I smelled alcohol on my coworker, can you fire someone because their spouse is a politician, and more

by Alison Green on July 18, 2024

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

1. I suspect my colleague was drinking before our morning meeting

I held a meeting late morning on Friday with my colleague, “Janet.” During our meeting, her behavior seemed fine, if even a little more level than her normal frenetic energy.

During the meeting, we pulled our chairs together to look at something on her screen and I very clearly smelled vodka on her breath. The smell was like she’d taken a shot right before coming into my office; this was not a case of being hungover and smelling like old booze.

Now I don’t know what to do. Recently, I witnessed her at a fancy work event drinking heavily (7-8 glasses of wine in a little under two hours) but since that didn’t cause any issues, I didn’t say anything to anyone (and still wouldn’t). But the fancy event drinking did put on my radar that she may have a problem with alcohol, and I was immediately reminded of it when I smelled the vodka.

What do I do now? She is well liked and respected in our office, and her work hasn’t suffered (to my knowledge). Am I obligated to tell our manager? Can I talk to my colleague? Say nothing and wait until this maybe happens again?

I know that my biggest priority is making sure she is safe and getting help, but a very, very close second is not getting myself in trouble for withholding information from my superiors.

I don’t think there’s anything actionable here. You didn’t see Janet acting intoxicated or see her swigging vodka. You just smelled something when you sat close to her.

If there were safety implications — if she operates heavily machinery or otherwise held people’s lives in her hands — that would change the calculus. But otherwise, there’s not enough here to act on.

Related:
I think my coworker is an alcoholic

2. We’re being forced to label all our office furniture

Our new chief operating officer is forcing our Engineering department to completely clear their offices of any items other than the desk, two chairs, and a filing cabinet and is mandating where our computers and phones sit on the desk. Though it sounds reasonable to have a clean office, we work in a manufacturing company and often we have items in our office that are being evaluated (we make valves). He has now told us that we MUST LABEL each piece of furniture in our office identifying what it is. For example, a label on the desk that says DESK. Yesterday we were told that we must take a picture of our office once it is set up to his specifications and put the picture on our wall to remind us of how our office should look.

This is a degrading exercise for a group of engineers and counterproductive given the industry we are in. Is this a practice that we are unaware of, or should we see this as a character situation with him? How should we handle this respectfully? You should know that he is not at all open to hearing our opinions directly.

This is extremely odd. It would be one thing if he just wanted less cluttered offices — a bit controlling but not outlandish — but labeling your furniture? So there’s no doubt that a desk is in fact a desk? Was there some safety incident with someone mistaking a trash can as a chair? This is so over-the-top controlling that there’s either a really weird incident that provoked this or your new COO has misplaced his gourd.

This is something where you want influential allies involved — someone with power and influence within the organization, like the CEO’s longtime and trusted assistant or your own boss who has the ear of someone powerful, or so forth — so you can tip them off and see whether someone can intervene. But I’ve got to think this is a sign of problems with this new hire and more trouble is brewing.

3. Can you fire someone because their spouse is a politician?

The recent news of Usha Vance resigning from her law firm — a law firm that reportedly has progressive values — leaves me wondering: If she hadn’t resigned, could they have fired her after her husband became Trump’s running mate?

Federal law doesn’t prevent private employers from discriminating on the basis of political beliefs. But some jurisdictions do — including Washington, D.C., where that firm has an office, although I don’t know if it was her office. (D.C’s law might seem strange since D.C. is a town full of employers like lobbyists and nonprofits where your politics play a role in whether you’ll get hired or not, but in a lot of those cases political beliefs are considered a bona fide occupational qualification, which gets around the law.)

Regardless of the law, in reality, given the nature of the situation, if she hadn’t resigned on her own it almost certainly would have been a conversation about optics/client relations/PR and a mutual agreement to part ways, not “you’re fired, clean out your desk today.”

4. Employer missed our scheduled phone interview

I am job hunting and recently applied for a job that I am really excited about. Less than an hour after I submitted my application, the HR manager emailed me to say I sounded like a great fit and they’d like to schedule a phone interview at specific time and date the following week. I responded an hour later thanking her for reaching out and confirming I was available.

My interview time came and went with no call and no email. I figured they might have had a meeting run over or a conflict pop up, so after about 15 minutes, I emailed them to confirm the call would still take place and offered to reschedule if there was a more convenient time for them.

It has now been over 24 hours since I sent the email and I still haven’t heard a peep. Is it overkill if I email them again to reiterate my interest and ask to reschedule the interview? I really want this job and genuinely think I’m a perfect fit for it, but I also recognize that it’s just a first stage interview and I don’t want to come across as obsessive and over-eager.

It’s fine to email one more time asking about rescheduling. After that, though, if you don’t hear back, assume that for whatever reason it’s not going to happen and move on and don’t keep following up.

Asking someone to set aside time and then ghosting them — and not even responding to an email about it afterwards — is incredibly rude, but it’s also not terribly uncommon in job-hunting. Hopefully they’ll get back to you, but some employers just have utterly chaotic hiring processes and the more you can let the rudeness roll off you, the better.

5. What shows up in a background check?

What info shows up in a typical employment background check? A friend has recently gone through a hard time and was staying in shelters and accessing various public aid programs. They’re doing better now, but they’re worried about that info showing up in a background check and an employer being biased about their previous circumstances. Would any of that actually be on a background check an employer would do? What’s usually in those and what are employers looking for with them?

They shouldn’t need to worry about that at all! Employment background checks are about verifying your employment history and education — confirming that you actually did the things you said you did (worked the places you said you worked, for the time periods you said you were there, that you’re not ineligible for rehire, etc.). Some also include criminal background checks. They don’t look the sort of thing your friend is worried about. The thing that could get the closest is that some types of jobs will run a credit check, but they’re not going to see whether or not someone received public aid.

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  1. Ask a Manager* Post author

    No politics in the comments on question #3, please. It’s possible to discuss the core question being asked without delving into anyone’s own political opinions. (If you feel you cannot, please pass this one by.)

  2. Diabetty*

    A person in diabetic ketoacidocis can also smell as if they have recently been drinking.

    1. Phil*

      Yeah that’s what I was thinking too (though my medical knowledge only extended to “maybe some medical thing is causing it maybe”).

    2. Oui oui oui all the way home*

      I work in production of a TV series and the head of our wardrobe department sometimes sprays vodka to clean a clothing item or accessory. So if LW’s co-worker had used vodka to spray something she was wearing, LW could have picked up the scent from that. (I realize this is unlikely, just pointing out there may be other reasons for the smell.)

      1. Be Gneiss*

        Early in 2020 when everyone was searching for hand sanitizers, a lot of our local/craft distilleries started making alcohol-based sanitizers, and some of them really smelled boozy. I forgot about that completely until a month or so ago when I grabbed a bottle from an old tote bag. It was noticeably boozy. Just to say that we can keep a few other options on our “jump to conclusions mat.”

        1. MicroManagered*

          we can keep a few other options on our “jump to conclusions mat.”

          I love this! lol

        2. Nonanon*

          This reminded me of our “emergency sanitizer” route (ie “we didn’t order 100% ethanol in time, the shipment got delayed, and we still need to culture tissues”): Go down to the nearest liquor store and get a few bottles of Everclear.

          It never came to that, but god it was a fun conversation to have.

          1. DrB*

            Heck, run to the nearest pharmacy and grab a bottle of 70% isopropanol! It’s definitely less pleasant if you get a whiff of the spray, though.

          2. Emotional support capybara (he/him)*

            I run a laser engraver. In accordance with the service tech’s recommendation, we keep a bottle of Everclear for cleaning reasons.

            1. Justin D*

              friend works as a brewery and they use Everclear to clean the parts that will touch the actual product (because rubbing alcohol is too toxic).

              1. N C Kiddle*

                I’ve seen vodka recommended for sterilising sugarcraft picks, presumably for similar reasons.

        3. Almost A Shrimp*

          A local distillery made one that smelled exactly like tequila. I gagged every time I used it.

          1. Ann O'Nemity*

            Exact same. My university brought the tequila sanitizer in bulk. Our office coordinator accidentally dropped a gallon of it, busting the cap and spilling it all over the conference room carpet. The smell was atrocious, but thankfully dissipated pretty quickly. In 2022, we started pitching the leftover tequila sanitizer because no one liked it and Purell was readily available again.

          2. Dawn*

            We had tequila sanitizer at my retail job and policy for a while was to spray it on everything after every interaction, the customers must all have thought we were completely blitzed.

          3. Nina*

            I love tequila (because it hasn’t been implicated in any of my bad decisions around alcohol) and that sounds amazing honestly.

        4. Princess Pumpkin Spice*

          I work with plumbers, and hand sanitizer ranks high on the must have items list. I got a couple large bottles from an organic/ natural company, and to me it smelled like 99 Bananas and my bad decisions in college. Got the job done, though.

          I agree there are a ton of viable explanations rather than taking shots in the morning. I also don’t think 7-8 glasses of wine at a wedding is that egregious as a one-off occurrence (if it was even wine at all, and not a spiritless stand in).

          1. Observer*

            I also don’t think 7-8 glasses of wine at a wedding is that egregious as a one-off occurrence

            Also, a LOT depends on the wine, even assuming it was actual wine. The amount of alcohol can very *widely*. The wine we use for Kisush (the blessing before the Shabbos meals) is 7%, and one of the wines some of my kids prefer 4% and another 3.5%.

            It also does make some difference over how much time the alcohol was consumed. 8 drinks in an hour is going to hit very differently than the same number of drinks in 3 hours.

        5. Sally Sue*

          I just had a flashback to 2020 and this one particular brand of hand sanitizer that I couldn’t even use because the smell reminded me of college student grade tequila which had some unpleaseant, nausea-inducing memories attached to it. I’ve been out of college for 30 years so both the smell and the memories were strong lol.

          1. KaciHall*

            Ah, thank goodness the days of below-the- bottom- shelf liquor are behind me. The addict of Heaven Hill or Burnetts still makes my stomach turn, and it’s been… well, it’s been long enough. (My diploma could legally drink in the US now.)

        7. Butterfly Counter*

          I’m just realizing that a particular brand of hand sanitizer that I briefly used smelled exactly like cheap vodka. I hated using it; was supposed to be a gel and it was pure liquid, and, along with the smell, was so bad that I threw it out after only a couple of uses. When I put it on, my brain was smelling “‘bad’ hand sanitizer” so I didn’t even think about it. But it was very much a cheap vodka smell!

        8. Annie*

          Yes, I remember that. I had some hand sanitizer and just smelling it would make my mouth water as if I was drinking tequila.

        9. Petty Betty*

          BOTH the vodka clothing spray and the old hand sanitizer were my automatic jumps, as I am a costumer and I help friends clean out their hoarder parent (and grandparent) homes after their passings and we find a LOT of things like that because our local distillery was giving them away.

          In conjunction with her 7-8 glasses of wine, yeah, it’s suspish, but if her work isn’t suffering, and you didn’t SEE her drinking, you can’t be sure, so it’s only speculation. Unless she does something that actually stands out and screams “I’m inebriated”, this isn’t an actionable event.

        10. Bitte Meddler*

          My favorite hand sanitizer smells *exactly* like a fresh lime margarita, down to the tequila.

          I have massaged it into my hands before going into a building and watched people near me surreptitiously sniffing around for the source of the booze.

      2. Brooklyn*

        I picked up this habit doing theater in college, and use it pretty frequently. The alcohol kills the bacteria that cause the “funk” smell on clothes, and then evaporates away. 15 minutes later it’s not noticeable, but if I was about to meet with someone, took a whiff of myself and though “oh, no one should have to deal with that”… I mean, I wouldn’t think twice about doing it.

        Is it likely? No, but this feels like “this could be someone innocuous and it’s not your business” territory.

      3. Project Maniac-ger*

        That’s what I thought of at first glance – she saw a tiktok that said she could spray vodka on her suit to kill the smell so she wouldn’t have to get it dry cleaned or a similar situation.

        8 glasses of wine in 2 hours at a work function does make this more suspish, but someone can be both a social binge drinker and participate in tiktok trends.

        Not enough hard info to do anything, OP.

    3. Ashley*

      Came here to say the same thing.

      My partner has Type 1 diabetes, and if he drops into ketosis, it literally smells like he’s taken a shot of vodka.

        1. Be Gneiss*

          I mean, you can’t smell it the way you can smell tequila or gin, but you can smell it.

        2. MassMatt*

          Alcoholics wish this were true and the aroma is less pronounced than for other forms of alcohol but it is still very much noticeable.

          Alcohol also affects the aroma coming from your pores, which breath mints do nothing for.

        3. Orv*

          Alcohol itself has a scent regardless of what it’s in. Not everyone can smell it, but I’m very aware of it after spending a few years working in a casino. I can even detect whiffs of it from rising bread (the yeast excretes ethanol as a byproduct.)

    4. JSPA*

      it’s only in the context of “recently drinking heavily at an event” that the smell of a neutral alcohol is relevant at all. I have a bottle of bad vodka under the sink right now. I use it in place of rubbing alcohol often enough (cuts / disinfectant / water remover / stain remover) or as emergency mouthwash. My normal alcohol consumption is one drink or less per week.

      IMO, Everyone presumably saw the level of social drinking. Its not on the LW to point that out. Neither is the LW required to have a good nose. Nor, having smelled an alcohol product, to determine whether it was indeed on somebody’s breath, or elsewhere on their person.

      If the co-worker is also a work-friend, there’s room to say, “you’ve seemed a bit different lately; I wanted to check in if you’re doing OK?”

      But IMO, if they’re driving in, it’s more responsible (within the context of problem drinking) for them to take a swig after they arrive at work rather than before (and hours before they’ll be driving home).

      To be clear, if its what it looks and smells like, I’m assuming that things will likely indeed get worse, to where they impact function and safety, and the letter writer can keep an eye out for that! But it’s also possible that this is atypical behavior triggered by a short term crisis (or someone falling off a wagon that they will be getting back onto).

    5. Pennyworth*

      I thought vodka doesn’t smell, which is why it is often the drink of choice for people who don’t want to be noticed.

        1. Raisin Walking to the Moon*

          We use a cleaner where I work that, if it’s freshly mixed and freshly sprayed, smells EXACTLY like a cold bottle of vodka.

          1. Librarian of Things*

            We make our own air freshener, trying to avoid allergens in commercial products. So, one of our cleaning supplies actually is vodka. (Vanilla oil in bottom-shelf vodka in a spray bottle. Please just ignore that gallon bottle of McCormick vodka in my desk!)

      2. sparkle emoji*

        I’ve heard that as well, but all liquor has a baseline alcohol smell to me. Might come down to different senses of smell.

      5. Butterfly Counter*

        From my experience, it depends a lot on the brand. I hated vodka for most of my adult life because of a bad experience and the smell would make me gag. But there’s a brand out there that is much more subtle, IMO, that I actually like to drink.

      6. New Jack Karyn*

        It definitely smells like alcohol. I hate the taste and smell of alcohol, and 99.2% of the time, when someone says, “Try this cocktail, you can’t even taste the alcohol!” I can taste the alcohol.

      7. Bitte Meddler*

        Vodka definitely has a distinct odor.

        What it *doesn’t* have is the scent / taste of, say, caramel, or herbs, or other “notes” that other kinds of alcohol have.

        That’s why it’s good for mixing drinks. The vodka won’t interfere with your strawberry mango puree, ginger beer, lime, lavender liquor, etc.

        But it definitely smells like alcohol.

      8. Nina*

        Pure ethanol absolutely has a smell. It’s not a strong smell, but if you’ve been around it for a while (I work in the food industry currently, we use non-denatured ethanol for sanitizing) then yeah, it has a smell that you can identify and recognize. To me it’s sweetish, sharp, and slightly vanilla-y. If I was standing close to someone who had just spilled ethanol on their clothes or taken a swig of it, yes, now I would probably notice. Before I worked here I wouldn’t have.

      1. Yikes On Bikes*

        She was seen drinking what the LW considered a large number of drinks in a short amount of time at an event but hasn’t seemed to be impaired at work. Even if she went a bit overboard at an evening work function, that’s hardly akin to a “drinking problem”.

        1. WellRed*

          I’m a drinker. That was an excessive amount by any standard. Maybe she never drinks and was stone cold sober during the meeting in question. We don’t know which is why Allison’s advice was good.

        2. Nicole Maria*

          To me as a supervisor, the fact that the letter writer seemed to have counted how many drinks Janet had at this event is just as questionable as the drinking itself. Why are you monitoring someone like that when you’re not their supervisor? Maybe this one a one-off thing for them, but I’ve struggled a number of times with staff who are too concerned about what their peers are doing/not doing.

          1. KTB2*

            THIS. I have never in my life counted the drinks that someone else is consuming. I’ve kept track of my own for obvious reasons, but keeping track of someone else’s consumption is truly none of my business.

          2. Yikes Stripes*

            This was my first thought. I genuinely cannot imagine ever wanting or needing to count the number of drinks a peer has at a function where alcohol is present unless they’re already known to be a belligerent drunk or something like that.

          3. Rebelx*

            We don’t know that OP was specifically monitoring or counting their coworker’s drinks. For example, they could have been seated at the same table which made it easy to notice how many refills were accepted without it necessarily being nosy. Plus I can understand paying some attention to how much my coworkers are partaking at a work event in order to gauge my own consumption. Or maybe OP was being nosy. Point is, we don’t know, and it seems a little uncharitable to assume that, and it doesn’t really affect the advice one way or the other.

            1. Yorick*

              Yes, and 8 glasses of wine could be an estimate based on casual observance rather than an actual tally

        3. Also-ADHD*

          Yeah, I mean I can’t drink 7 glasses of wine, but I’ve seen people do it (especially every size pours) without having underlying or larger issues.

        1. Hastily Blessed Fritos*

          Drinking to excess. Seven glasses of wine in an evening is certainly binge drinking; it may or may not be indicative of a larger problem, but dismissing it as “she was seen drinking” as though it was two glasses of wine is also not accurate.

          1. Nodramalama*

            Ok. Go to a bar and throw a stone and you’ll hit someone who is “drinking to excess”. One instance of heavy drinking does not equal a suspected drinking problem, unless you’re also diagnosing most people from the age 18-33.

            1. Happy meal with extra happy*

              I mean…yes, many young adults have a problem with drinking too much. Just because it’s common, doesn’t mean it’s not a problem.

            2. Hastily Blessed Fritos*

              Sure. Your point? I’m not saying the co-worker has A Drinking Problem. I’m saying that drinking seven glasses of wine in two hours is different from just “being seen drinking”. I’m sure lots of other people had a glass or two at the same event, and thus “were seen drinking”, and I think the distinction between “some” and “too much” is one worth making even if there’s no evidence to go beyond that.

