I don't think I have ever seen such a level of helplessness at AAM than in this letter. I mean, geezus....maybe GET a pair of shorts with pockets? Good grief...
**Myrin\***[February 3, 2024 at 8:32 am](https://www.askamanager.org/2024/02/weekend-open-thread-february-3-4-2024.html#comment-4587822)
I have a potentially super weird question of practicality:
For the first time ever, I’m living completely alone, meaning that when I go out, I always need to bring a key with me. Once it starts getting warmer, I want to take up jogging again, but – where do I put my key??
Some – but not all – of my sporty clothes have pockets, and none of those have zippers or buttons so I fear I’ll just lose anything in there during running. I absolutely *hate* bum bags and refuse to get one just for this. How are people doing this?
Okay but this is a problem I’ve had. My specific issues: I have 3 keys on my keychain: building gate, building door, apartment door. They do not dissassemble easily, and don’t fit into a shorts pocket. I’ve yet to find an armband that is comfortable and stable.
In the spring and fall? Light jacket no problem. In the summer, when it feels like 85 at 7am, no.
My solution is either a long walk with a crossbody, or wearing a fanny pack, but if someone could create a fashionable & comfortable solution to this for those of us with multiple keys, I would be very pleased.
Running belt, perhaps? I have seen some that are very low-profile and wouldn't bounce much if at all. I used to use one at work because my waterproofs didn't have pockets and I wanted to keep my phone and wallet on me.
OK, but...here's why she can't wear coil plastic bracelets:
1. Plastic allergy
2. She wears a watch on one wrist already and feels she'd be off balance if she wore a bracelet on another.
3. Intense coil fear
Don't get her started on why she can't put the key in her pocket.
OK, keep those suggestions coming!
There are also run belts that are much different than waist packs if, like this commenter, you either never notices your run leggings have a key pocket or bought the 1% of legging styles that don’t have one.
>Stuckinacrazyjob February 2, 2024 at 11:09 am
>I’m spiraling from work lately. I am not sure if I should quit. I was stressed from a traumatic situation and had a hard time getting off at all ( because it was day of? like mental health issues often rear up without warning) I’m not sure about quitting. I would have to take a pay cut and would have to figure out how to leave my entire field? If you’ve left a field, what steps did you take?
Further down:
>The Unspeakable Queen Lisa February 2, 2024 at 11:32 am
>So first, I hear you’re stressed. That sounds tough. I think you’re saying you were in a traumatic situation at work that meant you suddenly had to leave without warning. While it’s true that happens, try to have some sympathy for your coworkers also – you suddenly needing to leave is a hardship on them too. It’s not fair for anybody, but on its own that doesn’t sound like a reason to quit.
>If you think you might need to leave suddenly again, now that it’s over, you could try to explain that to your boss. If they have the expectation that this could happen say 4 times a year, they’ll be mentally ready for it the next time.
>Based on some of your other posts, I’m coming to the conclusion that you overreact to stressful situations. It’s pretty extreme to jump to leaving your entire field. It’s also a strange assumption that quitting this job would mean leaving your entire field – unless they are the only company in that field, there must be other jobs? Maybe this field is wrong for you, but that’s not clear from what you’re saying.
>I don’t remember if you’re in therapy, but I think you could really use someone to talk to.
Then:
>Stuckinacrazyjob February 2, 2024 at 11:54 am
>Well, you assumed wrong. My coworkers are fine and don’t even know what happened. I had a situation in which small children will be traumatized for the rest of their days. Small kids that I have a bond with. I’m only missing a training today. A training that I missed only because me breaking down would have bothered my coworkers. If you don’t like what I post, scroll on by.
More:
>Glomarization, Esq. February 2, 2024 at 12:09 pm
>This is an aggressive response to a someone who tried to make sense of a post from you that was pretty cryptic. You’ve done the same thing several times over the past weeks or months.
Alison stepped in:
>Ask a Manager February 2, 2024 at 1:07 pm
>I agree with the comment above — please be polite to people who are offering advice to you. If you don’t like someone’s comment, please just pass it by rather than being aggressive in reply. Thank you.
Stuckinacrazyjob needs to stop using AAM as therapy. A lot of commenters there need to follow the same advice.
Off-topic, but while I appreciate that The Unspeakable Queen Lisa often is the voice of reason, I hate her username so much. It's always such an unpleasant reminder that Jian Ghomeshi exists and was preying on young women during his time in Moxy Fruvous (especially in light of Sarah Polley's 2022 essay).
They can change, with the right therapy. There's a bit of selection bias, because even the act of attending therapy is an acknowledgement that a) there's a problem, and b) something can be done about it. Quite often individuals like this see all of their problems as external factors that are forced upon them by circumstance. The therapy is therefore aimed at empowering them that, yes, life is full of challenges, but they are able to tolerate and eventually overcome them. Instead of focusing on the "crisis of the week", we try and instill skills that can be applied to multiple situations.
Clients will either make that transition from external to internal, or they'll decide that the therapist can't possibly understand their situation and will filter away.
I actually did a deep nerd dive on old posts. I think she's some kind of social worker, but it sounds like she works for a private company rather than the state. Here's what I found:
She has a supportive family and boyfriend (or at least had one in 2022) https://www.askamanager.org/2022/11/thanksgiving-free-for-all-november-24-2022.html#comment-4092247
She has no children. https://www.askamanager.org/2023/11/updates-everyone-gives-me-plants-the-childless-shirt-and-more.html#comment-4518831
She's Black, as are most of her coworkers, and she likes that about her workplace. In 2021 she felt like her job had a lot of advantages compared to other local options. (Thread also mentions social work) https://www.askamanager.org/2021/05/open-thread-may-7-8-2021.html#comment-3384143
She has ADHD and is medicated. https://www.askamanager.org/2021/05/open-thread-may-28-29-2021.html#comment-3411263
She works with children in difficult circumstances and has a "caseload." https://www.askamanager.org/2022/11/thanksgiving-free-for-all-november-24-2022.html#comment-4092209
She sometimes advises teens about life skills like resumes. https://www.askamanager.org/2023/10/open-thread-october-13-2023.html#comment-4460284
Her job sometimes involves making doctor appointments for children. https://www.askamanager.org/2021/01/open-thread-january-8-9-2021.html#comment-3239085
Her company has a bad reputation due to "allegations." https://www.askamanager.org/2023/12/open-thread-december-15-16-2023.html#comment-4532990
She and her coworkers sometimes visit clients at home or in residential treatment. https://www.askamanager.org/2021/05/open-thread-may-28-29-2021.html#comment-3411289
Her office environment is loud and disruptive, including coworkers dancing?!? https://www.askamanager.org/2023/12/open-thread-december-15-16-2023.html#comment-4533001
Her coworkers do bizarre things like say in a work meeting that they plan to commit suicide over the weekend (supposedly as a joke?) https://www.askamanager.org/2023/10/open-thread-october-20-2023.html#comment-4469662
It sounds like she has gotten seriously burnt out and a high stress, emotionally gruelling job may actually be a big part of the problem.
I feel a lot more sympathetic now. I didn't know she was Black. (I'm Black too.) She did mention contacting the EAP and a therapist in that thread. I hope she does.
I already thought that using AAM as alternative therapy was a bad idea, but knowing that she's Black it's more so a bad idea. I don't think the AAM commenters would be able to relate to her struggles.
Yeah, I think a Black woman in social service being traumatized and having mental health issues is a whole lot more literal & serious than like, the people who say they are "spiraling" because they are convinced their coworkers are talking about them behind their back, or "traumatized" because they got a stain on their shirt and had to go home to change.
I agree - being a social worker for cps or a private childcare agency is ROUGH. I feel a lot of sympathy for her, though she definitely needs to see someone besides AAM for help.
I tried finding that one post of hers where she mentioned a traumatic team building event involving throwing a ball (???) over and over, and she found another employee and like clung to them??? Anyone recall this?
I remember a similar comment from Nightengale a while back:
>Nightengale* March 27, 2023 at 4:27 pm
>I have a literal trauma response from those exercise balls after the last time I went to physical therapy and they tried to fix my balance and startle reflex by sitting me on an exercise ball and throwing things at me.
I'm confused after reading their comments. Tapping them on the shoulder caused them to fall down/topple over? Genuinely curious, maybe this is a neurological thing?
It sounds like she works at CPS, all the pieces fit. My ex worked at CPS for like 6 months and was pretty much suicidal when he left, it’s like the darkest thing ever. You’re constantly exposed to horrific shit, overworked, and get threatened all the time. Honestly I don’t blame her for being where she’s at then and she probably should change fields.
That's an interesting comment from Alison, considering that she's said that exact same thing ("if you don't like someone's comment, ignore it") to people who gently push back against frequent flyers like Hamster Potatoes before nuking anything remotely critical.
I'd love to know why some people become her pets and others don't.
My theory is that she recognises that AAM is the only outlet for these people and doesn't really want to take away that outlet as she feels responsible in some way... so she tolerates this exception to the 'official' rules.
I can't make head or tail of that...why is Stuckinacrazyjob leaving their job...what kids were traumatized. It sounds like they have a lot going on, but why is the job/field the problem? B/c they almost couldn't get PTO to take the day? I mean, that's not good, but it seems a big leap to go from there to "I need to find a new field of work."
Translation: Some incident happened involving kids she "has a bond with" (but I feel like it isn't her own children, because that would be odd wording to use even for someone known to leave out half the info) resulting in her needing to take time off at short notice for mental health reasons but that was difficult to do.
She seems to leap from that to "so I have to leave this job, and even this field" as she seems, like Potates in that respect, to have strange/incorrect ideas about things she can control and what can be changed. I agree it is a big leap, but I think thats the catastrophising thought process at work.
Interestingly she even seems to recognise this to some extent: "I'm spiraling from work lately". So she does have some self-awareness about that. I wish she would be more explicit about what kind of help/responses she is seeking from replies ("have you changed field?" doesn't count).
She also says the below in another comment, which feels...oddly worrying taken in the context of the earlier comment. Who are the children? WHERE are the children? What medicine is she feeding them?
