing it might be, but I wouldn’t assume hairy legs would be side-eyed everywhere (especially in less conservative fields).
2. Career coach wants me to use someone else’s job title
I’ve recently hired a career coach as I’ve been looking to leave my job for a while and figured putting money down would finally motivate me to fully participate in the job-searching process. It’s been going fine, but I’m concerned about their advice for my resume. They’ve changed my current job title to fit the jobs that I’m looking for. For example, if my current job title is operations manager and I’m hoping to transition to the leadership coaching field, they’ve encouraged me to change that to say “leadership coach.” Aside from that just not representing my current role, I’m weirded out by the fact that someone at my current workplace does have the title “leadership coach.” If people from my workplace see my LinkedIn profile updated with that job title, they might actually think I’m having a break from reality and that I think I have my coworker’s job.
Is it normal to paint your resume and LinkedIn to reflect what you’re looking for instead of what you’ve actually done? If so, how would I do that without confusing all my past and current colleagues?
No! Not even slightly normal. This is not a thing that is done or would be okay to do. You can’t just randomly change your current job title to something completely different. And even if you could do that, which you can’t, it would be bizarre to list “leadership coach” as your title and then, presumably, have the bulleted list of accomplishments for that job be things that have nothing to do with that job and instead reflect your actual job of operations manager.
What does your career coach suggest you do when an interviewer asks why your title doesn’t match your resume’s description of your work? What do they say will happen when employers contact your company to verify your title and discover that you lied about it? (For the record, you could lose the offer.) And there’s also your very good point about how weird it will look to colleagues if you use someone else’s title on LinkedIn.
This is so astoundingly and strangely off-base about how hiring works that I’d be very wary of taking any other advice from this coach.
3. Should I report deceased people’s LinkedIn profiles?
As I get older, I’ve encountered former colleagues who died but their social media accounts including LinkedIn are still active. A freaky thing on LinkedIn is that LinkedIn generates posts on people’s work anniversaries as if those people are still working at the employers. LinkedIn support accepts requests to remove those accounts from non-family members by providing an obituary. I have done so once, but felt nosy afterwards.
What’s your take on reporting deceased people’s LinkedIn accounts? Some people, while still living, wrote a post notifying their connections that their accounts will be closed because death was imminent. Some people also entrusted family members to use their accounts to notify others upon their death.
Unless the person is a family member or you’re the executor of their will, I’d stay out of it. You have no way of knowing what their wishes might have been; it’s possible they or their family wanted their profile to stay up, and you risk directly violating their wishes. It’s really theirs/their family’s/their executor’s to handle.
4. My interviewer apologized for ghosting (but they didn’t and I wish they had)
About six weeks ago, I interviewed for an entry-level position in a field I’ve been considering moving into. They told me they hoped to have an update after two weeks and they’d let me know if anything changed. Then I repeatedly heard from them via email with apologies for not having updates yet and explanations about the status of the offer — an industry conference delayed us, the offer is stuck with HR, etc. Then six days after the last follow-up, they sent me a rejection email with a long apology for “radio silence” and “ghosting.”
However, I did not feel remotely ghosted. It’s standard in my experience for interview processes in this field to be pretty slow moving with lots of gaps in communication (a comparable org told me after an interview in May that they hoped to have an update “before September” for a job I applied for in February). So I was assuming that these detailed updates about the status of the offer were because they were planning to offer me the offer. I know that basically the number one thing you tell people about job searching is to assume nothing from a potential employer’s communications, but I was assuming. And now I do feel a little resentful that these updates spent so much time pushing this offer to the front of my brain when I could have just ignored it until the rejection rolled in.
Is this type of communication typical? Should I reframe my expectations here, or is it worth bringing up to the hiring manager that I didn’t find their approach to the process as helpful as it seemed like they wanted it to be? I know more transparency is theoretically good thing, but this felt like more of an exercise in frustration than a meaningful shift in the power dynamics of the interview process.
Nah, let it go. They were trying to do the right thing: they gave you a timeline and then tried to keep you updated about potential changes to it. It’s possible, even likely, that they were doing that because they did consider you a top candidate and thought they could end up making you an offer — in fact, this looks to me a lot like what can happen when you’re in the top two or three candidates and they want to make sure they maintain the connection because they very well could end up offering you the job. But even if it’s not that, it’s worth reframing your expectations; let this just reinforce that the only true sign that an offer is imminent is when they say “we are sending over an offer.”