            3. JSPA*

              A non-zero percentage of people are a bar have or will develop a drinking problem, but that’s not really relevant.

              Most people (some hapless new hires aside) don’t treat work functions as an appropriate place to down a quick 7 or 8 glasses in 2 h0urs.

              And most women who can down 7 or 8 glasses in 2 hours and not show any impairment have a significant baseline level of alcohol consumption that’s consistent with physiological addiction (increased tolerance) as well and/or the coping mechanisms of behavioral habituation.

              On a biological level, I’m less worried for someone who drinks 7 glasses and ends up with their head in the toilet than someone who’s unphased and unbothered by putting away high amounts.

      3. Jennifer Strange*

        Even if that were true (which, as others have pointed out, it’s not) it doesn’t change that right here and right now there are reasons she could smell like vodka without actually having had alcohol.

      4. Michelle Smith*

        Taking the event in isolation, I’m not so sure. I’ve definitely overdone it at work parties before when I was younger, but I’ve never had drinks at my desk when I was supposed to be working or anything like that. I don’t even keep alcohol in my home. I don’t think one event = a pattern of troubling behavior.

        1. Rooby*

          Yeah but for a non-alcoholic, “overdoing it” at a work event would be like, four drinks over the course of an evening, not eight in an hour.

      5. Observer*

        She’s already suspected of having a drinking problem.

        Yeah, but the LW actually doesn’t have any basis for that suspicion, unless there are a lot of details that they are leaving out.

        1. Rooby*

          AM alcohol smells and 8 drinks in a short period are more than enough to make that a likely possibility.

      7. Lenora Rose*

        Drinking, even to excess, at one event does not a heavy drinker make. I’ve known people who were likely to drink only a few times a *year* who got wasted at specific events.

    7. Daryush*

      Yes, but that’s a serious medical condition. She wouldn’t be at work, business as usual, if this was the case. Like the breath is least of your worries when you’re in DKA.

      1. Miette*

        Exactly, If she was able to get through a meeting without appearing altered in any way, it wasn’t DKA.

        1. Ashley*

          In my lived experience with my partner, that’s not actually true. Responses to DKA vary widely and depend on many factors.

          1. Banana Pyjamas*

            This. One of my littles gets KA and once it was so alarming I though he was dying, while another time he was acting like a perfectly normal toddler but smelled like a bottle of acetone (which was a different kind of scary).

    8. Seashell*

      My thoughts were mouthwash, which can be alcohol-based, or that she was drinking the night before. Possibly still drunk from the night before, which isn’t great at work, but I agree it’s hard to be sure it was drinking while at work.

      1. Hyaline*

        I also thought mouthwash, or cough syrup, or the possibility it was something innocuous. LW might believe it was vodka but given it could be plenty of other things, it would be a poor choice to attempt to report it.

    10. BW*

      Head and Shoulders shampoo makes an Old Spice Bourbon smelling shampoo. There are several other shampoo brands that smell strongly of alcoholic drinks. Not to mention, back in high school, some girls would rinse their hair in beer because it made it softer.

      1. CommanderBanana*

        I sometimes wear a perfume from a perfume line that was started by one of the Hennessey descendants and the perfumes are meant to smell sort of booze-y. The one I like smells like warm bourbon. Now I’m wondering if anyone’s sniffed me and thought I was drinking.

    11. Long time listener first time caller*

      Some asthma inhalers can also make your breath smell a lot like alcohol for a few minutes after taking them.

      2. 1LFTW*

        Huh. I usually can’t smell my own breath, so I hope none of my coworkers or students have thought I drink at work.

    12. Molly Coddler*

      usually if someone does have an issue with alcohol, they exude it from their pores. i’m sensitive to that smell, having lived with an active alcoholic for years back in the day. people who drink a lot end up sweating it out of their pores and i happen to be able to smell it. just on someone’s breath? it could be anything for any reason.
      a colleague of mine accused me of smoking weed in my office a few years ago. because she smelled it. so she called HR, there was an investigation, and i was found in the clear because i did not smoke weed in my office (that is tiny, has no windows, and is in an inner hallway with 6 other co-workers). i am still upset to this day that she messed with my livlihood on a hunch of hers. months later my boss smelled it while i was in her office – so she said ‘now i know for sure you didn’t do it’ – like what????? my rep, my name, my job, were on the line because of her accusation. TL;DR, stay out of it. you don’t know the deets, and it’s no one’s biz. if OP is concerned, they can talk to her personally. if they don’t feel comfortable doing that then please stay quiet because without the whole story you might be messing with her livlihood, her life, her everything. it’s kind of OP to care, though.

      1. Observer*

        if OP is concerned, they can talk to her personally.

        I would not even go that far. The LW is jumping to a lot of conclusions here and could really mess up badly.

        Again, unless there is a lot the LW left out, “keep out” is the way to go.

    13. darsynia*

      Yeah, my husband speaks about when he was a kid and his dad was suffering from this. They had been on a walk that ended up longer than expected, and his dad was slurring his words; they went into a fast food place and he had to order food for his dad and the people at the counter didn’t want to believe him or let him buy anything, they wanted to report his dad for being publicly drunk. His dad is a really dignified guy and my husband was shy. It’s probably been 31 years since it happened but it made quite an impression on him.

      1. darsynia*

        Ack, I left off, he’s Type I and I was speaking about Diabetic Ketoacidosis. He has since gotten an insulin pump, this was in the late 80s. I also typed this up hours ago and didn’t hit send till now, lots of convo in between, sorry!

        1. T1D*

          Hmmm, this sounds a bit more like hypoglycemia. It absolutely can be confused for drunkenness, but doesn’t involve a boozy smell and needs to be treated with food while DLA needs insulin and fluids. Food without insulin only makes DKA worse.

    14. Yoyohello*

      My deodorant is made of alcohol. I buy the unscented version so it just smells like straight up booze. The smell burns off after a bit but it someone stood next to me while it was fresh they might think I have been drinking.

  3. Gretta Swathmore*

    I’m so baffled by the labeling COO. Why label a desk with just the word “desk”? Can anyone speculate what that might accomplish? I mean outside of a kindergarten classroom, what could this possibly achieve?

      1. Antilles*

        That still doesn’t explain it though. Why? Because even if some type of workplace accident did occur, I find it very hard to believe that said accident was caused by a professional working adult not recognizing what a “desk” is.
        I work in engineering and we had someone in my first job who was injured because they stood on their chair to reach something, the rolling chair rolled, and the guy fell off and landed awkwardly enough to sprain an ankle. But we didn’t label our chairs with “chair” afterwards because that was never in question. He didn’t stand on the chair because he was genuinely uncertain about what the black leather object with seats and an arm rest is; he stood on the chair because he was hurrying and didn’t want to bother with grabbing a step-stool. And so the post-accident lessons learned focused on the actual cause of don’t take shortcuts, use the right tool for the job, it’s worth the time to be safe, etc.

      2. WOOLFAN*

        I have a former co-worker who tripped while walking, fell face first into the corner of a desk, and ended up needing several stitches. (That sinking feeling when you see something like that out of the corner of your eye but can’t tell how bad it was, ask them if they’re okay, and they moan “no”… ugh, it was so scary.) I can only assume that if we had properly labeled the desk as a desk, that accident would have been avoided. ;-)

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

          How about the AAM letter-writer who sat on a DESK (when they should have sat on a CHAIR) and broke both the desk and their coworker’s FEMUR?

            1. darsynia*

              This comment and all of the ones above it are golden, thank you everyone for your hard humor work this morning!

          4. Molly Coddler*

            ok, cheap-ass rolled over and one fell out, i just have to say your name on here is GENIUS and HILARIOUS, yes in caps.

      3. Fluffy Initiative*

        Several years ago I worked in an office that was implementing “5S”, and some overzealous manager insisted we label everything as well. And OUTLINE ON OUR DESKS where everything was supposed to be. Including heavy, non-moving things like scanners, printers, and other equipment. I completely understand labelling shelves or bins or places where movable equipment needs to be returned after use, but this was crazy. My guess is something similar happening here.

        1. Mary Me*

          I worked at a place that did 5S and wanted us to set up our work stations in a very specific way. We did repetitive tasks all day not dissimilar from a factory line. Unfortunately the person who decided how this should be arranged did not do our jobs all day and was quite put out when I mentioned I wasn’t as tall as her and reaching that far 500 times a day would cause a repetitive stress injury. Thankfully the higher powers didn’t actually monitor our setups that closely as long as we were following the clean protocols and not hurting ourselves.

          1. pally*

            Yep! I saw a lab where even the biohazard waste buckets had their spot outlined on the floor. In thick red tape. With instructions that the bucket was not to be moved from that space. They were located to the right of where the tech was stationed. Made for easy disposal of contaminated pipette tips. Makes sense.

            Buuut! If the tech working that station is left-handed, are they expected to use the biohazard waste bucket to their RIGHT? That’s not very convenient for lefties. They have to cross the body to eject those contaminated tips. Can potentially expose the tech to biohazardous materials. Not good.

            Sure enough, no equivalent space was marked out to the LEFT of the tech station. In fact, the floor space to the left was marked out – in tape- with a “Keep Clear” stamped in the middle of the space. Do they not hire lefties?

            Yeah, I’m left-handed and I observe things like this all the time. Usually I get the “gee, no one ever thought about that” response.

            1. And thanks for the coffee*

              Lefties was the first thing I thought of after seeing this question. If the phone had to be on the top right of the desk, then why couldn’t those who are left handed put the phone to their left. I’m right handed. Just weird.

              1. Sometimes hiring*

                I’m right handed and keep my phone on my left so I can still use my right hand to look things up on the computer if necessary. I would also be annoyed if told my phone HAD to be to my right!

            2. I went to school with only 1 Jennifer*

              Because left-handedness is SOOOOOO rare! (shaking my head)

        3. No Longer Gig-less Data Analyst*

          As someone who went through 5S training as part of a Yellow Belt certification, this was the first thing I thought of! Our instructor even had examples of people taking it way too far as a cautionary note.

        4. Annie*

          yes, they said this was manufacturing, so it definitely sounds like it falls into the “5S” category. Part of that is labeling and setting in order, as you know, so usually it’s just labeling smaller tools and yes, having outlines for where the tools go (so it’s easy to see if things are out of place).

          We did have 5S in our desks even outside of the shop floor. Thankfully we didn’t have to label and outline everything, but we did have to get our area checked and take a picture of the area, and verify that we “set in order” our desk each night. I got dinged because the cords from my computer and monitor were not wired together and looked messy.

          It can definitely be taken to the extreme, and that sounds like what is happening here. The person pushing for this doesn’t quite understand the WHY and just is pushing that it has to be done to the extreme.

    2. The Prettiest Curse*

      If this was my office, I would be so tempted to wear a t-shirt saying EMPLOYEE in massive letters whenever I was there.

        1. Miette*

          Oh yes, malicious compliance is the order of the day. I’d also label the photo of the office setup to say “photo.” Then label all the labels “label.”

            1. Phony Genius*

              Please tell me I’m not the only one here who read this and remembered the scene in 1951’s A Christmas Carol where Alistair Sim (as Scrooge) rapidly repeats the word “label” to himself while searching his desk for one.

            2. Beany*

              If the labels were made of turtles, you could have a turtle saying “turtle” … turtles all the way down.

            3. Another Jen*

              I just scrolled down to see if someone had gotten to this ahead of me. Definitely, “desk label” and then “desk-label label” and so forth, and so on…

          2. MassMatt*

            Label the pens! The doorknobs! The windows!

            Seriously, this is so bizarre, pointless, and controlling that I can only imagine far far worse directives will be coming down the pike. I would update my resume and start looking.

            And in the meantime, look at it as an anthropology experiment on strange behavior to keep your sanity.

      2. AcademiaNut*

        Also “light-switch”, “floor”, “light-bulb”, and moving into the rest of the office, “toilet-paper roll”, “coffee filter” and so on. I’d be tempted to label the boss appropriately, but that *would* get you fired.

        I did once label all my furniture at home, but in a foreign language as part of learning vocabulary.

        1. Clisby*

          That’s not uncommon to do in a home when a child is first learning to read. But it’s not because the 5-year-old literally does not recognize a chair when she sees one.

          1. Observer*

            Exactly. You do that because they DO know what these things are, so now you are teaching them to associate these “shapes” (ie letter combinations) with meaning that goes beyond the shape.

        2. Phony Genius*

          I’d get some magician’s thread and tie it to the ceiling so that I could attach a label to it that says “air” so that it looks like it’s floating.

            1. Fíriel*

              It’ll work less well if you also label the fishing line, which of course you must do.

        3. Jackalope*

          For awhile when I was living in a foreign country I and my housemate (who was local to said country) often had other housemates who didn’t know the language yet. We labeled everything in the house in the new-to-them language, took newspaper adverts and practiced vocabulary with the produce section, etc. Our bosses decided to start sticking newbies with us because they became the best prepared to speak the language. But beyond that I can’t see a reason for this!

          1. Annie*

            My sister did that with my niece when she was trying to teach my niece French! Lots of labels throughout the house.

        4. run mad; don't faint*

          A friend did label everything -and I mean everything, light switch, pens, pencils, pencil holder – in his office one day after the boss instituted a similar policy of clear labels on “all items”. The boss was a micromanager and making him and a great many others bananapants. Fortunately, a coworker saw it before the boss did and gently pointed out that such malicious compliance was only likely to get him in trouble, possibly even fired. They had a fun five minutes ripping labels off of all the unnecessarily labeled items. Apparently that was a nice release of frustration for my friend. So I guess it helped! And a few months later, the boss was fired much to the relief of everyone who reported to them.

      3. Twice Bitten*

        I’d be tempted to go the Magritte route, and label everything that wasn’t a desk as “ce n’est pas un bureau”

        4. Festively Dressed Earl*

          Maybe the COO is transforming the entire office into a surrealist art installation?

      5. Aeryn Sun*

        I would be VERY tempted to label everything including myself. Label all the parts of a chair, label individual pieces of paper, label each pen, etc. Malicious compliance. I don’t think I’d have the guts to do it but man I wish I did.

      6. pagooey*

        This! I worked in a chain bookstore, 30+ years ago, where we had an old-school label maker for our name badges. On one slow night, a couple of us decided to label everything at the cashwrap area: not just REGISTER 1, REGISTER 2 and SMALL BAGS, etc., but STAPLER and KNUCKLEBUSTER (credit-card carbon slip imprinter; kids, ask your parents!) and eventually the places where we and the customers were standing: ALAN and PAGOOEY and CUSTOMER 1 and, over to the far left, opposite the counter where actual customers would line up to make purchases, IMPATIENT CUSTOMER YELLING QUESTION.

        Most of the stickers stayed on there for years; I know they outlasted me! (And Alan, come to think of it.)

    3. coffee*

      My best guess is that someone has some large item they need for their work, so they have to have more “furniture” than the COO wants to see in an office. Solution, label it so it’s clear what it is and the COO knows it’s a work thing. Then he’s applied that as a blanket rule?

      My other guess is it’s just a petty power trip.

      1. ecnaseener*

        Hmmm, so maybe LW can get away with extra furniture if they label it — “beanbag chair,” “blanket nest,” “spice rack” …

        1. Mockingjay*

          You forgot the cot for the napping intern. Large label, please, in proportion to its importance.

    4. Jordan*

      I would be annoying about it and label every object in a different language
      Silla
      Schreibtisch
      carta da lettere
      Nár fhág sé a chlaíomh ar an mbord?

      1. Filosofickle*

        I would be tempted to label my desk “bureau” to be extra annoying, because it is both a different language (French) and also a word in English for a different type of furniture. :D

      2. niknik*

        Oh, you bet ! I’d break out that label printer and go to town.
        – “Door”
        – “Window”
        – “Floor”
        – “Wall 1”, “Wall 2”, ..

        1. Thegreatprevaricator*

          Exactly this, I’m not sure I would be able to restrain myself. It tickles me to imagine it

        2. BellaStella*

          This was what I was thinking too! Stapler, pen1, pen2, blank paper, printer, scissors, potted plant1, potted plant2, watering can, dish1, plate 1, etc etc …. I like Floor, and Window and Door and Wall too. This is so odd. Maybe the COO has a brain thing where they cannot remember common names for things? No idea and cannot speculate but wow, this is odd.

        3. Hastily Blessed Fritos*

          This is what I was thinking too! Coffee mug, mouse, notebook, pen….

        4. Potatohead*

          I actually did this as a joke once on Thanksgiving…my mother had put a sticky note ‘Oven’ on the oven as a reminder to check it, so before guests showed up I labeled everything else in the kitchen similarly.

          2. Jay (no, the other one)*

            I once came back from vacation to discover that my officemates had found the admin’s labelmaker. EVERYTHING was labeled. JAY’S DESK, JAY’S CHAIR, JAY’S COMPUTER, JAY’S FAVORITE PEN. The photo on my desk said JAY’S HUSBAND. It was very funny – because it was a joke, not a mandate from some lunatic micromanager.

            2. Pamela S*

              I once came back from long service leave (that’s a three month paid vacation we Aussies get every 7 or 10 years of employment) to find a coworker had similarly labelled everything in my office. There was a sign with an arrow pointing to my office, in case I forgot where it was. There were labels on the laminator, the phone, the binding machine, with instructions on how to use them in case I’d forgotten how.

            3. fhqwhgads*

              When I first started reading the letter that’s what I thought they were being asked to do, not just label each desk “desk”, but Armand’s desk, Benedict’s desk, Caroline’s chair, Dionne’s bookshelf, etc. Like some sorta thing to prevent anyone moving furniture between rooms.

          1. A Significant Tree*

            I’ve never seen a label maker without that label!

            other than the fact that it’s a bizarre instruction from the COO, I’d definitely have fun with it. Different fonts, different color label tape, every single item…

            1. Squirrel!*

              Oh my gosh, I just noticed that my label maker isn’t labeled! Must fix that. It has labels on it – one with my name, others to show what the different sizes/fonts look like – but is not itself labeled

        6. RVA Cat*

          HR gets involced when the labeling goes “to the window, to the wall, til the sweat runs down your….”

        7. Juicebox Hero*

          I’d label my ceiling tiles both by number and position, each of the recessed light fixtures, and the planks in the flooring the same way, too.

      3. CowWhisperer*

        Braille. With clear Braille tape, you won’t see it – but it’s labeled and accessible. Just make sure you put it the
        right way.

    5. I’m not a black belt*

      This cycle happens in a manufacturing environment. Someone takes 6s training regarding efficient manufacturing and immediately imposes the SAME standards on the engineers work spaces that are required for the manufacturing spaces. The engineers take the moral hit (and some leave) and eventually things drift back to a more reasonable standard. But yes, it doesn’t show actual mastery of the 6s principles and is focused on the wrong are-.

