our off-site includes a body fat analysis, have to use six PTO days to take a five-day vacation, and more

by Alison Green on May 30, 2024

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

1. Our off-site includes a body fat analysis

My company recently merged with another and we’ve been invited to an off-site coming up soon. At a briefing meeting this week, our group was given a preview of the agenda for the off-site, which is a combination of working sessions, outdoor activities, and group meals.

However, the agenda also includes a two-hour slot for an InBody test — which, for those not familiar, is a body composition analysis that provides a detailed breakdown of body weight in terms of muscle, fat, and water. It’s been presented as an “optional,” “fun” activity. Even so, am I off-base to think this is a completely inappropriate thing to have in a work setting? Most worrying, it’s also been mentioned as a “traditional” activity, which now has me wondering about what sort of culture I’ve ended up in.

You are not off-base. This is inappropriate in a work setting.

It’s optional, so skip it. If anyone asks why, say “Oh, it’s not my thing” or “No real interest” or “I’ve always figured that’s between me and my doctor.” If you’re comfortable with it, you also could ask some coworkers about it — “they said this was a traditional thing — what’s up with that?” Who knows, maybe you’ll hear the CEO loves it and no one else participates, or that at least a bunch of other people think it’s weird. I wouldn’t necessarily conclude you’ve ended in a completely messed-up workplace culture; lots of companies have This One Weird Thing We Do. But I can see why you’re alarmed.

2. We have to use six PTO days to take a five-day vacation

Several years ago, I worked for a company with a vacation policy I found truly bonkers. I worked at the corporate headquarters of a large regional chain. Everyone at the corporate office was salaried and exempt and worked a standard 40-hour work week, Monday through Friday. It was incredibly rare to work late (and no one worked on weekends). We got three weeks of PTO a year.

The weird thing was: if you took off a full work week of PTO Monday through Friday, you were required to use six PTO days, not five. The reasoning from management was that technically, we were all supposed to work a 46-hour work week (eight hours Monday through Friday, plus six hours on Saturdays), but they simply never enforced the “requirement” to work on Saturdays. And this policy only applied to taking off Monday through Friday—you could take off five (or more!) consecutive work days (for instance, Wednesday through Friday, then the following Monday and Tuesday) without having to use an extra vacation day for the Saturday you “missed.”

Neither the 46-hour work week nor the weird PTO policy was ever communicated before hiring, and it wasn’t documented in the employee handbook—people would find out about it through the grapevine or when they tried taking a week off.

Naturally, this caused a lot of anger among staff, but nobody would push back because management was very toxic and punitive whenever someone questioned authority (that’s a whole separate letter). People just accepted it or found some workaround to avoid losing an extra vacation day. In one memorable instance, a co-worker took PTO Tuesday through Friday, came to work on the following Monday, then took PTO the next Tuesday through Friday (they actually flew home to work that Monday, then flew back to their destination to finish their vacation!).

I know that in cases like this, the answer to “Is this legal?” is almost always “Yes, but it sucks.” But I’ve always wondered if this at least tiptoed up to the line of something shady (especially since the company was known for sketchy labor practices, like hiring long-term freelancers and treating them like employees). I also cannot fathom the reasoning behind such a policy — there was zero impact on workflow if someone took a Monday through Friday vacation, and we were never asked to actually work on Saturdays.

Can a company really require salaried, exempt employees to take an extra PTO day for a weekend day they are never actually required to work? And why on earth would a company do so?

What?! That’s one of the most bizarre policies I’ve ever heard in my 100 years writing this column, and that bar is quite high. (To be clear, there have been many far more bizarre occurrences. But as a corporate policy, this is up there.)

They claimed they had a 46-hour work week that no one was ever informed of and that wasn’t practiced because it was actually fake? And it was fake — as demonstrated both by the fact that no one ever worked Saturdays or over 40 hours a week, and by the fact that they didn’t tell new hires about it. If you have a policy of working Saturdays in a corporate job, you tell people about it before hiring them. They didn’t, because the policy isn’t real.

As for why a company would do this … I cannot imagine. Maybe a decade ago they really did work Saturdays and no one ever updated the policy once that changed (still pretty indefensible). Maybe there’s a sociopath in HR. Who knows.

But while there might be a state law out there that this would violate (California, is it you?), in most states this would be legal. No law requires your employer to give you vacation time, so companies can generally make up whatever weird rules they want to about it.

P.S. I’d bet money you shouldn’t all have been categorized as exempt though.

3. Should my resignation letter include 700 words on why I’m leaving?

I have decided to leave an organization that I have worked at for almost six years. I have some frank, critical feedback that I would like to submit to the organization’s leaders; it is a small organization and I have worked closely with them in the past. Is the resignation letter an appropriate place to outline the reasons why I am leaving? My current draft is about 700 words.

They have done exit interviews in the past, but not consistently, and I want to document my feedback in writing before leaving. I will not need them as references as I am quitting to work for my own business.

Noooo, don’t do it. First, a resignation letter absolutely is not the appropriate place to offer feedback. A resignation letter should be about two sentences and is used solely to document your decision after the conversation where you resign. Second, if you want to give that kind of feedback, I’d strongly recommend that you do it in a conversation, not in an unsolicited letter — but I’d even more strongly recommend that you reconsider doing it at all. If they were truly open to input, you probably would have had opportunities to give it earlier. Critical feedback shot at people as you’re walking out the door doesn’t generally carry a ton of weight or credibility, and it’s an investment of your emotional energy into a place that you’re trying to sever ties with.

(Also: don’t write off the possibility that you might want them as references at some point. Hopefully your new business will thrive and you’ll never apply for a traditional job again, but business ventures don’t always work out that way.)

Related:
should I tell the truth in my exit interview?

4. Did my teacher ruin my college applications?

When applying to college, I asked my high school history teacher to write a letter of recommendation for me. Our school had a system in place where the teachers would submit letters through an online portal. The student cannot view the letter until after submission, and only then if they request a copy.

Months after submitting my applications I needed to use this letter for scholarships and so I requested a copy. To my shock, I saw that my teacher had, in fact, used my older sister’s name repeatedly throughout the letter, instead of my own. All of the facts listed were the same, we both were 4.0 students, both class president, and both had this teacher for the same AP class, just two years apart!

I got rejected or waitlisted by every school I applied to. It has been almost a decade now and I still wonder. How bad of a mistake was this? Is this enough to reject an applicant on its own? Would it be worse in a professional context, rather than academic?

Nah, they’d almost certainly just assume the teacher sent the wrong letter. I doubt it was a major factor in your applications.

Professionally it might be a little weirder, although there too you’d generally assume the teacher messed up. (Although in most industries, written letters of recommendation for jobs aren’t much of a thing anyway, especially from high school teachers.)

5. Explaining why I’m leaving a job after 15 years

I’m struggling with how to best explain my decision to leave a company after 15 years of employment. The job had run its course and I was not making the money I should have after being there that long. I don’t want to appear negative or money hungry at an upcoming interview.

First, it’s not money-hungry to believe you should be earning more. But you’ve been there 15 years! You don’t even need to mention money; you can simply say, “I’ve been here 15 years and I’m ready to take on something new.” Everyone will get that. It’s one of the easiest answers to give and to understand.

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{ 311 comments }

{ 311 comments… read them below }

  1. Le le lemon*

    Letter 2 is amazing. The mind boggles. Did they really just not want (or want to punish) those who took a whole week off work? What happened if someone took Wed – Tue off, for example?

    Also pretty impressive that they never asked anyone to work the 46 hours.

    1. Annie*

      My most benign speculation is to discourage people from taking 10-day vacations that run from the weekend before the time requested off work to the weekend after and then calling in sick when the return flight gets delayed, jet lag hits, a food/body disagreement rears its ugly head, etc.

      1. Person Person*

        That doesn’t really make sense, someone taking a Tuesday-Monday vacation or a Monday-Thursday vacation would have the same problem. Really you’re just encouraging people to go Monday-Thursday and then call out sick.

    2. Katie Impact*

      The way the policy is described, it sounds like someone could even take Tuesday of one week all the way from Thursday the next week off and not have to spend an extra PTO day, as long as they worked at least one day in each calendar week.

      1. Myrin*

        Yeah, that is honestly the part that takes this from “wild” to “WILD!!!” for me. If they just always enforced the imaginary Saturday, that would still be not-logical and shitty, but at least it would be consistent. But that’s not even how they did it!!

      2. Also-ADHD*

        Which makes no sense if it was replacing a Saturday workday (that no one works). So weird.

        1. Wilbur*

          I’d tell them I was working Saturday. Apparently no one’s there to check anyway.

          I wonder if they base their salaries off of a 46 hour work week compared to the 40 hour weeks their competition works (I’m guessing they don’t).

      3. Clorinda*

        The obvious solution would be for the worker to take six days, Friday through the following Friday, if this bizarre policy was only triggered by the Monday-Friday vacation schedule.

        1. AtoZ*

          They do have a M-F vacation in there, so I would think the company would make them take 7 days PTO in this case, truly bonkers!

          1. MMR*

            I wonder what would have happened if they just said “oh no, I’m only off Mon-Fri, I’ll be back as usual on Saturday.

            I would so be willing to go into work for a friend and check if anyone showed up to look for them so I could call and warm them to call in sick, if only to spite this company lol

            1. Annie*

              Right, I would just say “oh, I did work Saturday, so you don’t have to deduct that extra day.” lol

      5. Former college rep*

        Re LV. 4 regarding college application letter – I disagree with Alison’s assessment. Having worked for many years and an application/admissions adjacent role, I can say the assumption would be that the teacher wrote this about the letter Writer’s sister, and the current applicant had somehow gotten the letter to reflect her own experience.

    3. WoodswomanWrites*

      Yep, completely nutty. It belongs in Alison’s “Wait, what?!” category for archived letters.

    4. Pandas*

      I’m thinking this was either an attempt to chip away at people’s PTO if they are in a state where vacation needs to be paid out, a gambit to prevent people from taking more than four days off in a row, or both, but whoever came up with the policy was bad at spotting “loopholes”. Maybe the same person from that old letter who would give people their birthday off on the closest day if it fell on a weekend, but couldn’t comprehend doing the same for someone born in a leap year because the day didn’t technically exist. Similar level of time awareness.

      1. Rain*

        Every time I come across that letter (or worse, the response doubling down), I am flabbergasted all over again.

      2. MMR*

        But why not just give people threee fewer days of PTO? It’s not like they were required by law to give three weeks. So bizarre.

        1. FrivYeti*

          Potentially it was an attempt to get people to spend their PTO more gradually. If someone gets a weird bee in their bonnet and decides that it’s hard on the company for a person to be gone for a full week, they add a penalty clause to make it so that people will take more partial weeks, and then retroactively invent a justification for it.

      3. OP2*

        Ohhh, that makes a lot of sense. I don’t know for sure that they paid out vacation days when people left, but it would be consistent with management’s general attitude to look for ways to reduce the number of vacation days they’d have to pay out in that case.

    5. radish*

      I honestly think it’s because, in their minds, people should be punished for getting 9 days off in a row instead of just 7. I’ve heard of workplaces where there’s some resentful feelings around chaining vacation days with weekends to essentially maximize your vacation time.

      1. DyneinWalking*

        I can imagine that, but that’s SO messed u.

        Here in Germany, every beginning of a new year there are hundreds of recommendations for how to distribute you vacation days around that year’s legal holidays to maximize your vacation time. While I’m not sure of every industry and company here is cool with that, it’s overall entirely normal to “game”* the system that way.

        *Honestly I’m not sure at all why it would be bad. The overall amount of vacation is the same – it’s just a matter of how much consecutive vacation you get, and consecutive vacation is extremely important to decompress properly from work!

        1. Emmy Noether*

          Yeah, that’s not gaming the system, that’s just smart planning. The only problem for the employer is that a lot of people will want the same weeks off, so there has to be a system to ensure coverage (in my experience, it tends to mostly even out by itself if the workforce is sufficiently diverse, especially regarding parents of school age children vs. not).

          1. Caffeine Monkey*

            My employer gets round the issue at Christmas by offering a work-one-get-two-free deal. If you work one day between Christmas and New Year, you get the other two days off without it hitting your annual leave.

          2. The Starsong Princess*

            My company has an elaborate lottery system for the desirable weeks – before and after Christmas, Thanksgiving and week of July 4th. The number of employees needed to cover is projected and the vacation slots are distributed at the end of January for the year. It’s a complicated 1st choice, 2nd choice system and what you get is dependent on your area’s needs but it is meticulously fair.

      2. Emmy Noether*

        Well, that’s just stupid (not you, the people that think that way). Vacation days are there for the employee to get a break from work, come back refreshed and more productive. A longer break at no extra expense to the employer is a win/win and should be encouraged.

        Whatever do those people think about planning around holidays to get a whole week off at the price of 4 days PTO?

        1. JM60*

          Not only is a longer break generally more refreshing, it’s often not that productive to work for only 1-2 days (such as if someone took every day of the week off except Wednesday to avoid the penalty m). Some types of work are more efficiently done with several consecutive work days.

          It can also be easier for others to understand your availability if you’re present/absent an entire week, rather than random days here or there.