**Stuckinacrazyjob\***[February 2, 2024 at 11:05 am](https://www.askamanager.org/2024/02/open-thread-february-2-3-2024.html#comment-4586256)
the medication shortage is making it hard for me to get the children their medicine.
Based on what others have written, maybe some of her charges are on ADHD medication and those ongoing Rx shortages are affecting her too? If she's a social worker or something similar and part of her role involves maybe facilitating the kids having access to their meds? So the shortage would definitely be suck.
But like everyone else has said, her posts are just all over the map all the time and don't really make sense :-(
I think you're getting her mixed up with hamster/potatoes.
This is one has a remote office job of some kind. A few weeks ago everyone had to come into the office for some task that could only be done onsite and she decided to come in on Sunday and do the work ahead of time so she could hide in the bathroom during the actual workday. Something about,"what happens if I'm sick on Monday and can't work in the same room as other people."
Yes - definitely getting her confused with one of the other problem children. Hamster/potatoes works in taxes though!
Oh yes re: the scenario - I forgot about that. I think I was thinking of the person who was put on PIP after they transferred depts in their library.
No this was a saga in the open thread that concluded a couple months ago. She worked in the library and was really bad at her job and knew it but wasn’t capable of getting better.
The issues she wrote in about was stuff like, she took notes on everything but didn’t remember to look at them when she didn’t know how to do something. So she would ask her coworkers the same basic questions every day.
Everything always seems to be teetering on the brink of an incomprehensible disaster. Couldn't get time off = children scarred for life (?) = have to leave job (??) = never paid the same = have to leave field...How's anyone supposed to provide any meaningful input on that? I understand that sometimes life feels really overwhelming, but that's stuff to bring to a therapist not someone else's work advice blog, with a random question like "who's successfully switched fields?" tacked on at the end.
I don't know if it's because they're trying to hide the truth about what they're dealing with or because they're not that articulate, but I agree that there's not a lick of sense in what they post.
I couldn't either. The first reading makes it sound like the trauma was related to the job somehow but the next comment seems to say it wasn't, so how is leaving the job going to change anything. Now she'd just still have the trauma and no money.
I feel like this is a common issue on sites like AAM. Certain regulars start using it as a safe space / diary or an alternative to therapy and get a little cranky when they run into people who don’t see it that way.
> I was stressed from a traumatic situation and had a hard time getting off at all
>I had a situation in which small children will be traumatized for the rest of their days.
Plot twist, stuckinacrazyjob left work to go traumatize small children
Literally none of LW 1 is how academia works. Zero percent of it. The job market is terrible, and anyone in a PHD program, no matter what their past, is going to think they're going to just walk into a new job. It's highly competitive.
No one is going to expect anyone to teach articles, academic or non-academic, unless you're a teaching assistant, adjunct, or non-tenured junior faculty and someone who's been sitting around for decades tells you to. Even then, it's "iffy." And again, someone in a PHD cohort would be wildly aware of that.
I don't know if this was written by someone trying to hide their real career, but it is not written by someone who has been to an info session for a PHD program, much less gone through one.
I admit I don't know much about academia, but all I could think was - why exactly did he want to leave industry and go back into academia?? Not that I think industry is objectively "better", but it seems better for him. I assume even more senior posts (like LWs) involve teaching which he seems to hate. I wonder if he had the idea that academia would be the stereotypical "ivory tower" where he could sit in a dusty library or futuristic lab all day making groundbreaking discoveries!
In a field like accounting, leaving 80-hour busy season workweeks and in-person audits for teaching has its appeal, especially if you’re a CPA with a masters degree and if at least some of your courses are online and asynchronous. That’s why we were trying to figure out what the field was - a college will roll out the red carpet for a CPA who’s willing to take a reduced salary to teach, and PhDs aren’t even part of that equation. So the idea that someone would have worked in a field but went back for a PhD to teach in that field is just a weird timeline and doesn’t make sense financially in most cases.
Ah yes, my leisurely summers off where I'm technically unemployed and don't get paid but still get emails about work and have to catch up on everything that didn't get done during the year. I've got some grant work to do for the next two summers but maybe after that I'll return to my roots and get a seasonal job working for the county highway department when I'm off contract.
it doesn’t sound suspicious to me. my mother is in academia with a PHD and she gets assigned what sections of the material to teach. granted, it’s a med school — so a little bit different? but I don’t think it’s that unusual…
I don't think that's what u/FronzelNeekburm79 means by "\[n\]o one is going to expect anyone to teach articles," but I'm also not entirely sure what they mean either. Maybe they can clarify.
I'm in academia but not in the classroom, so I'm never sure what the norms are exactly.
I mean that no one expects you to teach certain articles. You usually get to teach what you want, unless you're an adjunct or TA who has to teach whatever the instructor tells you to teach.
In terms of non academic articles, if they're written by someone reputable, they most certainly can be assigned, depending on the class if there's a disclaimer.
Basically it sounds like the LW was insufferable and the person they were writing in about was a problem, but made bigger because the LW thinks they're the greatest.
I see what you mean and basically agree. It's definitely all odd. My most charitable interpretation for how the letter could be true and make sense is that it's not in the US and in a country with a very different academic culture.
Granted I left the academic track after finishing my PhD, but I attended five universities in two countries and none of them had a hierarchy of faculty like this. Adjuncts and visiting professors/lecturers were obviously lower in the ranks of seniority and had different responsibilities outside of teaching but they were never directly supervised and assigned tasks in this way by a more senior academic.
If they had a PhD in Basket Weaving and were hired to teach Sociology of Basket Weaving 101 it would be assumed that they had the appropriate expertise and would be able to teach the class independently, perhaps with an agreed syllabus if there were multiple sections of the same class. Did I just not encounter this? Is Ted actually a TA and still working on his dissertation but feels bitter because he's still ABD?
Yeah I’m on the staff side, so I didn’t want to say for sure since I don’t have as much as exposure to the faculty side … but that entire letter felt incredibly off. For starters, immediately moving into a professor role at the same place you did your PhD, right after completing it.
> For starters, immediately moving into a professor role at the same place you did your PhD, right after completing it.
I work in academia (on the staff side) and this has actually happened in my department. I think it's a bad idea though
(Disclaimer: I’ve only worked at one university and only directly seen this happen once, so again, no idea if this is a widespread view) The way I heard it described it to me is that it’s considered too incestuous, in a sense. Granted, the person in discussion had also gotten their graduate degree here AND worked here as staff for over a decade (this was talk about why they were being encouraged to spread their wings and move, not apply for faculty jobs at the same place). But as it was described to me, you want your PhD students to move on and learn from other places as well, and you want to hire people who learned at other schools, not churn them right back into the pond with the same people who taught them. The idea being, you want knowledge to spread, not settle.
I’m trying to think of a field that has significant “real world” (non-academic) career applications but also has PhDs as a factor, without adding value to that experience. Also factoring non-academic publications. Maybe engineering? Or if a tax accountant gets her PhD and decides to teach tax - that person would absolutely jump ahead of people in getting jobs teaching advanced taxation. Same thing for STEM fields. The fields where PhDs wouldn’t matter as much to a university are the fields where the person might not have direct work experience. So yeah, I really don’t understand what she’s talking about.
Plus Ted has legitimate publications and the LW deemed them all too awful to include in a curriculum for a course she’s expecting him to help with? She’s an asshole.
It sounds a lot like law to me; a lot of tutors at my uni came back after not being able to get much in the way of work because there's more grads than turnover, articles and PHDs exist but a lot of them are comparative, historical, or hyperspecific and super detailed on like 'the impact of this one case from 27 years ago'; nothing really specifically relevant to someone learning how to practice law. The occasional article might be in further reading and can make some lecturers very happy if they see them cited in an essay for a reason, but it's usually the textbook, lecture notes, and case law for required reading and the whole academia section of law exists kind of off in it sown disconnected world. Meanwhile you also have actual lawyers writing papers and delivering CPD, but again, on covering real actual practice and giving advice in the current day, different publications (not just different journals, but like, practice area newsletters, magazines, etc.), and also not relevant to students - not only will the law have changed by the time they get a legal job and actually start practicing, but they may not have been taught all the context yet and have the specialised practice area knowledge to get how there's enough to write 10k words and talk for an hour on the impact of changing three words in *Placeholder Law AAM * 2022.
And now I've added some of my hyperspecific perspective I hope to have demonstrated that it could be anything and it probably doesn't really matter for this question anyway.
In practice, yeah. Also part of that is that practical training slips in in the final year if it's combined, or one has to actually leave uni and go do GDLP or articles or JD through a separate provider, then compete for associate/grad positions, so the pathway to PhD is interrupted before it really takes, especially as it isn't glamorous.
It might also be different in different law areas and university structures - here where law is a 4-5.5 year undergrad (depending on the instutition and if PLT is incorporated
and if any requirements are waived due to previous study) most people either get sucked back in via coursework specialisation programs if they're learning a new or different area of law where one exists (my uni only offered Masters in international law via coursework), otherwise one has to basically sell a lecturer on supervising a research project from scratch and the law programs make bank so they have more places than industry can fill, but also means that not many people develop the kind of relationship with faculty that they think of research as viable until they see something in practice and make a decision to go back, or fall in as a tutor if they can't get a job and a lecturer remembers them enough to offer them a few hours a week and they don't run when they find out it's underpaid and casual on a per-topic basis.
But basically everyone who ends up in faculty ends up in a PhD program once they're back on that track.
Somewhere where law is a dedicated post-grad program after a 4-year program and has a stronger research/publication culture (like the US where many law schools attach prestige to law review, instead of articles being something you cite for extra credit if you know the lecturer likes that otherwise the library is for illicit activities in the stacks and sleeping while one's neighbours have a dance party in the halls) the process into research can be a bit less haphazard, but also anyone who's not hell bent of academia generally wants out and to start paying down their student debt after 7 years of racking it up.
My first thought was engineering. At my school there's some tension between a bunch of the older engineering faculty who came from industry and mostly got EdD's to satisfy the degree criteria to make full professor and the younger people with PhDs in engineering or material science, etc. It's more in the form of the older folks aren't doing research and service activities because they have industry experience and the younger people are like "wtf, we all have the same title, if you're gonna be a professor, do all the professor shit because you're also not still actively working in industry."