5. Do you have to be paid for your waiting time if your manager is late to open the building?
I have a question about the legality of docking hourly employee pay. Let’s say that an hourly employee is scheduled to start work at 5 am. The opening manager is scheduled to start at the same time and this manager has the keys to unlock the door to get into the building. What happens if the manager oversleeps and doesn’t arrive until 6 am? Can the business dock the pay of the hourly employee by one hour? I can’t find anything online about this type of situation, but I hope that the employee would be required to be paid for that time since it is not their fault that they can’t get inside the building to clock in.
Yes, they’d need to be paid for the hour they were waiting. This falls under what’s called “waiting time,” which is where you arrive at work and are required to remain there until you’re needed. This is the same concept as if you got to work and your computer was down so you couldn’t work immediately but were expected to wait there while it was fixed.
A California-based toymaker is recalling 7.5 million singing and swimming Baby Shark bath toys after multiple lacerations and puncture wounds were reported in children playing with them. What do you think?
NASHVILLE – After another successful season, the NHL will be celebrating its best players in traditional fashion, by making them sit in a crowded auditorium while a collection of obscure American media personalities butcher the pronunciation of their names. Commissioner Gary Bettman explained the motivation for the festivities. “Hockey is the ultimate team game, no […]
The post NHL honours its best by forcing them to listen to D-List celebrities mispronounce their names appeared first on The Beaverton.
Francesca Gino, a prominent behavioral science professor at Harvard Business School, has been accused of fabricating data in studies than span over a decade, and most recently in 2020.
(Image credit: Maddie Meyer/Getty Images)
This post was written by Alison Green and published on Ask a Manager.
It’s the final installment in “where are you now?” season at Ask a Manager. (If I didn’t print your update yet, it’s still in my queue for later!)
Remember the letter-writer worried that if they quit their job when everyone else was quitting, the organization would fall apart? Here’s the update.
I wanted to thank you for your kind response and the commenters for their feedback and thoughts on the letter. The day that my letter was published, I spoke to my family about the financial consequences of quitting without another job lined up and ended up resigning the next day. It was definitely the right decision. The short answer is that the organization kind of fell apart, but I wish them the best. The way it all happened is a doozy, so grab your popcorn and your coffee.
I gave a little over 7 weeks notice to coincide with the end of a program we had coming up and not leave the staff in a lurch. Our board chair, who happens to be my coworker Abby’s best friend, didn’t try to ask me to stay as she’d been through a tumultuous job herself and knew I was frustrated with the lack of authority in my position.
During my only board meeting that overlapped my notice period, the board chair shared that there wouldn’t be any time to say goodbyes to me as she wanted to go into an executive session with just the board to discuss the fact that all staff have now resigned. I didn’t even get a thank you for my five years there.
Abby, as some commenters suspected, was on a power trip and tried to take over the organization the second I resigned. Here are some highlights:
- Announcing that she needs to be made interim Executive Director with hiring and firing power immediately, a title and authority she actively sought against for me, literally the day after I resigned
- Stating that neither I or the Board are her boss
- Deciding that I am not allowed to be part of the staff/board transition committee since I “won’t have time”
- Even though she gave 18 months of notice, she wasn’t going to have time to prepare transition documents and must stay on as a part-time consultant to create these documents after her last day
- Declaring that the transition committee “doesn’t have time” to take my feedback about announcing my resignation to the general community — despite the Board chair and I agreeing on a different plan
The transition committee’s original plan to announce my departure was going to be buried in another email, which made it look like they were hiding something (or that I had done something wrong), and this was a sticking point for me. During the back and forth with the Board chair about my resignation announcement, it came out that Abby had given the board an ultimatum to make her interim Executive Director after I leave, and the Board chair and board members involved in the “mediation” never informed the rest of the board about what happened or that Abby had yelled at program participants. I got a call from one of the Board members on the transition committee asking what was going on and I gave her the details. She was shocked, and then informed the other Board members what was happening.
The Board ultimately decided not to make Abby Interim Executive Director, and informed her of their decision two days before my last day. She stated that she would move up her last day to be either the following business day or December 31. The Board chose the end of December, to which Abby then decided to take a 6-week “mental health break” immediately and return to less than 2 weeks of notice period to wrap things up. I’m impressed with how unabashedly unashamed she was in using up her accrued sick time, which would not be paid out otherwise.