          1. WeirdChemist*

            I’ve taken a vacation that went Wed-Wed, and got practically no work done on the M/T before I left or the Th/F when I got back for the exact reasons you mentioned. This company is probably losing out on manpower by incentivizing people to not just take M-F vacations!

          2. So they all cheap ass-rolled over and one fell out*

            I burned a ton of vacation last summer and I had complicated schedule of one week on, one week off, two weeks on, 9 days off, etc. Even that was too much for my teammates or manager to keep track of when the time off was contiguous. I can’t imagine an entire company where everyone is gyrating to work 4 days off, 1 day on, 4 days off to avoid the policy.

      3. Hannah Lee*

        It almost feels like a policy that came into being after one incident that didn’t go the way someone in power wanted it to go. Like, they were in a relationship with an employee, had planned to take a long vacation with them by taking only 5 days off but vacationing for 9 days, but broke up before the trip. And then then ex took the 9 day vacation with someone else. So they slapped on their villain mustachio and proclaimed “Ha! You shall never do that again! Mwhua ha ha!”

        I mean, it makes about as much sense as the reason they actually gave, so that’s my theory LOL.

      4. LabSnep*

        I worked in a place where I gamed my vacation days with my schedule to get almost three weeks off using 9 vacation days.

        I remember some sour grapes co-workers being mad and trying to protest it, but I was flying abroad and gave zero craps.

        The people who tried to complain would have high fived anyone in their clique for pulling the same heist off, it was a toxic environment and I was bullied a lot there. Glad to be out

      5. OP2*

        Yeah, that tracks with the whole vibe of management’s attitude—punitive and resentful.

    6. bamcheeks*

      Yes, and also, if they’ve hired people and let them assume the working week is a standard 40 hours, everyone’s pay and PTO is about 9% less than they think it is!

    7. Person from the Resume*

      There are so many confusing things in the letter.

      standard 40-hour work week. incredibly rare to work late (and no one worked on weekends) Great!

      Toxic, this policy (which makes no sense in the inconsistent enforcement that it is only enforced if the employee takes m-f off but not if they take a Tuesday – Tuesday.), the supposedly secret (bizarre) 46 hour work week which never enforced (great??)

      It doesn’t make it less bizarre, but I do wonder if the policy had some relation to the chain stores (???) which may have regularly worked Saturdays.

      But it’s still very wierd and inconsistent. They nickel and dime only on the m-f vacation, but not if you break the same number of days up over two calendar weeks.

      1. OP2*

        I have wondered if the policy had something to do with making the benefits for salaried office workers and hourly retail workers feel more aligned. But the stores were open 7 days a week, 6am to 11pm, and all the retail workers were unionized—so totally different policies and benefits for them. That said, management openly resented the fact that their retail workers had a union, so maybe this was their way of extending that contempt to office workers where they could be jerks with impunity. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

    8. Grey*

      My winner for most mind boggling policy is still “Ridiculously rigid attendance policy” from 2011.

          1. So they all cheap ass-rolled over and one fell out*

            That update is almost a complete 180. I have a flexible job but even we aren’t allowed to work only 4 hours in a day without taking PTO. Though, I guess we used to be able to, because they updated the policy a few years ago to explicitly say that if you are not-working 3 or more hours in a day, you have to take some PTO. So I guess I guess it’s close because we can work 5 hours and a minute and call it a whole day.

          2. Spero*

            It’s so interested to read the comments section for that because I feel like there is a lot more defense of ‘they can be ridiculous if they want because they’re the managers’ than we see in today’s commentariat! Allison was clearly tying her response back to ‘what is the business purpose and is that happening’ but more commenters seemed resistant to that.

          3. MigraineMonth*

            That update has given me so many mixed feelings. The company listened to the survey! They got rid of the draconian rigid system and instituted flex time…

            Then the company face-planted: “We still get a point for a call-in… We all have meetings at 9 am, group meetings to discuss stuff. If we are late to this meeting by even a minute, we get …. You guessed it a point. No fudge room at all at any time.”

            Come on, company, we were rooting for you!

      2. NotAnotherManager!*

        I still think the Leap Year Birthday person who wrote back in to double-down on being entirely wrong still wins for me.

    9. Miette*

      I have learned to never be surprised by the crazy bananapants policies of retail chains (AKA ways we actively loathe our employees). Just a few examples that have taught me this: I once worked Christmas rush at a store where the district manager hated the sight of Doc Martens and therefore added them to the banned list for what was allowed to be worn while working. My sis worked in corporate for a large chain that enforced the same public holiday schedule on HQ as the stores, so if the stores are open on Thanksgiving Day, then anyone in HQ that wants it off must take a day of PTO. A close friend worked as a store manager at another chain, and when the ENTIRE TOWN WAS FLOODED following a hurricane, with people having lost their homes and businesses, was taken to task by her DM when the store’s revenues fell off. The mind: it boggles.

      1. WeirdChemist*

        I once worked a retail job where shorts were only allowed in the dress code during a certain period of time arbitrarily decided by upper management. The dates changed every year (and we got no notice when the change happened until we showed up for the day).

        So like May 10, “How dare you try to wear shorts to work!!! That is so inappropriate and unprofessional!!!” And May 11, “Yeah, shorts are fine, whatever”

        1. Debby*

          I just wanted to share this regarding my Husband’s employer (he is a Deputy for a county in Indiana). Until just this year, ALL deputy’s could not wear their short-sleeved uniform tops until the Sheriff sent out a memo in the Summer stating they could. And they could not start wearing their long-sleeved uniform shirts until the Sheriff sent out another memo in the Fall stating that they could.
          It boggles the mind that Deputies could be trusted with guns and tasers, but not as to when to wear short sleeves vs long sleeves. That, too, boggles the mind!

        2. zuzu*

          What’s hilarious is that in Bermuda, shorts are actually *required* in some workplaces. My friend and her husband moved there because there are a lot of insurance companies and he could get a much better job and move up faster as an insurance executive than he could in Hartford. I went to visit and he was laying out his clothes for Monday: blue blazer, dress shirt, tie, Bermuda shorts, knee high socks. The corporate dress code required long pants for winter, shorts the rest of the year, with certain colors of shirt, tie, and socks considered appropriate (shirt and socks always pastel) and a blue blazer. Women could wear dresses.

          Friday happy hour at the expat bar was trippy. A bunch of grown men in, essentially, schoolboy outfits with their blazers off and their ties loosened.

      2. Women's Retail Sucks*

        Back in 80s, monies for research were hard to come by. When my boss decided to relocate from NYS to VA, he took his grants with him. And I was out of a job.
        After some rather fruitless searching, I took a job in retail, women’s clothing. It was an outlet owned by the manufacturer and we sold two lines of their women’s clothing.
        One day there was a major power for almost all of My Kisco. Stores were closing all around us. As manager, I called corporate to let them know. The conversation went pretty much like this:
        C: You’re on the to floor, aren’t there skylights?
        Me: Yes, but the dressing rooms are dark and the registers are down.
        C: Each store was issued a solar/light powered calculator. Use that to add up sales and calculate sales tax. When the power comes back on, enter them all into the register.
        Me: But mall security is recommending we close.
        C: No.
        So, as the only person who was truly good with numbers, I stood there holding the calculator up just above eye level (to allow enough light from the vertical skylights to hit and allow it to function) adding up sales and sales tax. For about an hour.
        Then security came around and said that they were clearing the mall, because the generators that were operating the exit lights and other emergency lighting needed to be shut down.
        I called corporate back and they actually argued with me. Finally, after accepting that we had to close, they told me that they expected the store reopened within 15 min of the power being restored.
        So, I went home for a couple of hours. And then reopened and manned the store by myself (we were supposed to have a minimum of three at all times) until the evening shift came in.
        Yes, I started looking for another job.
        And, despite doing a very good amount of business for a week day, the registers balanced to the penny.
        And no, no acknowledgement from corporate or my truly horrendous manager.

      3. MigraineMonth*

        I worked at a retail non-chain, a little hobby business, and it was an entirely different type of fruity. Mangopants, perhaps. The owner more or less lost interest in the place.

        Which led to me, a teenager, being the only worker in the store and dealing with issues such as:
        – barcodes had to be typed in manually as the scanner didn’t work with the inventory system;
        – I had to invent prices for the big-ticket items since no one put price tags on them;
        – the electric company kept threatening to shut off power;
        – an older woman calling 3-4 times a week, long distance, to inquire about a special order I had no way of fulfilling;
        – I hadn’t been paid in two months and the owner wasn’t answering my calls;
        – an unaccompanied young child kept showing up;
        – there were threatening calls from various suppliers about unpaid bills;
        – the cash drawer on the register didn’t lock, so anytime I left the front of the store I would stick all the twenties in my pocket to keep them from being stolen (and once walked home with them).

        It was a lot of experience!

    10. Djs*

      Was thinking about #3… what if you said something like “come back to me in a month and we’ll talk”. Knowing full well that they won’t.

      But on the 0.01% chance they do reach out to you, maybe then you’ll know they’re actually serious about improving?

    11. Any Given Fergus*

      I almost wonder if I worked at the same place as letter 2, because we had the same policy, except in my case, you were absolutely expected to work evenings and weekends. It was the most toxic place I have ever worked, and the bonkers vacation policy was probably the least problematic thing about it. I got so used to taking a Tuesday through Wednesday vacation that after I left, it took a bit of time to understand that it was ok and NORMAL to take a Monday through Friday off instead.

    12. KitKat*

      Occam’s razor… my guess is a pedant in payroll. Many, many places have pedants working in payroll — that seems likelier to me than some nefarious scheme to cheat workers out of small amounts of PTO.

      I imagine the pedant says that a week is 46 hours, so a worker can’t use 40 hours of PTO (5 days) to cover 46 hours (1 week). If you take a partial week (Th/F) followed by a partial week (M/T), you could still be working the remainder of the 46 hours on the other days in those weeks. There’s only a “gap” if you’re taking the full M-F off in a single work week.

      Ok now I’m feeling alarmed that this strange person’s logic sort of makes sense to me? That says something bad about me, I think.

    13. OP2*

      They did not dock an extra day for taking off Wed – Tue, which was extra strange. It applied only to taking off five days within the same calendar week.

      One reason people didn’t push back was that the mythical 46-hour workweek was framed by management as “We could technically make you come in for 6 hours on Saturdays, but we’re being so generous by not enforcing that.” There was a strong implication that if people pushed back on the policy, management would retaliate by making everyone start working those Saturdays—which is why I think everyone just accepted the whole nonsense.

      1. Meg*

        Oh man, it sounds like my last boss worked there! Whenever we would push back on being overworked and exhausted (vets who routinely worked 70 hours with on call and weekends) we would be threatened with double on call and even more scheduled appointments on weekends. We only asked for no scheduled Saturday appointments because I literally couldn’t get to patients who needed treatments when I was supposed to do vaccines, pony measurements, emergencies for anyone who called within 90 minutes of our office on top of medical treatments.

    14. Meg*

      I had a boss who banned me from taking off Fridays or Mondays. I could see him trying something like this because he was bonkers and just wanted to control his employees.

  2. Double A*

    Ironically, letters of recommendation ARE a thing for teaching jobs. You are required to submit them with your application. It’s extremely annoying.

    (Caveat, my sample size is two states, it every job I applied to in those states required them).

  3. Zelda*

    > my 100 years writing this column

    Oh hey, May 28th was your blogiversary, wasn’t it? Happy blogiversary! Just, um, 17th blogiversary, not 100th…

    3. Vanamonde von Mekkhan*

      I really want to see how an AAM letter and answer from 1924 would look like.

        1. Irish Teacher.*

          Given that my country was basically two years old at that time and so many things were new or majorly changed – coming under Irish, rather than British ownership – hmmm, I really like the idea of such a thread.

      3. Sparrow*

        My dearest Ms. Green,

        I am afraid to report that I have run into a fair bit of trouble with my current employer. I spent most of the past three years working as a lady’s companion for a wealthy girl up north. The pay was very nice, but the lady was petty, irascible, and an awful scold—she was always quick to chide me thoroughly for the slightest of errors. To be frank with you, Ms. Green, I got the bum rush and had to find new work very quickly.

        As luck would have it, an old friend who lives in a city about a day’s train ride away wrote to me that she was leaving her job as the companion for a lady of great wealth and local acclaim. She had already recommended me most highly, and the job was mine if I were to accept. I wish now that I had asked why my friend was leaving the job, but in my desperation, such caution was not at all in my mind. I accepted the job and quickly embarked on the journey to my new employer.

        The lady herself is as wonderful as my friend assured me. What my friend did not mention is that the lady’s husband is the most abominable cad. He can often be spotted walking around town with a dame on his arm; on more than one occasion, he’s been so bold as to bring them back here and take drinks with them in the parlor while the lady and I remained upstairs. Like my former lady, the gentleman (if one can apply such a word to one whose behavior is so disagreeable) is most ill-tempered, and he finds every opportunity he can to scold me. However, I hold great love for the lady I am companion to, and she pays me a wage higher than any I’ve made before.

        Should I remain here for the pay and for the wonderful relationship I’ve developed with the lady? If I do, do you believe there to be any way for me to convince her husband that his behavior is ill-befitting a man of his status and needs to stop? And, if I may ask one last question, Ms. Green: am I wrong to feel anger towards my friend for not mentioning this man’s awful behavior? Knowing what I know now of this man and my friend, I’m quite certain she left this job because of him. I feel such anger that she declined to tell me his flaws, but is such a feeling reasonable?