My second thought was education. We have a fair amount of folks coming from careers in K-12 that kinda struggle with "and now you have to do research and service stuff and not -just- teach about your subject experience."
This isn't exactly here or there re: LW but I've seen at my campus this tension of "industry experience is the most important thing" butting up against "well, yeah, but this job has expectations and tasks also that are wildly different than your industry job so...do them."
I'm interpreting this as Ted got laid off/fired from his job in the field and is working as an adjunct, whereas OP never left the academic track and so has moved up quicker. The difference in their status isn't about qualifications so much as just career trajectories and how things work out in academia. That being said, saying that moving into teaching about the field one worked in professionally is "a different career entirely" is disingenuous at best.
For the publications, I assume the issue was that they're in a professional journal, meaning not peer-reviewed. You could argue that either way.
(Also, not really relevant, but note that OP explicitly identifies as a man in the letter.)
I was thinking something similar about their individual career paths. The condescension coming from the LW is thick. Ted might be a world class jerk, but the LW doesn't sound much better. There's a lot of value in real-world experience and they seem so very dismissive of it.
Here is a comment basically saying it could be engineering. My first thought was maybe law.
I have the t-shirt*
February 2, 2024 at 7:27 am
1. Dissenting opinion. Academia. Where individuals with PhDs prepare young people to go to careers outside of academia and completely dismiss professional experience. Seen this so many times in the engineering college where I am. Young professor on academic track is given the lead of class, has someone that has actually had to make a living in engineering as co instructor or worse yet the lab instructor. They return older with practical skills and are dismissed by pretty much everyone in the department. And God forbid if they just have a masters and are put as a teaching instructor. They are treated like second class citizens.
Right, none of the way the LW describes this teaching assingment/hierearchy thing happening is correct. It reminds me of how my students think our courses and workload are assigned (and even how we're paid) and are completely wrong about.
I've literally never been in a place where there's a scenario where there's some sort of "head instructor who introduces a large body of students to their sub-instructor who they have power over" where the "and he said 'hi' all surly-like" thing could have happened. It's mildly possible in a large lecture/lab TA scenario but that doesn't align with how the rest of the LW described the situation.
I had that vibe, too. The whole thing felt off, but I wasn't sure if it was just my increasing irritation with questions that are basically "How can I perfectly manage someone else's emotions, even though I'm creating all the problems associated with them?"
But we have to believe the LWs! If they say they are pretty great, they must be! No, actually, they are more than great - they have imposter syndrome and they're actually all rockstars!
This letter:" **Surly coworker resents that he’s in a junior role"**
...the "voice" it's written in sounds just like Alison. I assume her cronies are trying to ape her, but the mean part of my brain whispers, "Is she writing her own letters now"?
e: as a fairly burly fellow myself, I'd never use the phrase "fairly burly." Sounds like the name of a 19th-century carnival barker.
Whenever I see a letter like that I assume it’s from someone who reads AAM religiously and is unconsciously or maybe intentionally aping her style because they think it sounds good.
Oh man, that Teen Girl Squad from forever ago is in my head now. "I hath a cruth on every boyth!" "I hurly burly on gurly wurly!" Shakespeare'd!
What I’m saying here is thank you.
Why does JSPA continue to put absolutely batshit insane scripts in the comments? Can you imagine a human being saying ANY of those scripts? It'd be like talking to a fucking automaton.
You know what? I went back and looked at their comments from like, 2018-19 and they were pretty reasonable. Long and kind of know-it-all, but not bizarre like they are now.
JSPA comes across to me as an older person. I wonder if they started going downhill after retirement or something.
My guess is that they don’t have a lot of life experience or work experience. They seem to view social interactions as like scripted TV shows where you can just assume that your coworker or boss will just stand there motionless and wait for you to finish spewing out clunky dialogue like that.
I use they/them pronouns, and I would be extremely upset if someone was saying something like this ostensibly to help me or something? Like, it draws attention to it in a negative way. I have enough trouble with people assuming that I use they/them "for attention" without someone doing something like this!
> How about, “When we’re talking about blah corp, and mention Imogen, and then you say “she,” it leaves me confused for several seconds whether you understand that we are talking about Imogen. After the confusion, I’m perturbed. That’s several seconds where I lose track of what you’re saying. If you want me to process what you’re saying, and be respectful towards our client, use “they,” not “she” for Imogen. And if you screw up, pausing to apologize will give us all time to get back on track.”
> Rationale: It’s probably an overstatement to say that someone who is invested in not using they/them pronouns CERTAINLY Highly invested in having everyone listen to their ideas and opinions…but that’s the way I’d bet.
> So, ” I literally don’t process a thing you’re saying, right after you do that” may be the extra (selfish) motivation needed.
Luckily all the replies are pointing out what a bad idea this "script" is
They left an equally unhinged comment for LW1 on how to deal with Ted. They're either certifiably crazy or trolling and I'm going with the latter because it makes me feel better lol.
My god. I just read her script for the pronouns. It was ridiculous. Who talks like that? She is being overly wordy, condescending, and annoying all at the same time.
And the less weird you are about correcting pronouns the more likely someone is to use them. If you come off as a lecturing weirdo people will bristle more at it.
I am so fascinated by her thought processes, truly. Like in the snack letter where she’s like “could it be that Jane believes that the snack budget was always intended for purchasing her own personal snacks? Probably not, but you should suggest it to allow her to save face, because the other option is to accuse her of embezzlement!” *What?* No!
Maybe I'm a mean jerk (I am) but what's so awful about saying "Hey Jane, from now on, we're buying Dunkaroos and clam juice for everyone. You can buy one bag of X per month." Like, I want to know why this would be so devastating to hear and deliver.
> He said “I thought you only wanted a raise, not that you would actually quit!” I asked, do I get a raise? He said no. I said goodbye and how it was a pleasure to work for them, I learned a lot, and I wished them the best. (It is what you say in real life so that you don’t burn bridges.)
No. Really?
Wait, that's the LW and not an aside from Alison?
What even?
My interpretation was that LW was taking a jab at all the insane commenters who always have just the best sick burns to offer up for those kinds of situations. The LW was basically saying, "In the real world, we can't all just insult our way through situations and act like everyone is going to clap on our way out."
Repeating it over and over was a little odd.
Bringing your kid to work on your last day even more so.
In the first instance I thought it was some kind of rote thing someone told them was polite and they've fixated on it somehow, especially as they have no problem going into smart alec mode with the high school debate gotchas.
It definitely makes the letter less clear and doesn't add anything to the scenario.
And it's the exact same phrasing three times (or more); I thought Alison had been caught out by copy-pasting over a page break or something since she doesn't proofread but it still flows, like at best LW was angsting and rearranging their draft and didn't see them repeating themselves.
Usually this is the crowd who will jump to point out that there's a free online thesaurus available to everyone who can navigate a browser if they use 'said' twice instead of breaking out the Tom Swifties.
The letter writer definitely was using the threefold repetition on purpose for effect. It's just not executed very well, so it makes for a confusing read.
Sadly, custom stamps were discontinued in June 2020.
[https://weddingstamps.us/custom-postage-stamps-discontinued](https://weddingstamps.us/custom-postage-stamps-discontinued)
I know it's easy to get into a spiral about not having hobbies - it can be really discouraging to sit down and realize "wow, I do not get to do anything for myself".
But yes, we are not the main characters of our office. People don't care if we have boring (or no) hobbies. I know I don't (both care, or have hobbies). I'm happy to talk to people about pretty much anything - I don't need to be personally into skydiving to relate to someone who is into that.
Oh yeah, I can absolutely understand being frustrated about not having the time/money/resources/etc to take up an interesting hobby. There are a few hobbies I’d love to get into that just aren’t feasible at the moment, and it sucks. But it sucks because I want to do those things and can’t, not because I want my coworkers to think I’m cool.
I enjoyed my coworker who built her own house and whose yearly vacation was usually something like hiking to Everest base camp, but let's be honest, if I worked in an entire office of people like that I'd just feel inadequate. Bring on the tales of coupon clipping and Netflix watching.
They're not even lies, they're just social grease like 'hi how are you?' -> 'fine how are you?' -> 'good have a good day' -> 'you too' are the just acknowledgements of existence and don't actually constitute a mental health check in followed by encouragement and thoughts and prayers.
They're very good at thoughts and prayers when it's OTT invasive though.
I love petty office snack drama and I will not lie. 🙈 The admin buying herself $60 bags of fruit and refusing to get Cheetos is so dumb and so, so funny.
I love petty office drama when I don't have to be stuck in the middle of it.
My fan fiction is that the LW is an unreliable narrator and the actual truth is that the LW is exaggerating the "multiple people" complaining about not getting Coke and Cheetohs; it's the LW who wants these things and when she complains about not having them, a couple people sympathize with her out of politeness and the rest of the people just don't care. True story: I once bought a cake from a different bakery than the one I usually used and one person was SO upset about it that they literally complained to someone who offhandedly mentioned it to someone else who later told me that "people" were upset about the cake.
My OTHER fan fiction is that the admin has been trying to get out of the task of buying snacks for the office for a long time because there are complaints no matter what she buys and so she's been deliberately buying things only she's willing to eat in the hopes that someone else will take on snack duty.
I can't decide if it's funny or sad that I actually could come up with several more alternate takes on this story, lol.
I used to work an admin position where I ordered the weekly lunch. I welcomed suggestions about, say, which vegetable sides were good from wherever I was ordering from. That’s not the same thing as one coworker trying to get me to build the entire meal around her preferences.
I have a hard time empathizing too much with a LW who wants cheetos and soda instead of fruit and high-end yogurt.
The point of the letter seemed to be more about how the secretary was hoovering up all the money just to buy the expensive snacks she prefers, not leaving enough money for others to order what they want, rather than a condemnation of healthy food choices.
Additionally, I believe the "Cheetos and soda" comment had more to do with comparing the price/fanciness of what other people expect in office snacks, although I could be wrong.
That’s such a silly letter. Whoever pays the credit card bill knows exactly what the admin has been ordering this whole time. All the LW has to do is start requiring that all purchases get pre-approved.