After I left, things got worse. I got a call Friday night at 11 pm from a Board member saying that my exit interview notes had gone out to the Board and staff by accident, and we worked to get him access to delete the email from the staff accounts. Luckily, Abby was already on her mental health break so she didn’t see the notes when they went out. Then, the Board member who was taking over some of the administrative things from me (payroll approval, mail pickup, etc.) started emailing me every week with questions. Almost all of the answers were found in my transition documents that I put together and shared, and some were silly, like asking if we had branded envelopes in the office. After a few weeks of this and responding back days later and with lots of “I don’t know as I’m not on staff anymore,” the Board member continued to email. I wrote back a polite but direct email stating that I can’t be one of the first people he asks questions as I’d left the organization several weeks ago, he responded with a nasty email ending with, “Whatever. I won’t email you anymore.” But then, the Board chair started emailing me questions and I told her off the bat that I’ve answered many questions now and moving forward, I will need to charge [an exorbitant rate] for my time. I stopped getting questions, finally.
I took several months afterward to recover from the burnout, and now I’m job hunting outside of the nonprofit sector using your book and the blog’s advice!
The organization didn’t quite fall apart, but it went into a hiatus and hasn’t had any staff since the end of December. Lessons learned:
- Don’t give more notice time than necessary
- Get everything in writing
- Severance agreements are your friend
- You can’t fix what is institutionally broken
- People won’t return kindness if they don’t have to, so look out for you
- Alison and the commentariat are a wealth of knowledge and support
Thanks again for taking my question and for your thoughtful response. I can’t express my gratitude enough!
This post was written by Alison Green and published on Ask a Manager.
Earlier this month I asked about the pettiest things you’ve seen (or done!) at work. You offered up so many ridiculously petty stories on that post that I can’t fit them all my favorites into one column … so here’s part 1. Part 2 will be coming next week.
Note: We’re not endorsing petty behavior here (well, except the dog’s). We’re just enjoying the entertainment value.
1. The replacement monitor
My personal favorite is from my call center days. One of my team’s monitors had an almost imperceptible yet inevitably headache-inducing flicker which was far beyond merely annoying, yet every time it was reported to our regular IT guy he insisted it was fine. Cut to his holiday, and I reported it to the cover IT guy, along with the back story. He appeared 10 minutes later with another monitor, then proceeded to carefully remove the ID stickers from both, before swapping them around and disappearing with the now-relabelled defective one. When he got back, I asked why the subterfuge — “the replacement is regular IT guy’s monitor.”
2. The air fresheners
My old boss was a really big air freshener person. She had tart warmers, plug-ins, lit candles, electric oil diffusers, salt lamps, going all the time in her tiny office.
All of us complained at some point, but our other colleague “Ted” got migraines and would beg her to get rid of all the scented stuff. She put up a fight and refused to stop and told us all to get over it. Later on she even gave Ted a warning about his attendance, despite being the one who caused his migraines.
Ted called our risk management officer who came in to inspect our building. The RMO flipped out about the sheer number of lit candles and plugged in electrical scent lamps, all of which were major fire hazards. She made our boss box them all up and put them in her car, and came in weekly to check for more scent diffusers. I left the company but people told me for years afterwards until old boss quit that RMO inspected her office weekly for years.
3. The uniforms
I used to work for a security contractor. I had a coworker who had changed to a new job site and required a completely different uniform.
These companies are notorious for requiring uniforms but not providing everything (i.e. we’ll give you only two shirts for a full time job, you have to buy your own pants, belt, boots etc). As a woman, I especially had difficulties because most often clothing was “unisex” (read: men’s cut) and would look sloppy and unprofessional. Anyway, my coworker was not provided a new uniform before his start date, and was told to wear his wife’s uniform (!) because she had recently quit and not yet turned her items in. He proceeded to do so, finding the smallest and most ill-fitting items he could. He even made sure to wear her name tag.
Within 48 hours, someone drove from the office to deliver him uniforms on site. I bought him lunch, brimming with pride.
4. The very good dog
Several lifetimes ago, I worked for a tiny wildly corrupt nonprofit. It has since gone under, which it needed to. It was a super toxic workplace with one of the few culture benefits being that you could bring your dog to the office. I had my first dog at the time, a very smart rescue dachshund. She happened to be with me at the office on the day that I was fired without warning. I did the traditional packing my things into a copy paper box move and, unbeknownst to me, my dog marched into the main room where the two VPs sat, one of whom would be fired the following week, and pooped right next to the desk of the VP responsible for firing me. This was a housetrained and very, very smart dog.