        2. Formerly Frustrated Optimist*

          This is spectacular, and you should consider re-posting it on a Friday open thread, because I don’t think a lot of people saw it here!

  4. Abogado Avocado*

    LW#3: No, do not put your criticisms of your current employer in a document that you are giving to them and that can be used against you in the future. Yes, you are starting your own business and believe you are shutting the door on this employer forever. However, life is long, the world is small, and you never know whether some thin-skinned person at your current employer will use your written criticism as justification for causing trouble — whether with clients, partners or suppliers — for you in your new business.

    Better that you leave on good terms and impart any constructive criticism to HR orally in an exit interview, if one happens. You never know when you might need a favor from someone at the old job.

    Good luck with the new business!

    1. Name Anxiety*

      I mean, agreed, but also as a counterpoint I once asked for an exit interview with HR because 100% the reason for my leaving was my supervisor’s behavior and was told that they didn’t do them but I could write it down if I wanted. So I did write a whole thing up, sent it to HR and copied some members of the executive team including the CEO who I knew would be supportive. They forwarded it to some other folks on the executive team and my supervisor was encouraged to seek other opportunities after my last day.

      I’m not saying this is typical, but if you have some faith in the higher-ups, and they already know something about the situation and agree, it could be a catalyzing moment for them to realize that if things don’t change they could continue to lose good people.

      1. MsM*

        Yeah, I feel like there’s room to add a line to the resignation letter that you’d welcome an exit interview and leave it at that. If they don’t take you up on it, then that’s just confirmation they don’t want to hear it, and all you can do is take comfort in knowing it’s not your problem to solve any more.

        1. Antilles*

          Honestly, even if you add that line and they give you the exit interview, I still would expect it’d be pointless.

          The fact that LW was there for six years and never felt comfortable in giving this feedback previously seems pretty telling. If you never told them before because you thought they’d shoot the messenger or would ignore it (or if you did tell them and they did ignore it), why would that be any different now?

          1. ferrina*

            Exactly this. If a company doesn’t want feedback, there is no way to frame the feedback in a nice enough way for the company to cheerfully accept it. Don’t waste your breath and don’t burn a bridge for someone that was never going to listen anyways.

      2. Knope Knope Knope*

        That’s great but completely different. You were asked to document this feedback after following the normal process. All an unsolicited 700 word screed will do is make OP seem unhinged.

    2. Brain the Brian*

      Yeah, definitely don’t do this. Even if you’re leaving the job on not-great terms, your old bosses may want to patronize your new business if you leave things as they are now, and they probably won’t if you send them a parting shot in writing.

    3. Artemesia*

      I have read several of these letters over the years — in some cases because they got shared rather widely in the vein of ‘get a load of this — isn’t this just what you would expect Chuck to write?’ DON’T. Nothing good will come of it and you may become an industry wide joke and certainly will be a joke among the leadership of your organization.

    4. Artemesia*

      Your letter is more likely to become a company or even industry joke than to effect any change in the organization. Sometimes feedback moves the needle, but NEVER in a tendentious letter from someone leaving the company. I have had those letters shared with me and know of situations in other organizations around such letters. They always make the writer look a fool. Don’t do it.

      1. Falling Diphthong*

        Think:
        1) Has anyone ever gotten totally fed up with me, decided to sever all contact, and as they marched out the door fired off a manifesto about all the things I am doing wrong?
        2) If this has happened, did I earnestly reflect on my failures and behave differently going forward, in line with their guidance as to what I should have been doing all along?

        If your answers are not “Yes, multiple times” and “Yes, every time” then you probably shouldn’t theorize that this is how other people are going to operate.

    5. The Magician's Auntie*

      You do need a backup plan – a huge amount of business owners return to the world of employment at some point. While you may not need to do that, a plausible back up plan is an important part of running your own business. Please don’t endanger your reference from this job if you can help it!

    6. Lionheart26*

      This reminds me of the colleague who left my company, and on his last day sent the entire staff a looooooong letter filled with bitter and petty complaints and lots of talk about his amazing new opportunity and he’d think about us all and feel sorry for us while he’s sipping cocktails on the beach bla bla bla.

      A few years later, new CEO came to me and said “you’ve worked here a long time, did you ever work with Reginald? He’s just applied for his job back”. I just said “let me forward you something and you’ll have all you need to know”

      1. Enough*

        Husband worked with a guy whose wife made it know how much she disliked the company he worked for when he got a new job in another state. A year later they were back and he had his old job. Fortunately, it didn’t effect the employee but her reputation certainly took a hit.

      2. Thank someone I no longer work there*

        Your letter reminded me of a retirement letter someone wrote that, among other things, said “Some of you thought I was an AH (spelled out) and you’re right if you deserved it I was an AH to you.” A few years later industry rumor was he was a gambling addict and needed money so applied for a job at my newer employer saying he “missed the industry”. That letter alone was enough that I wouldn’t have agreed to hire him, though I had other reasons as well. Including the interview my boss decided we should give him “as a courtesy” for a job managing people where, no matter what follow up questions we asked, he only talked about his technology experience.

      4. Hannah Lee*

        He’s just applied for his job back

        It’s amazing how often the guy who sends those ridiculously ranty (often childish) parting missives or flounces with a rant then later pops up wanting to come back to work at the place. With no mention of their parting dramatics.

      5. Anon for this*

        A colleague who left the organisation sent out a ‘burn all the bridges’ email to the whole section.
        This was several years ago – it still comes up in conversation every so often.

    7. IceQueen who loves dogs*

      Agree, keep your resignation letter short. We once had an employee do something similar to what LW#3 is suggesting and included all the reasons why she was happy to be leaving in her resignation letter. Her next role didn’t pan out as she expected and a little over a year later, she reached out to us about coming back. We cited all the reasons she listed in her resignation letter why we didn’t believe that would be a good idea.

    8. El l*

      Agree. I’ve personally done this before, even sent to boss. And then I asked boss to throw it away.

      Why? Because in 99% of situations, management is not going to listen or take it to heart. Nothing will happen.

      Only spend time and energy teaching to those who can be taught.

      1. ferrina*

        Yep. If management was actually interested in the feedback, they would have been asking before the employee left.

        OldJob liked to do pro forma exit interviews. It was a waste of everyone’s time, since we all knew nothing would change, but it did lead to this amusing interaction….

        HR: Do you have any feedback for the company?
        Me: Well, I was pretty vocal about my feedback during my time with the company. Do you or upper management have any follow-up questions or any topic you’d like me to speak more on?
        HR: …. no.

    9. Little Owl*

      So, for #2, what does “3 weeks of PTO” actually mean – in terms of number of days off? Because I thought it was supposed to be based on the number of days you work in the week. (Or that’s how it works where I am). So this policy would have been slightly less infuriating (although still very strange) if they’d got 18 days of leave, based on the supposed 6 day working week. But if they only got 15, that sounds immoral and maybe potentially illegal, then because of the discrepancy? Depends where you are, I’m sure, but it sounds like it should be!

    10. Pastor Petty Labelle*

      Great #3, you got it all out of your system by writing it down. Now burn the letter so you aren’t tempted to send it. Your resignation letter should be I am resigning my position with X. My last day is Y.

      1. Jackalope*

        And LW, if you’re reading this, take this suggestion literally if you can. Don’t just delete the letter on your computer; print it up (at home so no one else sees it, or the library), take it to your back yard, and actually light it on fire. (Adjust as needed if you don’t have a yard.) So very cathartic.

    11. anon24*

      I worked for a company for over 4 years. There were some really bad moments, there were many days where I threatened to walk out and quit on the spot, and I made many complaints to my supervisor. But there were also good things about the job too. Towards the end, some things changed and I was able to distance myself from the bad. I ended up leaving to move multiple states away and figured it was my chance to say all the things I wanted… But I’d already said them (professionally) while employed and I figured even if I never needed the bridge again, why burn it?

      Well guess whose life fell apart and who moved back and is now working for that company again, who was more than happy to rehire me? I’m so glad I left on good terms, because it was so easy to get my job back when I needed to make something happen fast.

    12. run mad; don't faint*

      I really appreciate that you stressed an oral exit interview as the most appropriate venue. Very Old Job handed me a multi page exit questionnaire. There were a lot of things I wanted to tell them, both substantial and petty (I had long since reached the BEC stage with that job and should have left a year earlier than I did). But the questionnaire gave me pause. I ended up writing brief, very anodyne answers which was a good choice as I had to hand the questionnaire to my boss when I was done. On reflection, telling them about my legitimate concerns wouldn’t have changed anything, and telling them about the minor stuff would have shown how I had lost perspective and demonstrated just how much pettyness the job had brought out in me.

      1. London Calling*

        I filled in an online questionnaire (also at BEC stage and would have left a year earlier but…pandemic….)

        Would you work for this company again? YES
        Would you work for this manager again? NO
        Would you work for this Exec Director again? NO

        And presumed they could work it out for themselves.

        1. run mad; don't faint*

          I no longer remember much about the one I filled in except that it was long and one of the questions was, “On a scale of 1 to 5, how much do you feel your concerns were heard?” I wanted to put 1 but settled for 3 since I felt certain they would discount any truly negative answer. And honestly, once I was gone for a while, I could see that 3 was actually the best answer. So despite being tedious, the lengthy questionnaire kept me from making a fool of myself on my way out the door.

    2. Abby*

      Yes!! It made me think of the episode about workplace wellness schemes. Just awful.

    3. Dandylions*

      I like some things about Maintenance Phase and Burnt Toast and honestly?

      This activity doesn’t bother me because it’s optional.

      As a “morbidly obese” person whose muscle levels literally puts me into the obese category I personally found it cathartic and validating. It helped me set a healthy weight goal. Even though 210 would be considered obese, it’s a healthy weigh fat % for me because I’m so muscular.

      I know not every obese person will feel this way but again, it’s optional.

      1. Spero*

        But it’s noted that was typically a ‘traditional’ not an optional activity in the past – that may technically be optional but it doesn’t feel totally optional for the new staff member to opt out of.

        1. My Useless 2 Cents*

          The “traditional” doesn’t bother me much just because it’s been more than 20 years that this stupid workplace wellness crap has been pushed. An activity put into place in 2004 could easily be seen as traditional and 2004 was a prime “blame the fat people for high health insurance costs” era. Not that that has totally gone away but it was much more in your face 20 years ago. If the company is saying it’s optional, I’d take them at their word.

          **Wow, how old do I feel that 2004 was 20 years ago!

      2. zuzu*

        Not at work, though.

        If I want to have that done, I can do it myself. There’s no reason that my employer, who provides my health insurance, needs to have that information.

        1. Quill*

          Exactly. All details of my health beyond “I need X day / hour off to deal with health” aren’t my job’s business.

      3. MirandaTempest*

        I personally don’t want to set any weight goals, nor do I want to think about such things at all, and especially not at work. If you want to get your body fat measured on your own, that’s fine. I’ll also note that people whose bmi says they’re “obese” (not a word most fat people like) who are that way because of muscle usually look quite different from those who are high bmi because of body fat, and they’re also treated very differently by doctors, workplaces, society, etc. My friend who looks like The Rock might not be as affected by this as I, a fat lady, am.

    4. Rainy*

      These are the times when I channel Chad from SNL.

      No one ever has a response to that super bland “Oh, no thank you”.

    5. WillowSunstar*

      Yes, in this day and age we really should be past the point of criticizing other people’s bodies, at least at work, but it looks like some companies still are not. :(

      If they show any other signs of fat phobia, run for the hills.

  6. Heidi*

    Now that I think about it, letters of recommendation probably get mixed up all the time. Teachers have to write multiples of these, and if the student isn’t allowed to see them, there may not be anyone else paying close enough attention. I wish there were a better system than LORs. It was so mortifying for me to ask someone to write one, even though they were totally nice about it.

    1. Coverage Associate*

      Ideally, people in industries where letters of recommendation are a thing, including high school teachers for undergrad applications and college professors for graduate school applications, understand that writing letters of recommendation is part of the job, like continuing education or networking or department meetings or other parts of jobs that are necessary but not the day to day work output. I was lucky to have instructors like that, and I paid it forward when I was established in my profession by joining the board of my school and hiring a principal who really stressed the issue.

      Also, in some industries, letters of recommendation are more pro forma, equivalent to a reference check that confirms dates of employment, job title and eligibility for rehire. In those situations, someone leaving on good terms may write their own letter for their soon to be former manager to sign.

      Now I remember an old etiquette book I have that talks about the letter of recommendation process: the soon to be former employer was supposed to complete and sign the letter in front of the employee and hand it to the employee in an unsealed envelope. Then the polite thing for the employee to do was to seal the envelope immediately without reading the letter. This was just for situations where the employer was writing to an individual the employer knew, sometimes called a letter of introduction. Obviously, it would be different if the employee was getting a letter to show to several potential employers.

      1. OpalescentTreeShark*

        Do you genuinely believe that teachers don’t know that their professional responsibilities include writing recommendation letters?