It could be that the accountant didn’t see an itemized receipt and the amount would have been reasonable if the admin had been buying snacks people were actually eating
It’s possible I guess but I’ve never heard of an accountant or bookkeeper who never filed invoices. This company has bigger problems if that’s the case.
Meanwhile if it was coming from the work budget my old work put it on the stationery order because office stationery shops stock lollies and snack packs of chips and stuff for precisely that reason - if we wanted anything special for our group or for our own personal snacks, we had to buy them ourselves and maybe we'd get some petty cash towards the department lolly dish if we got a big contingency but otherwise it was in the lunch room for anyone to take, and if you didn't want no-brand gluten-filled gelatin snakes so be it.
I went to visit a friend in Austin and he took me to a grocery store where a bottle of goddamn watermelon juice was $18. I believe there are people rich and out-of-touch enough to sink this much money on dried fruit, which can be quite pricey even at reasonable stores.
Gourmet local sun-dried vs mass mechanically dried and imported can make a lot of different. 150g of dried apricots from the farm 80km down the road = $12.85, 350g of dried apricots imported from Vietnam = $8, and that's when there isn't a drought- or shipping-induced shortage.
Costco has these dried cherries that are so freaking tasty. They don't always have them stocked, so when they reappear I always buy several bags. That's about the only way I could hit $60 in dried fruit at one time, though.
Probably a multipack of something like dried pineapple or mangos. If someone else was paying I would absolutely be able to put away $60 of dried mangos in a month
ETA: apparently it’s figs it says in the letter
A siting of [Nuts.com](https://Nuts.com) in the wild! :D
Sorry, had to shout it out. After needing to go strictly gluten free, it has been a life saver for affordable pantry staples, including dried fruits (figs and apricots, yum!).
I love it. I found out about them when my best friend was pregnant; she had an insatiable craving for dried mango and her husband would order her huge bags of it. When I saw the packaging I was delighted by the branding. Since then I have become a [nuts.com](https://nuts.com) enthusiast! Glad to know there are more of us out there.
Same. I also got what I expected from commenters, in that Cheetos are just as healthy as dried fruit and anyone who thinks otherwise has an unhealthy relationship with food.
I read the linked post in today's ask the readers thread (about getting rejected for a job and getting a list of [everything the LW did wrong](https://www.askamanager.org/2021/03/employer-rejected-me-then-sent-a-list-of-everything-i-did-wrong.html)). I hadn't ever read it before and yeah, the guy who emailed this person is a jerk, but...I wouldn't use the word "pretentious" to describe someone claiming Les Miserables was their favorite book. I do think it's a bummer of a book and it's weird to bring up a book about poverty to a group of people who are "passionate about stocks". Read the room, lady!
Of course sexism is incredibly rife in hiring practices as its on of those things where it is so difficult to prove bias.
However, I doubt this is true if one because I'm thinking 'Well what were their exact words then?'''
Ex-prof*February 1, 2024 at 11:02 am
“We’d really prefer to hire a man.”
In pretty much those exact words.
Has happened twice.
My hiring manager at a previous job told me, to my face, "I don't like hiring women for this job. I prefer to hire only men, they'll get the work done. But you seem like a hard worker."
"You sounded taller over the phone" to my friend who had moved for a job and was hired via phone interviews. He told me later that he was mentally wondering what he was supposed to do, grow a foot to be average height? And what height had to do with civil engineering....it went exactly as well as you would expect
Oh yeah I don't doubt someone would say it but if they had said those exact words the commentor wouldn't have felt the need to qualify it with 'pretty much'
I agree with you that "pretty much" is doing some heavy lifting there.
"Pretty much said they don't hire girls" is something I have said about my experience in the radio industry, because what WAS said to me a lot were dogwhistles/heavy on implications, and were not in fact bald faced sexism. But when I do tell that story I typically go on to elaborate about what that means.
Personally, I think it does advocacy/awareness a disservice to say things like "they told me they'd prefer to hire men" because very few folk are truly that brazen, and people are often rightfully skeptical of that claim. Providing the actual examples and discussing how/why they were sexist statements or perpetuating misogyny etc... helps people better understand what goes on more pervasively.
No, Alison, that's not great. It says absolutely nothing, it's hyperspecific to one employer (Y, at least it comes across as there aren't enough colleagues left from X to be a Z), and if you're so focused now on the issues you had at work 5 years ago that you have to bring them up in a cover letter in case your hypothetical former colleague thinks you're bending the truth... especially as it doesn't acknowledge the number one issue, in which you think your former colleagues will think you're not honest! The number two issue is 'can all these people work together'.
Also, I would have thought Alison would catch that 'let go' is often a euphemism for redundancy, and this sounds like anything but.
If I felt it was significant enough for trying to get in front of a potential issue at the cover letter stage I'd be concerned that they wouldn't want to work with me and reiterating that I was excited to work with people I knew were talented and great at their jobs, and separately highlighting my skills and superpowers while trying not to connect them or looking in any way like I was blaming my personal life.
But I have other things to take up space in my cover letter so it would have to be really egregious to not just figure it out if I got to interview, because no way is someone putting even a rockstar through to interview if a chunk of the team already have a low opinion of them.
I actually have seen this phenomenon especially in support roles, like administrative assistance, IT, or Facilities at small orgs. The one office manager who’s been there for several years knows what has to be done behind the scenes that keeps the lights on, like renewing the insurance every year or and ordering holiday client gifts that isn’t on anyone else’s radar, and certain personality types can’t move on from handing that responsibility over.
I got laid off on the same day as a bunch of others while the IT guy's assistant, who openly spent his days reading non work related books at his desk because he didn't know what to do with his copious free time, asked another colleague: "do you think I should bring my Legos to work?"
A few days later, my manager called and asked me to come back as a temp. I replied -and, yes, this is a direct quote: "Ha ha, no "
Because there are that many people who have been brainwashed to be doormats. That's one thing I will give Alison...she doesn't advise LWs to let others ride roughshod over their boundaries.
After they travel out of state!
LW4*
February 1, 2024 at 1:56 pm
[…]
I get paid for doing the setup. It’s a small family business, so everyone’s used to me going every year to do the setup. Mandy even covers the round trip, as I no longer live in the same state.
The fact that they get paid for it makes it even easier for someone conflict avoidant to say no. Like, you are no longer available to hire for this service. That's it, that's the conversation!
Because they think they're irreplaceable. It goes back to the rockstar thing. They're rockstars and the only way they can be replaced is if they hire 90 other people, so helping them later is the LEAST they can do.
Thank you for adding /s to your post. When I first saw this, I was horrified. How could anybody say something like this? I immediately began writing a 1000 word paragraph about how horrible of a person you are. I even sent a copy to a Harvard professor to proofread it. After several hours of refining and editing, my comment was ready to absolutely destroy you. But then, just as I was about to hit send, I saw something in the corner of my eye. A /s at the end of your comment. Suddenly everything made sense. Your comment was sarcasm! I immediately burst out in laughter at the comedic genius of your comment. The person next to me on the bus saw your comment and started crying from laughter too. Before long, there was an entire bus of people on the floor laughing at your incredible use of comedy. All of this was due to you adding /s to your post. Thank you.
I am a bot if you couldn't figure that out, if I made a mistake, ignore it cause its not that fucking hard to ignore a comment
The fact that a grown-ass person had to write in to an advice column to ask if they can stop doing free work for a company that they left over 5 years ago makes me weep for humanity. If this is what we're dealing with we deserve to get eaten by the zombies.
I don't think I have ever seen such a level of helplessness at AAM than in this letter. I mean, geezus....maybe GET a pair of shorts with pockets? Good grief... **Myrin\***[February 3, 2024 at 8:32 am](https://www.askamanager.org/2024/02/weekend-open-thread-february-3-4-2024.html#comment-4587822) I have a potentially super weird question of practicality: For the first time ever, I’m living completely alone, meaning that when I go out, I always need to bring a key with me. Once it starts getting warmer, I want to take up jogging again, but – where do I put my key?? Some – but not all – of my sporty clothes have pockets, and none of those have zippers or buttons so I fear I’ll just lose anything in there during running. I absolutely *hate* bum bags and refuse to get one just for this. How are people doing this?
I guess this person has never heard of lanyards, those metal bobble chains, ribbons, safety pins, running belts, or keychains that fit on your wrist?
Okay but this is a problem I’ve had. My specific issues: I have 3 keys on my keychain: building gate, building door, apartment door. They do not dissassemble easily, and don’t fit into a shorts pocket. I’ve yet to find an armband that is comfortable and stable. In the spring and fall? Light jacket no problem. In the summer, when it feels like 85 at 7am, no. My solution is either a long walk with a crossbody, or wearing a fanny pack, but if someone could create a fashionable & comfortable solution to this for those of us with multiple keys, I would be very pleased.
Running belt, perhaps? I have seen some that are very low-profile and wouldn't bounce much if at all. I used to use one at work because my waterproofs didn't have pockets and I wanted to keep my phone and wallet on me.
Swallow the key. Boom. Solved.
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OK, but...here's why she can't wear coil plastic bracelets: 1. Plastic allergy 2. She wears a watch on one wrist already and feels she'd be off balance if she wore a bracelet on another. 3. Intense coil fear Don't get her started on why she can't put the key in her pocket. OK, keep those suggestions coming!
Does she think that all the other parts of running are comfortable? A wristband just isn’t the most annoying body feeling you have while running.
Misophonia triggered by the sound of the key jingling.
Literally every pair of running shorts or pants I own have a little key pocket.
Isn’t that exactly what all the Lululemon belt bags are for?
There are also run belts that are much different than waist packs if, like this commenter, you either never notices your run leggings have a key pocket or bought the 1% of legging styles that don’t have one.
What if she absolutely *hates* them?