The VP noticed the poop right as my dog and I were getting ready to walk out the door for the final time, my arms loaded with my copy paper box, my dog in her harness and on her leash. She demanded I put everything down and go clean up my dog’s poop, which until that moment I truthfully did not know existed. I knew I was never going to get a reference from this place and particularly her, so I said, “Nope” and walked out the door, never to return. It was so satisfying. My good girl got so many treats for that.
5. The lights
Our owner and GM hate each other. The GM hung some lights in a very public space of the office, and the owner hated them and made him remove (owner offices at a different location). Except GM never removed them. He just turned them off. Now, whenever people come in, our GM turns on the lights, tells them the story and asks them to email the owner about the “really cool lights that are gone.” Owner remains unmoved. I’m one step under the GM and the showdown is a bright spot in my work life.
6. The recycling bin
I worked in an open office at a small company where maybe 10-15 of us were in a large room at any one time. Every 1-2 desks had a small waste basket where people would toss wrappers/lunch detritus/etc. Of note, there was no recycling available in the space when I started.
I was out for a week and when I came back “Joe” was talking to me about something and saw a soda can in my waste basket. Apparently we had gotten a recycling bin while I was out, but it was sort of behind the door in a place you wouldn’t see unless you looked. Instead of telling me “We got recycling last week, it’s over there,” Joe proceeded to mansplain to me how to put something in a recycle bin. He literally demonstrated by taking the can out of my trash and moving it over while explaining how to put a can in a box as if I were a particularly slow 2 year old.
Joe thinks he is a feminist, but in case you missed it, he is actually a misogynist and did this with the room about half full. I, along with others, seemed to find ways for all our empty bottles and cans to end up in his personal waste basket for at least the 6 months until I left. In fact, his trash was basically never empty during that time.
(Note: Joe would meticulously put recyclables in the recycling bin, so no harm done other than to Joe.)
7. The girl
We had a tutor who would have described himself as a “good old boy.” He used to describe ME as “the girl on reception.” I am in my 30s and the company’s operations manager.
Every time he called me “the girl on reception,” I would find a reason to send him an email and increase my job title in my email signature by 1pt size each time.
It got pretty big before he was unceremoniously fired.
8. The card
A coworker and I were bitter enemies, which was awkward because there were only three people on our team. One time a vendor sent us a gift of cookies to share, and Enemy Coworker intercepted it and ripped apart the card to destroy the evidence that it’d had both our names on it. But I has SUSPICIONS and took the ripped-up card pieces out of the trashcan, reassembled them, and presented the evidence to our manager like I was Kid Sherlock Holmes.
We were both rightfully yelled at by a grandboss for our pettiness and told to get our act together. Luckily for both our sake, I left the company shortly after; we brought out the worst in each other.
9. The assistance
I’m in a public facing “helping profession.” Before I left my last job, I changed every instance I could find of my contact info to my slacker coworker’s email and told people how happy they’d be to help after I left.
10. The buffet
I worked at a hotel that put on a grand Sunday brunch buffet—ice carving, free-flowing cheap champagne, and so on. Working it was exhausting—my thumbs were raw from peeling the foil and popping the corks, the tables were spread across the lobby, which was upstairs from the kitchen so we had to haul stuff up there and haul it down, for $2.11 an hour. But the tips made it a lucrative day. I answered the phone to take a reservation one busy Friday morning at the restaurant because the cashier was swamped. It was for a large party and I told the caller about the 15% gratuity for large parties, and she got snippy and asked why, “since we have to serve our own plates?” In a serious, helpful tone, I told her we could arrange a table where they got nothing to drink, near the busser station so they could retun their dirty plates there, would she like one of those? and in the long silence that followed, I hung up on her.
11. The allies
I’m a trans man, I use he/him pronouns and have used them for over ten years. I have been rocking a beard for quite a while, I have short hair, a flat chest, a very masculine first name and a low voice. Despite this, I once worked with a woman (I’ll call her Jane) who kept calling me “her” and “she” and “Mrs. LastName” because “you look so womanly, I can’t remember that you’re a man!” I transitioned well before being hired and she didn’t even know I was trans until I’d been there a while, so I don’t know what made her think “woman.”
I reported her to HR, but I’m not sure what actions they took. To my coworkers credit, they did a good job trying to get her to stop:
– Any time Jane said “she,” a different female coworker (Lisa) would respond as if Jane was speaking to her, even if Jane was looking right at me. If Jane said she wasn’t talking about Lisa, Lisa would say, “But you said ‘she,’ so you’re talking about a woman, right?”