        1. Mockingjay*

          Ah, Lean Six. Years ago I was on a joint agency program (Navy and Marine Corps) and the Navy got the bright idea to implement Lean Six Sigma on projects that already followed strict DoD Acquisition Category (ACAT) processes in great detail. I’ll never forget the teleconference in which the Marine Corps leadership explained in very explicit language that not a single penny of their funds would be spent on worthless duplication of effort.

          (Not saying that Lean Six Sigma doesn’t have value; if you are starting from the ground up, it has lots of tools to analyze and organize project needs to be successful. But it’s not the only process out there.)

          1. SheLooksFamiliar*

            ‘But it’s not the only process out there.’

            Say that a little louder so all the newly minted Green and Black Belts hear you, please.

            1. MigraineMonth*

              Yeah, right. Next you’re going to tell me it’s possible to write software without Agile stand-up meetings!

              1. I Have RBF*

                Agile Kanban does not require standups. Only obsessive Scrum requires standups circle jerks.

        1. Observer*

          If any auditor actually needs a label to know that a desk is a desk, you need to go back to the auditing agency and let them know that their auditor seems to have the capacity of a child just developing language skills and that doesn’t work for any sort of audit.

          We once had an auditor from a government agency insist that a specif contract could not actually be a contract because it was the wrong format. The agency told him to knock it off. They did not do it for *us* but themselves, to be clear. Because what were they going to do with a report full of those kinds of “findings”?

          1. JustaTech*

            One time one of my sites was audited not by the Feds (we know how to work with them), but by the new owners. Who wanted to count everything. OK, cool, here are all the rooms, here’s the warehouse, here’s the very complex inventory system.

            Nope, not good enough, they wanted to count every single vial of the most expensive thing. The most expensive thing that must be kept in a super-cold freezer until right before we use it. You can’t just take them all out (many hundreds of thousands of vials) and count them and then put them back and still have anything be usable.

            So maybe an assets audit to count up the value of the desks and chairs?
            (Not likely.)

            1. Observer*

              Well, it does sound like your new owners were idiots who purchased a line of business that they knew nothing about.

              So I suppose that it’s just *possible* that this is for an audit, but it would have to be this COO, because with any outside auditor you would be able to push back. Which means that Alison’s guess that the “COO has misplaced his gourd” is too kind.

    6. Awkwardness*

      That sounds like some 5S initiative gone rougue.
      I fear the comments will have a strong opinion of this letter, but I find it a bit hilarious. That would not be the first person to be carried away with labelling.

      1. Brain the Brian*

        I’m wondering about how much experience as a COO this individual has. If they’re relatively new to that level of work, perhaps they’re trying to “prove” they know the 5s principles and vastly overdoing it.

        1. Pastor Petty Labelle*

          Definitely trying to prove something. Taking the idea of imposing your vision of the company to a whole new level.

          Still laughing at Alison saying the COO misplaced their gourd.

            2. Nina*

              nonononono under 5S they should label the place where their gourd is meant to be, and then check the tooltag on that location to see who has taken their gourd.

        2. Annie*

          I think that’s exactly what it is. The COO is following 5S to the extreme, without understanding the purpose of it and why it’s valuable in specific situations.

          As I mentioned above, we had a similar initiative, thankfully without the labeling and outline on desks, but with pictures of our workspace that showed what the 5S state should be, and we had to sign off each evening that we 5S’d before leaving for the day. In our cubicles, which weren’t even filled with miscellaneous paper or anything.

      2. Cinn*

        I thought 5S too when I got to the bit about the photo of what the place should look like. But the rest… is totally overboard and not really grasping the point of 5S at all.

        Also, surely the new boss can’t mandate where the computer/screens are because of DSE (basically the ergonomic assessment of your desk for your needs), or this that not applicable outside the UK?

        1. Brain the Brian*

          Not applicable at least in the U.S., as far I’m aware. We don’t label things where I work, but we do have mandated positioning for our chairs and company-issued computer / telephone equipment so that our IT department can easily replace things (including re-threading cords) as necessary.

          1. Other Alice*

            At a previous job, mgmt had an “ergonomics expert” mandate where the computer screens and desks would be placed in our new office building. I had to call the office manager into my cubicle and show her the sunlight hit the screen in a way that made it absolutely impossible to see anything or do any work. She, who had her office on the other side of the building like mgmt, said “but the expert”. I left shortly after because it was just the tip of the iceberg. Regardless, I find it easy to believe that someone would mandatw that, for any number of nonsense reasons.

        2. kicking-k*

          I’ve encountered the “photo of what the room should look like” as a tool for helping children, especially ND children who may struggle with planning, to envisage what a tidy room looks like and help them to achieve it. But for adults? In a non-family setting? I’m wondering if he’s used it for his own kids, or himself, and it’s been a wild success…

          The immediate problem with this I see is with accommodations for disability. I have back support cushions added to my office chair and extra shelving for specific work I do; other teammates have laptop stands, footrests, and other ergonomic equipment. People aren’t interchangeable and neither are their working needs.

          1. Nina*

            “photo of what the room should look like”
            Again, really common in 5S environments, really weird otherwise.

          2. Nightengale*

            I borrowed an occupational therapy gym a few years ago. I had permission to take items out of the gym and bring them to another part of the building for an event so long as they were all returned properly.

            The gym had a photo posted of where everything went with the caption, “clean gym looks like this.” It was REALLY helpful. Apparently they had a lot of staff and volunteers in that space and so it was most efficient to take the picture once rather than expect people to remember where things went or to be always telling people where things went.

            The same occupational therapists did not have photos of their own cubicles. . .

          3. RM*

            “photo of what the room should look like” is also a tool for staff in hotel, restaurant, and event spaces to quickly re-set rooms to a standard and also to quickly note missing items due to guest breakage or thievery. Waaaay more to intuitive for both training and for reference while working.

        3. SweetestCin*

          Based on my current desk setup in the US, I’m going with “yeah, ergonomic assessments are pretty rare”. Currently in P/T for a problem directly attributable to my desk chair. Currently in a long-winded circular battle with HR over whether I can get a replacement that’s suitable, the rub being both that I don’t know what will be suitable and that whatever it is it won’t look (gasp) uniform.

        4. yams*

          I actually have a sheet with a picture of what my desk is supposed to look like as a standard work instruction, the lean team came and hung one in everyone’s desk lmao.

            1. Annie*

              It was when I was working at a different location. I got dinged for being non-compliant because the cords of my computer/monitor were too messy, and not nicely bound together *under my desk* in a cubicle in which no one would see the cords except me.

              We had to sign-off everyday that our desk looked like the picture before we left (it was a laminated picture hung up in our cubicle, so we signed off in dry erase). Of course, usually we just pencil-whipped it at the end of the week before we went home.

          1. 1LFTW*

            Yeah, someone upthread mentioned working at a lab where the bio-containment waste bin could only be on the right side of the work station. I’m not a lefty, but my father is, and I think I just heard him blow a gasket from several time zones away.

      3. SarahKay*

        That was exactly my thought. When my company first started the whole 5S thing each site had an appointed ‘5S Champion’ who was supposed to make sure we all conformed.

        I’m in an office, attached to a manufacturing site. Having a workbench clearly labelled with what tools go where makes sense. You can easily see if one is missing; it is missing because you left it in the item you were repairing? (This has happened; outcome not as bad as leaving surgical implements in a patient but still very bad.)

        Having my desk labelled in the same way makes rather less sense.
        I did the workplace agreement thing (photo of how my workspace is laid out) but refused to do the labels; it’s my desk, we don’t hotdesk, and I know what goes where.

        During a slightly heated disagreement with the 5S Champion I told him that if he provides me with a picture of the European VP’s desk, showing labels for where VP’s phone, stapler, etc should go then I would do the same for my desk, and smile while I did it. Until then, there was my workspace photo, I was done. (Reader, I did not have to add labels to my desk.)

        1. Insert Clever Name Here*

          This is amazing. Please accept this gold star from an internet stranger.

        3. Red Reader the Adulting Fairy*

          I once opened my hood after a visit to a mechanic’s shop to find a foot-long wrench in my engine. (When I took it back to them, the mechanic was like “Oh, hey, I’ve been looking for that, thanks!” “IT WAS IN MY ENGINE.” “……… oh.”)

          1. Elsajeni*

            We had a tree trimmed in my backyard recently, and a couple days later the youngest guy on the crew rang our doorbell unexpectedly and asked, in a sheepish tone of voice, “Did we leave a chainsaw here?” (And you know what? They HAD! We hadn’t discovered it because it was between the fence and the tree they were trimming, and not really visible unless you were right up on it. I assume the young guy was assigned to make the embarrassing visit because he was the one who left it.)

        4. bamcheeks*

          Genuinely finding this conversation about 5S principles fascinating, because I’ve never come across it before but I can see how it would make sense in an engineering or manufacturing context. Love learning about things like this!

        5. Gretta*

          Well, you and the other 5S people have figured it out. I’ve abided by “Marie Kondo” rules for my household/workplace for the last decade. She prefers no labels on things because it’s visually noisy and I agree with her! That works well for me; however, I wouldn’t try to impose some system on others who may have different ideas of what it pleasant in a work area.

      4. Seeking Second Childhood*

        I too thought misunderstood 5S. It could also be the flip side – malicious compliance, because 5S wasn’t designed for personal unshared workspaces.

        1. ArtK*

          Nothing kills productivity and quality quite as much as misapplying productivity and quality processes. Misapplying can include from “it doesn’t belong here” to “we haven’t adapted it to our specific situation.”

          Stuff like this always makes me think of the cargo cults of New Guinea after WWII.

          1. I Have RBF*

            Cargo cult is exactly what is going on.

            You see it in software companies with “Agile” (Scrum) being mandated for all teams. But Scrum doesn’t work for operations teams that are working on a steady state and problem solving, because that kind of work doesn’t fit into “sprints” (mini death marches).

            You see it in manufacturing with Lean, 6 Sigma, 5S, etc.

            You see it in all sorts of companies who impose open plan offices (Facebook does open plan, and is successful, therefore we must do open plan to be successful.)

            Management by fad, or management cargo-culting, is one of the major causes of institutional misery, especially in the tech arena.

      5. ecnaseener*

        Of course it’s hilarious! My strong opinion is that it’s utterly absurd, which is both hilarious and a very bad sign of what else this guy might come up with.

      6. Apples and Oranges*

        Yes I made another comment before I saw this one. 5S gone wild! It happens.

      7. Not So Lean*

        5S is exactly what I was thinking too, especially with the detail about having the picture to refer to.

    8. Kevin Sours*

      When I first read labeling I was thinking asset control tags. Which is a bit annoying for desks and chairs especially if the tags are prominent. But you can at least see where that is coming from. Labeling the desk with “desk” makes me wonder if he graduated preschool.

      1. Allonge*

        Me too, on the asset labeling. It’s actually hilarious becaouse ours have just a barcode and sometimes things are encoded wrong in hte system and then we need to figure out why an external hard drive shows up as ‘monitor’.

        But yes, the barcodes have a function. Also, things in the asset inventory are labelled by people responsible for this, we don’t need to do it ourselves.

        1. Bumblebee*

          We have asset tags on most things but the spreadsheet they relate to gets screwed up every year, and we all spend a day trying to find things that are tagged to us mistakenly, or tags we have never known about that suddenly come back to life – I spent a lot of last year arguing that no one could possibly know where the 10 year old digital camera that relates to none of my direct reports’ jobs, that none of them ever purchased or indeed used, should be an urgent item to find. And one year I was informed that I owned the braille printing machine!

        2. Orv*

          My workplace does that too. It makes sense, but I find it a little hilarious every time I see something ridiculously big with a barcode label on it, like a pickup truck.

      2. Anima*

        Yes, I was thinking barcodes, too, until the letter said to label desks “DESK”. My uni has barcodes all over the place because the furniture belongs to the Land (German version of state), and that makes totally sense – to know how many chairs the Land owns and we’re they are. But DESK is indeed preschool level…

      3. N C Kiddle*

        I was envisaging a label with the employee’s name, so that if someone had a rogue piece of furniture he would immediately know whose it was. Which would still be petty and micromanaging, but marginally less ridiculous.

        1. A Simple Narwhal*

          Yes that was my thought too! That at least makes some small amount of sense, especially if it’s an office where things get shared or moved around a lot. But to just say this is a desk, this is a chair? Outside of learning a new language I can’t see what this accomplishes.

        2. dulcinea47*

          This is what I was thinking too, b/c I had a coworker who did label all her cubicle stuff with her name. She lived in fear that someone was going to take “her” chair or one of her 10 calendars, I guess.

          1. Annie*

            I can understand that. The place I worked was very much a place in which you wanted to label your chair. There were lots of older, crappy chairs that newer people got stuck with. I had a nice chair and labeled it, but was gone for two weeks around Christmas, and got back and it was gone. I never could find it. I had written my name in Sharpie on the chair adjustment level. Someone switched it out with a crappy chair in which the armrests were torn up. :(

          2. Nina*

            My dad has long worked in an open office… he has a special ergonomic chair that he brought in himself and got a specific accommodation letter for. It used to go walkabout nearly every weekend, until he got a brass plate that said ‘THIS CHAIR IS HARRY’S PERSONAL PROPERTY. IT IS A DISABILITY ACCOMMODATION” and riveted it onto the back of the chair.

        3. Jackalope*

          We had a lot of our stuff (chair, file cabinets, etc.) labeled with our names since we had some work being done in our office which required the work crew to move everything at night and then put it back before we came in. I’m still amused every now and then when I see the big labels on my stuff, but at least it makes logical sense.

      4. Observer*

        When I first read labeling I was thinking asset control tags.

        Yeah, that could make sense. And I also doubt that the LW would be complaining about that. Sure, a lot of asset tags have related human readable stuff on them, but that’s mostly to make sure that you are using the correct tag. Like if I see a tag that says chair on someone’s desk, I know to check that in the system and see what is going on – and perhaps find the chair that doesn’t have it’s asset tag.

        Labeling the desk with “desk” makes me wonder if he graduated preschool

        Yup.

      5. Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain*

        Same. Some people bring in personal pieces of furniture, and when they leave it can raise eyebrows when they’re seen rolling a bookcase or leather office chair out the door. All university property has a little barcode tag and we’re theoretically not allowed to move an item out of the office/room that it’s tagged for.

        1. Orv*

          The university I work for does that, but only for items that cost more than $5000 when bought.

        2. Rainy*

          In a recent office swap, I was told to leave all university property from the old office there and use what was in the new office. I pointed out that my desk chair was bought for me and is set up for my back. “Oh, okay, take your chair, and put the chair from the new office in the old office, but everything else has to stay.” Well, there were some pieces of furniture in the new office that were the same type as the old office but I preferred the ones from my old office, so I said “I’m going to swap the [items] so I can keep the one I currently have.” I spent five minutes explaining that if the list of contents of an office say “desk chair, desk, other desk, upholstered chair, bookcase” and when I am done swapping, that list still says “desk chair, desk, other desk, upholstered chair, bookcase” it does not matter if I kept the pine finished bookcase and moved the oak finished bookcase because there is still “bookcase (1)” in each office. The point was finally conceded and I kept my preferred [item]s.

          Four hours later I got a completely un-self-aware message from that same manager saying “The person taking your office is mad about the desk, I know your new office has a [preferred desk], can you swap them.”

          (The desk that is productive of such ire is twelve feet long and was assembled in situ in the old office when the suite was built, which is why when I inherited that office I adjusted to the rage-inducing desk. My new office is a different shape and entered via two right angle turns in passageways that are decidedly not twelve feet wide. So–no. I cannot swap them unless you plan on developing portal technology. I just gave her the preferred desk from my new office. I don’t like that feature anyway.)

    9. Storm in a Teacup*

      Also why label desk etc…
      It would make a tiny bit more sense if things were labelled with the employee name or with the office room number but still weird

      1. Storm in a Teacup*

        Also this reminds of the time in an old role when my colleague used a dymo labeller for the first time, got super excited and in to it. I popped out to a meeting and came back to the office to find my chair and all of our actions very neatly labelled

          1. MigraineMonth*

            Yeah, my seven-year-old self got her hands on one for a while before my parents confiscated it in self-defense. Fun times!

          2. Rainy*

            I bought a labelmaker for home after resisting for a very long time and let me tell you, it was life-changing. At this point I don’t even remember what purpose I bought it to serve, it’s been so helpful. One thing I do is use it to make labels that I can put around a cord and stick to itself on the other side, flag-fashion (if that makes sense), so that I can label all the cords from my aquarium setups right above the plug so that when I’m doing maintenance I don’t have to use trial and error to figure out which plug to pull when I need to unplug various life-support equipment.

        3. SarahKay*

          Fun fact: my company makes it’s own version of a Dymo labeller, which we have to buy rather than a Dymo brand. They are still universally referred to as a Dymo labeller; apparently the site that makes them is very bitter about this.

        4. Nonanon*

          One of our lab managers thought the PI was too “over the top” in insisting how everything was labeled, so she decided to label everything…. including our tape dispenser and stapler.

          1. JustaTech*

            Ha, in my labs it’s always been the lab manager insisting we label everything because my goodness tube racks walk.
            The last time my lab got in a whole bunch of new tube racks we couldn’t decide what to label them, because our group name kept changing. So we labeled them with our group lead’s name, because he wasn’t going anywhere, right?
            And then he got demoted and eventually quit, but 9 years later all our tube racks still have his name on them.

      2. JSPA*

        Maybe someone was using desks and chairs as ladders, hurt themselves, and claimed ignorance when injured or when instructed to go get a step-stool?

        “Sure, it’s a mop bucket, but who’s to say it isn’t also a stepstool?”

        1. SheLooksFamiliar*

          Thanks, now I have ‘Sending Our Love Down The Well’ playing in my head.

    10. Cats cats cats*

      it sounds like someone getting over zealous about 5S, which is an organization tool.

    11. The OG Sleepless*

      Wasn’t there something like this related to ISO 9000 in the 90s? I vaguely remember a Dilbert cartoon about it.

      1. Me, I think*

        Because I am generally 30 years behind the times, ISO9000 is what I thought of, too. I remember my engineer dad talking about it. Pretty sure he didn’t have to label his desk “DESK” though. :)

      2. Loredena*

        One place I was at when they did iso9000 labeled bookcases, manuals, and me as Reference.

    12. Irish Teacher.*

      Yeah, when I read the title, I thought it was going to be a case of their being asked to label it with their name, so people would know what belonged where if anything got moved. Still seemed a bit ridiculous, but it made more sense than this. Like if you can read the label on a desk, you should be able to see that…it’s a desk.