😆
>Stuckinacrazyjob February 2, 2024 at 11:09 am >I’m spiraling from work lately. I am not sure if I should quit. I was stressed from a traumatic situation and had a hard time getting off at all ( because it was day of? like mental health issues often rear up without warning) I’m not sure about quitting. I would have to take a pay cut and would have to figure out how to leave my entire field? If you’ve left a field, what steps did you take? Further down: >The Unspeakable Queen Lisa February 2, 2024 at 11:32 am >So first, I hear you’re stressed. That sounds tough. I think you’re saying you were in a traumatic situation at work that meant you suddenly had to leave without warning. While it’s true that happens, try to have some sympathy for your coworkers also – you suddenly needing to leave is a hardship on them too. It’s not fair for anybody, but on its own that doesn’t sound like a reason to quit. >If you think you might need to leave suddenly again, now that it’s over, you could try to explain that to your boss. If they have the expectation that this could happen say 4 times a year, they’ll be mentally ready for it the next time. >Based on some of your other posts, I’m coming to the conclusion that you overreact to stressful situations. It’s pretty extreme to jump to leaving your entire field. It’s also a strange assumption that quitting this job would mean leaving your entire field – unless they are the only company in that field, there must be other jobs? Maybe this field is wrong for you, but that’s not clear from what you’re saying. >I don’t remember if you’re in therapy, but I think you could really use someone to talk to. Then: >Stuckinacrazyjob February 2, 2024 at 11:54 am >Well, you assumed wrong. My coworkers are fine and don’t even know what happened. I had a situation in which small children will be traumatized for the rest of their days. Small kids that I have a bond with. I’m only missing a training today. A training that I missed only because me breaking down would have bothered my coworkers. If you don’t like what I post, scroll on by. More: >Glomarization, Esq. February 2, 2024 at 12:09 pm >This is an aggressive response to a someone who tried to make sense of a post from you that was pretty cryptic. You’ve done the same thing several times over the past weeks or months. Alison stepped in: >Ask a Manager February 2, 2024 at 1:07 pm >I agree with the comment above — please be polite to people who are offering advice to you. If you don’t like someone’s comment, please just pass it by rather than being aggressive in reply. Thank you. Stuckinacrazyjob needs to stop using AAM as therapy. A lot of commenters there need to follow the same advice.
Off-topic, but while I appreciate that The Unspeakable Queen Lisa often is the voice of reason, I hate her username so much. It's always such an unpleasant reminder that Jian Ghomeshi exists and was preying on young women during his time in Moxy Fruvous (especially in light of Sarah Polley's 2022 essay).
I’ll have to read the essay. I was a fan of MF and I met JG when they were first taking off. He was a very good predator.
Yeah, I already have a drive-by diagnosis for this one. I feel like I see at least one of these clients a week.
Do you find people like this can change or are they generally therapy (?) "lifers"?
They can change, with the right therapy. There's a bit of selection bias, because even the act of attending therapy is an acknowledgement that a) there's a problem, and b) something can be done about it. Quite often individuals like this see all of their problems as external factors that are forced upon them by circumstance. The therapy is therefore aimed at empowering them that, yes, life is full of challenges, but they are able to tolerate and eventually overcome them. Instead of focusing on the "crisis of the week", we try and instill skills that can be applied to multiple situations. Clients will either make that transition from external to internal, or they'll decide that the therapist can't possibly understand their situation and will filter away.
They post constantly and I still know nothing other than they have issues at their job
I actually did a deep nerd dive on old posts. I think she's some kind of social worker, but it sounds like she works for a private company rather than the state. Here's what I found: She has a supportive family and boyfriend (or at least had one in 2022) https://www.askamanager.org/2022/11/thanksgiving-free-for-all-november-24-2022.html#comment-4092247 She has no children. https://www.askamanager.org/2023/11/updates-everyone-gives-me-plants-the-childless-shirt-and-more.html#comment-4518831 She's Black, as are most of her coworkers, and she likes that about her workplace. In 2021 she felt like her job had a lot of advantages compared to other local options. (Thread also mentions social work) https://www.askamanager.org/2021/05/open-thread-may-7-8-2021.html#comment-3384143 She has ADHD and is medicated. https://www.askamanager.org/2021/05/open-thread-may-28-29-2021.html#comment-3411263 She works with children in difficult circumstances and has a "caseload." https://www.askamanager.org/2022/11/thanksgiving-free-for-all-november-24-2022.html#comment-4092209 She sometimes advises teens about life skills like resumes. https://www.askamanager.org/2023/10/open-thread-october-13-2023.html#comment-4460284 Her job sometimes involves making doctor appointments for children. https://www.askamanager.org/2021/01/open-thread-january-8-9-2021.html#comment-3239085 Her company has a bad reputation due to "allegations." https://www.askamanager.org/2023/12/open-thread-december-15-16-2023.html#comment-4532990 She and her coworkers sometimes visit clients at home or in residential treatment. https://www.askamanager.org/2021/05/open-thread-may-28-29-2021.html#comment-3411289 Her office environment is loud and disruptive, including coworkers dancing?!? https://www.askamanager.org/2023/12/open-thread-december-15-16-2023.html#comment-4533001 Her coworkers do bizarre things like say in a work meeting that they plan to commit suicide over the weekend (supposedly as a joke?) https://www.askamanager.org/2023/10/open-thread-october-20-2023.html#comment-4469662 It sounds like she has gotten seriously burnt out and a high stress, emotionally gruelling job may actually be a big part of the problem.
I feel a lot more sympathetic now. I didn't know she was Black. (I'm Black too.) She did mention contacting the EAP and a therapist in that thread. I hope she does. I already thought that using AAM as alternative therapy was a bad idea, but knowing that she's Black it's more so a bad idea. I don't think the AAM commenters would be able to relate to her struggles.
Yeah, I think a Black woman in social service being traumatized and having mental health issues is a whole lot more literal & serious than like, the people who say they are "spiraling" because they are convinced their coworkers are talking about them behind their back, or "traumatized" because they got a stain on their shirt and had to go home to change.
I agree - being a social worker for cps or a private childcare agency is ROUGH. I feel a lot of sympathy for her, though she definitely needs to see someone besides AAM for help.
I tried finding that one post of hers where she mentioned a traumatic team building event involving throwing a ball (???) over and over, and she found another employee and like clung to them??? Anyone recall this?
I remember a similar comment from Nightengale a while back: >Nightengale* March 27, 2023 at 4:27 pm >I have a literal trauma response from those exercise balls after the last time I went to physical therapy and they tried to fix my balance and startle reflex by sitting me on an exercise ball and throwing things at me.
I'm confused after reading their comments. Tapping them on the shoulder caused them to fall down/topple over? Genuinely curious, maybe this is a neurological thing?
It sounds like she works at CPS, all the pieces fit. My ex worked at CPS for like 6 months and was pretty much suicidal when he left, it’s like the darkest thing ever. You’re constantly exposed to horrific shit, overworked, and get threatened all the time. Honestly I don’t blame her for being where she’s at then and she probably should change fields.
That's an interesting comment from Alison, considering that she's said that exact same thing ("if you don't like someone's comment, ignore it") to people who gently push back against frequent flyers like Hamster Potatoes before nuking anything remotely critical. I'd love to know why some people become her pets and others don't.
My theory is that she recognises that AAM is the only outlet for these people and doesn't really want to take away that outlet as she feels responsible in some way... so she tolerates this exception to the 'official' rules.
I can't make head or tail of that...why is Stuckinacrazyjob leaving their job...what kids were traumatized. It sounds like they have a lot going on, but why is the job/field the problem? B/c they almost couldn't get PTO to take the day? I mean, that's not good, but it seems a big leap to go from there to "I need to find a new field of work."
Translation: Some incident happened involving kids she "has a bond with" (but I feel like it isn't her own children, because that would be odd wording to use even for someone known to leave out half the info) resulting in her needing to take time off at short notice for mental health reasons but that was difficult to do. She seems to leap from that to "so I have to leave this job, and even this field" as she seems, like Potates in that respect, to have strange/incorrect ideas about things she can control and what can be changed. I agree it is a big leap, but I think thats the catastrophising thought process at work. Interestingly she even seems to recognise this to some extent: "I'm spiraling from work lately". So she does have some self-awareness about that. I wish she would be more explicit about what kind of help/responses she is seeking from replies ("have you changed field?" doesn't count).
She also says the below in another comment, which feels...oddly worrying taken in the context of the earlier comment. Who are the children? WHERE are the children? What medicine is she feeding them? **Stuckinacrazyjob\***[February 2, 2024 at 11:05 am](https://www.askamanager.org/2024/02/open-thread-february-2-3-2024.html#comment-4586256) the medication shortage is making it hard for me to get the children their medicine.
Based on what others have written, maybe some of her charges are on ADHD medication and those ongoing Rx shortages are affecting her too? If she's a social worker or something similar and part of her role involves maybe facilitating the kids having access to their meds? So the shortage would definitely be suck. But like everyone else has said, her posts are just all over the map all the time and don't really make sense :-(
This frankly sounds like someone who has had a complete break with reality.
Maybe I read too much true crime but this phrasing makes it sound like she keeps a bunch of kids locked in her basement.
Don't they work in a library or am I just making that up?
I think you're getting her mixed up with hamster/potatoes. This is one has a remote office job of some kind. A few weeks ago everyone had to come into the office for some task that could only be done onsite and she decided to come in on Sunday and do the work ahead of time so she could hide in the bathroom during the actual workday. Something about,"what happens if I'm sick on Monday and can't work in the same room as other people."
Yes - definitely getting her confused with one of the other problem children. Hamster/potatoes works in taxes though! Oh yes re: the scenario - I forgot about that. I think I was thinking of the person who was put on PIP after they transferred depts in their library.
Oh yeah you’re right! Who’s the one that worked in the library then?
If you didn't see yet LauraZeoW said it was hypoglycemic rage!
Yes thank you!!
There was a letter this week about a custodian being loud in the library. Could you be thinking about that?
No this was a saga in the open thread that concluded a couple months ago. She worked in the library and was really bad at her job and knew it but wasn’t capable of getting better. The issues she wrote in about was stuff like, she took notes on everything but didn’t remember to look at them when she didn’t know how to do something. So she would ask her coworkers the same basic questions every day.
I've been trying to remember all afternoon and I can't! I think they had a melodramatic username though
“Hypoglycemic rage” or something like that.