        I hope the principal you helped hire emphasizes this by helping teachers find time to accomplish this instead of… just telling them they have to do it because THAT would genuinely be paying it forward.

      2. Iced coffee*

        Okay, being on a committee to hire a principal who told overworked teachers to keep writing recommendations letters (that they already know is part of their job) is giving this kind of a Futurama vibe:

        “Don’t quote me regulations! I co-chaired the committee that reviewed the recommendation to revise the color of the book that regulation’s in. We kept it gray!”

    2. Hlao-roo*

      My high school had a form we (the students) were supposed to fill out to help our teachers write out recommendation letters. I don’t remember what exactly was on the form, but maybe things like:
      – what class we had with that teacher
      – what after-school clubs we were part of
      – what we were planning to study in college

      I had a similar situation to Letter-Writer 4, where one of the teachers who wrote me a recommendation letter used my older sibling’s name (that teacher also wrote a recommendation letter for my older sibling). Luckily, in my case, I was allowed to read the letter before it was sent out, so the teacher corrected the name before any colleges/universities saw it. I assume mix-ups happen often enough (and are on the teacher’s part, not the students) that I don’t think it would be grounds for rejection.

      1. Dumpster Fire*

        It could also be that the teacher wrote and submitted a letter using the correct name and then simply sent the wrong one to the student afterwards. I usually use a naming convention that includes the student’s first initial, last name, and my name; so Suzy Jones and Sandy Jones would (assuming different graduating years) would both have letters named SJones_DumpsterFire.pdf.

    3. KitKat*

      I had a similar situation where a teacher mixed me up with a close friend in my year. Names were correct but some facts were swapped. At the time I was really worried about it but in retrospect, I don’t think it’s something that would alarm an admissions officer (things like which role each of us had in a school play, nothing really material or where it would look like I was somehow fabricating something to get an advantage).

      I’d guess it happens all the time and admissions folks just ignore those letters and evaluate the rest of the application. I’d be interested if anyone who has worked in that industry could come by here to weigh in!

    4. Anon41*

      My spouse works on admissions at an Ivy. This does sometimes cause issues. If the person is great it won’t be an issue, but occasionally it is. It’s a bigger deal if someone writes “I want to go to Yale” instead of “Harvard” that the applicant writes. Doesn’t always discount someone but I have heard if the committee are on the fence it can sway people.

      All you can do is control yourself and what you do. I will say it is better to have a recommender who can speak to you than someone with a fancy title. People think oh if Blinken writes me a letter I will get in. If it’s some sample recommendation it doesn’t mean as much as say your boss who was three rungs down from Blinken who writes a glowing recommendation. Same for undergrad and grad school. Unless the big name is writing you the best glowing recommendation don’t have them write it. You won’t stand out.

  7. Annie*

    For #2, I was expecting the company reasoning to be one too many incidents of employees in years past who called in sick the first day they were supposed to return from vacation, so the company tacks on an extra PTO day as a way to plan for things like return flight cancellations, unexpectedly severe jet lag, etc.

    The “you’re supposed to work some hours on a day we’ve never had you come in to work” explanation is bizarre.

    I wonder how many employees put in for four days off in a workweek then call in sick for the fifth day as a workaround?

    1. Hastily Blessed Fritos*

      I mean honestly, proactively tacking on a jet-lag / travel delay day, with the expectation that they get it back if it’s given back if not used, isn’t the worst idea in the world! (Personally I build this into my schedule myself, by returning on a Saturday and having a Sunday to recover, but I know not everyone does.)

    2. Bast*

      I get taking a day extra off if the person misses the day they are supposed to return for whatever reason, but it only makes sense if the person actually misses the day. If they say they are coming back Monday and they actually are back in their seat on Monday morning, there’s no reason to take that day.

      People who do that consistently are annoying and management needs to address it. My husband worked with someone who more often than not, was late (sometimes by up to a week) coming back from his vacations. It got to a point management made it a rule that if Bob stated he was going to be out for say, the week of June 3, no one was allowed to put in for the week of June 10 on the chance that Bob would not be back on time and they’d be short staffed. The better solution would just be to tell Bob if this keeps being an issue he’s done, but instead everyone else had to work around it.

      1. Ama*

        I worked at a fairly large employer for a time (about 10,000 employees) where the vacation time was pretty generous but the sick time was *very* generous — it never expired and accrued at a pretty quick rate so pretty much any employee who had worked there for more than 2-3 years had more sick time than they could use. They had a policy that if you took more than five days off in a row, if you took a sick day immediately before or immediately following it “may” be charged to vacation instead of sick.

        In practice, I never knew anyone who had this policy used against them, and I definitely had a couple of instances where I came back from vacations ill (including the year I came down with mono over Christmas). I have to think they put that in there so if someone *always* seemed to take a sick day onto their vacation — and I have no doubt with that many employees someone had tried it — there was a way to curtail it.

        1. watermelon fruitcake*

          They had a policy that if you took more than five days off in a row, if you took a sick day immediately before or immediately following it “may” be charged to vacation instead of sick.

          My employer has a similar policy but more along the lines of, if you tack on sick or personal time to vacation time or even a holiday without advance notice, you could end up on PTO probation, which puts additional restrictions on how you can use any PTO (we have three categories) for a period of time. It’s a bad policy imho; people get sick when traveling or over holidays all the time, for all sorts of reasons, and personal time, which we do not get much of, is *supposed* to be used when an unexpected health-unrelated emergency comes up (for example, a flight delay).

          So far, the only people that have ever had their PTO use scrutinized have been people who had pretty strong “misuse” patterns, not just a one-off. But the fact that it is in writing as part of the employee handbook troubles me because it means a different manager could come in and start reprimanding people, and they’d be within their rights to do it. We also technically have a policy that if you take off an undefined “too many” Mondays and/or Fridays using sick time, that could put you on probation, too.

        2. I Have RBF*

          Amusingly enough, before Covid I often had a sick day, or three, after my vacations, because I was often traveling or attending a convention that ended up with “con crud”. Now, if I am vigorous with my masking discipline, I don’t. The one time I screwed up with my masking, I got sick… with Covid.

          Most vacations involve traveling, crowds, and sketchy dining. All of these can lead to an increased risk of illness.

    3. OP2*

      I would totally have taken advantage of a loophole like that if I could have! Unfortunately, there was no differentiation between sick and vacation time. It was presented as 2 weeks of vacation and 1 week of sick time, but it was really all just one bucket of PTO. So a Mon-Thur vacation followed by calling in sick on Fri still counted as 6 PTO days.

      1. Anax*

        Oh, that changes things! For what it’s worth, three weeks of vacation and another three weeks of sick time would be fairly reasonable (in the US). Three TOTAL weeks is stingy even without nickel-and-diming you. I hope they’re at least giving you paid holidays, jeepers.

  8. emmelemm*

    There are a ton of crazy things about letter #2, but honestly: why did they “give” three weeks of vacation, only to force you to waste some of the days? Why not just give you two weeks of vacation?

    I mean, I know, I guess, it’s so when they hire you they say “we give you three weeks of vacation!” and not seem completely stingy. Then when you actually *get* there, it’s like, “Wellll, about that…”

    1. Adam*

      At least in the US, “three weeks” of vacation means 15 days of vacation, you don’t have to spend it in weekly chunks. So 15 days of vacation but you have to spend 6 to take off a contiguous Mon-Fri is still noticeably more than 10 days.

    2. Testing*

      The law in my country still harks back to the time when people in office jobs did work (half?) Saturdays. So the number of paid vacation days we get have to cover Saturdays “taken off” as well. It’s not logical but everyone’s aware of it. I wonder if this company has its roots in this country and then somehow has applied this logic also to other, foreign offices. Either way, it should have been made clear when hiring.

      1. Emmy Noether*

        I vaguely remember an employer that had some archaic, weird math around PTO and 6-day weeks in its policy. This company was over 100 years old and the policy negotiated with a union, so that explains why there were some legacy rules. It worked out to the number of days promised during hiring though, so after an initial “huh?!” I shrugged and forgot all about it. It had no impact whatsoever on how days could actually be taken in practice (and the union would have had a fit if it did, I presume).

      2. Sam*

        Yeah, this is a quirk in (at least) Finnish workplaces. We do generally get five weeks off, even accounting for the Saturdays, so it’s not a huge deal, but it is weird and annoying.

      3. JustaTech*

        I just realized that this is a weird quirk of my company – because we have manufacturing on the weekends, if you, a non-weekend employee, take a vacation that wraps around the weekend you have to code it in the system as two separate instances of PTO, so that the system doesn’t charge you for the weekend you wouldn’t have been working anyway.

        But that’s a quirk of ADP, not a nefarious plan by corporate. (Don’t give them any ideas!)

    3. AcademiaNut*

      And they’re actually lying about their vacation offering. If they offer you three weeks of vacation, and their work week is officially six days, then they should be offering 18 days. But they’re offering 15, calling a work week 6 days, and a vacation week 5.

    4. Emmy Noether*

      The real question is: By their own logic, three “weeks” of vacation should be 18 days. But its not, is it?

  9. James*

    I think the rules for LW 1 are/were more common than people think. My SO’s old work had the same rule. She was corporate, but they ran a bunch of stores opened 7 days a week. It was only Monday through Friday vacations needing an extra day. You could take off Tuesday-Monday, and only need to use 5 days. They also needed to work in the stores on black Friday, which consisted of showing up at 5 am, getting in the way for about 4 hours and then going home.

    1. Brain the Brian*

      Yes, but they need to communicate that to candidates before hiring them. And they need to be based in, ya know, actually having people work on Saturdays, which was not happening at the LW’s place of employment.

      1. Myrin*

        Re-reading the letter, I wonder about that last part, actually.

        OP says she worked in “corporate headquarters of a large regional chain” and my first question, not being a native speaker, is: can “chain” refer to anything but some sort of store or food establishment? (It can’t in my language, but I’m not sure about English.)

        Because if it can’t, that means that there were people in the company working Saturdays, since both retail and food service typically do operate then, OP and her coworkers just never saw those people because they were physically located elsewhere. I can easily see some top dog deciding that policies covering the ground workers would apply to everyone else, too, without actually thinking it through.

        It doesn’t make sense for people who work totally separately from these locations where they literally never have anyone working Saturdays (which sounds like the OP’s case), and it’s downright shady to never mention it anywhere, AND it doesn’t make sense in the specific way it was done (why do you have to take PTO in cases of a full week but not when you go from middle of the week to the middle of the following week?), but if it was like I’m musing here, it’s at least understandable where the policy originally came from.

        1. Cyborg Llama Horde*

          That makes sense. I could maybe imagine “chain” referring to, say, a realtor with offices all over the country, but that feels like a stretch. I think you’re right that it’s tied to the fact that they have establishments that are open on Saturdays. (But then they should be giving 18 days for three weeks of vacation, as noted above, or just have different policies for the different work.)

        2. Parcae*

          I think you’re on to something here, in the sense that this goofy policy is much more likely to arise in a company where a decent proportion of the employees ARE expected to work on Saturdays. “Chain” can describe a lot of different things (you can have a chain of restaurants but also a chain of hair salons or gyms), but it sort of implies the kind of business that’s likely to be open on the weekends.

          Alison makes the point that the policy to work on Saturdays could have been real once upon a time, and that part at least seems reasonable to me if the corporate office supports locations that are also open on Saturdays. (Although I would never want to work a six-day workweek! If I’m required to work on Saturdays, at least give me a weekday off instead!)

        3. OP2*

          Yep, it was a retail chain. The people who worked in the stores were hourly, non-exempt, and unionized, so their benefits were negotiated by the union and totally separate from the policies for office workers.

          The company was founded in the 40s, so I can imagine there was a time in which the retail stores and the corporate office actually had the same opening days and hours, and the PTO policy for corporate was a vestige of the times before retail stores were open 7 days a week (and before the retail workers unionized). Though why they didn’t adjust their policies with the changing times is a mystery.

          1. Brain the Brian*

            It makes sense for store workers, but not for people in the chain’s corporate offices. You’re right that this is not standard for any industry’s office workers, as far as I know.

    2. Coverage Associate*

      Yes, I can see situations where weekend days count differently for PTO purposes, especially in retail where weekends are likely to be the busier days for the business. An office worker taking Monday through Friday off is presumably actually vacationing Saturday through next Sunday and is unavailable for 9 calendar days, whereas someone taking Tuesday through Monday off is only unavailable for 7 calendar days. Hopefully, large retailers do have weekend management coverage if executives are going to be unreachable, but that should only apply to people who would actually have to come in for a weekend emergency.

      I’m thinking like how the CEO was on vacation at the time of the Deepwater Horizon disaster, and I think there was a similar scandal about a prime minister not cutting a foreign vacation short for a crisis at home. Had the CEO been climbing Everest (and so unreachable), there would have to be another executive to stand in, but not the whole executive suite. As that CEO learned, in some executive jobs, if you’re high enough up, you can have even a tropical island vacation (where a lower ranking employee might not be reachable by the office) cut short.

      1. EvilQueenRegina*

        That was the foreign secretary Dominic Raab who stayed in Crete rather than returning to the UK to deal with the evacuations when the Taliban advanced in Afghanistan.