– Alternatively, staff would ask who Jane was talking about, because no one named Mrs. LastName worked there. Sometimes she’d double down and people would act confused, because “we’re helping you remember his name/that he’s a man, you know your coworkers, right?”
Didn’t matter when this happened. If she got my gender/name wrong, everything ground to a halt so staff could “clarify who Jane is talking about” and “make sure they understand what she’s saying.” Meetings could drag on if she kept doing it enough, since no one let her get away with it. Even some people higher up would “help clarify” what she was saying.
Thankfully, she eventually stopped misgendering me, even if it took a while. I do genuinely wonder if she was being intentionally offensive, since she never had any problems remembering non-binary or trans women’s pronouns and names (even if they transitioned on the job). I guess I have a particularly womanly beard!
Note from Alison: This isn’t even petty! But it’s a great story and a model others might want to use, so I’m including it.
12. The screenshot
I’ve done this at several jobs. People would do this thing where they would call me or interrupt me on Teams to get a small set of numbers (like literally six digits) they were just too lazy to pull off a share drive because it was URGENT!!! When i would gently remind them where they could find this data, even with a live hyperlink on teams, they were always like “oh hoho but it’s easier and faster to call you.”
So every time they called i sent them the data back as a screenshotted picture. Enjoy manually typing for wasting my time.
13.The flowers
The HR lady at my old job, Sharon, was very used to getting her own way. She didn’t have a birthday, she had a whole birthday “month” (and was irritated she had to share it with Jesus), her BFF in the office would ask everyone to contribute to a birthday present for Sharon (this happened for absolutely no one else), when she got married she made her fiance re-do the entire proposal because the first one wasn’t “good enough,” and then her mom’s boss bought her every single gift from her wedding registry. Everything had to be pink and absolutely NEVER orange — she graduated from Texas A&M and acted like even seeing the color orange offended her very soul.
One year for Christmas, our boss gave us these blown glass flowers he got on vacation or something. They were kind of pretty, but otherwise pointless. I received a pink one. Sharon — horror of horrors — received an orangish/coral colored one. Shockwaves of offense begin radiating throughout the office. She walks into my office and spots my pink flower on the corner of my desk. Starts begging me to trade with her. Trying to convince me how she just absolutely cannot have anything orange around her and she must have pink. I couldn’t have cared less about the stupid flowers but I just shrug and say, “I think I’ll keep it but thanks for the offer.” I then placed it on the most prominent place possible on my desk and left it there for as long as I worked there, three years. It was just my little flag of victory, my nod to all us nobodies in the office, to that ONE time Sharon didn’t get what she wanted.
14. The personal calls
I had a coworker who would take long, and I mean 20-30 minutes, personal calls gossiping with her family members all day at work. She’d try to speak quietly sometimes but mostly it was full volume chatting while the rest of us worked around her. After a few months I waited for a call to end and then poked my head over the cube wall and said “I had to go the bathroom and missed it, was your cousin able to make bail?!?”
He had! And for some reason she then started taking the calls outside.
15. The heart attack
I once worked in a small office. One coworker got so upset about two other coworkers going out for lunch and not inviting her that she faked heart attack symptoms, made our safety rep call 911, and got carried out on a gurney.
16. The walkie-talkies
I had been working all summer at a residential summer camp as part of a select group of staff who had walkie-talkies on 24/7 for emergencies. The last week the directors became more and more loose with their use of the walkie-talkies for jokes and chatter, which I normally wouldn’t have minded, but by the last night of camp I was too stressed and sleep-deprived to have any sense of humor. As the evening wore on and the joking and staticky cackling grew to almost nonstop levels, I had had enough, and I walked the entire length of the camp with my finger on the talk button, completely silent, so that nobody else could talk. It couldn’t have been more than 5 minutes, but the radios went silent for the rest of the night. I don’t know if they ever knew what had happened, or that it was me who did it, but it was a thrilling moment of miniscule power I will forever relish.
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TORONTO – As Torontonians head to the polls in a snap mayoral election, Premier Doug Ford is warning that electing left-wing candidate Olivia Chow will not only lead to devastation for the city, but also lead to the previous 13 years of collapse. “Electing Chow will be cause businesses to flee our province’s capitol,” cautioned […]
The post Ford warns Chow mayoralty will cause Toronto’s collapse, also cause last 13 years of collapse appeared first on The Beaverton.
