December 2017

a fired employee still wants to attend the office holiday party

A reader writes: Our office recently let an employee go for numerous reasons after several warnings. It for was for minor things such as frequent lateness, too many personal calls and emails on company time, and general friction with other coworkers, to more serious things such as a very sharp decline in his work quality, […]

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open thread – December 22-23, 2017

It’s the Friday open thread! The comment section on this post is open for discussion with other readers on anything work-related that you want to talk about. If you want an answer from me, emailing me is still your best bet*, but this is a chance to talk to other readers. * If you submitted […]

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update: when an employee is too sick to call in sick

Remember the letter-writer whose employee was recovering from cancer and was sometimes too sick to call in sick? Here’s the update. I’m the boss with an employee who is/was dealing with some serious health issues that meant he wasn’t always able to call out according to our procedures. Per the suggestion of several commenters, we went to […]

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update: my coworker responds to everything I ask him to do with profanity and “your mom” jokes

Remember the letter from the person whose coworker responded to everything she asked him to do with profanity, name-calling, flat refusals, and and “your mom” jokes? She updated earlier here and here and here, and here’s the latest. The good news: RudeClerk still works here, but we basically never see each other ever. The upstairs (where he is) and […]

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the worst boss of 2017 is…

We have a winner! 11,748 votes are in, and the worst boss of the year is the manager who made someone leave a work note at a grave (update is here) … with 56% of the vote. The four runners-up, who managed to be pretty terrible themselves: * The boss who got drunk and angry that someone […]

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