        1. Le le lemon*

          Or former Australian Prime Minister Scott “Scomo” Morrison, who hid his holiday/tried to remain on holiday in Fiji whilst a large part of the east coast of Australia was experiencing deadly bushfires in early 2020.

            1. EvilQueenRegina*

              I had actually forgotten about that (because 2020), although now I see it I do vaguely remember something about that. Can’t believe there were two of them.

      2. Person from the Resume*

        This still makes no sense.

        An office worker taking Monday through Friday off is presumably actually vacationing Saturday through next Sunday* and is unavailable for 9 calendar days,
        … This person misses 2 Saturdays so should be charged 7 “work” days as PTO. The Sundays do not count.

        whereas someone taking Tuesday through Monday off is only unavailable for 7 calendar days.
        … This person misses 1 Saturday so should be charged 6 “work” days as PTO because the Sunday is not a work day.

        THE POLICY STILL IS NOT LOGICAL.**

        * I would not want to vacation Saturday through the following Sunday and works both days around a long vacation. I like being home at least partially the the day before and the day after my vacation.

        ** I was in the military. The overarching leave policy assumed we were always on call even when we were assigned to work staffs and schools that were closed on the weekends and had jobs that had little expectation of being called in while off. We had to take weekends and holidays as leave of we were not in the area. It sucked sometimes (when we had to take leave when the office was closed and no one else was working), but at least the policy was consistent in that if you were out of town it was a day of leave whether Saturday, Sunday, holiday and no matter what day you started and ended your leave

        1. Pastor Petty Labelle*

          Wow, I worked in a office while on Medical Hold. We just called it liberty from Friday to Monday. No leave lost.

          Even if the company was a retail chain — and I believe it was — corporate can have different leave policies than the stories themselves. Its just bonkers that because once the company worked half days, it now counts as a day of PTO. We moved past those half day Saturdays for office jobs, time to update the policies to the 21st century.

      3. Not Australian*

        Depending on conditions, it may actually be easier to contact someone on Everest than someone in the next street…

      4. Brain the Brian*

        Let us not forget then-New Jersey Governor Chris Christie’s family beach day after he ordered the statewide closure of beaches before a hurricane and kicked everyone else off. Politicians and their vacations are always stupid.

    3. bamcheeks*

      Ohhh, this is the way it would make sense to me— if LW works in the office function of a retail firm, and therefore there are some aspects of retail-expectations like weekend working that don’t apply to the office workers but are still part of the culture.

  10. Artemesia*

    The fat thing. Good grief. This is one that deserves a ‘oh yeah, I’m really doing that.’ response. Precisely the kind of thong that needs more pushback.

    1. Allonge*

      Also, how is it fun? I get that for people who wanted to try it, it may be cool to have it on the company’s dime, but fun is… quite a claim.

      Get your blood pressure tested, it’s hilarious! How about this amazing eye exam, you won’t be able to stop talking about it?

      1. DJ Abbott*

        I assumed it was marketing “fun.” Like TV commercials that try to make laundry detergent sound like a party. There aren’t enough eyerolls in the world!

      2. Crencestre*

        …And this year, folks, we’ve added a new fun activity – a free exam by a proctologist!

      3. Babra*

        Honestly, I’d find it interesting and entertaining at regardless of my weight. I’m curious what line of work / industry LW 1 is in.

        1. Curiouser and Curiouser*

          Yeah, it’s something I really want to do – not for weight loss issues, but to have a better understanding of my body and how it functions. And it would be great to do it on someone else’s dime cuz it costs a pretty penny. But I also understand that not everyone will feel that way, so it’s probably best to leave that off the work conference!

      4. Cinnamon Stick*

        I don’t think it’s cool to have on the company’s dime. I think office wellness should stick to areas that don’t open people up to judgement from anyone else.

        An office I worked in did group Weight Watchers. I didn’t participate despite the pressure, but I heard from those who did. They did a group weigh-in at each meeting, which meant if the weight went up, people got grouchy trying to find the person who dared gain weight.

        Another office did a hydration event with recipes for fruit/spice infusions, which was actually fun. Others have done opt-in yoga or meditation sessions.

        1. allathian*

          I’ve actually attended a WW group that met at my office. It worked for me because I wanted to lose about 20 lbs before trying for a pregnancy, and I did, over a period of about 6 months. The atmosphere was very supportive, and we all agreed that “what happens at WW stays at WW” and didn’t discuss our diets or weight with anyone else at the office.

          There was no pressure on anyone to attend, all my employer did was to provide the space for us to meet. We paid for our own attendance and clocked out for the meetings, and didn’t acknowledge the success (or not) of the group in any way.

    2. Freya*

      Even if I did want to do it, the fact that it’s at a work-related thing brings up the question of whether my workplace might have access to the results, either accidentally or intentionally, and the potential consequences of that.

      1. KitKat*

        Same. I’m not really interested in this, but I am interested in some fitness and exercise science topics. But I would have no interest in anyone I work with knowing any stats about me. They don’t need to know my precise 5k time and they certainly don’t need to know my precise BF percentage. Good grief.

    4. Alton Brown's Evil Twin*

      I’m guessing it’s “traditional” because your company is run by former wrestling or gymnastics coaches?

    5. AtoZ*

      I don’t know, maybe my perspective is skewed, but my office offers a lot of medical things for employees. We work long hours, and I do truly see it as a benefit. It’s always a third party that comes in and does them – they’ll set up a conference room or two and put up the privacy screens between stations. The most recent one was a mini physical, where they measured height, weight, cholesterol, blood pressure, and maybe a few other things I’m forgetting. They gave a packet with general nutrition tips, exercise and stretching ideas, and even some swag, like a jump rope and water bottle. We also offer flu shots, covid shots, blood donations, etc.

      These are truly opt in, where the company will send out an e-mail and you have to sign up and select a time to go. I have no idea who of my colleagues went (although I did see some in line but now I truly don’t remember) and none of the metrics got recorded – they were just written on your packet to take home, and none were given to the company. I wouldn’t have gotten any annual physical otherwise, so this was much needed!

      2. Alton Brown's Evil Twin*

        Well the difference is that your company is offering a whole suite of normal health and wellness benefits, on-site, to the entire workforce. Whereas OP’s company was just offering this one thing, in the context of an off-site work meeting, and then describing it as “fun”.

      3. STG*

        We have something yearly as well that includes this. Optional although if you go through all of the wellness events, you do receive an extra vacation day. Our PTO policies are already pretty good so it feels truly optional.

      4. Em*

        My workplace does this too, and it’s so popular you have to sign up the minute the event is announced or you won’t get a spot. They offer eye exams, dermatology exams, physicals, massages, spine health exercise class, yoga, etc. They also organize blood and platelet donations. What’s weird about this is that it’s offered at an offsite, at what sounds like a teambuilding, so there’s likely going to be a lot more chatter around who’s attending and maybe even sharing of results, which could make someone who’s insecure about their weight (for whatever reason) feel quite uncomfortable.

    6. Sparkle Llama*

      We recently had this offered at work as part of the wellness program, but we have a variety of wellness things throughout the year during the workday and most are attended by less than 10% of the staff so it is much less obvious that you are sitting this particular activity out which seems different than an offsite retreat. I know that no one in my department did it and we all thought it was weird. I think someone on the wellness committee wanted this offered quarterly and the committee compromised on once. We do also employ some people in jobs with rather robust physical fitness tests at hire so we do have a reasonable number of people who I could see being excited about this.

    7. Thomas*

      My employer, a local government, did it. BUT: It was in the office during normal office hours. It was private. With the caveat that I don’t know what every team leader said to their team, it was clearly optional. This is the UK and my employer doesn’t have any involvement in my healthcare so that concern is removed. Finally, promoting sport and leisure to the general public is part of my employer’s remit so something like this with staff could be seen as on-message.

  11. Keyboard Cowboy*

    100 years, and 100 more to come! Alison’s got a picture of the spicy food thief in the attic.

  13. Anax*

    On LW2 – It’s California, once again!

    Well… it would probably take a court case to REALLY hash it out. But in California, all PTO is considered “earned wages” – which means an employer can’t take unused PTO away, any more than they can take back your paycheck. PTO can’t expire, and it can’t be withheld.

    So… in my layman’s opinion, this would probably be illegal under California law.

    Your employer can deduct for actual expenses you agreed to, like health insurance, but they can’t decide there’s actually a secret thirteenth month that they’ve never mentioned before, solely for the purpose of deducting money from your pay.

    Since in California, PTO is part of your wage, it seems like the same rule would apply – they can’t decide that there are secret extra workdays which exist only to take PTO away. Especially when they’re enforcing it inconsistently, which pretty much proves there’s no business need!

    (We also don’t allow deductions for uniforms, dine-and-dashing customers, and other expenses that are a predictable cost of doing business, which might also be relevant.)

    Not useful unless you happen to be in California, LW2, but potentially interesting nonetheless.

    1. Tupelohoneyln*

      Maine also has a earned time off law as of 2021.
      I would guess that it is modeled at least somewhat after California despite us being very different states as far as economies and demographics go.

  14. BlueberryGirl*

    #4: For whatever it might be worth, I worked in college admissions (all be it very briefly) and during that time, I absolutely saw letters of reference with errors- wrong school, wrong names, all sorts of things. And you know? We basically ignored it. We assumed the reference writer made an error (people have to write so many of these things, errors are kinda inevitable) and didn’t count it against the applicant. Don’t know how other schools handled it, but we just shrugged it off.

    1. Anonymous Demi ISFJ*

      I work in admissions now and I absolutely agree. There would have to be other suspicious things in an application to make me care about wrong student or school names in rec letters.

      Students submitting a form essay that references a completely different school are another thing altogether…

    3. recovering admissions counselor*

      Just chiming in as another former admissions counselor to second this. Especially if all of the other things in the letter were true based on the rest of the application, you’d just think “oh, weird” and move on.

      If they did have an issue with it, they probably would have reached out to you or your counselor to ask for another letter, but since many schools require/accept two letters anyway, they would have likely just focused on the other one.

    4. badmitten*

      I currently work in Masters admissions and yeah, this wouldn’t raise any alarms–I might even think it was a nickname of some kind. If we were really concerned but it was otherwise a good candidate we’d email the recommender.

      Also, not directly related to the letter, but it’s important to keep in mind depending on where you’re applying, often there are many more qualified people than spots available. I went to an “elite” school freshman year, then a state school (couldn’t afford the elite school) and then got into a top rated world-wide university for my PhD.

      1. Rebelx*

        Yeah, I think often people don’t really grasp the numbers. Like, there’s an idea that if you’re the best in your high school, you “should” be able to get into the best colleges. Some people even feel entitled to it. But there are probably hundreds of thousands of high schools in the US? Each of which has at least a few students with excellent grades and extracurriculars who is vying to get into an Ivy League or similarly prestigious school. There just aren’t enough spots for all of the qualified students to get into the top schools.

        I was one of the top students at my school. I almost didn’t apply to some of the schools I eventually was accepted at because they weren’t as high on the rankings. Then, I got waitlisted at my top choices (which I didn’t even consider to be “stretch” schools; I was flat-out rejected by my “stretch” schools) and I was VERY disappointed. When you’re young and in an academically competitive environment, it can feel like if you don’t get into the “right” school, your entire future is messed up, and it can be hard to have perspective on the situation. In retrospect, however, the school I ended up at was still very good academically, probably a better fit for me in non-academic aspects, and set me on the path to where I am in my career and life today, which I am pretty happy with, so I wish I had a better perspective on things at the time.

    5. A nonny mouse*

      Yeah, I know for a fact that one of my younger sister’s teachers made this exact mistake (for a different letter, she handed us a copy and that’s how we found out) and my sister got into a lot of great schools.

    6. Orchida*

      Also in Admissions here!

      I see errors ALL THE TIME. Wrong name, referencing the wrong classes or activities, and often you can tell by a mismatch with the use of “he” and “she” that the letter writer has pulled up an old letter to copy & paste and forgot to update the pronouns. I realize you can’t always tell 100% from the pronouns, but a lot of the time you can make a reasonable guess when the pronouns don’t match the other pronouns provided by the applicant. Another error that indicates a copy & paste issue, when the name throughout has been “Mary” but then there’s one sentence that refers to “John’s” final project.

      I would say 98% of the time, I chalk this up to the fact that teachers and guidance counselors are overworked and are doing the best they can to churn out the number of letters of recommendation that they are asked for.

      The other 2% of the time is when it comes to admitting for an honors college or scholarship — these applicants tend to be qualified across the board with high scores and grades, and then we’re really looking to the letter of recommendation for that added tidbit that will tip the scales, and then the errors can undermine the confidence that the letter truly speaks to the student — we don’t hold it as a mark *against* the applicant, but it’s harder to count it as a mark *for* the applicant either.

      1. PrincessFlyingHedgehog*

        I’ve worked in admissions as well, and as long as everything else was solid, this type of mistake would have been ignored.

      2. Adultier adult*

        I’ve accidentally done this for my students- We get asked to do 20-30 of them in a very short turn around- I have 5-6 starter templates that I customize for the student asking- I’m certain a wrong name or he/she has been left at some point.

    7. ProfessorTeapots*

      I was going to chime in with something similar: if the last name’s the same but the first name is different I would just assume that the student changed their first name (which in my experience is not uncommon as students move from high school to college).