Clue: You have a favorite TV detective and are prepared to defend your choice with specific supporting details.
Catan: You enjoy asking whether anyone would trade wood for some sheep. Who cares if you’ve asked it for the tenth time tonight and your resource management strategy is completely unsustainable?
Ticket to Ride: You insist on describing yourself as a cool, chill, go-with-the-flow person, but all your friends have seen your competitive side, even those who weren’t there for the table-flipping incident of ’19.
Charades: You’ve never been to a game night before, but you have seen one on TV.
Jenga: You have a steady hand, an indomitable spirit, and an extra set in the car in case the host’s labradoodle runs off with fallen blocks again.
Uno: One of your friends is mad at you.
Risk: Most of your friends are mad at you.
Game of Thrones Risk: All of your friends are mad at you.
Life: You’re resentful that, despite having done everything you were supposed to, you do not have a career, a house, or a dated car full of pink and blue pegs.
Cards Against Humanity: You’re feeling better about game night since realizing that party games and drinking games totally count. Unfortunately, you only have the original Cards Against Humanity and none of the expansions, so your friends already know all the jokes, but whatever. You’re here for the drinks.
Apples to Apples: No one brought Cards Against Humanity, and you’ll take what you can get.
Carcassonne: You’ll take any opportunity to say the word “meeples.”
Cranium: You were really into art in high school and haven’t been able to do much of it in years, what with your corporate job slowly creeping into all your available time, your anxious pug mix needing constant validation and snuggling, and all these game nights to attend. Every once in a while, though, you think about giving it another shot, and you can’t help but be inspired when you’re handed a lump of clay, a tiny pencil, and an impromptu creative challenge.
Chess: You don’t really get, or care to get, game night.
Betrayal at the House on the Hill: Your original suggestion of shaking things up and doing a ghost tour instead of having a game night yet again was unceremoniously shot down. You hope you get to be the traitor this time.
Trivial Pursuit: In an attempt to relive the high of taking your team to victory at the The Office pub trivia night two Thursdays ago, you raided your parents’ game cabinet and didn’t realize their copy was from the ’80s. Your strategy of answering “Madonna” for every question isn’t working as well as hoped.
Scrabble: You were an English major.
Sorry!: You have revenge in your heart.
Everdell: Your friends instituted a ban on long war or strategy games after the time two of them ended up stranded at your apartment for three days in a snowstorm, during which you played exactly one game of Twilight Imperium. They left hungry, demoralized, and vaguely concerned about the unchecked spread of capitalism by human-sized space cats. You’re hoping the adorable woodland creatures will help you sneak this one past them.
Werewolf (a.k.a. Mafia): You relish in unleashing chaos upon a relatively tame gathering.
Heads Up!: You forgot to bring a game.
Pandemic: You’ve been trying to get your friends to play again since those disquieting summer 2020 Zoom game nights and have finally broken them down with the argument that “it would be nice to play a collaborative game, so everyone can be a winner,” that “it’s empowering to feel a sense of control over a random, uncontrollable event,” and that you even “brought the good expansion,” but you’ve failed to mention that you brought the expansion with the hardest-to-beat diseases. You have a dark sense of humor.
Monopoly: You’re no longer welcome at game night.
Americans Hate ISPs Almost As Much As They Hate Gas Stations, Survey Finds extremetech.com
Airline 5G mess still not over, expect flight delays from this weekend 9to5mac.com
FTC v. Microsoft: Phil Spencer says Xbox is not a robust business and fails to meet internal targets, and the Activision deal is a way to expand into mobile theverge.com
Biden to Officially Announce $42.5B BEAD Program, State Allocations Coming Today telecompetitor.com
Boston TV station to test 5G broadcast platform lightreading.com
UK police blame Android SOS feature for influx of false emergency calls theverge.com
YouTube Testing New Online Gaming Service After Google Stadia Shutdown gamerant.com
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NEW YORK—Claiming he could easily fit into a similar position at most companies, local CEO Mike Waltke told reporters Monday that his skill set was transferable to any job that requires an inept dumbass to receive a big salary. “I have the incompetence necessary to effortlessly transition into a role at any company…
APPLETON, WI—Expressing concerns about privacy and corporate overreach, Andrew Friedman, a man whose algorithm constantly feeds him solely basketball highlights and photos of half-naked women, reportedly stated, “It’s scary how much tech companies know about me,” in conversation Monday.“It’s honestly so crazy,…