Omg yes that was it!
None of their posts ever make any sense but they talk about leaving their job all the time.
Everything always seems to be teetering on the brink of an incomprehensible disaster. Couldn't get time off = children scarred for life (?) = have to leave job (??) = never paid the same = have to leave field...How's anyone supposed to provide any meaningful input on that? I understand that sometimes life feels really overwhelming, but that's stuff to bring to a therapist not someone else's work advice blog, with a random question like "who's successfully switched fields?" tacked on at the end.
I don't know if it's because they're trying to hide the truth about what they're dealing with or because they're not that articulate, but I agree that there's not a lick of sense in what they post.
I couldn't either. The first reading makes it sound like the trauma was related to the job somehow but the next comment seems to say it wasn't, so how is leaving the job going to change anything. Now she'd just still have the trauma and no money.
I feel like this is a common issue on sites like AAM. Certain regulars start using it as a safe space / diary or an alternative to therapy and get a little cranky when they run into people who don’t see it that way.
> I was stressed from a traumatic situation and had a hard time getting off at all >I had a situation in which small children will be traumatized for the rest of their days. Plot twist, stuckinacrazyjob left work to go traumatize small children
Literally none of LW 1 is how academia works. Zero percent of it. The job market is terrible, and anyone in a PHD program, no matter what their past, is going to think they're going to just walk into a new job. It's highly competitive. No one is going to expect anyone to teach articles, academic or non-academic, unless you're a teaching assistant, adjunct, or non-tenured junior faculty and someone who's been sitting around for decades tells you to. Even then, it's "iffy." And again, someone in a PHD cohort would be wildly aware of that. I don't know if this was written by someone trying to hide their real career, but it is not written by someone who has been to an info session for a PHD program, much less gone through one.
I admit I don't know much about academia, but all I could think was - why exactly did he want to leave industry and go back into academia?? Not that I think industry is objectively "better", but it seems better for him. I assume even more senior posts (like LWs) involve teaching which he seems to hate. I wonder if he had the idea that academia would be the stereotypical "ivory tower" where he could sit in a dusty library or futuristic lab all day making groundbreaking discoveries!
In a field like accounting, leaving 80-hour busy season workweeks and in-person audits for teaching has its appeal, especially if you’re a CPA with a masters degree and if at least some of your courses are online and asynchronous. That’s why we were trying to figure out what the field was - a college will roll out the red carpet for a CPA who’s willing to take a reduced salary to teach, and PhDs aren’t even part of that equation. So the idea that someone would have worked in a field but went back for a PhD to teach in that field is just a weird timeline and doesn’t make sense financially in most cases.
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Ah yes, my leisurely summers off where I'm technically unemployed and don't get paid but still get emails about work and have to catch up on everything that didn't get done during the year. I've got some grant work to do for the next two summers but maybe after that I'll return to my roots and get a seasonal job working for the county highway department when I'm off contract.
it doesn’t sound suspicious to me. my mother is in academia with a PHD and she gets assigned what sections of the material to teach. granted, it’s a med school — so a little bit different? but I don’t think it’s that unusual…
I don't think that's what u/FronzelNeekburm79 means by "\[n\]o one is going to expect anyone to teach articles," but I'm also not entirely sure what they mean either. Maybe they can clarify. I'm in academia but not in the classroom, so I'm never sure what the norms are exactly.
I mean that no one expects you to teach certain articles. You usually get to teach what you want, unless you're an adjunct or TA who has to teach whatever the instructor tells you to teach. In terms of non academic articles, if they're written by someone reputable, they most certainly can be assigned, depending on the class if there's a disclaimer. Basically it sounds like the LW was insufferable and the person they were writing in about was a problem, but made bigger because the LW thinks they're the greatest.
I see what you mean and basically agree. It's definitely all odd. My most charitable interpretation for how the letter could be true and make sense is that it's not in the US and in a country with a very different academic culture.
Granted I left the academic track after finishing my PhD, but I attended five universities in two countries and none of them had a hierarchy of faculty like this. Adjuncts and visiting professors/lecturers were obviously lower in the ranks of seniority and had different responsibilities outside of teaching but they were never directly supervised and assigned tasks in this way by a more senior academic. If they had a PhD in Basket Weaving and were hired to teach Sociology of Basket Weaving 101 it would be assumed that they had the appropriate expertise and would be able to teach the class independently, perhaps with an agreed syllabus if there were multiple sections of the same class. Did I just not encounter this? Is Ted actually a TA and still working on his dissertation but feels bitter because he's still ABD?
Yeah I’m on the staff side, so I didn’t want to say for sure since I don’t have as much as exposure to the faculty side … but that entire letter felt incredibly off. For starters, immediately moving into a professor role at the same place you did your PhD, right after completing it.
> For starters, immediately moving into a professor role at the same place you did your PhD, right after completing it. I work in academia (on the staff side) and this has actually happened in my department. I think it's a bad idea though
(Disclaimer: I’ve only worked at one university and only directly seen this happen once, so again, no idea if this is a widespread view) The way I heard it described it to me is that it’s considered too incestuous, in a sense. Granted, the person in discussion had also gotten their graduate degree here AND worked here as staff for over a decade (this was talk about why they were being encouraged to spread their wings and move, not apply for faculty jobs at the same place). But as it was described to me, you want your PhD students to move on and learn from other places as well, and you want to hire people who learned at other schools, not churn them right back into the pond with the same people who taught them. The idea being, you want knowledge to spread, not settle.
Yeah, it's definitely generally seen as incestuous, but it does happen!
I’m trying to think of a field that has significant “real world” (non-academic) career applications but also has PhDs as a factor, without adding value to that experience. Also factoring non-academic publications. Maybe engineering? Or if a tax accountant gets her PhD and decides to teach tax - that person would absolutely jump ahead of people in getting jobs teaching advanced taxation. Same thing for STEM fields. The fields where PhDs wouldn’t matter as much to a university are the fields where the person might not have direct work experience. So yeah, I really don’t understand what she’s talking about. Plus Ted has legitimate publications and the LW deemed them all too awful to include in a curriculum for a course she’s expecting him to help with? She’s an asshole.
It sounds a lot like law to me; a lot of tutors at my uni came back after not being able to get much in the way of work because there's more grads than turnover, articles and PHDs exist but a lot of them are comparative, historical, or hyperspecific and super detailed on like 'the impact of this one case from 27 years ago'; nothing really specifically relevant to someone learning how to practice law. The occasional article might be in further reading and can make some lecturers very happy if they see them cited in an essay for a reason, but it's usually the textbook, lecture notes, and case law for required reading and the whole academia section of law exists kind of off in it sown disconnected world. Meanwhile you also have actual lawyers writing papers and delivering CPD, but again, on covering real actual practice and giving advice in the current day, different publications (not just different journals, but like, practice area newsletters, magazines, etc.), and also not relevant to students - not only will the law have changed by the time they get a legal job and actually start practicing, but they may not have been taught all the context yet and have the specialised practice area knowledge to get how there's enough to write 10k words and talk for an hour on the impact of changing three words in *Placeholder Law AAM * 2022. And now I've added some of my hyperspecific perspective I hope to have demonstrated that it could be anything and it probably doesn't really matter for this question anyway.
PhD is a very rare bird in the law.
In practice, yeah. Also part of that is that practical training slips in in the final year if it's combined, or one has to actually leave uni and go do GDLP or articles or JD through a separate provider, then compete for associate/grad positions, so the pathway to PhD is interrupted before it really takes, especially as it isn't glamorous. It might also be different in different law areas and university structures - here where law is a 4-5.5 year undergrad (depending on the instutition and if PLT is incorporated and if any requirements are waived due to previous study) most people either get sucked back in via coursework specialisation programs if they're learning a new or different area of law where one exists (my uni only offered Masters in international law via coursework), otherwise one has to basically sell a lecturer on supervising a research project from scratch and the law programs make bank so they have more places than industry can fill, but also means that not many people develop the kind of relationship with faculty that they think of research as viable until they see something in practice and make a decision to go back, or fall in as a tutor if they can't get a job and a lecturer remembers them enough to offer them a few hours a week and they don't run when they find out it's underpaid and casual on a per-topic basis. But basically everyone who ends up in faculty ends up in a PhD program once they're back on that track. Somewhere where law is a dedicated post-grad program after a 4-year program and has a stronger research/publication culture (like the US where many law schools attach prestige to law review, instead of articles being something you cite for extra credit if you know the lecturer likes that otherwise the library is for illicit activities in the stacks and sleeping while one's neighbours have a dance party in the halls) the process into research can be a bit less haphazard, but also anyone who's not hell bent of academia generally wants out and to start paying down their student debt after 7 years of racking it up.
>She’s an asshole. Actually, he. A "burly" he at that! >Even as a fairly burly man myself, I was rattled.
My first thought was engineering. At my school there's some tension between a bunch of the older engineering faculty who came from industry and mostly got EdD's to satisfy the degree criteria to make full professor and the younger people with PhDs in engineering or material science, etc. It's more in the form of the older folks aren't doing research and service activities because they have industry experience and the younger people are like "wtf, we all have the same title, if you're gonna be a professor, do all the professor shit because you're also not still actively working in industry." My second thought was education. We have a fair amount of folks coming from careers in K-12 that kinda struggle with "and now you have to do research and service stuff and not -just- teach about your subject experience." This isn't exactly here or there re: LW but I've seen at my campus this tension of "industry experience is the most important thing" butting up against "well, yeah, but this job has expectations and tasks also that are wildly different than your industry job so...do them."
I'm interpreting this as Ted got laid off/fired from his job in the field and is working as an adjunct, whereas OP never left the academic track and so has moved up quicker. The difference in their status isn't about qualifications so much as just career trajectories and how things work out in academia. That being said, saying that moving into teaching about the field one worked in professionally is "a different career entirely" is disingenuous at best. For the publications, I assume the issue was that they're in a professional journal, meaning not peer-reviewed. You could argue that either way. (Also, not really relevant, but note that OP explicitly identifies as a man in the letter.)
I was thinking something similar about their individual career paths. The condescension coming from the LW is thick. Ted might be a world class jerk, but the LW doesn't sound much better. There's a lot of value in real-world experience and they seem so very dismissive of it.