  15. NotSarah*

    LW 1 – My old office had a wellness challenge during which people tracked the number of servings of fruits and veggies they ate each week. Not a huge deal, but we had lots of different body types, fitness levels, etc and it struck me as pretty off base. Anything diet or weight loss is NSFW.

    1. Justme, The OG*

      I’m a fat person who loves fruits and vegetables. I absolutely love salads. I would still never participate in that kind of thing.

    2. Apples and Oranges*

      Where’s the line though I wonder? My office has an on-site gym that’s offered as a perk and I wouldn’t want that taken away because its “weight-loss related.” There’s also several other wellness benefits that you can use if you want.

      It seems like these things are okay as a perk when it’s structure where no one really knows who is participating in what and there’s no pressure to join. And become problematic when there’s an expectation to join or a lot of visibility.

      1. Bryce*

        Yeah, I’d say “tracking”, formally or informally, is where it crosses that line.

        1. Presea*

          +1. There are many simple things that can benefit a wide variety of people if they’re available. But I struggle to think of anything a workplace could offer that would be beneficial to 100% of all potential employees when you take things like medical conditions into account, and coercing people into doing “healthy” things can often cause more problems than it solves.

        2. I Have RBF*

          Yup. Sure, go ahead and offer a gym (that I can’t use.) Big deal. But measuring and tracking anything about my body? No. Not happening. I don’t care whether it’s blood work, BMI, servings of anything that I eat, etc. Not my company’s business.

    3. Rainy*

      Yeah, I wouldn’t enjoy that at all. I don’t put my eating habits out there for scrutiny by people who aren’t me, especially coworkers. I don’t like eating lunch in a group because I don’t want to give people the opportunity to comment on my food choices.

      And no, I don’t eat a diet of nothing but chicken nuggets and fries or whatever the assumption usually is–I’m allergic to poultry, in fact.

      1. Anax*

        Honestly, a diet of nothing but chicken nuggets and fries is itself likely to be a disability, rather than childishness or incompetence. “Avoidant/Restrictive Food Intake Disorder” is the particularly severe form, most commonly associated with autism.

        One more reason we should all just not comment on others’ diets, honestly.

        (Embarrassingly, I usually struggle to eat at all unless someone physically puts a plate of food in front of me; the added sensory input is awful if I’m already overloaded.

        It’s one reason it really helps to work from home; I don’t get home at five pm having not eaten all day because the fluorescent lights and office conversations made putting food in my mouth unbearable. I can cook, and I’m not even a picky eater, just… not fond of the ‘eating’ part.)

    4. Cinnamon Stick*

      Mine is constantly doing step challenges. Also there are signs that say, “burn calories, not electricity, take the stairs.” on the elevator, which is ableist as all hell.

      1. I AM a Lawyer*

        I have to take the elevator due to a health condition, and this would make me so mad.

      2. basically functional*

        Ugh. The elevators in our parking garage used to be out of service all the time and someone “helpfully” posted one of those signs. So outrageously rude to people who can’t take the stairs! (Or, like, I technically can, but it causes me pain and I should be allowed to make my life as pain-free as possible without being accused of laziness and/or immorality.) Not to mention the egregiousness of insulting people for wanting to use the elevators for their intended purpose rather than just, you know, fixing the damn elevators. I assume someone complained, because it was taken down the day after I saw it (before I had a chance to figure out who to complain to).

    5. Hrodvitnir*

      Yikes. As far as diet stuff goes, this is about as chill as you can get, and a vast majority of people could do with eating more fruit and vegetables… but I cannot see any way for this to be a “wellness challenge” without encouraging toxic food and body discussions.

      The amount that people seriously cannot decouple “many people lack micronutrients and fibre in their diet and it could significantly improve your life to eat more fruits and vegetables” from “we should all be in starvation mode all the time or be ashamed, also if your vegetables have anything added it somehow doesn’t count” is seriously concerning, and a really unpleasant mindset to be forced to stew in.

  16. learnedthehardway*

    OP#1 – “No Thank you!” is a complete sentence. Follow that up by “I only discuss my health with my doctor” if anyone tries to pressure you. A further follow up of “Doesn’t it put the company at a liability risk if quasi-medical services are being imposed on employees?” would make a good further f/up, in case you feel a need to pull out counter-pressure tactics.

    OP#3 – Never put the “honest truth” about why you are leaving a job in writing. And be careful about what you say in exit interviews. A) you don’t know how the information will be used, and it’s highly likely to come back to bite you when you need a reference – your “honest truth” is going to be reported as “negativity” by whoever takes your criticism personally. B) It’s unlikely to be the bombshell you think it is – management already likely knows what the issues are. They lack the interest or will to change things, or they already would have done so. C) if you couldn’t effect change while you were at the company, it is highly improbable that you will inspire that change after you’re gone. I would nod and smile, and go on to live your best work life elsewhere.

    OP#4 – If you had good grades that met or surpassed the early acceptance range at the schools, but didn’t get into any of the programs to which you applied, it would be worth looking into further. Eg. the program my son applied to expected at least 85% average on several final year high school subjects for admission, and anyone who got over 94% was virtually guaranteed to get early acceptance. If someone didn’t get early acceptance despite surpassing the 94%, then it would make sense to investigate. But someone who got 85% might not have gotten in at all.

    That said, I think most programs have application numbers tied to every document now, likely exactly for the reasons that sometimes referees get a name wrong. So it probably didn’t affect your chances.

    OP#5 – I would talk about how you have progressed steadily at the company (either in terms of roles or in terms of the scope of responsibilities that you have taken on over time), and would say that you feel that future opportunities will be more limited (because of slow business growth, people not planning to retire, too many great candidates for the few senior roles available, etc). You’re also realizing that you need to make a decision now about whether to be a life-long employee at the company or not, and you feel that you need to expand your horizons, achieve your full potential, and find new challenges. Then, pivot to what you’re moving towards, what you want to achieve, and why you’re interested in the hiring company’s role/culture/business. You can add a bit about wanting competitive compensation in there, if you want, but I wouldn’t belabor the point. After all, you don’t want to be low-balled on your next role with a new company. Instead, do your research on your function in your industry and your geographic area, so you know what a competitive salary range is in your market. That way, you’ll know what to look for if/when they want to talk salary expectations.

  17. Agent Diane*

    OP3. Writing those 700 words has probably been very satisfying for you, which is a good reason to write it. Go all in venting on it as an act of catharsis.

    Then do the letter you will actually send, which will be a couple of sentences. Send that simple one.

    In UK politics, MPs are prone to sending 400 word resignation letters which they then publish by sending to the papers and posting online. That causes no end of entertainment for the Westminster Village, and might influence a leadership challenge etc. But Westminster is a silly place. Don’t copy it in the real world.

  18. Becky S*

    #3, I’m retired now but in my career I changed companies, fields, moved across state lines and ran into people from past jobs. Always leave on good terms.

  19. Lost in Translation*

    What LW2 described is actually legal and very common in my country. This is how it works: The law describes weekly work time as “maximum 45 hours in a week” and weekly holiday as “uninterrupted 24 hours of time”. So, only one day of the week is weekly holiday and the remaining six are work days. The employer may choose, as a benefit to its employees, to have 9-hour work days through Monday to Friday and let the employees have Saturdays off. Although the emloyees do not work on Saturdays, it is still a work day, and you cannot deduct it from the used PTO. The problem is not that this one day is “added”, it is the fact that there is no legal grounds to “deduct” it from the used PTO. You can only deduct Saturdays if they correspond to national holidays.

    2. Irish Teacher.*

      Hmm, I wonder if either the boss is from your country or the company has headquarters in your country and they are trying to apply the norms of one country to another without realising that while people in your country know the situation, people elsewhere do not have the same expectations and therefore should be informed.

      1. Lost in Translation*

        That’s what I thought too. The Labor Law is not perfect, but it protects the employees really well, so I hope they didn’t just take what suits them and leave out the rest.

    1. Bruce*

      Regarding your handle “VP of Monitoring…” The HR director for our team makes a point of linking to us on LinkedIn… she’s actually pretty reasonable and at my near retirement age I don’t have anything to hide so I accepted the link :-)

  21. Katie*

    The job I started at many years ago required us to work 45 hours. We were all hourly and so to get our full pay we had to work our 45 hours.

    I knew going in that was the deal, however many of my coworkers claimed that they did not. Two years or so after I started, they got rid of that policy.

    We only had to use 40 hours of PTO to get our full 45 hour pay (PTO hourly rate was higher).

  22. MeTwoToo*

    #4 I had a good friend in undergrad applying to Grad school for her Masters. She wasn’t accepted to 9 out of 10 choices. She found out one of her professors wrote in the rec letter that she wasn’t ‘responsible or mature enough for Graduate level work’. He never told her anything. She only knew because the last packet was misaddressed and came back to her. She’d already been rejected by all the others so she opened the letters.

    1. bamcheeks*

      This is so crappy when you have to pay for those applications! He should have just told her he wasn’t able to be a reference for her. At least she’d have known!

      1. lok*

        It sounds like the 10th was the one that came back to her and never arrived at the school she was applying to. As someone who reads grad school applications, though, a bad letter of rec like this would be so strange and out of place (at least for our program) that if all other components of the application are good, all other letters are good, and the student’s responsibility and maturity are well evidenced elsewhere on the application, it wouldn’t necessarily be a nail in the coffin. We might write it off as a weird letter writer.

    3. Bruce*

      What a discovery to make! To me that is a violation of the ethics and trust that you would expect from an educator. In my opinion it is ethical to refuse to provide a reference but to secretly savage a student who trusts you is despicable.

      1. Retired Vulcan Raises 1 Grey Eyebrow*

        Exactly. That professor was cruel, unprofessional and outright odd.
        Did he have some grudge or prejudice against her?

  23. NYC Man*

    Not even a question in my mind – the resignation letter should contain “X date is my last day. Thank you for this opportunity, all the best” and nothing else. It is in no ones best interest for the OP to give a critique of the company. At best, it’s a waste of your time to write such a letter and at worst, as others have said, it could (and probably will) come back to haunt you later on.

    I will concede that if you truly care about the company, the temptation to try one more time to fix things is very strong, but resist that.

    Good luck on starting your own company! Perhaps rather than sending that letter to the company you’re just leaving, send it to yourself and put a reminder in your phone to read it a year to the date of your launch date. It can be a reality check for you – are you doing any of the things that you found intolerable at the old place? If so, make adjustments! This way, you are creating an escape hatch for yourself to not be like the place that you used to work for. :)

  24. Delta Delta*

    #3 – Why use 700 words when you could spell out ‘I QUIT’ in cod? Sometimes brevity is your best tool.

  25. Formerly Ed*

    I once worked in a small office where the owner required that all vacations or PTO must be within a calendar week, Monday-Friday. My daughter was graduating from Harvard (!) on a Saturday, with parent activities scheduled on Friday evening. We also planned to spend a few days touring Boston while we were there. We were going to be driving halfway across the country to attend, so I informed the boss that I would be absent from Thursday of one week to Wednesday of the next week. When he pointed out that all vacations must be taken within a calendar week, I said, “OK; let me know when I get back if I still have a job or not.”

    I returned to my job the following Thursday, and no more was said about it.

    2. OP2*

      That is fascinating! My uncle worked for a company (decades ago) that initially offered no paid vacation. Eventually, they gave everyone two weeks of vacation, but people would usually just take a day or two at a time to give themselves a long weekend. The owner got annoyed that people were taking long weekends, so changed the policy to state that people had to use their vacation in one-week chunks, Monday through Friday.

      I don’t think anyone had the cajones to challenge it. Huzzah to you for standing your ground!

  26. Blarg*

    #3: I worked at a job that came with some inherent safety concerns – not the kind subject to regulation. The org slowly decreased the measures they’d taken to mitigate the danger. There was An Incident that revealed even more changes, and management basically said to suck it up. I quit. In my resignation letter I wrote that we were planning for best case scenario, not worst case, and that seemed bad.

    A year or so later, the worst case happened. Several people were killed. I will always have anger and sorrow over it, but I do not have regret. I am glad I said why I was leaving and wish they’d taken things more seriously.