    13. Automotive Engineer*

      Sounds like the new COO just read a book on 5S methodology that was championed by the Japanese automakers back in the 80s.
      It is a process of making sure a working are is clean and standardized which often is needed on a shop floor. (do a google search of 5S methodology or process for full details)
      Some execs take it way to far and implement it in the office space to the Nth degree. It should only be a tool to make sure that the office space is clean and neat at the end of the day. There is no need to worry about the parts on the desk that you are working on but if you need more than a day with parts try talking to your manager about have a Work In Process location on the desk or file cabinet. The biggest thing I have seen is engineers hoarding parts for months at a time.
      I have been through a couple of rounds of this BS and it never lasts in the office as the champion for it gets distracted and then things return to the status quo eventually.
      Best suggestion is to ride it out and within 6 months it will die off.

    15. Apples and Oranges*

      It sounds to me like Lean/5S or some similar productivity system. Especially given that they work in manufacturing. It’s common to label objects (and the spaces they go in) as well as post pictures of setups so people know where things go. It’s just no…necessary to impose this on people’s desks in this way. It’s more useful on a manufacturing floor or in a hospital where there is a lot of complexity and moving parts.

    17. teacherandhiker*

      My (extremely organized, Type A) mom bought a label maker one year around the holidays. She used it to label things mainly in the kitchen and dining room to help her organize for hosting. My dad thought it was really funny and started labeling everything – including the door and the cat. In walks our tabby cat with a label saying “cat” on her forehead. Fortunately my mom thought it was hilarious. (And don’t worry, label was promptly taken off kitty!)

      1. Prorata*

        Was there a label on the bottle of Bactine, which was rapidly emptied after The Cat showed their opinion of having a label affixed to its head??

    18. Hot Flash Gordon*

      I think it’s an extreme application of Kaizen principles of 5S. We did it at our offices years ago and had to apply labels on the desk for where the stapler, etc would go.

      1. Annie*

        Yes, that was always ridiculous for the office setting. For manufacturing floor, with tools, this labeling or a shadow board makes perfect sense. For a desk with a computer in a cubicle, it’s pointless.

    19. The Kulprit*

      I was certain that they meant “label your stuff as yours”, not some kind of 2nd language class activity. I’m not convinced this isn’t some sort of twisted, “how absurd can demands get before they push back?” experiment.

    20. Madame Desmortes*

      Because I am impossibly childish, I want to tape a label “CHUCKLEHEAD” to this COO’s forehead.

    21. AnonInCanada*

      The only label that I would find appropriate is one to affix to the COO, with the proper identifier “idiot.” This is so out of left field it’s baffling. And, as Alison pointed out, is likely a sign of even more bizarre things to come.

    22. Quality Person*

      I think that it was a poor application of 5S. (Part of a quality system where “everything has a place” and it’s not uncommon to label things and even tape out where they are supposed to be, for those that don’t know what 5S is.)

        1. Decima Dewey*

          I disagree. Clearly the organization has hired a grown up Double D from “Ed, Edd, and Eddie.” (neat freak Double D labeled *everything* in his room)

    23. BW*

      We had a huge, big OSHA thing at my last job. We were required to label EVERYTHING before the OSHA person showed up to review our workplace. Seriously, label EVERYTHING, no matter how stupid.

      2. MigraineMonth*

        I suspect your workplace didn’t understand the assignment, if that’s what they thought OSHA wanted.

        1. 1LFTW*

          …yeah, there are some fairly dangerous chemicals used at my worksite, and the only labeling requirement is that we don’t *remove* the labeling on those containers.

          I’m kind of laughing at the idea that OSHA would come in and say, “look, the problem isn’t that the desk is next to a vent that spews toxic gasses; it’s that the desk is not clearly labeled.”

    24. Beka Cooper*

      All I can picture when I think of this labeling and photo scheme is the daycare I used to work at. When we refreshed the different play areas each month, we labeled every item (to expose them to the words for literacy) and took a photo of how it looked on the shelf so it helped the kids put them back correctly. Obviously that’s not the reason here, but…actually it’s kind of what he said the purpose is for the photo of how the office should look. So, engineers, or five year olds?

      1. Daisy-dog*

        I’m just picturing a visitor coming by who starts to say, “Oh you’ve got a nice picture on your wall…of this office??? But slightly cleaner?”

        1. MigraineMonth*

          “Some employers encourage their workers to bring in photos of their loved ones, beautiful places or artwork that inspires. Here at Drudgery Co, we discourage reminders of anything outside of this office, where you will work long hours, six days a week until you eventually drop dead at your desk.”

    25. Just me*

      The COO is just a controlling jerk. There is no need to label all this stuff and to tell people where to place things on their desk. NO. Sorry but I just can’t do that it’s insane and it’s treating people like children.

    26. AnonInCanada*

      Anyone who lives in Canada will likely remember (or may come across) television commercials for a certain house brand of products called “No Name.” I can only picture this office resembling those commercials, with everything labeled as per this COO’s directive. Google “no name commercial” to see what I’m talking about.

    27. Dust Bunny*

      SAME.

      We have inventory labels on all of our significant furniture, but they’re letters and numbers, not the type of item.

    28. MigraineMonth*

      When I read the headline, I assumed it was an inventory label with a barcode. Or maybe one that included cleaning/safety information. Because obviously no one would put a label on a desk that just said desk, that’s just ridiculous.

    29. ReallyBadPerson*

      My malicious compliance would mean labeling the furniture exactly as one would in a kindergarten classroom: huge block print on lined, laminated cards, and I’d label the walls, lamps, and floor.

    30. BigTenProfessor*

      My guess is that they are doing something like a 5S system on the manufacturing floor. It’s a concept where everything has a place and there’s a lot of visual management designed to easily spot problems. Then someone was like, “oh, we should do this in the office, too,” but has no real concept of how that should work or why.

    32. Little Bobby Tables*

      Find the most preposterous substitutes for a desk and chair you can use without ruining your work or comfort. Stuff the computer and telephone inside the hollowed out cases of the strangest things you can find at a thrift store. That way the “desk” label on an old fridge turned on its side and the “computer” label on an old suitcase will make a bit more sense.

    33. Dek*

      Maybe he thinks they live in a political cartoon and everything needs to have a label.

      I would go a step further and start putting labels on people, clothes, stairs, doors…

    34. Festively Dressed Earl*

      It prevents anarchy! Society has rules! Wasabi from Big Hero 6 has moved up in the world, apparently.

    35. MCMonkeyBean*

      The labeling is wild but I think the part about taking a picture of the office and then hanging that picture up in the office is the wildest bit of all.

      Maybe ask if once you hang the picture up, you need to take a picture to document where it is. And then you hang that one up in its place… so I guess you better take a new picture now! Just spend all of your time at the office taking a new picture and re-hanging it. Sorry boss, I can’t finish those reports, I’m too busy making photographic evidence of what my office looks like to hang in my office!

    36. Laura LL*

      Either the person is controlling (and probably abusive in other ways) or as a mental disorder that makes him want everything to be clean and orderly (to an extreme degree). I’m not diagnosing because there are a few different things that could cause that, but this is not normal behavior.

    37. Raisins in Potato Salad Walking to the Moon*

      This is why I love reading AAM. I learn so much! I work in higher ed and never in my life heard of Lean Six, 5S, Six sigma, Agile….. if I heard them, I’d just think it was a Pink Floyd box set.

  4. Snoozing not schmoozing*

    How can a person tell if a person specifically has vodka on their breath, as opposed to other white or light-color liquors?

    2. Roland*

      What difference does it make lol. Regardless of the situation, actionable or not, it makes zero difference if it’s vodka or gin or something else.

      1. The Bunny*

        In this case though it’s that OP decided it WAS vodka that makes it matter. It wasn’t that she seemed drunk, or that she smelled of alcohol, but that she specifically smelled of vodka. That and the counting of drinks the other woman had at the party make me question if OP is smelling vodka…or smelling “alcohol” and that was the one that smelled closest.

        It could have been any number of things. Heck, during COVID we had hand sanitizer in our office that smelled strongly of tequila. Enough that the joke was that we might be using tequila on our hands.

        1. Hastily Blessed Fritos*

          There were a bunch of small distilleries that pivoted to making hand sanitizer early in the pandemic, when it was hard to come by and bars and restaurants were closed.

        2. Seeking Second Childhood*

          Vodka distilleries sold sanitizer that was made from their production waste. It smelled strongly like we’d been drinking.

          Vodka is also an effective tool for quick stain removal….which I don’t use unless I can launder the garment before being around other people.

          1. Polaris*

            Yes, I still have a couple of bottles of the vodka-waste sanitizer (they were a little overzealous in providing spray disinfectant to each of us, its labeled, by the way, with our names) on my desk. They do in fact smell like a poorly made, room temperature martini…

            1. BlueSwimmer*

              I’m a high school teacher and the school system started providing hand sanitizer when we returned to in-person school that reeked of booze. All the students smelled like they had been doing shots.

        3. OP #1*

          Vodka is my sworn enemy since it forsook me in college, so I know what it smells like.
          And I wasn’t “counting” her drinks, she was seated to my immediate left and drank the entire bottle of wine that had been placed on the table (no one else wanted any) plus more.

          1. T.N.H*

            But there’s no way you could tell the difference between vodka and some hand sanitizers/mouth wash. I’m a sommelier and I’m certain I couldn’t do it (on a chemical level, what would you even be detecting?). It reinforces that you jumped to a conclusion rather than giving it a bit more thought.

          2. Not a friend of Bill*

            I’m assuming this coworker can afford better booze than a college kid…
            Drinking at a fancy dinner event and (potentially but maybe not) on a Friday doesn’t make someone an alcoholic.

          3. Observer*

            so I know what it smells like.

            I think you are overestimating your capacity to know the difference between vodka and stuff that smells similar, as well as overlooking the many things that actually do smell like vodka.

          4. CommanderBanana*

            As someone who been in the unfortunate position of having to deal with the aftermath of drunk coworkers at events, I would definitely notice if someone downed an entire bottle of wine on their own at a banquet function.

            However. It doesn’t seem like she behaved inappropriately at that event, or seemed visibly intoxicated. She is not your direct report (if she was, or was mine, I would definitely say something about it). If you see her noticeably tipsy or intoxicated at work or an event, by all means, say something about it. But those two things, while they might be alarming, don’t necessarily mean she’s got a drinking problem, and even if she does, thus far it doesn’t seem like she’s done anything that would warrant you getting involved.

            Don’t borrow trouble unless you have a good reason to do so.

        4. Justme, The OG*

          I would joke about “spring break sanitizer” versus “hospital sanitizer” during the panini.

        5. Roland*

          Thread op asked about vodka “as opposed to other white or light-color liquors”. Not hand sanitizer. Those are pretty different arguments to be making.

          1. Nina*

            Let me see. Vodka smells pretty different to gin, tequila, rum, kirsch, sambuca, cointreau, triple sec, and most flavoured schnapps. It smells similar to Everclear because it’s fundamentally the same thing as Everclear.
            Where I live, hand sanitizer is usually unscented (and smells like ethanol/vodka or isopropanol) or cucumber scented.

        6. Not the class clown*

          I agree the smell could have been caused by a number of other things, but the hand sanitizer comments are odd to me – it’s pretty noticeable when an odor is coming from someone’s breath, as opposed to smelling it on them generally (like you might smell lotion, soap, detergent, etc).

    3. AcademiaNut*

      I can tell the difference between vodka and something like rum, gin or tequila by the smell.

    4. Shakti*

      I almost wonder if it was breath freshener or mouth wash with an alcohol base? I know vodka and rubbing alcohol can smell similar so it might be something as explainable as that? Especially since it was a morning meeting

      3. The OG Sleepless*

        That was my thought; I had a coworker whose breath had a vaguely chemical smell during morning meetings. Vodka was my very first thought, but then good sense took over and I decided it was probably mouthwash.

      4. OP #1*

        There wasn’t any other scent to it, no minty or “fresh” type of smell. It smelled like she took a shot of vodka and then breathed on me. Which is not to say that she did, but it wasn’t mouthwash.

        1. Bumblebee*

          I think here you have to go by her actions and their results – is she not doing her work? Is it affecting others who are depending on her doing on her work? Otherwise, unless you see her staggering to her car with keys in hand, this is really not your problem to own, no matter how noble your motives.

        2. SleeplessKJ*

          My work partner enjoys a morning kombucha and it smells strongly of alcohol. Decent vodka isn’t that detectable.

    5. Allonge*

      People have different levels of sense of smell, just as we have people with very good and bad eyesight and hearing.

      One of my friends can smell the difference between thyme we get here and the thyme grown in our home country and has a preference for one over the other; to me they have the same scent.

    7. MK*

      Vodka doesn’t smell exaclty the same as gin or rum or “other white or light-color liquors”.

    9. Curious Cat*

      I dated an alcoholic whose drink of choice was vodka, but also drank other liquors from time to time. You can definitely smell the difference.

      LW1, I once worked with a woman who was a closet alcoholic, and there were a couple times we’d be getting coffee from the staff room in the morning where I could smell vodka on her. I once made a comment about having a good time the night before due to the smell and she immediately got super defensive and denied that she ever drank. I found it odd that she got so worked up about it at the time, but after her alcoholism got out to the rest of the staff, due to an unfortunate incident at work, it all made sense. Alcoholics do not like to admit they had a drink, even if it was the night before. While I don’t think there is much you need to do at the moment, if you are concerned, you could do a gut check by simply asking her about it if it happens again. Her reaction should tell you whether she is in fact drinking on the job.

    10. PhyllisB*

      Vodka has a very distinct smell. It’s more of a basic alcohol smell than say, gin but it’s there and people who say it DOESN’T smell are fooling themselves.
      Now I realize if you spray it on garments it dissipates rapidly but when you ingest it that odor is going to linger.

    11. Expelliarmus*

      I think it’s generally accepted that “during covid” is shorthand for “during the height of covid”. Sure, we can argue that things will never be the same after 2020 in terms of the health landscape, but this context makes it clear that this anecdote was during the specific time in the pandemic before vaccines were a thing or were rolled out to the extent that they are now.

  5. inconvenienthusband*

    Re #3. She probably signed an employment agreement agreeing not to bring negative attention to the firm or something like that, which would give the firm grounds to part ways.

    1. BigLawEx*

      No associate I’ve ever known has signed an employment agreement. My experience with this is that she likely *voluntarily* left (with patriarchal pressure natch – see e.g. H.Clinton/M. Obama). When her husband leaves public office, she’ll be welcomed back as a partner with low billable requirements and the assumption that she’ll facilitate introductions.

      (This happened during my time in practice with various folks who went in/out of public office – a few in Ohio actually).

      1. Glomarization, Esq.*

        Yeah, four (or eight) years of staying out of practice avoids the risk of creating of conflicts of interest that may prevent the introductions she might bring in once she’s back in the office.

    2. person*

      That seems a bit strange – she’s not responsible for her husband’s actions or opinions, surely? I don’t think it’s very progressive if we’ve created a culture where successful women can lose their job because their husband’s behaviour is seen to reflect on their own professional conduct.

      2. ScruffyInternHerder*

        I suspect in such a case, you could reverse the genders and it would still be true.

        Still, I lean more to “can’t be seen working for a progressive law firm as it will put into question the truthfulness of my spouse’s conservative policy views” and a personal decision that was either hers or theirs as a couple. I don’t like it, and I wouldn’t like it if it were flipped to “working for a conservative think tank” and “liberal policy views” either.

        I agree that I should not be held professionally accountable for my spouse’s political views. I think that the reality is that when their “political views” are their career, it takes on a separate category and its just one of the many reasons why I’m not involved with a politician nor am I one.

        1. sparkle emoji*

          Yeah, I think this decision had just as much to do with JD Vance’s political ambitions as it did the firm’s political positions. It makes sense that they as a couple may have planned for her to leave her job when/if he did anything on the national stage for a number of reasons.

          1. La Triviata*

            Could also free her up for campaign events, social events while he’s in office, prevent conflict of interest issues, etc.

            1. Ansteve*

              I think the conflict of interest would play into it more. If this law firm were to have a case against the federal government, it would look bad to have the Wife of the VP working on cases

              1. saf*

                Doug Emhoff left his law firm too.

                Yes, it is all about potential conflict of interest issues.

        2. Bumblebee*

          Well said! And while I am loathe to like anything about either Vance, if she were going to be fired for his views, well, they haven’t exactly been secret before this. And I appreciate that she may be warding off future conflicts of interest, as a number of public figures really OUGHT to do.

      3. MPM*

        One could argue that there could be societal benefit to a federal law guaranteeing job protections if you or a spouse decide to run for political office, which would make governing accessible to the very large percentage of the population that needs money to live on while running for office, but unless/until that happens, it’s not protected activity. And with at-will employment, unless a few exceptions apply, your employer can nope out of employing anyone even tangentially connected to any number of potentially attention-attracting activities.

        1. MigraineMonth*

          I think there’s a more fundamental barrier that political campaigns in the US have gotten so expensive that very few people who need to work to live (and almost no working-class people) can win, even if they aren’t fired from their jobs during the campaign.

      4. Dandylions*

        It’s really not so much negative attention as conflict of interest.

        For a more common example my husband will not be able to get a job at the FDA because they are a regulatory body. If my husband were to suddenly be put in a political position to influence the FDA that would also mean If likely need to resign or he couldn’t take the role.

        These sorts of disclosures and reductions of the risks of inmoromper influence is vital to a healthy democracy.

      5. Teapot, Groomer of Llamas*

        The difference here I think is that the spouse of a POTUS or VPOTUS candidate tends to have a pretty large profile themselves, and is expected to play a pretty major role in campaigning. At the very least you have a time commitment issue, and that’s before stuff like PR and (in this case as a lawyer) potential conflict of interests. But it does sound like a mutual decision, and honestly, in 4 months-8 years when she’s off the campaign trail/White House, this would probably make her even more employable as a potential rainmaker.

      6. Laura LL*

        Frankly, I think she left because it would cause issues for her husband’s campaign to be working for a law firm that espouses progressive values. Or for her to be working at all, for some groups of people. It would be a negative for him.

    3. Smithy*

      I think an increase in conflict of interest would likely be a simpler reason – provided it’s not like Alison said and that demonstrating alignment to a mission is also part of it.

      As her husband’s political beliefs and party allegiance have already been known/accessible – the national vs the state would likely be a more straight forward route. Even Senator’s wives are known to join their spouses when campaigning and give speeches indicating at least support of their spouse’s campaign if not every single belief.

      However, with that change from representing a state on the national stage to representing the entire country – the law firm could likely more simply indicate that not having her on cases related to Ohio was a doable. But the potential for conflict of interest on a national stage, less so.

      1. Glomarization, Esq.*

        +1

        It’s all about avoiding conflicts of interest that would arise during and after her spouse’s term in office, which would prevent her from bringing business to the firm. The amount of business she’s not bringing in for 4 or 8 years of his term is dwarfed by the amount of business she’ll likely be able to bring in afterward, which will more than make up for the time she’s away.