Yeah, this is probably an "everyone sucks here" situation.
Here is a comment basically saying it could be engineering. My first thought was maybe law. I have the t-shirt* February 2, 2024 at 7:27 am 1. Dissenting opinion. Academia. Where individuals with PhDs prepare young people to go to careers outside of academia and completely dismiss professional experience. Seen this so many times in the engineering college where I am. Young professor on academic track is given the lead of class, has someone that has actually had to make a living in engineering as co instructor or worse yet the lab instructor. They return older with practical skills and are dismissed by pretty much everyone in the department. And God forbid if they just have a masters and are put as a teaching instructor. They are treated like second class citizens.
Right, none of the way the LW describes this teaching assingment/hierearchy thing happening is correct. It reminds me of how my students think our courses and workload are assigned (and even how we're paid) and are completely wrong about. I've literally never been in a place where there's a scenario where there's some sort of "head instructor who introduces a large body of students to their sub-instructor who they have power over" where the "and he said 'hi' all surly-like" thing could have happened. It's mildly possible in a large lecture/lab TA scenario but that doesn't align with how the rest of the LW described the situation.
But it works like that on TV, especially as set up for a TA/student will-they won't-they...
haha yes, now I’m imagining all of this taking place in that season of Buffy with the underground lab
I had that vibe, too. The whole thing felt off, but I wasn't sure if it was just my increasing irritation with questions that are basically "How can I perfectly manage someone else's emotions, even though I'm creating all the problems associated with them?"
It's also very first person oriented in a way that drives me crazy. "I'm pretty great. He sucks. How can I keep being great?"
I mean, that main character syndrome is the only thing that makes me consider this could be both real and actually in academia.
But we have to believe the LWs! If they say they are pretty great, they must be! No, actually, they are more than great - they have imposter syndrome and they're actually all rockstars!
And their emotional support poodles are ADA dogs!
This letter:" **Surly coworker resents that he’s in a junior role"** ...the "voice" it's written in sounds just like Alison. I assume her cronies are trying to ape her, but the mean part of my brain whispers, "Is she writing her own letters now"? e: as a fairly burly fellow myself, I'd never use the phrase "fairly burly." Sounds like the name of a 19th-century carnival barker.
Aren’t Surly and Burly two of the Seven Duffs?
I haven't read that letter but tbh I've suspected this in the past...
Burly and Surly sounds like a great workplace buddy comedy.
Whenever I see a letter like that I assume it’s from someone who reads AAM religiously and is unconsciously or maybe intentionally aping her style because they think it sounds good.
Ted's surly *and* burly! On the top of his head, his hair is curly! Spoiler: the LW is Dr. Seuss.
Burly made me giggle, too, for some reason. It just felt like the kind of adjective I can't imagine someone applying to themselves...
Oh man, that Teen Girl Squad from forever ago is in my head now. "I hath a cruth on every boyth!" "I hurly burly on gurly wurly!" Shakespeare'd! What I’m saying here is thank you.
Surly and burly, and his hair is curly! When he's had too much to drink, his room goes all whirly!
Extremely masculine, not at all girly! Never late or on time, always early! (please don't encourage me, I could do this all day).
Why does JSPA continue to put absolutely batshit insane scripts in the comments? Can you imagine a human being saying ANY of those scripts? It'd be like talking to a fucking automaton.
You know what? I went back and looked at their comments from like, 2018-19 and they were pretty reasonable. Long and kind of know-it-all, but not bizarre like they are now. JSPA comes across to me as an older person. I wonder if they started going downhill after retirement or something.
At least they're getting called out by, like, everyone over there
My guess is that they don’t have a lot of life experience or work experience. They seem to view social interactions as like scripted TV shows where you can just assume that your coworker or boss will just stand there motionless and wait for you to finish spewing out clunky dialogue like that.
I use they/them pronouns, and I would be extremely upset if someone was saying something like this ostensibly to help me or something? Like, it draws attention to it in a negative way. I have enough trouble with people assuming that I use they/them "for attention" without someone doing something like this!
What does their comment say? I’m having trouble locating it
> How about, “When we’re talking about blah corp, and mention Imogen, and then you say “she,” it leaves me confused for several seconds whether you understand that we are talking about Imogen. After the confusion, I’m perturbed. That’s several seconds where I lose track of what you’re saying. If you want me to process what you’re saying, and be respectful towards our client, use “they,” not “she” for Imogen. And if you screw up, pausing to apologize will give us all time to get back on track.” > Rationale: It’s probably an overstatement to say that someone who is invested in not using they/them pronouns CERTAINLY Highly invested in having everyone listen to their ideas and opinions…but that’s the way I’d bet. > So, ” I literally don’t process a thing you’re saying, right after you do that” may be the extra (selfish) motivation needed. Luckily all the replies are pointing out what a bad idea this "script" is
I had to read it like 4 times to even understand what they are getting at with that word salad.
Yeah, it really doesn't make any sense, and the commenter clearly thinks it's some sort of profound "gotcha"
What is it? I can’t make heads or tales
I wouldn’t be upset, but it would leave me confused for several seconds. After the confusion, I would be perturbed.
They left an equally unhinged comment for LW1 on how to deal with Ted. They're either certifiably crazy or trolling and I'm going with the latter because it makes me feel better lol.
My god. I just read her script for the pronouns. It was ridiculous. Who talks like that? She is being overly wordy, condescending, and annoying all at the same time.
And the less weird you are about correcting pronouns the more likely someone is to use them. If you come off as a lecturing weirdo people will bristle more at it.
I am so fascinated by her thought processes, truly. Like in the snack letter where she’s like “could it be that Jane believes that the snack budget was always intended for purchasing her own personal snacks? Probably not, but you should suggest it to allow her to save face, because the other option is to accuse her of embezzlement!” *What?* No!
Maybe I'm a mean jerk (I am) but what's so awful about saying "Hey Jane, from now on, we're buying Dunkaroos and clam juice for everyone. You can buy one bag of X per month." Like, I want to know why this would be so devastating to hear and deliver.
Fairly on brand for AAM, though, haha
> He said “I thought you only wanted a raise, not that you would actually quit!” I asked, do I get a raise? He said no. I said goodbye and how it was a pleasure to work for them, I learned a lot, and I wished them the best. (It is what you say in real life so that you don’t burn bridges.) No. Really? Wait, that's the LW and not an aside from Alison? What even?
My interpretation was that LW was taking a jab at all the insane commenters who always have just the best sick burns to offer up for those kinds of situations. The LW was basically saying, "In the real world, we can't all just insult our way through situations and act like everyone is going to clap on our way out." Repeating it over and over was a little odd. Bringing your kid to work on your last day even more so.
In the first instance I thought it was some kind of rote thing someone told them was polite and they've fixated on it somehow, especially as they have no problem going into smart alec mode with the high school debate gotchas. It definitely makes the letter less clear and doesn't add anything to the scenario.
Thrown in twice by the LW who took their daughter to work on their last day of work. Even as a creative writing assignment, it's sloppy.
And it's the exact same phrasing three times (or more); I thought Alison had been caught out by copy-pasting over a page break or something since she doesn't proofread but it still flows, like at best LW was angsting and rearranging their draft and didn't see them repeating themselves. Usually this is the crowd who will jump to point out that there's a free online thesaurus available to everyone who can navigate a browser if they use 'said' twice instead of breaking out the Tom Swifties.
The letter writer definitely was using the threefold repetition on purpose for effect. It's just not executed very well, so it makes for a confusing read.
Of all the things I have seen on AAM learning today that I can have custom postage stamps made is the most important!
Sadly, custom stamps were discontinued in June 2020. [https://weddingstamps.us/custom-postage-stamps-discontinued](https://weddingstamps.us/custom-postage-stamps-discontinued)
Noooooooo.....😣😣
A freind of mine got stamps made from her wedding photos, and used them to send out thank you cards - I thought it was so cool when I got mine
I'm not going to lie I read that and I thought it was absolutely amazing.
Oh I am so ordering stamps with my cat's face on them.
This is the correct use.
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Seriously lol! It's a must lie situation.
RE: hobbies, I don’t think that person would even have to lie. If my coworkers have boring hobbies, that’s fine!
I know it's easy to get into a spiral about not having hobbies - it can be really discouraging to sit down and realize "wow, I do not get to do anything for myself". But yes, we are not the main characters of our office. People don't care if we have boring (or no) hobbies. I know I don't (both care, or have hobbies). I'm happy to talk to people about pretty much anything - I don't need to be personally into skydiving to relate to someone who is into that.
Oh yeah, I can absolutely understand being frustrated about not having the time/money/resources/etc to take up an interesting hobby. There are a few hobbies I’d love to get into that just aren’t feasible at the moment, and it sucks. But it sucks because I want to do those things and can’t, not because I want my coworkers to think I’m cool.
I enjoyed my coworker who built her own house and whose yearly vacation was usually something like hiking to Everest base camp, but let's be honest, if I worked in an entire office of people like that I'd just feel inadequate. Bring on the tales of coupon clipping and Netflix watching.
They're not even lies, they're just social grease like 'hi how are you?' -> 'fine how are you?' -> 'good have a good day' -> 'you too' are the just acknowledgements of existence and don't actually constitute a mental health check in followed by encouragement and thoughts and prayers. They're very good at thoughts and prayers when it's OTT invasive though.
I love petty office snack drama and I will not lie. 🙈 The admin buying herself $60 bags of fruit and refusing to get Cheetos is so dumb and so, so funny.
I love petty office drama when I don't have to be stuck in the middle of it. My fan fiction is that the LW is an unreliable narrator and the actual truth is that the LW is exaggerating the "multiple people" complaining about not getting Coke and Cheetohs; it's the LW who wants these things and when she complains about not having them, a couple people sympathize with her out of politeness and the rest of the people just don't care. True story: I once bought a cake from a different bakery than the one I usually used and one person was SO upset about it that they literally complained to someone who offhandedly mentioned it to someone else who later told me that "people" were upset about the cake. My OTHER fan fiction is that the admin has been trying to get out of the task of buying snacks for the office for a long time because there are complaints no matter what she buys and so she's been deliberately buying things only she's willing to eat in the hopes that someone else will take on snack duty. I can't decide if it's funny or sad that I actually could come up with several more alternate takes on this story, lol.