    2. Slow Gin Lizz*

      I similarly wrote a final email to the board of the nonprofit I just left, because there were some serious management issues that I felt the board had a right to be aware of. It’s a NP that works in the rare disease sector and all of the board members either have the disease or have family members with the disease, so they have a personal stake in the issue in a way that stakeholders for a lot of other orgs and companies don’t necessarily have. But here’s why I did it:
      1. I am concerned over the future of the org
      2. There was one lying and manipulative c-level exec who was doing bad things (exactly like Petunia from yesterday’s letter)
      3. The head of the org didn’t seem to care or notice that our Petunia was doing bad things
      4. I and my then-boss had spent months trying to get the head of the org and the other execs to do something about our Petunia (nothing was ever done, at least not so far)
      5. I’d had an exit interview with my grandboss and mentioned why I was worried about Petunia being a part of the org (and while I think grandboss took my concerns fairly seriously, esp since boss and I had been voicing them all along, she was fairly new and understandably reluctant to rock the boat at this stage of her employment)
      6. As far as boss and I could tell, the head of the org was telling the board how fantastic Petunia is and how she was going to get us lots of money, which was either a fabrication on his part or a result of Petunia managing to convince him that it was true
      7. I had the backing of my then-boss to write the email to the board

      And these last two are the *most* important reasons why I felt it was safe for me to email the board:
      8. My then-boss and her former (retired) boss had both told me many, many times that they absolutely would give me a terrific reference for future jobs (which was good b/c the head of the org lost his mind when I emailed the board and said he’d never give me a reference, which of course is fine b/c I don’t need one from him); I also have plenty of good references from previous jobs
      9. I was leaving the NP sector and the rare disease sector for a very secure position at a university and the chances of any of this coming back to bite me seems quite slim

      All this being said, OP, I think if you really are concerned about safety (of actual workers, like Blarg says they were, or of the safety of the organization) and if you are *not* concerned about your own safety (future references, possibly needing to return to this job at some point, etc), I could see a case for maaaaaaaybe writing such an email, but I’d say to first give them a chance to do an exit interview with you. Your resignation letter should be brief, as AAM and others have said, and then if for some reason you still think you need to let the place know about the issues, keep it brief and positive and send it to only those who need to know. By positive I mean don’t say, “This part of my job totally sucked” or “Amber is an AH,” but rather say things like, “It’d be better if this part of my job had more XX” or “I found that Amber’s communication style didn’t mesh well with mine.” You know, stuff that’s not mean spirited or could come back to bite you in the butt.

      Or you could do as some other commenters here have suggested (and Captain Awkward just did yesterday!) and write the letter (in Word and not in your email), print it, and safely burn it and forget about it. Sometimes the process of writing the letter will help you get out your frustrations or realize that you probably shouldn’t send it. I did the same thing with mine, and then after reading it about a hundred times and sitting on it for hours (and sending it first to my editor mother, just to see what she thought about it, and talking it through with my boss too), I realized that I really did need to send the email because the recipients needed to hear what I had to say. Did the board listen to me? I think mostly not (though I know at least one of them is going to keep a closer eye on Petunia), but other staffers did and have been texting me ever since to thank me for writing it.

      If you really do feel you need to send the email, I do suggest you at least write it NOT in your email first and sit on it for a few hours or even days if you can to be really certain it says what you want to say and that you really do need to say it. Good luck, OP, with your resignation and your new business!

  27. HailRobonia*

    Here is an ideal body fat analysis for work:

    “Your human body contains fat. End of analysis.”

    1. Managing While Female*

      I read this in a Neutral Janet from the Good Place voice and lol’d.

  28. 1-800-BrownCow*

    LW #3, I’ll echo Alison, with exclamation. Noooo, don’t do it!!!! Nothing good is going to come from you writing a 700-word critique of the company in your resignation letter. You won’t be helping yourself or the company. You are leaving and honestly, your feedback at that point doesn’t mean much to them and likely the response from management after reading your critique’s is “good riddance”. Basically what you’re saying to the company is “Bye, I’m leaving for a better opportunity. And by the way, here’s a list of everything I think you’re doing wrong and need to change or improve that I didn’t have the guts to address with you until I had one foot out the door.” Okay, maybe you did bring up concerns and they were ignored (you didn’t mention either way if that was the case or not), but if you have and nothing was done previously, they’re not going to be interested in doing so now, when the employee that has the issues is no longer an employee there.

    Even though you seem confident that your done with this company and won’t ever cross paths with them in your new business venture, you just never know. Maybe a spouse of someone in upper management, who heard all about it, might have reason to do business with you. Or someone else there leaves the company and ends up in a similar business venture as yourself. Or due to unforeseen changes in your future, you may need to change direction again and find yourself back in the same field. Trust me, you never know.

  29. pally*

    For #3: whenever someone asks me a “should I do this action?” question, I ask them “what is the reaction you expect to see as a result of this action?” Given what you know about the situation and people involved, walk me through how this action will actually result in the reaction you expect.

    What does the LW hope will happen as a result of submitting their feedback? A change in management practices? If one letter of feedback were enough to enact that kind of change, it would have happened long before this. Management that values feedback solicits it from their employees. They don’t wait for it to arrive in a resignation letter.

    It may feel good to submit this feedback, but nothing will change. And you never know what folks will think of you-and who they might tell-about what was said in the letter.

    Not worth going to the trouble of writing it.

    1. Jennifer Strange*

      Yup, this is the kind of thing that sounds satisfying in theory, but just isn’t worth it in practice.

      1. Georgia Carolyn Mason*

        It’s actually fairly satisfying to write and not send. Just keep it off your work computer!

  30. Little Owl*

    So, for #2, what does “3 weeks of PTO” actually mean – in terms of number of days off? Because I thought it was supposed to be based on the number of days you work in the week. (Or that’s how it works where I am). So this policy would have been slightly less infuriating (although still very strange) if they’d got 18 days of leave, based on the supposed 6 day working week. But if they only got 15, that sounds immoral and maybe potentially illegal, then because of the discrepancy? Depends where you are, I’m sure, but it sounds like it should be!

    1. OP2*

      The “3 weeks of PTO” translated to 15 days in practice. So logically, that indicates a 5-day work week. The whole “You’re actually supposed to work 6 days a week, but we are kind enough not to enforce that” reasoning was really bizarre. Legal where I live (the US, and not California), but definitely crappy and mean-spirited.

  31. Ana Gram*

    We have to do an InBody analysis every year at our work physicals. The occupational health provider is weirdly focused on BMI and useless stats. They had me the print out, I had it back and tell them to shred it, and we all move on.

    If it’s not mandatory, skip it.

    1. Bella Ridley*

      My work also offers optional InBody analysis every year or every other year and they’re wildly popular. Yeah, the BMI stuff is there, but most people like seeing the muscle mass analysis and its changes.

      1. Squidhead*

        Yeah, my gym offers it as a paid add-on, so getting a free scan would be nice if someone was into that, in the same way that any other free thing would be enjoyed by some and not by others. But at the gym it can also track your trends (because you’ve done the scan there before). I assume doing it at a work event you’d have to manually compare to your previous results unless the software is more networked than I thought. I’d definitely regard it as optional.

    2. 20 Points for the Copier*

      My gym does them, but I learned early on that they are unreliable – and particularly so in some cases. I have some foreign material in my body that wigs out the scanner and gives a very inaccurate result. Not necessarily something I’d want to share at a new job.

  32. TyphoidMary*

    LW3 I usually write two resignation letters: One where I say everything I want to say…and one that I actually send.

    1. Juicebox Hero*

      I’ve done this. I see it as akin to writing out a long, nasty letter to a former sweetheart where you list all of their flaws and how much you hate them and the million and one little things they did to piss you off – then burning it. It lets you vent your spleen in a way that doesn’t harm your reputation or get spread around their whole business network.

  33. Yup*

    LW#3: Write all your criticisms down on paper, fold it in 4, and take a match to it. You’ll feel better and you won’t potentially burn a bridge you never saw coming down the road.

    Eons ago, I worked with a client consultant who insulted and berated our creative team and spent presentation meetings playing with their pen and sighing. A few years later, I was at a new job and overheard they’d interviewed that same consultant for a position that would make him my boss. I never darted out of my chair so fast to set the record straight. He never knew why he didn’t get a call back and could probably not have picked me out of a lineup. But he burned that bridge and no one who had to put up with him was ever going to forget it.

    Keep your nose clean. This isn’t calling out bad or unethical behaviour–this is you wanting to unload. You never, ever know who may stand in your way (or clear the path) down the line.

  34. Shoot another shot, try to stop the feeling*

    OP4 — a therapist is the solution here. I don’t say this with judgement, but it’s not at all normal or healthy to be this hung up about this a decade later.

  35. Fitness Nerd*

    My work has an InBody machine in the onsite (free, nice) gym and you can get scanned 4 times a year. I love it. It gives me information about whether I’m reaching muscle gain goals, and a body composition analysis at a doctor’s office costs a lot of money that I wouldn’t normally spend.

    If they’re not forcing people to do it I don’t see why there’s an issue with it being available to anyone who wants that information. Of course I can see why it would be a problem if it’s being communicated as mandatory, too.

    1. Justme, The OG*

      But there is a difference in it being available in your gym and it being scheduled as a possibility at a work offsite meeting.

      1. Malarkey01*

        Ehh I’m less bothered by that. This is an offsite in another country and includes outdoor activities, work meetings, and group meals. If they’re going someone that is like a spa/wilderness retreat having this offered is way less everyone step out of the strategy meeting for your scan and more this is a thing the center had available and they’ll be doing scans from 3-4 on Tuesday if interested.

    2. Hrodvitnir*

      Because the chances they’ve arranged something like that and it comes with zero side of normalisation of unhealthy fixation on body types is low.

      It’s more a symptom than a cause IMO, and OP can’t do much about it – they can just say no without shame and hope for the best.

      FTR I’d love a free body distribution analysis (preferably a DEXA scan but I’d do this too for funsies) – but as a hypothetical, if the price was being surrounded by discussion about it with all the societal mess that comes with it, that’s an easy pass.

  36. Long-Term Employee Still Looking*

    LW#5: As a long-term employee who is still looking, until I got my first interview, I was convinced that wanting to leave a my current job would be viewed as a mark against me. I was catastrophizing to the point of paralysis.

    In actuality, not actively looking for a new job until I was actively looking for a new job meant I had antiquated and often times incorrect information about what looking for a job looks like in today’s market. Gumption anyone?

    In preparation for my interview, I did research on possible answers to the “Why do you want to leave your current job?” question. Based on my research, I had prepared an answer (“I want to pursue new and different opportunities.”)

    No interviewer ever me asked a follow-up suggesting I was a bad employee for wanting to move on. Even if they thought that, I find that doing that type of worrying is unhelpful to me and what I hope to accomplish. I can’t control that. It was very freeing to release what I can’t control.

    I am still looking and good luck to you.

  37. Devious Planner*

    LW #4 – Speaking as a teacher, mistakes happen. I’ve never made that particular one (that I’m aware of, I guess), but things happen. I had a student panic because I missed a deadline when the Common App displayed a different due date than what the college actually wanted, but it did not matter.

    Most high school teachers probably average 30 a year, if I had to guess. I teach mostly 9th grade students, so I generally write about 10 a year, but if you teach exclusively 11th grade students, you can end up writing up to 75-80 letters each year. Colleges do understand this and generally will not hold a mistake against a student, especially if they get 2 letters and only one of them is messed up. I’m getting that info from a friend who used to work in college admissions.

  38. Sneaky Squirrel*

    #2 – Your employer is bananas! I know this wouldn’t have worked if you tried, but it feels like you could have just said “Oh, then I’m actually working Saturday to my normal schedule” and proceeded to take just the 5 days off.

    1. OP2*

      It was very tempting to try that! But managers liked to stress that they *could* make everyone start working Saturdays if they wanted to, so there was a strong implicit threat that pushing back on the policy would trigger a punitive outcome for everyone. Very yikes.

  39. Overthinking it*

    the LW says they get “3 weeks” vacation, but accounting for these “non-enforced” Saturday hours, that would make 18 days/yr, not 15, so charging six days instead of five. . . should be fair?? Sort ot? And it’s odd that if you leave on Thursday and return Tuesday, that Saturday doesn’t seem to count

    1. Ginger Cat Lady*

      I’d bet money that weeks are 5 days long when giving PTO, and 6 days long when using it.

  40. RagingADHD*

    If a 4.0 student and class president was rejected or waitlisted by every single school they applied to, I have to wonder how broad their range of schools may have been and what their safety schools were? Are safety schools not a thing anymore?

    Back when dinosaurs roamed the earth and I was a high school senior, many state schools would auto-accept any student with a good GPA and / or certain test scores.

    1. Bruce*

      I know someone who was a great student but forgot to have their 1st semester grades sent to the colleges they’d applied to. They were really happy they’d applied to a State school that had accepted them as soon as they’d applied. It turned out to be a good thing overall, and they went on to a very challenging grad school.

  41. Scarlet ribbons in her hair*

    Alison said, “As for why a company would do this … I cannot imagine.”

    Well, I can imagine. It’s just another way that companies cheat their employees out of vacation time.

    One company that I applied to said that they gave two weeks of vacation time. Actually, they gave only one week, but they claimed that since the employees got New Year’s Day, Presidents Day, Memorial Day, 4th of July, Labor Day, Thanksgiving, and Christmas off, that was seven additional days! More than one working week! So the employees actually got MORE than two weeks off!

    Another company that I applied to said that while they gave only one week of vacation time, If the employee went on vacation Saturday, Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, that was nine days off, and nine was almost equal to ten (the number of working days in a two-week period), so the employees would wind up with practically two weeks off.

    Some companies track vacation days by the week, meaning that if you take off a week that includes a legal holiday (such as Labor Day or Thanksgiving), you are charged for a week, meaning five days of vacation, rather than four.

    At a previous company, we had to submit our vacation requests to the office manager, who then submitted them to the owner of the company “when he was in a good mood.” (Her words, not mine.) One time, a co-worker wanted to take off the first week in December. The owner eventually told him that he had not submitted his request early enough (because it took a very long time for the office manager to determine that he was in a good mood), and he said that the co-worker could take off the week including Christmas. The co-worker protested, because Christmas was going to be on a Thursday, and we had been told that we would be getting Friday off, and we would probably leave early on December 24, and he didn’t think it was fair to be docked five vacation days for two and a fraction or maybe three actual vacation days. The owner said that he could have two additional vacation days the following year. Fine. But when the co-worker tried to take those two days off, the owner said that he had changed his mind.