    4. Resident Catholicville, U.S.A.*

      It also could be as simple as she decided to quit to go on the campaign trail- that’s a lot of time to take off to follow your spouse around in support of his career. I don’t know that that falls under any traditional leave scheme. She seems accomplished enough, if she doesn’t become Second Lady, she can find a new job easily after the campaign is over. If her husband becomes Vice President, she may forego her career to support him entirely.

      While I agree in theory that it shouldn’t matter what his politics are in relationship to her job, in practice, his beliefs are so controversial that an employer who sees she married him, supports his campaign, and is willing to stump for him, may not approve and decide to cut ties. If they didn’t work in areas that both either made or practiced law and no one was getting national attention, this wouldn’t be an issue. But since she’s a lawyer, he’s a lawmaker and now a larger public figure, it DOES matter.

      1. sparkle emoji*

        Agreed, it’s possible she was pushed out, but there’s plenty of practical reasons a VP candidate’s spouse might not want to work during a campaign, and political reasons why they might not want the potential second lady to have a job at odds with the his campaign stances.

      2. person*

        Good points, but I’d be interested if anyone knows of similar cases where this has happened to male political spouses?

        1. B*

          Kamala Harris’s husband, Doug Emhoff, was also a lawyer at a major international firm and took a leave of absence (and subsequently resigned) when Harris was nominated. I think this is completely de rigeur.

          In addition to the practical reality that you cannot focus on a high-pressure legal career while campaigning (and a VP’s spouse is definitely part of the campaign), it creates all kinds of perceived and actual ethical issues to try to do both.

        2. Resident Catholicville, U.S.A.*

          According to Wikipedia, Doug Emhoff, Kamala Harris’ husband, took a leave of absence from his job during the campaign and then quit when she was elected. He currently has a teaching position at Georgetown, so probably a role that provides some flexibility, similar to Jill Biden’s.

          Since we’ve had so few female politicians as candidates in the US for Vice President or President (*coughwhyarewesobehind*), which are the ones where a spouse would really have to take the most time away from their own jobs, maybe some comments in other countries could chime in.

          1. Resident Catholicville, U.S.A.*

            Also, to be fair, Jill Biden kept her job through both Joe Biden’s Vice President and Presidential terms- and got A LOT of flak for it. The expectation, *wrongly*, is that a spouse has to give up their job and be 100% in support of spouse’s career. It probably is easier if one spouse doesn’t work, especially if their are young children involved (Obama and Vance both come to mind, since their children were young) but obviously that’s nonsense, even if pundits and commentators will make meals of it.

          2. Emmy Noether*

            Joachim Sauer, Angela Merkel’s husband, kept his job as a chemistry professor* during her time in office. He also largely kept out of politics, and out of campaigning specifically (a lot less is expected here of politician’s partners, but even by those standards, it was remarked upon). He did do the hosting of the partner’s program for visiting foreign dignitaries (sometimes?), which is expected. I have not the faintest clue what his views are, and as I understand it, that’s the way he wants it.

            *Fun fact: Merkel was also a chemist/physicist before making a career of politics.

    5. Pastor Petty Labelle*

      Unlikely. More like a conceern about conflicts of interest.

      Second Gentlemen Doug Edelman took a leave of absence from his firm when Kamala Harris was selected VP candidate. It’s just really hard to be a candidate’s spouse and not get associated with the spouse’s campaign. So its better to step away from the job.

      Karen Pence stopped teaching for a bit, then found a school in Virginia to teach at — that matched her political beliefs.

      1. Ex-Lawyer*

        As a former lawyer at several large law firms, I second the idea that her resignation is completely normal and would be expected for both workload and conflict-of-interest reasons. She was still an associate, and campaigning is definitely not consistent with maintaining the workload expected from a senior associate. Also, depending on the structure of the firm, her continuing as an employee could create a conflict of interest for the firm representing parties with business in front of the federal government, or any of the national political parties, etc. I’ve worked at firms that regulated what publicly-traded companies I could personally own stock in, in order to manage conflicts of interest! Completely agree with Alison that there would have been a mutual parting of the ways if she had not resigned already.

    6. AVP*

      If anything she’s going to need a six-month leave to do all of the traveling and events, that has a 50% chance of turning into a permanent job for her. It’s probably easy in this case to just part ways, and let her get a new job if she needs one in January.

  6. IT Relationship Manager*

    #2, as a nerd who never needs an excuse to use a label maker, this actually sounds like a fun goofy task to do on a slow day while complaining about management.

    2. Martin Blackwood*

      Yeah, you could absolutely have fun with making sure the picture on the wall of your desk includes the picture on the wall, and that that picture includes a picture on the wall, etc.

      2. SarahKay*

        When we started the whole 5S thing (Sort, Store, Shine, Standardise, Sustain) in my workplace someone actually did that with their desk picture.

        With a digital camera and time to kill you can apparently do about 5 iterations down….

      3. ferrina*

        Make sure you label the wall and the door! Don’t want anyone getting those two mixed up.

        1. Msd*

          I know! Think of all the work comp cases because people ran into the wall when trying to leave the room.

    3. Cohort 1*

      I was thinking that in the long run your label maker would seriously damage the desk, chair 1 and chair 2, and the file cabinet . Just try peeling that sucker off eventually. Then I thought of all the other ways to label such things. White glue? Wood glue? Gorilla glue? Egg white? Rubber cement? Scotch tape? Masking tape? Blue tape? Package tape? Unless your furniture is all made of steel, those stick-ums are going to shorten their lives considerably.

      Alternatively, I think I want to label my furniture Edward, Colin, Mary Rose, and Patricia.

      1. Bilateralrope*

        Just make sure the labels are placed somewhere where they will not get in the way, but are still visible. That way, removing them is someone else’s problem.

        Especially if the labels also state that they are there because the COO ordered them.

      2. RandomNameAllocated*

        Washi tape is very low tack – and comes in all sorts of exciting colours and patterns. Indeed I wonder if there is some with office furniture on and you could then circle the item on the tape and put the tape on the item!

    4. Bilateralrope*

      Just remember to add “this label ordered by {COO}” to every single label. Just in case anyone has questions about whose idea this was.

      As for the picture, its label says that the picture and label were ordered by the COO.

      1. Granny*

        And, include a picture of the COO on the sign. My thought was to make a massive sign that covers the side of the desk that says DESK. Or, use many signs in different fonts (languages) that say DESK. Cover the whole side of each item! Make ut a Modern Farmhouse Decor. Add function notes: SiT on the chairback and wORk on the Desk.

    5. Not Australian*

      Reminds me of teaching my son to read: we labelled everything, including him, and he was *so* happy about it…

    6. Gritter*

      In the IT department of a company I used to work at, management where really anal about asset tagging all IT equipment. Even things peripherals like keyboards and monitors.

      As a joke we asset tagged the Microwave in the kitchen and put it in the database. To his credit our boss saw the funny side.

    7. Ipsedixitism*

      Then you’d need a smaller label maker to label the label with “label”. And so on. It’s a recursive nightmare!!

    8. Lab Boss*

      Summer camp policy for off-season storage is to label every place you store things, and then inventory accordingly (so you will have Totes A, B, C; Cabinets A, B, C; with an inventory for each). We used the rifle range gun safe to store some random stuff we didn’t want the mice getting into, so we stenciled a large red “SAFE A” onto the side. You see, boss, the policy specifically says off-season storage should be labelled and lettered…

    9. CowWhisperer*

      Even more fun: Braille label maker with clear tape!

      You’ve labeled everything, it’s ADA accessible and the tape is invisible from a distance.

      I loved labeling my classroom for a Deafblind student. She ignored them – she was low-vision and preferred magnified text – but her classmate loved them. I teased the VI consultant that his student was going to need magnified text, but there’d be two new Braille transcriptionists between the other student and my fascination with the language. He was awesome and replied that that’s his definition of a successful education.

  7. Pink Sprite*

    Re: letter 1: If Janet drives to and from work, that’s the heavy machinery she should NOT be using/driving.
    While she smells of alcohol, but is generally acting okay doesn’t matter. Other people are on the same roads and streets. She has no business driving.

    1. Stoli*

      Especially after seven glasses of wine. It’s definitely a work problem if she’s drinking at work or on work property.

      1. AnneMoliviaColemuff*

        I think that’s making a lot of assumptions that aren’t in the letter. Drinking wine at a work function is fine, and there’s nothing about her driving.

        2. Bast*

          I don’t want to go too far into this, but while drinking at a work function is fine, 7-8 glasses of wine at a work function would be… pushing the limits of acceptable, to say the least. If it were a glass or two, fine, but 7-8 is stretching it.

          1. Magenta*

            How many glasses of wine would you get out of a standard bottle in the US? In the UK wine is sold in measures of small 125ml, medium 175ml and large 250 ml, so 7-8 glasses could be anything from just over a bottle to closer to 3 bottles.

            Most people I know would be a bit merry after just over a bottle of wine, we wouldn’t be driving but would be perfectly capable of having work conversations and getting ourselves home via public transport

            It also depends what kind of event it was, 3 bottles is too much at a networking event, where 1 bottle would probably be the limit, but 3 would be seen as on the high side of acceptable at a work Christmas party.

            1. Hlao-roo*

              A standard bottle of wine in the US is 750 ml and a standard serving (or glass) of wine is 5oz or roughly 150 ml, so one bottle is roughly 5 glasses of wine.

            2. Flor*

              OP1 said above that she had the whole bottle that was on the table “plus more”, so probably in the range of 4, maybe 5 250ml glasses.

              Personally, I’d be pished after a whole bottle, but I know a lot of people who can put away a bottle or more over the course of a meal (especially if it’s a substantial meal over a couple of hours) and, as you say, be a bit merry but fine to have work conversations and take public transport home.

        3. I'm just here for the cats!!*

          Does anyone find it odd that OP was monitoring her so closely? Like either the OP watched her like a hawk or the OP could have assumed that she drank that much. Like if she drank 7-8 glasses in 2 hours she would have to have gotten a new glass every like 15-20 minutes.

          1. My Brain is Exploding*

            Somewhere else in this thread the OP mentioned she sat next to the person, who drank an entire bottle of wine by herself and then some.

          2. Gray Lady*

            She might have been sitting at a table with her. It’s possible to notice something like that without being highly focused on it — especially for people who are naturally observant of details.

        4. Rooby*

          Some people are really telling on themselves if they hear 8 glasses of wine in one evening (let alone a couple hours) and don’t at least think “whoa, oof”.

          1. Nina*

            I mean, yeah, to me that’s a lot, but I’m very much aware I’m a lightweight (I get it from my mum). For me, 2 drinks is enough when I’m around friends, and 1 drink is enough at a work function. I don’t have a great sense of how much is ‘too much’ for people who have better alcohol tolerance.

        5. Rooby*

          Notably, you changed the pertinent information about what happened (drinking 7-8 glasses of wine) to instead be saying something few people would object to (“drinking wine at a work event”, full stop). Like yeah, it’s fine to consume wine in general at an open bar work function. That’s not what’s under discussion here, what’s under discussion is binge drinking.

          1. AnneMoliviaColemuff*

            No I didn’t. The person I was responding to said “especially if they are drinking at work”. There was no evidence that there was drinking anywhere other than a work function, which is fine.

      3. Hastily Blessed Fritos*

        It is, in fact, possible to get places without driving. That’s enough wine to raise eyebrows, definitely, but there was nothing in the letter about driving and no reason to assume it.

      4. Sailor Susie*

        Tangentially related to #5: what would happen if someone with an employment gap to hide, instead claimed to have worked at a company that either no longer exists or doesn’t keep good records. I suspect Twitter would be the latter.

        it would be lying and lying is wrong, and maybe grounds for termination if they found out later; but what would show up on the background check? And do you think most companies would be suspicious?

        (happily employed, just curious. )

        1. Kara*

          Not sure about background checks, but even in a company that no longer exists or keeps lousy records you’d still normally have external records such as paystubs, IRS taxes paid in, unemployment paid in.

        2. Evan Þ*

          When I got hired by Very Big Tech Firm, their contracted background checker emailed me at one point that one of my past employers had gone out of business. They asked me politely to send them a scan of a W2 or paystub from them, which I did.

          Not sure what would’ve happened if I hadn’t had either of those on hand to scan in. I guess if nothing else, I could’ve gotten my tax transcript from the IRS, which would’ve recorded that employer had sent me a W2 with such-and-such date.

    2. Nodramalama*

      She may not have actually drunk alcohol. LW has no standing to action this any more than you would stand outside a bar, smell people and then follow them to see if they drive.

      1. ScruffyInternHerder*

        I’d argue less, and I’m not thinking that anyone needs to smell people outside bars either!

        LW thinks she smells alcohol on her coworker. Um, okay?

    3. A Little Birdy Told Me*

      Last night I went out after work and drank four double G&Ts – two in the pub with my grandboss and his colleague, who each had two pints each (before going out for dinner with their director, where I know they drank further), and another two at the gig I was going to.

      None of us were driving home – they went by train, I went by bus. None of us questioned it, even though I know they both drive (I’ve never so much as had a lesson), because we’re all adults with access to public transport and we all know that drink-driving is unacceptable.

      1. Justin D*

        Your use of “pints” and “drink driving” suggests that you live in the UK. In the US there’s a very good chance she was driving. Drunk driving is illegal here the bar for what’s considered drunk is much higher legally and in some circles it’s totally acceptable to drive drunk.

        1. MK*

          I don’t think US car culture/public transport availability means there is a much higher chance of her driving in this case. She could have come with someone else or used a taxi, many people who usually drive or take the bus/tube the rest of the time do it at these occasions.

        2. Fluffy Fish*

          and there’s just as very good of a chance that she was with a designated driver, took a cab, walked, ubered, bused or subway. There are PLENTY of places in the US that have perfectly good public transit and hired vehicles.

          Yes pulic transit isn’t as ubiquitous as Europe but lest not pretend there aren’t plenty of cities with access. Heck my small city has a great bus system and its free.

        3. SnackAttack*

          Eh, not necessarily. In a lot of places, yes, you need to drive to get around, but if they live somewhere like NYC or SF or Washington, DC, she’s probably not driving. Also, lots of people take Ubers, especially to work events where there will be drinking. I work in an industry where a lot of people drink, and pretty much all of them just Uber/Lyft back to their home or hotel.

      2. Academic Social Worker*

        Sounds like you’re in the UK. In the US there’s much less access to public transit

        1. Orv*

          There’s Uber pretty much everywhere. I often Uber somewhere if I expect I’ll be drinking more than would be prudent for driving home.

          1. Rooby*

            No there isn’t Uber everywhere. Plenty of midsize to rural towns and suburbs do not have rideshare or taxi.

      3. Rooby*

        There are a LOT of cities and towns in the US that are not remotely walkable and have essentially no public transit. And all of them have bars. Many bars have big parking lots. It’s a big problem over here.

    4. jmc*

      Exactly. If she is drinking and driving then she should 1: lose her license for life, there is NO excuse for that and 2: lose her job because this is unacceptable behavior. That being said they should investigate thoroughly to see if she is drinking because there is a medical condition where anything consumed turns into alcohol in your stomach. Not saying that is what’s happening here but it’s a possibility.

      1. Lefteye*

        …/should/ LW investigate thoroughly though? Feels like a leave it alone until you see indications of a problem situation, and even then why would LW be investigating, they’re not HR

      2. SnackAttack*

        There’s no indication that she was driving. Sure, lots of places in the US have pretty bad public transportation, but lots of big cities do have decent bus/metro systems (Chicago, DC, New York, etc.). Also, the only options aren’t use public transit or drive yourself. Most people I know use Ubers or Lyfts or taxis, or have a DD.

      3. Yikes Stripes*

        Oh my god, no. Under no circumstances should OP1 be thoroughly investigating if their coworker has any form of medical condition. That is absolutely none of their business and suggesting that it is is beyond the pale.

    5. Festively Dressed Earl*

      And that’s pretty much the line where LW 1 has a duty to get involved – if they see Janet drinking or notice a strong alcohol smell along with erratic behavior, and shortly thereafter Janet takes out her car keys, then it’s time to say something. And that something should be “Hey, I’m calling you an Uber.” Anything other than that, LW has to stay in their lane unless it’s affecting Janet’s work.

  8. The Bunny*

    LW#1

    I’m curious why you even noticed how much she drank at a party?

    There are tons of reasons someone could smell of alcohol and getting a whif of someone and thinking “that person smells like vodka” seems oddly specific, especially as vodka doesn’t really have much of a smell. This coupled with counting her drinks at a work event really makes me wonder why you are paying such close attention to how much she may or may not be drinking.

    1. WS*

      Other issues aside, to me vodka has a very distinctive smell. Then again, I smell alcohol very strongly, so strongly that I don’t drink alcohol or wear perfume, because the alcohol smell is overwhelming to me. If LW says she can smell vodka, there’s no reason to think she can’t.

      1. The Bunny*

        With respect, it really is the point as OP seems oddly focused on this woman and her drinking.

        I wonder if it would have smelled of vodka close to this woman absent LW’s odd fixation with counting the number of drinks the other woman drank at a party.

        When you hear hoofbeats don’t assume zebras and all that.

        1. Shakti*

          I agree there’s a strange fixation with this woman and drinking! Also there are alcohol based breath fresheners and mouthwashes and as pointed out above perfumes. There’s a lot of things it could be other than drinking in the morning! If they smelled beer that would be a different conversation as that’s pretty distinct and there aren’t a ton of other things that smell like beer

          1. WS*

            But vodka doesn’t smell like mouthwash alcohol or perfume – there’s a strong alcohol odour but each smells different.

        2. Myrin*

          It’s not a “fixation” if you realise something and then a later event reminds you of that something.

          And there could be a number of reasons OP noticed the drinks at the party – what immediately came to mind is that OP sat or stood opposite/next to Janet the whole evening and simply realised “Oh wow, Janet is getting up again to get a new glass of wine – that must be the third time and we’ve barely been here an hour!”.

          I agree that this is not a situation where OP should say anything, and I was surprised to hear her say “vodka” specifically but I have actually heard, in fact only recently, people say “vodka” when they just meant “alcohol”. I was wondering where that came from and then figured that since I’m not a native English speaker, this might simply be some sort of “idiom” (in a loose sense) I’m not familiar with.

          But in any case, can we maybe extend some grace to OP here?

          1. Allonge*

            This. Noticing two things is not a fixation. If coworker was drinking in the morning that is not good; drinking heavily at work functions is not advised (yes, it happens, to me too).

            For me the question is more why OP thinks they would get into trouble for not reporting this.