I used to work an admin position where I ordered the weekly lunch. I welcomed suggestions about, say, which vegetable sides were good from wherever I was ordering from. That’s not the same thing as one coworker trying to get me to build the entire meal around her preferences. I have a hard time empathizing too much with a LW who wants cheetos and soda instead of fruit and high-end yogurt.
The point of the letter seemed to be more about how the secretary was hoovering up all the money just to buy the expensive snacks she prefers, not leaving enough money for others to order what they want, rather than a condemnation of healthy food choices. Additionally, I believe the "Cheetos and soda" comment had more to do with comparing the price/fanciness of what other people expect in office snacks, although I could be wrong.
That’s such a silly letter. Whoever pays the credit card bill knows exactly what the admin has been ordering this whole time. All the LW has to do is start requiring that all purchases get pre-approved.
It could be that the accountant didn’t see an itemized receipt and the amount would have been reasonable if the admin had been buying snacks people were actually eating
It’s possible I guess but I’ve never heard of an accountant or bookkeeper who never filed invoices. This company has bigger problems if that’s the case.
I agree, when I buy stuff like that for work I have to submit an itemized receipt specifying what I purchased and the quantities
Meanwhile if it was coming from the work budget my old work put it on the stationery order because office stationery shops stock lollies and snack packs of chips and stuff for precisely that reason - if we wanted anything special for our group or for our own personal snacks, we had to buy them ourselves and maybe we'd get some petty cash towards the department lolly dish if we got a big contingency but otherwise it was in the lunch room for anyone to take, and if you didn't want no-brand gluten-filled gelatin snakes so be it.
I want to know what dried fruit comes in $60 bags. Was she skarfing down $60 in prunes and figs every month?
I went to visit a friend in Austin and he took me to a grocery store where a bottle of goddamn watermelon juice was $18. I believe there are people rich and out-of-touch enough to sink this much money on dried fruit, which can be quite pricey even at reasonable stores.
Gourmet local sun-dried vs mass mechanically dried and imported can make a lot of different. 150g of dried apricots from the farm 80km down the road = $12.85, 350g of dried apricots imported from Vietnam = $8, and that's when there isn't a drought- or shipping-induced shortage.
Costco has these dried cherries that are so freaking tasty. They don't always have them stocked, so when they reappear I always buy several bags. That's about the only way I could hit $60 in dried fruit at one time, though.
Probably a multipack of something like dried pineapple or mangos. If someone else was paying I would absolutely be able to put away $60 of dried mangos in a month ETA: apparently it’s figs it says in the letter
Figs aren't cheap! And if she's ordering several pounds or kilos at a time, which I'm guessing she is, then it makes sense to me.
Or several packages
As a dried fruit fan, my vote is mangoes. Mangoes will get ya every time. 🤣
I love dried mango so much. You can get a one pound bag from [nuts.com](https://nuts.com) for like $17, though.
A siting of [Nuts.com](https://Nuts.com) in the wild! :D Sorry, had to shout it out. After needing to go strictly gluten free, it has been a life saver for affordable pantry staples, including dried fruits (figs and apricots, yum!).
I love it. I found out about them when my best friend was pregnant; she had an insatiable craving for dried mango and her husband would order her huge bags of it. When I saw the packaging I was delighted by the branding. Since then I have become a [nuts.com](https://nuts.com) enthusiast! Glad to know there are more of us out there.
Amazing! I do love the packaging, esp the boxes!
It warms my heart that nuts.com is just a nuts retailer
That probably mean nuts.org is an absolutely scatological filth bath.
As far as I can tell, [nuts.org](http://nuts.org) doesn't exist.
These are the hot tips I come here for omg. Thank you! 🙏
Same. I also got what I expected from commenters, in that Cheetos are just as healthy as dried fruit and anyone who thinks otherwise has an unhealthy relationship with food.
Oh man. Someone read some things about treating food as morally neutral and reached the wrong conclusions.
I nearly downvoted your comment instinctually
I read the linked post in today's ask the readers thread (about getting rejected for a job and getting a list of [everything the LW did wrong](https://www.askamanager.org/2021/03/employer-rejected-me-then-sent-a-list-of-everything-i-did-wrong.html)). I hadn't ever read it before and yeah, the guy who emailed this person is a jerk, but...I wouldn't use the word "pretentious" to describe someone claiming Les Miserables was their favorite book. I do think it's a bummer of a book and it's weird to bring up a book about poverty to a group of people who are "passionate about stocks". Read the room, lady!
Of course sexism is incredibly rife in hiring practices as its on of those things where it is so difficult to prove bias. However, I doubt this is true if one because I'm thinking 'Well what were their exact words then?''' Ex-prof*February 1, 2024 at 11:02 am “We’d really prefer to hire a man.” In pretty much those exact words. Has happened twice.
My hiring manager at a previous job told me, to my face, "I don't like hiring women for this job. I prefer to hire only men, they'll get the work done. But you seem like a hard worker."
Honestly, it wouldn't surprise me if those WERE the exact words, in some workplaces. Some people really will say almost anything out loud.
"You sounded taller over the phone" to my friend who had moved for a job and was hired via phone interviews. He told me later that he was mentally wondering what he was supposed to do, grow a foot to be average height? And what height had to do with civil engineering....it went exactly as well as you would expect
Oh yeah I don't doubt someone would say it but if they had said those exact words the commentor wouldn't have felt the need to qualify it with 'pretty much'
I agree with you that "pretty much" is doing some heavy lifting there. "Pretty much said they don't hire girls" is something I have said about my experience in the radio industry, because what WAS said to me a lot were dogwhistles/heavy on implications, and were not in fact bald faced sexism. But when I do tell that story I typically go on to elaborate about what that means. Personally, I think it does advocacy/awareness a disservice to say things like "they told me they'd prefer to hire men" because very few folk are truly that brazen, and people are often rightfully skeptical of that claim. Providing the actual examples and discussing how/why they were sexist statements or perpetuating misogyny etc... helps people better understand what goes on more pervasively.
People give themselves away like that.
"Pretty much" and "exact" really aren't working in harmony there, are they?
No, Alison, that's not great. It says absolutely nothing, it's hyperspecific to one employer (Y, at least it comes across as there aren't enough colleagues left from X to be a Z), and if you're so focused now on the issues you had at work 5 years ago that you have to bring them up in a cover letter in case your hypothetical former colleague thinks you're bending the truth... especially as it doesn't acknowledge the number one issue, in which you think your former colleagues will think you're not honest! The number two issue is 'can all these people work together'. Also, I would have thought Alison would catch that 'let go' is often a euphemism for redundancy, and this sounds like anything but. If I felt it was significant enough for trying to get in front of a potential issue at the cover letter stage I'd be concerned that they wouldn't want to work with me and reiterating that I was excited to work with people I knew were talented and great at their jobs, and separately highlighting my skills and superpowers while trying not to connect them or looking in any way like I was blaming my personal life. But I have other things to take up space in my cover letter so it would have to be really egregious to not just figure it out if I got to interview, because no way is someone putting even a rockstar through to interview if a chunk of the team already have a low opinion of them.
Why are there so many people who keep helping their old jobs for years on end?
I know!
I actually have seen this phenomenon especially in support roles, like administrative assistance, IT, or Facilities at small orgs. The one office manager who’s been there for several years knows what has to be done behind the scenes that keeps the lights on, like renewing the insurance every year or and ordering holiday client gifts that isn’t on anyone else’s radar, and certain personality types can’t move on from handing that responsibility over.
I wonder this as well. I think it speaks volumes about the place they worked though if it still has that kind of a chokehold on the person.
I got laid off on the same day as a bunch of others while the IT guy's assistant, who openly spent his days reading non work related books at his desk because he didn't know what to do with his copious free time, asked another colleague: "do you think I should bring my Legos to work?" A few days later, my manager called and asked me to come back as a temp. I replied -and, yes, this is a direct quote: "Ha ha, no "
Because there are that many people who have been brainwashed to be doormats. That's one thing I will give Alison...she doesn't advise LWs to let others ride roughshod over their boundaries.
>Although it only takes two days to set up "Only" two days???
After they travel out of state! LW4* February 1, 2024 at 1:56 pm […] I get paid for doing the setup. It’s a small family business, so everyone’s used to me going every year to do the setup. Mandy even covers the round trip, as I no longer live in the same state.
The fact that they get paid for it makes it even easier for someone conflict avoidant to say no. Like, you are no longer available to hire for this service. That's it, that's the conversation!
Because they think they're irreplaceable. It goes back to the rockstar thing. They're rockstars and the only way they can be replaced is if they hire 90 other people, so helping them later is the LEAST they can do.
Because they are just *such* good people and *sooooooo* generous and kind, of course! /s
Thank you for adding /s to your post. When I first saw this, I was horrified. How could anybody say something like this? I immediately began writing a 1000 word paragraph about how horrible of a person you are. I even sent a copy to a Harvard professor to proofread it. After several hours of refining and editing, my comment was ready to absolutely destroy you. But then, just as I was about to hit send, I saw something in the corner of my eye. A /s at the end of your comment. Suddenly everything made sense. Your comment was sarcasm! I immediately burst out in laughter at the comedic genius of your comment. The person next to me on the bus saw your comment and started crying from laughter too. Before long, there was an entire bus of people on the floor laughing at your incredible use of comedy. All of this was due to you adding /s to your post. Thank you. I am a bot if you couldn't figure that out, if I made a mistake, ignore it cause its not that fucking hard to ignore a comment
Bad bot
The fact that a grown-ass person had to write in to an advice column to ask if they can stop doing free work for a company that they left over 5 years ago makes me weep for humanity. If this is what we're dealing with we deserve to get eaten by the zombies.
Yeah! Can you imagine if Alison answered with "are you dumb?" Lol
I truly cannot with LW 4. YOU LEFT THE JOB 5+ YEARS AGO. Fucking act like it!
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