    At another previous company, we were closed on Columbus Day. I wanted to take off the day after Columbus Day, but the office manager said no. She said that there was a policy that we couldn’t take the day off if it was before or after a legal holiday, because the owner said that that was “cheating the company.” Cheating the company out of what, I still don’t know. I said that I had been working at the company for over three years, and this was the first time I had heard about this policy. Then I started to think hard to see if I could come up with an example of someone taking off the day before Christmas or Thanksgiving or whatever. Fortunately, the office manager said that I could take the day off, because she figured that maybe the owner had forgotten about his policy of no vacation days allowed before or after a legal holiday.

    At yet another previous company, I had arranged to take off six vacation days (one week plus the following Monday). Then, before I left, I asked for the following Friday off, too (meaning that I would be out for six days, in the office for three days, and then out for one day). The office manager said no, because that Friday was “too close” to my already approved vacation time. What’s funny is that I’m sure that if I had asked for two weeks off (ten days) instead of six days originally, she would have said okay. But since I wanted to come into the office for those three days (Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday), she said no to Friday.

    It just boggles my mind the ways companies try to cheat their employees.

    1. OP2*

      Wow, those are some even more draconian policies! I feel much less alone knowing that many other companies get up to PTO nonsense.

  42. H.Regalis*

    LW1’s letter is one reason why I’m happy to be in the public sector where we never have to do stuff like this because no one wants to pay for it. The bodyfat analysis sounds not at all fun. If they wanted to do an optional health thing maybe massages or a trip to a sauna or something, but not that.

    1. Rainy*

      My workplace has a list of perks for employees that includes that a massage/spa chain in our area offers a percent discount on massages and one free massage per quarter.

      That perk doesn’t exist. You can always tell when someone has read the list of perks because there will be a whole new wave of anger about the lack of massages. My employer won’t take it off the perk list. No one can understand why.

  43. PinaColada*

    Alison, it may be good to update the article linked (for exempt vs non exempt) with the new salary minimums that will be coming based on the recent DOL rulings:

    “As of April 23, 2024, the U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) finalized a rule that increases the minimum salary threshold for white-collar exempt employees under the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA):

    July 1, 2024: The minimum salary increases to $844 per week ($43,888 per year), which is the 35th percentile of pay for full-time salaried workers in the lowest-wage census region
    January 1, 2025: The minimum salary increases to $1,128 per week ($58,656 per year)”

    1. Exemption Exception*

      Glomming on to your comment to ask why Alison thinks LW2 was wrongly categorized as exempt. I didn’t see enough in the letter to tell either way, but I’d think there’d be a decent proportion of exempt employees in a corporate office.

  44. C4TL4DY*

    #2 actually makes some sense to me because of a job I worked that was 7 consecutive days on and 7 days off. It was scheduled from Thursday to Wednesday, so that the days would be broken into different pay periods (4 days one week and 3 days the next week). I assume that the LW is salaried for 46 hrs a week in case they need to do OT. So splitting up the pto as they described might put the days onto different pay periods.

  45. CommanderBanana*

    Do employers just lie awake at night coming up with creative ways to screw over their employees?

    1. CommanderBanana*

      Also, I’m sure these are the same people whining about how nObOdY wAnTs To WoRk AnYmOrE

  46. Gaia Madre*

    For #1, I had to undergo a physical exam for a training certificate (40-hour hazmat), full workup with hearing test and everything. I get there and after the usual tests and blood draws, I was told to “undress completely and put this gown on” for a gyn exam. I said no. I said, I have a doctor for that and I’ll share any relevant with you, but I am not going to consent to that. No big argument in the doctor’s office, ok, no problem. My supervisor finds out and asks me about it. I tell her what I told them, and she raised he voice at me and insisted that she was “sending me back to complete the exam.” I ran this ALL the way up to the big, big boss and told him that he needed to speak to her. I did NOT get in any trouble and the first chance I got, I transferred to another team. It’s one of the few times in my life that I really stood up for myself and I’m proud of that. How humiliating, though.

    1. Aspiring Chicken Lady*

      Horrifying. I simply can’t figure out what they they think they’d find down there that would be relevant to most workplaces.

      1. Gaia Madre*

        Funny, thank you. I believe it was a matter of liability. Like if I developed cancer as a result of working near hazardous materials. That’s why I offered to share any ‘relevant’ info. Otherwise, I got it covered! I was astonished by how hard she pushed back on me over it, though. I was in my 20’s.

  47. Justin D*

    I’ve gotten to the point where I wouldn’t even really say anything substantial in an exit interview. I’d even decline maybe. What’s the point?

  48. it's gonna be bye bye bye... oh, wrong song*

    OP5, 15 years is way longer than it’s (usually) in people’s best interest to stay in one company, because it dampens your wage growth. I don’t think anyone will need any more explanation than “it’s been 15 years”; the same would be true if it were like six years! Also the idea that you’d be seen as “money hungry” for making a business decision to increase your earning is some deep-level capitalist hypnotism – try to shake it off. That kind of thinking ONLY serves to influence you to exploit or disadvantage yourself in favor of the business.

  49. Dawn*

    LW4: It is so, so incredibly common for a high school teacher to absentmindedly refer to a student by a sibling’s name, or a peer’s, or even a parent’s – my grade 11 chemistry teacher once went purple and almost collapsed yelling my brother’s name at me before he realized (heavens only knows why he didn’t just, I don’t know, walk over to my desk, that most people wouldn’t even bat an eye at it. And if they were really concerned, they’d ask you about it.

  50. NotBatman*

    LW4, are you me? I asked a high school history teacher for a letter of rec, and later discovered that she’d obviously reused the letter she wrote for my older sister. At least my name was correct, but my own accomplishments were absent, and my sister’s were listed as being mine. My sister is highly successful, but she and I had different GPAs, extracurriculars, leadership roles, and core interests. I was wait-listed by every college I applied to and I’ve always wondered if the dramatic mismatch between my own and my teacher’s list of my activities had something to do with it.

    Anyway, I now work in higher ed. I can tell you that a letter obviously about the wrong person would likely be a net neutral for your application. It wouldn’t do you any favors, but it wouldn’t do you any harm either. If there were 50 applicants with your GPA and extracurriculars and we could only take 20, then a strong letter might be enough to nudge you into the “accept” pile but it’d take a truly awful letter to push you toward the “reject” one.

    I also write tons of those letters, and I’m careful to label every file as “JANE DOE Reference Letter” and to write an individual letter for every single person who requests one. Because I’m still annoyed about my teacher’s laziness, and tbh you’re entitled to be annoyed as well.

    1. Op #4*

      Thanks for the perspective on both sides! I am over the mistake at this point, just have an idle curiosity about it. I like to think that 8 waitlists means I was qualified where I applied, just unlucky!

  51. watermelon fruitcake*

    #2

    In my state, at least in the public sector (I hope it is not limited to public sector, but, you know, #America), we have to be compensated for our earned, unused vacation time when leaving our job. To that end, our vacation time has a dollar value attached to it, and is considered an accounting liability. We can carry over one year’s worth of vacation earnings, but after that it expires. It is *only* paid out if you separate – voluntarily or not – but not if it expires, and in my org, you cannot choose to trade it in for pay (though I know some other public sector workers in this state at different orgs whose union contracts allow them to trade in up to, e.g., one week of unused vacation time for pay).

    The reason I mention this is, if LW2 were in one of the states that requires PTO payout, thus establishing a standard that PTO has a monetary value/is decidedly compensation, and in the absence of any written record or other enforcement of a 46-hour, 6-day workweek… would this PTO requirement then be illegal? A form of wage theft?

    1. OP2*

      In my state, there’s no law requiring PTO to be paid out upon leaving, so technically the policy wasn’t wage theft—but it sure felt like it.

  52. London Calling*

    *I don’t want to appear negative or money hungry at an upcoming interview*

    Wanting to be paid the going rate for your work and remunerated fairly isn’t ‘money hungry.’ This isn’t one of those jobs that you’re supposed to do for the love of it, is it?

    1. Ginger Cat Lady*

      Right?!?!?
      People work for money. People have bills. People need money to pay those bills. Your work has monetary value. Asking for the market rate monetary value of your work is not “money hungry”

  53. Petty_Boop*

    So, a couple of questions for LW 2: Do you have to put in a PTO request ahead of time? Or do you just put PTO on your timesheet for the days you take? I have never been required to request PTO but I know that some people do, but I wonder if you went on a M-F vacation and just put 8 hours PTO on M, T, W, Th and F…what would happen? Would payroll adjust it, would anyone even notice? Maybe you can start a revolution of just…not going along with it!

    1. OP2*

      Yep, PTO had to be approved. We’d get verbal approval from our boss, then enter the PTO into an internal system. Then the PTO request had to be approved in the system by both our manager and HR. If we put in a Mon-Fri PTO request without including the following Sat, the request would be denied and we’d get the “46-hour workweek” lecture and have to re-do the request.

      I was initially surprised that no one wanted to push back as a group, but the thread of being forced to start working Saturdays really put a damper on any protest.

  54. anywhere but here*

    LW1, I agree that it doesn’t make sense to have that in a professional context, but I also think that I personally would see it as a perk to be able to measure my body comp for free (if the measuring process is accurate and not easily accessible, like one of those pool things). I wonder if your other colleagues may feel similarly.

  55. ConstantlyComic*

    The only discussed policy I can think of that’s more bonkers than the PTO in Letter 2 is “you must take a day off on your birthday but if you’re born on Leap Day this only happens for you once every four years”

  56. I treated you like a son*

    When I was younger and need recommendations, I would offer to write them myself and then have my recommender look over it, edit, etc.

    It was more of “let me make this as easy as possible for you”, but the typo example here is another reason this might have been a good idea

  57. Elizabeth*

    On letter #3, I’ve left two jobs that were very fraught because of structural factors (turnaround work). In both cases I had a brief, factual resignation letter and left files in impeccable shape. I can count in glowing references from both. You don’t owe them free consulting advice on the way out the door, and it’s never taken well.

  58. An Australian In London*

    If I were asked to take six days of PTO for five calendar days, I would ask for six days of pay for five calendar days worked.

    I understand that doesn’t work anywhere with US exempt rules for salary.

    This isn’t theoretical. Some years ago I was headhunted for an overseas project on a consulting basis. I quoted my day rate. They told me that local work culture was to work 60 hour weeks (10 hour days, Mon-Sat). I said sure, let’s convert my day rate into a pro-rate hourly rate. Oh no, has to be a day rate. No problem, I’d bill in whole days as I worked that many hours, so seven days one week and eight days every second week. Absolutely not, they said, this is how everyone here works. Well, says I, that can’t be working out that well for you if you find yourself having to hire internationally, and the largest telco company in your country does not need me to donate to them.

    There was no contract. Bullet dodged.

  59. CSRoadWarrior*

    #3 – I admittedly wrote a long resignation letter, though probably not 700 words. But I was only at that job for 5 weeks and “felt the need” to do so, if you meant. And I quit on the spot, without notice. Why? Because that job gave me severe panic attacks, something that has not happened in any other place I worked. Now just thinking about it, I should have just told them it was not a good fit and I would be leaving. As Alison said, just two sentences.

    But yes, just write a short resignation letter saying your last day will be X and thank them for the opportunity. No need to write a 700-word letter, especially after you have been there a long time. And please don’t criticize either – you would be burning bridges that way.

  60. monogodo*

    #5:
    I had a similar experience when I interviewed for my current position almost 5 years ago. I’d been with my previous employer for 15 years. The interview panel was made up of 5 people. One of them asked me why I was looking to leave that other company after 15 years.

    I explained that I knew I could work at that company as long as I wanted to, but I also knew that there was no room for growth. Even after 15 years I was “low man on the totem pole” at my location. The other three employees there had a combined 70 years with the company, and the “newest” one of them had close to 25 years. I also explained that, while money isn’t my biggest motivation, that after 15 years with that company my pay had only increased $3.75/hour more than what I’d been hired at.

    It worked, because they hired me.

    1. allathian*

      Yeah, stating that you’re looking for new challenges because you feel your current job isn’t giving you the opportunities for growth that you want is perfectly reasonable and isn’t badmouthing your employer in a way that’s likely to bite you in the butt later.

  61. And thanks for the coffee*

    Re #2
    The logic here isn’t.
    About the same as the leap year birthday lack of logic.

    I find these really hard to wrap my head around, instead I just keep shaking my head. What??!

  62. Save Bandit*

    LW 3 – I know how tempting it is to want to give feedback on why you’re leaving. I wrote a similar such letter for my own catharsis, pretending it would be something I’d actually give my former employer when I left (though I had no plans to do so). At the time, I thought it was balanced, even-tempered, and unemotional. I came across it a year later and re-read it, and it was so much worse than I remembered. I was in so deep that I was totally unable to be a fair judge at the time. It’s not worth it. They won’t change, and you won’t get the satisfaction you think you will.

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