            1. MigraineMonth*

              There are some jobs where you would absolutely get in trouble for not reporting that you suspected a coworker was drinking before work/possibly intoxicated at work. Generally those are safety-critical jobs like operating heavy machinery, manufacturing, flying an airplane, etc.

              There are also contexts where it would make sense to report a coworker even in an office job, for example if the coworker were obviously impaired just before an important presentation or if they were possibly having a medical episode.

          2. 1LFTW*

            Yes to all of this.

            OP asked a perfectly reasonable question about workplace norms, because those norms (and rules!) differ from workplace to workplace, depending on whose safety might be at risk.

        3. That's a lot*

          I think if my coworker drank 7-8 glasses of wine in under two hours, I would notice and worry. That’s a bottle of wine! Or more! I’m not fixated on alcohol or care very much about other people’s consumption most of the time. Noticing and worrying a bit with that amount isn’t odd. I don’t think that gives me license to necessarily DO anything about it since it isn’t any of my business and potentially a one time thing… But the noticing isn’t a sign of fixation in my opinion.

          1. Butterfly Counter*

            My understanding is that a bottle of wine is 4-5 glasses.

            I would very much notice if a coworker was drinking a lot because I’m nosy.

            However, alcohol at a function is very different than drinking at work. OP needs to only keep a lookout for coworker’s competency with her job (barring any work-related driving or other heavy machinery operation). OP doesn’t need to let their boss know that coworker is potentially an alcoholic based only on smell.

        4. The Prettiest Curse*

          Well, this comments section does tend to hear hoofbeats and assume it’s anything BUT an animal with hooves. (See the “Your colleague can’t possibly have OCD because it’s different to my own personal experience of OCD” discussion from earlier this week.)

          I agree that there’s not sufficient reason to assume this OP’s colleague was drinking before this meeting. But regarding the drinking at the previous work event – unless she was drinking from very small wine glasses, 7-8 glasses of wine is at least 1, possibly 1-and-a-half bottles of wine. I think many people would notice if a colleague drank that much in the space of 2 hours even if they didn’t seem visibly impaired, just because it’s a lot to drink in a short space of time.

          1. Nodramalama*

            I would say that the horse is not “coworker has a drinking problem” though. We’re talking about one work event. There are a lot of reasons why someone would drink a lot at a work event that does not mean they have a drinking problem. They might not be PROFESSIONAL reasons but they are reasons all the same

            1. The Prettiest Curse*

              I personally wouldn’t assume that someone had a drinking problem based purely on how much they drank at one event. It would, however, be a data point if there was a pattern of that type of thing.

              1. Nodramalama*

                Yes, but there is no pattern. The two data points is once coworker drank a lot at a work event, and once OP smelled something they identified as alcohol.

                1. Allonge*

                  Data points are how a pattern is made though? This is not a court of law where OP needs to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that coworker is an alcoholic.

                  These two data points can be cause for concern in some situations (operating machinery) and can be nothing in lots of others.

              2. sparkle emoji*

                I agree that these could be useful data points. However, at this point there are only 2 data points and neither feels so egregious(in my subjective opinion) that action has to be taken at this point.

          2. WellRed*

            It’s more like 2 bottles, it’s A Lot by any measure, and most people understand you shouldn’t over imbibe at work events (though it happens),

            1. sparkle emoji*

              It’s a lot, but one instance of heavy drinking and one instance of smelling alcohol on them don’t feel like enough to really know what’s going on. I think it’s reasonable for LW to just keep paying attention for now without intervening.

            2. Observer*

              < most people understand you shouldn’t over imbibe at work events (though it happens)

              That doesn’t come close to indicating that she has a drinking problem. *Especially* since the LW does acknowledge that they have not seen any behavioral or work related issues. In fact, they say that she drank a lot at the event, but not that she behaved like she was tipsy. And her behavior during their meeting was fine – even a bit more subdued than usual, which is *highly* untypical for people who have been drinking enough for it to affect them. Alcohol can make people “weepy” but “more level than usual” is not what anyone would expect.

              1. MigraineMonth*

                A lot of people who have drinking problems develop a high tolerance for (and even dependence on) alcohol. Someone who has 7-8 glasses of wine and doesn’t seem intoxicated is far more likely to have alcoholism than someone who does so and is clearly drunk. If the coworker has alcohol dependence, she might need to drink before work just to be functional at work.

                None of which changes the advice for LW1: there’s nothing to report, and you don’t have a relationship with your coworker where it would be appropriate to raise your concerns.

          3. AngryOctopus*

            Just want to say that at a work event the pours of things are often small, so her “7-8 glasses” could just as easily be 1-2 glasses that you’d get at a restaurant.

          4. jmc*

            How about we STOP having alcohol at work events? It causes nothing but trouble. If you can’t get drunk to have fun then something is wrong!

            1. jmc*

              I mean if you can’t have fun without getting drunk there is something wrong, that came out weird.

            2. Orv*

              If I’m going to be doing Mandatory Fun with people I already spend eight hours a day with, there’s gonna need to be some kind of substance involved.

              1. SnackAttack*

                I think the solution is to not have an open bar. Realistically, most (not all, of course) people want some kind of alcoholic beverage when they’re doing mandatory mingling with colleagues. That doesn’t mean that people “need to get drunk to have fun.” That being said, I’ve seen open bars lead to trouble at many of these kinds of events. A lot of work places will give people 1-2 tickets for them to use on alcoholic drinks, with unlimited refills of soft drinks and the like.

                1. Orv*

                  Yeah, some people will still drink to excess at a cash bar, but an open bar is usually a bad idea.

                  The worst idea is starting out with an open bar and announcing it will close at a particular hour. This usually results in people trying to binge the free booze before it’s taken away.

        5. ecnaseener*

          How exactly is it “assuming zebras” to smell alcohol on someone’s breath and think they must have been drinking alcohol? I agree there could be another explanation, but the horse, the Ockham’s razor explanation, is that the smell of alcohol came from alcohol.

          1. Siege*

            So far the prevailing theories are diabetic ketoacidosis, craft brewery hand sanitizer from 2020, and the obvious bottle of vodka just absolutely everyone has in their cleaning supplies.

            Frankly I’m shocked more people aren’t concluding she’s drinking and driving and attacking OP for not calling the cops instantly, since that’s usually where the comments go, but I guess attacking the OP for noting that the person they were sitting next to at a work function drank more than a full bottle of wine is standing in.

            1. Rooby*

              It really seems like the comments today are full of people pretty defensive about their own heavy drinking. It’s the only conclusion to draw from how many people are tying themselves into balloon animals to pretend 1) coworker didn’t do anything weird and 2) OP would have to go out of their way to notice.

              1. artificial morning person*

                Seriously. I mean, two or three beers at a work event is very, very normal for me. But if I put away an entire bottle of wine and then some over the course of a couple hours, I’d end up under the table. But almost everyone in the comments section is saying, no that was just one time! She didn’t even seem drunk! Like, someone who drinks that much with no visible effects has probably built up quite a tolerance, and the way you build up that kind of tolerance is to drink lots of alcohol over time. But people are tying themselves in knots trying to convince themselves that there’s no way this coworker could possibly have a problem.

              2. SnackAttack*

                I feel like with most of these types of discussions, I fall somewhere in the middle. It seems like everyone has a different definition of what constitutes heavy drinking (some people might say that 2 glasses of wine at an event is a sign of a problem, whereas others might say 8 glasses is nothing). Personally, I think 7-8 glasses of wine in 2 hours is indeed a lot – it’s much different than, say, splitting a bottle of wine with a friend over dinner. I’d also be inclined to believe that OP is correct in their assumption about the coworker having had vodka.

                That being said, I don’t think the right solution is to assume that everyone here is just being defensive and that the colleague definitely drove to work and that OP should definitely call the cops. I also don’t know if I’d assume that one night of over-indulging 100%=drinking problem (though with the vodka breath I’d start to believe it’s a possibility). I think what Alison said was perfectly reasonable – that it might be something to watch out for, but not actionable at this point.

          2. Observer*

            How exactly is it “assuming zebras” to smell alcohol on someone’s breath and think they must have been drinking alcohol?

            The zebra here is that the CW has a drinking problem so severe that it might actually require talking to their manager. That’s a wild leap. The idea that they might get in trouble for withholding this “information” is . . . a lot.

            the Ockham’s razor explanation, is that the smell of alcohol came from alcohol.

            Yeah, but even there it’s not actually the obvious solution to think that she’d been drinking (a lot of mouthwashes are NOT minty but do have a lot of alcohol), much less drinking enough to be a problem given that *her behavior during this meeting where she smelled of alcohol was fine. And actually was such that it would actually be highly unlikely that she had been over-indulging.

        6. anon this morning*

          Disagree entirely. The OP said they were seated next to each other and the coworker finished the table’s wine bottle alone and had more.

          When you hear hoofbeats, assume horses. Alcohol use disorder is super common. Super super super common. It is far more likely than “I had a hand sanitizer from 2020 that still smells like vodka even though vodka evaporates pretty quick and it’s four years later”.

          Folks are pretty sensitive about alcohol use, but… that doesn’t change that it’s very common!

          1. Nodramalama*

            The horse for someone drinking heavily at one event is, they drank heavily at one event. Not they have a drinking problem.

            1. MigraineMonth*

              Maybe, but 1) drinking more than a bottle of wine is well beyond binge drinking, and 2) they did it at a work event.

              Then, the LW1 noticed evidence that they had been drinking before work, which (if true) would be pretty strong evidence that the coworker had a problem with alcohol.

              I agree that this doesn’t rise to anything LW1 needs to report and that there may be other explanations, but it’s weird that commenters seem to think there’s *no* evidence of an alcohol problem.

          2. Panicked*

            I think people underestimate exactly HOW common alcohol use disorders are. During the pandemic, liquor stores were considered essential businesses because of how common it is (and how dangerous detox can be). My parents, who are alcoholics, were gobsmacked by the amount of people waiting in line for the liquor store to open. People they knew, people that they would have *never* guessed had alcohol use disorder, were in line with them daily. It’s extremely easy to hide during normal times.

          3. Been there*

            Alcohol use and abuse are also extremely normalized in our society. Drinking over a bottle of wine by yourself shouldn’t be normal! Anything over 7-8 glasses in a week is considered problematic use.

            1. MigraineMonth*

              In high school I was taught the dangers of binge drinking, which the CDC defines as 4 or more drinks in a single occasion for a woman (5 or more for a man). I would be concerned if someone were to nearly double that at a *work event*.

              The fact that the coworker drank that much and didn’t seem drunk also tips the likelihood that that what LW1 smelled on her breath really was vodka from “probable” to “almost certain”.

              Fortunately, there’s still plausible deniability that it’s mouthwash or whatever, so LW1 doesn’t have to do anything about it unless the coworker is operating machinery or similar.

          4. Orv*

            My quarrel is I don’t think suspecting someone of over-indulging is a good reason to go to their manager and try to get them fired.

            1. Yikes Stripes*

              Yup, this.

              If OP has not noticed that Janet’s work is suffering or that she’s acting erratic or is in some way noticeably intoxicated at work *and* Janet doesn’t operate heavy machinery etc etc at work then it’s absolutely not something that OP should be reporting.

        7. Rooby*

          Someone having an alcohol addiction isn’t zebras. It’s horses. Some kind of Rube Goldberg sequence that coincidentally results in her binge-drinking and then having vodka breath, while technically possible, is the zebra option here.

          We don’t have to pretend alcoholism is some kind of rare condition. There are easily accessible statistics on it.

    2. Awkwardness*

      I’m curious why you even noticed how much she drank at a party?

      I was wondering this too. Unless you share the same table and see her ordering new wine, it would be difficult to spot how many glasses she had.
      It would be really unfortunate if she was on LWs radar because of wrong assumptions. LW should avoid confirmation bias.

      1. Allonge*

        it would be difficult to spot how many glasses she had.

        Or maybe people notice different things?

        It’s not like ‘drinks a lot’ is not a danger signal to a lot of people, for one.

        1. That's a lot*

          Yes, and it is also actually potentially relevant information for me, too. If a person drank that much at a party and I happened to notice, I would definitely decline a ride home from them, even if they seemed normal.

      2. That's a lot*

        At a big party, I wouldn’t notice because I don’t track people like that. But if I were sitting at the same table and near by I think it would be hard NOT to notice. That’s really a lot of wine in a very short period. I’d probably notice if someone drank that amount of water. Or ate large amounts. Doesn’t give me automatic license to say or do anything about it (or judge them), since it is none of my business, but noticing what other people around us are doing isn’t odd. And alcohol isn’t exactly safe in the same way as water at that volume, too. I’m not saying the LW should stick their nose in this, but noticing doesn’t come off as odd to me.

      3. My Brain is Exploding*

        They sat next to each other and the person drank an entire bottle of wine and then some.

    3. Ellis Bell*

      None of these observations seem in the slightest bit odd to me, and I’m not a particularly observant person. I notice how many drinks people have if I’m in their company because I was taught to pace myself to company and get people a drink if I’m going up. I don’t know if I would have smelled vodka in this situation, but I have smelled vodka on a temporary worker (I wasn’t the main person to notice, but I could smell it too) who my boss had to ask to leave because it was a safeguarding issue. I can see it being a strange idea to you, because I had never smelled vodka on anyone before that day, but it’s actually quite noticeable in a non alcohol environment. Also, how hard is it to believe an OP? Can we not just phrase advice on what to do IF you smell vodka on a colleague?

    4. Martin Blackwood*

      If youre drinking in a small group, say at a table at an event, you might notice compared how much someone drinks compared to everyone else. I could tell you who drank the most from the last time i went out with coworkers, but id have to give an estimate for number of drinks not an exact number…which is what OP gave, an estimate! Maybe OP is wrong, maybe OP is basing this off a ten minute conversation where Janet started with a full glass and ended the conversation with an empty glass and excused herself to get a new one and extrapolated wrong. Noticing things about people doesnt mean youre obsessed with how much people drink.

      1. Myrin*

        Yeah, I’m naturally very observant and notice all manner of things without actively trying to. I also have a really good memory for trivial information (weirdly, often combined with a less-than-stellar memory for actually important things). I’ve literally always been that way and it’s nothing I can “explain”, it just is. But I’ve found that many people who aren’t like that have a really hard time even imagining it and think you must be paying special attention or obsess or take notes or what-have-you when really I’m just sitting there doing my thing.

    5. londonedit*

      And also leaping from ‘I saw her “drinking heavily” at a party’ to ‘she clearly has a problem with alcohol’. Maybe she does, I don’t know, but can we not call everyone who enjoys a few glasses of wine an alcoholic? Plenty of people can enjoy a few drinks without having a ‘problem with alcohol’.

      1. Nodramalama*

        Yeah I think it is also talks to industries, ages and attitudes to drinking. Because if I saw a coworker downing wines at an event I would think “they’re making use of the free bar!” and that’s where my thought would end. I certainly wouldn’t be worried unless their actual behaviour was worrying

        1. Kotow*

          I mean honestly in the legal field (which **does** have a problem with alcohol abuse), if I saw someone drinking that much I would assume they’re making use of the open bar. I think I heard that for the general public the assumption is 3 drinks a person but for attorneys you should assume 6 drinks a person. But unless I saw other indications of a problem, I wouldn’t even think about it.

      2. Adult ADHDer*

        But OP’s coworker wasn’t just “enjoying a few glasses of wine.” She drank seven glasses of wine in two hours. This fits the NIAAA’s definition of a binge drinking episode, and the fact that she did it at a work function demonstrates remarkably poor judgment at best.

        It’s frustrating that the substance use related threads here always seem to lead to the comment section being overrun by people who are so eager to show that they’re tolerant and nonjudgmental and cool about substance use that they completely mischaracterize the facts underlying the situation. It’s disingenuous to say that what OP’s coworker did is equivalent to casually “enjoying a few drinks.” It’s both disingenuous and unkind to imply that the OP is some kind of Puritan scold because she thought that a coworker having 7 drinks in 2 hours at a work function was worthy of concern.

        1. londonedit*

          Why was OP even counting in the first place? If the co-worker can drink whatever number of glasses of wine at a party, and it didn’t seem to cause any issues, and her behaviour was perfectly fine, what on earth is the problem?

          1. Allonge*

            Some people notice these things without determining they will be counting how many glasses Belinda drinks. Can we not blame OP for being somewhat aware of their surroundings?

            They asked a question on what to do with this, the answer is nothing. People get to have questions about things without it being a Huge Issue.

            1. Nodramalama*

              But they’ve made it a Huge Issue because they’ve determined its part of a pattern of problem drinking.

              1. Happy meal with extra happy*

                The whole point of this is that they’ve literally not made it a Huge Issue – they’re checking in with AAM to see if it’s an issue.

                1. Allonge*

                  This. Every other week at least we see a post here where the answer is ‘you don’t need to do anything about it, not a problem / not your problem’.

                  People having a question on somewhat-sus behaviours is normal.

          2. Myrin*

            I mean, OP clearly didn’t count or she would’ve been able to give an exact number instead of an estimate (“7-8 glasses”).

            But quite apart from that, I really don’t understand the incredulity and scrutiny about this.
            Humans are predisposed to group things into patterns of threes and fours. It’s really not that hard to imagine a situation where OP is like “Gosh, this party has been going on forever. What time is it? Oh my, it’s only been an hour! Ah, there goes Janet again getting another glass of wine – this must be the third or fourth time I’m seeing her already.” and then the same thing happens over the course of the next hour.

            Are there really only a handful of us in the comments who this happens to regularly with all manner of things?

        2. Media Monkey*

          to be honest, i think there’s a big difference in attitudes to drinking/ work socialising in US vs other countries, and i think those “nonjudgmental” attitudes are often just that – it’s not something lots of us judge people on as it’s not that unusual here.

        3. Ellis Bell*

          I agree with you that it is a lot, and it would make me worry for a friend, but you can’t count the drinks of a colleague in that way, or expect other people at the job to care. You can inadvertently notice the amount, and be privately worried on their behalf, but the amount that people drink is up to them unless it has any kind of detrimental effect on others. The OP has to balance their (probably good) instincts that it was A Lot to drink, against the fact that someone counting and reporting a colleague’s drinks intake would also be seen as A Lot. There’s not much a manager can do with this. If there was anything more definitive in their behaviour, or if they were breaking a work policy like drinking at work against safety rules, or being unprofessional with clients or something, I would say otherwise, but this isn’t OP’s to manage.

          1. Allonge*

            But then this is why OP asked a question on an anonymous advice board on the internet instead of going to their management or addressing the (non)issue with the colleague.

          2. Adult ADHDer*

            I don’t disagree, and I think this is a reasonable answer. I’m not saying that I think OP should necessarily go to her boss with this (unless, of course, they are in a field such as healthcare, where having someone drinking at work could actually endanger other people, in which case I probably would advise erring on the side of caution and reporting her suspicions). But I don’t think it’s fair to imply that OP is a jerk for even noticing her coworker’s behavior.

        4. Irish Teacher.*

          I think culture (both social and work culture) comes into this a bit too. While I don’t think drinking 7 drinks in one go is a good idea, well, googling gives me a survey done here in Ireland that says 40% of the 15-24 year olds surveyed in 2015 said they drank more than 6 drinks on the average night out.

          Now, some of that might be exaggeration as the younger people being surveyed might have been having a laugh or trying to sound “cool” and of course, it is quite likely lower among older age groups, which the LW’s coworker probably fits into but I definitely don’t think it’s something so unusual that doing it on one occasion would make me think it cause for concern or reason to pay any more attention to the person in future.

          If I were to be concerned about all the coworkers who talk about how drunk they were after our staff parties, I’d be concerned about a lot of people.

          It may have been very out of step for the LW’s work culture, but a lot of people are going to judge it against their own and if they have a number of coworkers who have done this on one occasion, but who generally drink sensibly, they aren’t going to necessarily assume this coworker is any different.

          1. marmalade*

            But also, how long is the average night out? If you go for dinner at 6 and don’t get home till after midnight, 6 drinks is one an hour. It’s a lot, but you’d be hard pressed to say someone who drank the 6 drinks over 6+ hours was ever really intoxicated.

            1. Pastor Petty Labelle*

              No you wouldn’t. 6 drinks in 6 hours is still a lot. 1 or 2 drinks over 6 hours is not a lot.

              But the OP said it was 7-8 drinks in a couple of hours, which is a lot no matter how you cut it.

              1. Allonge*

                6 drinks in 6 hours is also very dependent on the person, what else they are consuming, what exactly the drink is etc.

                A full bottle of wine and plus in two hours – people who can handle it without being intoxicated will be the exception.

            2. Kotow*

              If only it were that much of an exact science! It also depends on the strength of the drink (13.5% vs. 12% alcohol), how quickly you drank it, whether you had food, and how much (6 oz vs. 9 oz pours). Every summer we have a conference at a resort (so no driving) and it’s well known that people drink from 11am until 11 at night. You’d think that’s plenty of time to metabolize everything but people still have visible hangovers the next day.

          2. Seashell*

            I drank that much with some regularity while I was in college (in the US) decades ago. I also was at a bar with friends who were also drinking heavily. We typically acted foolishly, and sometimes there was vomiting at the end of the evening. It definitely wasn’t workplace-appropriate behavior, and we all grew out of it.

            I enjoy a glass of wine or two occasionally these days. 7-8 glasses in 2 hours would have me falling down drunk, as I suspect it would most people who aren’t heavy drinkers.

            1. Ellis Bell*

              Where I am, in Northern England a lot of people keep up that level of drinking into much later years than their teens/early twenties. I know people in their sixties for whom that’s a perfectly average Saturday night. I’m not claiming it’s healthy, but it’s not uncommon enough to be really indicative of anything other than that’s the drinking culture here. Some industries/regions would consider it unremarkable, sadly.

        5. Hastily Blessed Fritos*

          If a friend drank that heavily, I’d talk to them, because I was concerned with them. I wouldn’t say anything to or about a random stranger unless they tried to drive. A co-worker is between these two situations, and it’s not super clear whether OP is coming from “I am concerned for her well being” or from wanting to get her in trouble.

          1. MigraineMonth*

            I think it’s pretty clear OP is worried *they* could get in trouble for not saying something. It’s a pretty common question to Alison: “I know about X, do I have to tell my manager/report it?”

          2. Adult ADHDer*

            There is nothing in the letter from which you can reasonably extrapolate that OP is trying to get her coworker in trouble. She says she’s concerned about the coworker and is concerned that she’ll get in trouble if she says nothing and management finds out she knew her coworker was drinking on the job. Both of those things are totally reasonable things to be worried about here, and have nothing to do with wanting to get someone in trouble.

        6. WellRed*

          Interesting. I’ve actually found this forum to be incredibly judgmental and unforgiving about alcohol, drinking and substance abuse.

          1. Cleary*

            For sure. I’m really surprised that anyone would think that this forum takes a cool, laid-back attitude toward alcohol.

            There are substances that I would say are generally approached with that attitude, but alcohol is definitely not one of them.

            1. Magenta*

              I agree, it seems quite judgemental and puritanical to my UK sensibilities. Is the attitude to alcohol here typical of the US or a particular demographic in the US or just a quirk of this forum?

              2. Happy meal with extra happy*

                Honestly, it’s this forum’s love of creating fan fiction and being internet detectives determined to poke holes in OPs’ questions.

              3. Statler von Waldorf*

                I can’t speak to the attitudes in the US, but in my Canadian experience, there is a much sharper line here between drinking at a work function and drinking at a social function than the vibes I’m picking up from the non-Americans here.

                The commenting community here is also extremely white collar, (just check the salary survey’s to confirm that) which I think is relevant here. At the accounting firm I worked at, drinking a bottle of wine by yourself at a work-based social event would be “A Thing” that would be talked about for months to come. In the Oil & Gas industry, that’s just Tuesday.

                1. a clockwork lemon*

                  The last time I went to happy hour with coworkers I’m pretty sure three of us put 3-4 bottles of wine down over the course of about four hours. Nobody behaved inappropriately, nobody drove themselves home.

                  It’s true that all of us would be “binge drinking” under the CDC/college dorm substance abuse seminar definitions, and it’s equally true that none of us have a substance abuse problem. I will, however, concede that we are all absolute gluttons, because at the same happy hour we also demolished like seven or eight shareable-sized servings of various deep fried foods.

              4. Adult ADHDer*

                You think it’s judgmental and puritanical to be concerned about a coworker who drinks 7 glasses of wine in 2 hours at a work event and shows up to work first thing in the morning with vodka on her breath? Wow, okay.

              5. SnackAttack*

                Honestly, I think it’s mostly this particular forum. It also depends heavily on the industry. When I worked in government, there really wasn’t much drinking at all (partially because alcohol was on our own dime, haha). Now that I’m in the private sector, alcohol is always involved.

          2. Nodramalama*

            I mean half the comments here have just diagnosed the coworker with a drinking problem with basically no evidence, so yeah, agree with that.

            1. ferrina*

              Well, the coworker clearly has a high tolerance (7-8 drinks in 2 hours), and that doesn’t come out of nowhere. And the smell of vodka is tough- it could be vodka, or it could be something unrelated. Usually when you hear hooves you think horses, but that doesn’t mean that zebras don’t exist. Or even two halves of a coconut being banged together by someone following King Arthur.

              I’d say that there are indications that the coworker could have a problem, but the evidence is definitely not conclusive. I feel bad for the OP- there’s definitely enough evidence to make me worry, but definitely not enough evidence to know one way or another. And I have no idea what I would do in this situation. This is a really tough question!

          3. Siege*

            Honestly, I find this forum to just be contrarian, with a touch of fanfic. There have been posts about coworkers drinking where the comments arose en masse to decry the fact that the drinker was OBVIOUSLY going to kill someone through drinking and driving and why hadn’t the OP already reported it to the cops, and then there was the one where someone wrote in about a person who fell asleep in meetings and the comment section arose to decry the entire idea of meetings, obviously the problem is the expectation someone will stay awake during the work day or seek accommodation if they can’t, meetings are all so terrible that they should never happen, etc. There are an awful lot of entirely normal things that the commenters themselves undoubtedly do (like greet their coworkers politely) that, if asked about in a letter, are THE WORST THING EVER that no one should ever expect anyone to do, how very dare you.

            1. Statler von Waldorf*

              So because you believe this forum is be contrarian, with a touch of fanfic, you decided to write a comment that is contrarian, with way more than a touch of fanfic.

              I’m not sure whether to chant “one of us, one of us” or to just raise a questioning eyebrow.

              2. Siege*

                I am actually just a trainwreck enjoyer and find this commentariat eminently satisfying on those grounds.

                1. Statler von Waldorf*

                  A questioning eyebrow it is.

                  If you want a REAL trainwreck full of contrarians, 4chan exists. Compared to that, this place is pretty tame.

            2. Adult ADHDer*

              I agree. It makes me sad, because I’ve been here for a long time, and I remember when this forum was full of people who were tough on LWs when they needed to be but also kind and motivated by a desire to help. Now, it feels like most of the comments section is just people who are looking for an excuse to pile on a LW for something. And then once one person does it, everyone else feels empowered to do it too.

              This letter is a good example. The letter writer wrote in because she had a coworker who drank seven glasses of wine in two hours at a work function and came to work smelling like vodka one morning, and people have called her Puritanical and judgmental, told her to mind her own business, and implied she’s just thinking of reporting it to get the coworker in trouble, even though there is absolutely no evidence in the letter that that is true. That’s just rude to someone who wrote in because they were genuinely seeking advice. If you had a problem, would you write in if you knew you could expect to be torn to shreds in the comments? I sure wouldn’t.

              1. Butterfly Counter*

                To be fair, one of the first questions OP asked was whether they’re obligated to tell their manager about this. I think that’s where the push-back is coming from, because, no, they are not. Especially with such scant evidence. Had OP asked only if they should say something to their coworker, there would most likely be a very different vibe in the comments. Speculating to one’s boss about a coworker having a disorder that would be 100% likely to have their boss treat them more negatively isn’t something to take lightly. Unless OP has real behavior or work problems with their coworker, whether or not they’re an alcoholic really isn’t their business (again, barring safety issues).

                No one here knows whether or not the coworker has a drinking problem. Depending on a number of different factors (trauma, experience, culture, family, etc.), many of us think might know. But we don’t.

              2. SnackAttack*

                It changed a lot after Covid (like everything, I suppose). It used to be much more nonjudgmental and forgiving; it seems angrier now.

        7. kt*

          I’m 100% with you overall, but I’d say that it represents loss of judgement not poor judgement. A bottle and a half of wine in 2 hours at work without obvious loss of function is a sign of practice, let’s say. And it’s no longer at “oh I am consciously deciding this is a good idea” but instead at an unconscious, non-judgement stage.

          And to folks in the comments, remember, you don’t have to be an alcoholic to have a problem with alcohol. The work “alcoholic” is freighted with cultural baggage that may or may not be helpful.

        8. Nodramalama*

          Ok, and half the teenagers, university kids, and young professionals have binge drinked before in a session. Most of them don’t have drinking problems. AND really it’s none of OP’s business that coworked drank too much at an event.

          1. Allonge*

            I would argue that binge drinking at a work event is a reason for a different kind of concern than binge drinking in general.

            Also, OP is not asking the Alcohol Police to come and arrest coworker or referring them to rehab; OP asked if they need to tell their manager about this or should talk to coworker.

            1. sparkle emoji*

              I understand why OP is asking, and I think the answer from most is no, they don’t need to and probably shouldn’t speak to the manager based on the 2 incidents in the letter. That’s not to say the binge drinking was smart. But it’s still only one incident of known concerning drinking, and one suspected incident. If more things happen, the answer that could change.

      3. Been there*

        The LW didn’t write in after the party, she wrote in after the party AND smelling vodka on her coworker another day in the morning. That should give most people pause.

        1. Jennifer Strange*

          Except as others have pointed out the “vodka smell” could have been caused by a number of things that don’t involve her actually drinking vodka, so there’s no firm evidence she had any alcohol in her system.

          1. Roland*

            This isn’t a courthouse, no one needs “firm evidence” to express concern to an online advice columnist.

            1. Jennifer Strange*

              No, but I would want firm evidence before reporting someone as drinking at work.

          2. Allonge*

            But again, this is not a court of law. Firm evidence is not required to ask a question about (what look like) ill-advised actions at work.

            1. Jennifer Strange*

              See my response above. I’m not bashing the LW for asking, by the way, but I don’t think there is anything actionable here.

              1. Allonge*

                I don’t know what ‘firm evidence’ means in a work context – there are lots of places that would not care either way and there are places where ‘X may have been drinking before coming to work this morning’ is something you flag at all costs. There is probably a lot in-between.

                It depends also on whether the work environment is reasonable – I had bosses I could have flagged this to as a concern so they watch out for any further signs of something amiss, and I worked in places where we would have shielded actively drunk colleagues so managers don’t see them. Life is complicated and all that.

            1. Jennifer Strange*

              Okay? Seeming far-fetched to you doesn’t actually make them far-fetched, though.

    6. Caleigh*

      Vodka absolutely has a clearly distinctive smell. I’m so confused by so many comments claiming otherwise. I know what vodka smells like and I’m not confusing mouthwash for it. Do y’all have Covid over there or something?

      1. The OG Sleepless*

        The sense of smell varies more from person to person than any other sense. My sense of smell is a bit iffy. If I really concentrated I could probably tell rubbing alcohol, vodka, and the residue of mouthwash apart, but they aren’t that different to me.

      2. Hastily Blessed Fritos*

        In addition to the general variation in sense of smell, there’s the issue of familiarity – if people don’t drink, or don’t drink liquor, they’re less likely to know what vodka specifically smells like vs. alcohol more generally.

      3. lunchtime caller*

        A lot of people in the comments who haven’t grown up smelling it on people, I’ll say that much lol

      4. Two Dog Night*

        One thing I learned when dealing with an alcoholic in a workplace is, people’s ability to smell alcohol varies a lot. I honestly can’t smell alcohol on someone’s breath at all. Other people can definitely smell it, and can distinguish between types of alcohol…. and there are plenty of people in between those extremes.

        If LW says they smelled vodka, I’m guessing they’re in the second group of people. If I had been in the LW’s position I probably wouldn’t have noticed anything.

      5. Leaving academia*

        I think there’s also the confusion from the belief (marketing?) that (good) vodka has no taste. The reason it’s used in cocktails is it doesn’t have any flavor. What people are absolutely missing is that it still tastes like alcohol. I definitely couldn’t tell the difference in smell due to lack of exposure, and until this comment section did not know it had a distinctive smell. But I do know in general I have a pretty good sense of smell and can distinguish smells other people can’t.

    7. Maybe*

      The OP commented somewhere that they were all sitting at the same table, and no one else had wine except this coworker, who drank the entire bottle at the table plus more.

  9. HousingInfoRequired*

    OP5, there are actually many different types of background checks used by employers and they check different types of information. It is possible some of the public aid programs will show up on some of the more invasive checks depending on which programs they were, but most employers do not require that level of checking so it’s not likely. Also, you do have to provide a list of all of your home addresses for the past 7 years for most of the checks (this is supposedly used to generate a list of all of the locations where they need to do criminal background checks as these are usually done at a county level) so periods of homelessness or housing insecurity may show up and may even cause problems with completing the forms (if there are gaps).

    It is also going to vary whether the company itself has access to this information or just the background check company, and also whether housing insecurity is something they report on or if they only care that the applicant is honest.

    Good luck to your friend.

    1. sarah*

      I’ve handled background checks at three different jobs. Public assistance is covered by confidentiality restrictions and does not show up on the type of background checks employers have access to run.

    2. Martin Blackwood*

      On addresses – depends on the check! Cant say “will definitely” for anything. For work i didnt need to give a list of addresses, just fingerprints (I handle some confidential information). I *did* need to give seven years of addresses for a Police Record Check for my name change. I’m not 100% sure what jobs would require that, other than working with kids/vulnerable persons.

      1. A perfectly normal-size space bird*

        Unfortunately, a lot of employers just do a one-size-fits-all boilerplate check for every employee, regardless of whether its relevant. Which can be a problem because perfectly qualified people for a job might get eliminated based on something in the background that would only have been a problem in a completely different position. At OldJob, my favorite candidate for receptionist got eliminated for a DUI from several years prior. There were positions where driving was required but this wasn’t one of them. The company just flat out rejected anyone with a DUI to avoid liability.

    3. Bellis Coldwine*

      Unfortunately there may end up being a serious problem with this re: the recent Supreme Court ruling in the Grants Pass case. If sleeping in public is criminalized by local governments, there may be an increased risk of being unhoused showing up on a background check in some form.

      2. NotRealAnonForThis*

        Possibly?

        I know that my spouse’s business background checks failed to catch a felony from another state in a now former employee’s check, because coordination between law enforcement agencies in this country is pretty abysmal. Still that feels like something that should have been caught, as it was pertinent to the field that they were in, and yes, he’s changed services for background checks. And yes, since that information came up in the midst of not-great circumstances (he committed another felony), he was let go for lying on his application. Had he been honest on his application? I don’t believe that saying he had a felony would have excluded him, but what the felony WAS and the circumstances surrounding it might have.

      3. Karo*

        Yeah, but they’d also have to be looking for that level of crime. A lot of companies now won’t look for misdemeanors (because of disparate impact and the chance of being sued). They’re much more likely to look for felonies (dear god I hope a human being looking for a place to sleep when society has failed them isn’t a felony).

        1. sparkle emoji*

          Yes, the background checks my company typically does are criminal background checks and go back 7 years for felonies only. I know some companies do more rigorous ones that could catch housing insecurity, but I want to reassure LW’s friend that plenty of companies won’t look for that.

        2. Leaving academia*

          Also, in order for it to show up on a background check, they have to have been cited/arrested for it. While this is absolutely a concern for the future, presumably LW would have stated that as part of the friend’s concern.

    4. Jellybeans*

      Yes, exactly. There are so many different kinds to say “no they definitely won’t show” is not a good answer.

      Being in a shelter would 100% show up on any standard, basic background check in my personal experience – my job involves having to take a background check every three years, and having to ensure that every single person has a background check, so I have quite a bit of personal experience.

      Maybe some industries do things differently, but to make a blanket statement that no background check would uncover these things is simply not factually correct at all.

      1. ferrina*

        Exactly.
        I’ve had three background checks for three different jobs, and each one was different. My current job does a basic criminal background check- in this case LW’s friend doesn’t need to worry about anything. The most intense background check I’ve had was the 7 year exhaustive history- that was so I could work in a secure facility. That was a pain for anyone that had ever lived abroad because you needed someone to verify that you had lived there and hadn’t done anything outrageous- I could see similar issues if someone had been unhoused. That said, the housing thing alone was never an issue. It just meant that results of your check would get delayed, sometimes for months. I had worked at the facility for several months before my background check cleared- all it meant was that I had to be accompanied by someone in the facility while we were waiting for the background check, and when it cleared, I could walk around by myself.
        There are more intensive checks if you are in a role where they are worried about coercion, bribery or blackmail (like certain intelligence roles). That’s the only scenario where I could see it being an issue for OP’s friend.

      2. Analyst*

        I literally had to list the address if everywhere I had lived in thw past 7 years on my most recent one. whether anyone sees that part or it’s just used to confirm identity I don’t know.

    5. ecnaseener*

      Yeah, my concern would be the gaps from any unhoused periods causing problems. When I filled out an online background check recently, it wouldn’t allow for gaps between housing — it automatically set each address’s end date to be the same as the following one’s start date, so I couldn’t enter an accurate end date for times I stayed with my parents for a few weeks in between apartments.

      In my case it didn’t seem to cause any problems, I guess they either didn’t check the end dates or they allowed for a few weeks wiggle room because they knew about that issue with the form. Hopefully that wiggle room extends long enough to cover LW’s friend’s situation!

    6. A perfectly normal-size space bird*

      Definitely agree on the many types. I used to have a job where I would perform employment, criminal, and credit background checks for clients, the latter two being fairly exhaustive. After running criminal checks, we might use previous address info for a location the client lived in to contact the jurisdiction directly if there was relevance. As someone upthread said, law enforcement records are fractured and information sharing not as good as TV procedurals make it out to be. Sometimes we knew a client had a conviction because they disclosed it but it never showed up in the reports. Certain jurisdictions never showed up in any of the services, hence the manual check if a client ever lived there.

      The credit background checks were the most exhaustive and we would use multiple services for general information, then use location information so we could identify undisclosed assets and any delinquencies. Every service always missed something another one caught. And there’s a ton of incorrect info that can creep into a person’s credit history, especially their address history and it can vary wildly between services. Mine often shows me living at my childhood home despite not living there since the 20th century. Sometimes I still get jury summons from there because whoever does the summons uses one of the services that has the wrong info.

    7. Festively Dressed Earl*

      An ex-friend knew the addresses of 2-3 major homeless shelters in our area and would screen out people who listed one of them as their current residence. One of the many, many reasons why she’s an ex-friend.

  10. The Bunny*

    LW#5

    None of that will show.

    Background checks are looking for criminal charges that led to convictions or judgments.

    Sometimes, vehicle infractions (Cuyahoga County in Ohio I’m looking at you) will show but that’s about it.

    Recipients of public assistance aren’t committing crimes by being on aid, so that won’t appear.

    Evictions do appear sometimes. But not always and usually then only if they get to court and an actual judgment is issued.

    As Alison mentioned, occasionally employers run credit checks, but this is becoming more and more uncommon and I can’t remember the last employer who wasn’t the Federal Government that is, who actually pulled credit for people without signer authority for company checks.

    Yes if you can’t tell I spent a few years in charge of backgrounds for a company with varied business interests all over the US.

    1. Jellybeans*

      I run background checks and that would show up. It might not be universal but it would definitely show in some background checks.

      1. Beth*

        Would a civil lawsuit show? The skip level I’m dealing with worked for a large tech company and was personally sued for gender discrimination by a former employee. All of the behavior outlined in the filing ring true, and the suit was just dropped, leading me to believe it was settled out of court – the large tech company was sued as well.

        If you google his name it is the second item that pops up. Which I know because when he started being a micromanaging bully I wanted to see if anything came up on glassdoor or similar.

        My colleague and I have been scratching our heads as to how this wasn’t flagged during the hiring process but if it was a civil suit and the former employer gave a neutral response it makes sense.

        1. One HR Opinion*

          I’m sure it depends on the state, the type of check run, etc. Becasuse of the type of work we do, we get information on arrests, convictions, etc. but we don’t get any civil information. The only time I’ve seen that is when I’ve had to use Casenet to get more information on an outstanding case or license issue and that’s just because all the cases are together.

          Although it’s known to happen, you aren’t really supposed to Google or check people’s social media when deciding whether or not to give them an offer.

          1. Beth*

            Thank you – appreciate the insight! Kind of reassures me they probably had no clue.
            I know there has been at least one HR complaint made against him, but the employee had already been on a PIP for a while. His manager is aware there are issues and I am compiling documentation before going to HR with my immediate manager.

    2. Seashell*

      I’m curious if you ever saw an order of protection from Family Court come up. It’s not a criminal charge, but seems like something that might appear.

    3. I Have RBF*

      All of my jobs have criminal and credit checks. The credit checks are looking for bad money management that would make a person vulnerable to bribery or blackmail to compromise systems.

    4. A perfectly normal-size space bird*

      Evictions might not appear but rent and utility delinquencies show up in a lot of non-criminal background checks and utility delinquencies are reported to credit agencies. Sometimes rent delinquencies will show up in a credit report if the landlord is a company that reports it. There are also states where civil and criminal court records are publicly searchable and smaller employers often use that vs a paid service.

  11. Aardvark*

    #2
    There are some techniques that have arisen from lean manufacturing (eg Kaizen) that are about having clear and well-labelled set ups. But they are meant to be for things like tool sets on manufacturing lines, and for routine roles and tasks. I have had a company try to implement it in engineering offices to the point my line manager wanted inserts in our desk drawers so that individual highlighters had a space. Fortunately we pushed back and our next up manager realised that this was impractical. but even that boss didn’t make me define my desk as a desk.

    Asking for neat and tidy is fine. Applying specific organisational techniques in appropriate situations is also ok. but have to label a chair as a chair is ridiculous.

    1. IngEmma*

      I should have refreshed before I posted! But I completely agree. This smells like someone who has completely missed the forest for the trees on the point in lean methodology.

      I have lost the fight about bad implementation many times before. I try to keep bad implementation away from my floor team as much as possible, and then I see what I can just privately roll my eyes about and what else I’m prepared to kick a fit about.

  12. Dark Macadamia*

    Perhaps LW2’s COO is from the town in 100 Years of Solitude, where they started labeling everything to combat their collective memory loss?

    I would definitely want to go malicious compliance and label EVERYTHING… each individual pen, every valve I inspect, my lunch, myself…

    1. Christine*

      I need a label for the book as I read it during the shutdown and have no memory of that.

      1. Bellis Coldwine*

        I proudly wear a “HENCHMAN” tshirt (from the sadly now-defunct “BatLabels” Twitter account) from time to time.

      3. Festively Dressed Earl*

        Batman: “Albert, I need to clean up, please fill the bathtub.”
        Albert: “Very good, sir. What is a htub?”

    4. TiffIf*

      Step 1: Take a picture of your chair
      Step 2: Label photo THIS IS NOT A CHAIR
      Step 3: post photo on wall

      :D

    5. 3-Foot Tall Inflatable Rainbow Unicorn*

      My form of malicious compliance would be to say I was willing and eager to do the task but needed a few more details to do it to COO’s satisfaction, so please give specific directions as to label color, size, and font; photograph angle and color; method of hanging the photograph, and any other tiny question I could think of.

      And I’d cc all of COO’s superiors in that email.

  13. IngEmma*

    I have a guess for the bananas labelling COO. Does this man think he’s doing 5S ?

    I have had this exact style of argument with people about bad lean / six sigma / Toyota way / continuous improvement ‘implementations’ in manufacturing / ops / supply chain.

    Personally, I find it very frustrating. 5S works really well if you’re using it to achieve the actual goal, and really good 5s implementation can seem silly and still work. But people without much common sense or who don’t think critically about what the point is can end up implementing it in ways that’s absolutely absurd. This feels like that, taken to an extreme.

    If that is what’s happening here, I feel like the pushback is reasonably obvious. Everything in its labelled place is to streamline operational needs. Which can be broadly defined for sure. But the desk isn’t going to walk away and it’s not a movable tool.

    If anyone reading has had success pushing back on bad implementations of CI principals, I’d love to hear them. I can find it hard to articulate when I think we’re implementing something poorly / in a way that’s ridiculous because the tendency is for people to say ‘oh you might not think lean works. But it does. Look how successful Japanese manufacturing is!’ But I think a lot of continuous improvement / empowered teams etc frameworks are very effective. And they can also be absurd. Like making engineers label their desks, throw everything else out & keep reference photos.

    1. The Bunny*

      I wondered this too. Does he think he’s using some sort of performance improvement technique and is too new in the role and company (and full of “I’m going to OWN this new job” energy to take the necessary step back and realize he’s acting like a crazy person?

      1. IngEmma*

        I think that’s probably what’s happening. We use lean-style stuff (in a consumer goods manufacturing facility, and I generally think quality and production control through stats is a good idea. As is the other major component of empowering teams/ doing high level front line training.)

        But we definitely have folks who have failed up by repeating buzz words and switching companies every year and a half. I am not very good at suffering fools, so these people annoy me immensely. (At the risk of doxing myself, one of these people is our plants current safety director, who has been here a year and carries around a book about ‘HOW TO MANAGE LIKE A NAVY SEAL!’ He has it with him constantly, but his book mark has been on page three since he started here. He’s a fan of misapplying lean principles…. )

    2. Sharpie*

      Could someone explain 5S to me? The only 5 S’s I know of are a military way of spotting something out of place when out in the field on operations – Shape, Shine, Shadow, Silhouette, Sudden movement.

      Which doesn’t exactly fit in a civilian office environment!

      1. Filosofickle*

        It’s a Japanese methodology “that results in a workplace that is clean, uncluttered, safe, and well organized to help reduce waste and optimize productivity”

      2. The Bunny*

        It comes from Toyota and is supposed to create a more productive workspace because it’s organized.

        The idea is if everything is where it should be, you function better because it’s all laid out logically.

        The actual S’s (and yes I had to look them up) Sort, straighten, shine, standardize and sustain.

        I can see how what this person is doing could be taking this idea and going Way. Too. Far with it.

      3. Lab Boss*

        I can tell you how it’s used pretty well in a lab environment:

        Each of my technicians has a work station. Each of them can organize how they like, but they’re expected to have labels on the drawers with what is in each one. That way anyone, including them, always knows what goes where. Their work benches have tape squares around the “footprint” of where the equipment goes. Centrifuge sits in this square, pipette rack sits in this rectangle, etc. When they’re actively working they might move things around to make more sense for the day’s workflow, but they always put everything back into its home box at the end of the day. Only things in regular day-to-day use get to live in squares on the benchtop, things used more occasionally are expected to be stored away when not in use. This helps make sure clutter doesn’t build up and equipment doesn’t end up either getting in the way, or shoved out of the way somewhere weird and then forgotten.

        1. Allonge*

          That makes total sense.

          It sounds like OP’s management tried to implement somethingk like this without understanding what purpose it serves. Or how the specific environment it’s implemented in makes a difference in its usefulness.

        1. lefteye*

          …what is it?

          Please tell me it really is mostly about executives doing basic summer camp team building exercises with absurd names, or handing out “followship awards” to motivate underlings

          1. 12345*

            It’s a quality control methodology. The name six sigma comes from the bell curve of a normal distribution.

            1. lefteye*

              i’m sorry, i’ve never worked in a corporate environment and i failed math. what does quality control methodology mean here, like specifically? it’s not a group you belong to, just like checklist for correct producing something? what does the bell curve have to do with it?

              1. Missa Brevis*

                This requires a little bit of math but I’ll try not to get into the weeds. In a bell curve, all your data points are piled in the middle and the curve gets thinner and thinner as you move away from the center. Sigma is a measure of distance from the center. Six sigma is a distance from center where something like 99.9999998 percent of data points are inside that line.

                The original point of six sigma as a production methodology is to improve processes to the point that 99.9999998 percent of what you produce is without defects. It’s gotten more generalized since then, but it’s still basically about standardization, making decisions based on data, and having procedures that prevent errors from happening rather than catching them after the fact.

                It’s not a group you belong to, exactly, but there are official trainings and certifications.

                As other people have mentioned, it’s frequently picked up as a corporate fad without really thinking about whether it’s appropriate to the situation, and if 6sigma is what this boss is trying to do, it’s a particularly unhinged take on it.

          2. Kevin Sours*

            The basic concept of it is the idea that investing in better process control and focusing on making good parts is more cost effective *and* leads to better overall quality than investing in traditional testing and quality control downstream of manufacture.

            The problem is that this requires a great deal of discipline, training, and investment to pull off effectively and it got sold as a magic buzzword easy fix by highly paid consultants. With little attention paid to if it was even an appropriate solution to the problems at hand.

          3. atalanta0jess*

            Ok, but here’s a detail you absolutely need: they DO give the practitioners of six sigma rankings that align with karate belts. E.g. a six sigma expert is a black belt.

            They also insist on using lots of jargon.

        1. Missa Brevis*

          My employer is big on Six Sigma and it actually works pretty well in my experience – but I work in a high-throughput production setting, which I understand is what it was originally meant for. Not sure how well it translates to other settings.

          1. JustaTech*

            My employer has run *very* hot and cold on 6Sigma (we’re in biotech so it makes some sense). The company paid for a whole bunch of my initial group of coworkers to get their 6Sigma belts, then upper management changed and then if you said “6Sigma” their heads would explode, then management changed again and they were all for it, but before anyone else could do the training management changed *again* and no one has said anything about it.

      4. Generic Name*

        This gave me a good chuckle. It’s one of those things that seems like it should be a parody, but it actually exists. The folks here explain it pretty well.

  14. coffee*

    LW2, if you don’t have any influential allies, I would handle it by complying at first and then gradually leave work stuff on your desk to see if he notices/cares. In my experience these kinds of things are a big deal when they’re introduced and then fizzle out.

    I would also raise it with my boss, although with little expectations of success. I would focus entirely on the work impact:
    – Has the labelling taken time away from other work and caused problems with the other work?
    – Do you not have enough storage space for the valves and your paperwork? (And presumably your personal items need to be stored too, so is there space for that?)
    – Are there ergonomic impacts for anyone? E.g. if you’re left-handed, the phone is often better placed on the other side of the desk than for right-handed people.

    I wish I could say “Remind your boss that this is bananapants and demoralising, and that will sort it” but in my experience that will do nothing except perhaps annoy your boss. You have to keep all your feedback very factual and focused on drawbacks to the company.

    1. Sheworkshardforthemoney*

      As a left-handed person I’d push back hard on the placement of my work tools. It’s hard enough being left-handed without having to conform to arbitrary rules that make my workspace less efficient.

      2. ferrina*

        You’d need to label all your things as left-handed.
        “Left handed desk.”
        “Left handed mouse.”
        “Left handed pen.”
        “Left handed stapler.”

        On the bright side, at least your office supplies couldn’t walk off?

        1. 1LFTW*

          I, uh… may be the kind of person who can use left handed scissors, not notice that the grip feels weird, and wonder why the thing I was cutting is so messed up.

  15. Overthinking it*

    Not just the labeling that’s. . . strange, but the “where” on the desk the phone and computer must sit. Different people are going to find different position comfortable, obviously (we have different arm lengths, different injuries, etc.) This kind of conformity sounds like something in a dystopian sci-fi movies!

    1. Coffee*

      I had to once have my work desk in weird position that looked like cleaning crew didn’t put it back. It made it so much easier to focus on relevant things happening around me and ignore everything on my right side.

    2. Lady_Lessa*

      Grin. When I work the polls in Ohio, the tables where voters are checked in and get their blank ballots all have to be set up the same way, and we get pictures of how it should look. Besides the computer tablet, printer and blank ballots, we have info about translation, working the polls, precinct map etc.

      The inspectors from the Board does come around and that is one thing that they look at.

  16. I'm the Phoebe in any Group*

    What is 5s and 6s that some commenters are referencing? I can’t figure it out from context.

    1. Six sigma*

      Six sigma methodology, which has five phases.

      It’s a process improvement methodology.

    2. Junior Dev (now mid level)*

      I think 6s is Six Sigma which is an approach/philosophy for improving productivity at an organization. I don’t know too much about it.

    3. Awkwardness*

      5S/6S is a process improvement method under the umbrella of “lean manufacturing”. A part of this is, simply speaking, to make sure that every tool has its place so nothing is lying around imposing danger or requiring unnecessary time to find the tools. Therefore spaces are often labelled in order to make clear what space or drawer or bin this is and what it is for.

      1. ferrina*

        I’ve occasionally done this in situations where I either have a lot of people that are coming and going (less time explaining where things are/having different people put it in different places), or I’m working with small children (they get pictures with the labels), or I know I’m going to forget stuff (I’m ADHD, and labels on my boxes are a must). I never knew it had a name!

        That said, I’ve always been able to figure out that a desk is a desk.

    4. Automotive Engineer*

      A quick google search for the following terms can give you a good summary.

      5S methodology
      Six Sigma Theory

    5. SarahKay*

      5S is (was originally) a Toyota tool for streamlining production. In English it usually translates to Sort, Store (or Straighten), Shine, Standardise, and Sustain.
      Often a sixth S is added: Safety.

      It’s been adopted by lots of big companies to try and improve their own results – mine is one of them.

    6. Mermaid of the Lunacy*

      It’s this trendy thing we did in my company about 10 years ago where a bunch of people transitioned into full-time Green Belt and Black Belt roles, and everyone was forced to take training and look for opportunities to use it, and while it had some benefits, like every other trend we jammed it down everyone’s throats to the point where everyone was fed up with it and started rebelling against it, and when its trendiness had subsided, all those full-time Green Belts and Black Belts had to find other jobs or were let go. It became the butt of jokes for years thereafter. “Let’s 5S this sh*t!” “I think we need to have a Kaizan to figure that out!” “Oh, you still put Green Belt on your resume? How cute!”

  17. What we check*

    LW5–

    That sort of thing certainly wouldn’t show up on the background checks we do, which comprise–

    do you have citizenship or the right visa to hold the job?
    did you work for the people you claim you did?
    do you hold the qualifications you say you have?

    Home address may be an issue for criminal record checks, but what will be important for us is the outcome of the check.

  18. Freya*

    I would be quite frustrated with anyone mandating where my work items are on my desk – about half my coworkers have their phone to the right of their computer screens, and the other half, like me, have it to the left. This is an active choice each employee has made for their workflow and physical needs – and frankly, with my short arms, my phone is as far away from my keyboard as it can be and still be reachable without me leaning over, because I use my pen jar more often so it’s closer (can’t use the desk drawer, these are nice big desks and the drawer is literally out of reach when I’m typing), and my tissue box is on the right so that it’s also reachable by the coworker who uses the desk next to mine. My computer is where it is so that I can easily plug in headphones for video calls.

    All of which is to say that someone who wants to rearrange my desk at work will be getting a request for reasonable accommodations from me, because I am not average size and I need my workspace layout to reflect that.

    1. Bananapants Circus with Dysfunctional Monkeys*

      Yeah my brain immediately went to accomodations – especially if someone has necessary extra equipment, even something simple like a footrest, does *that* have to go? Because the C level strikes me as the type to come in and just remove it, accomodations be damned.

      1. 1LFTW*

        Yup. I’m not particularly short for a woman, but I’d bet you anything COO’s desk placement schematic was based on an “average” male. There are so many reasons why this is an ergonomic nightmare.

  20. Kevin Sours*

    For OP #3 there is also the issue of conflicts of interest. Trump is notoriously litigious as is his campaign. Having her in the firm could limit what cases they could ethically take.

    1. Hotdog not dog*

      I imagine there would also be security concerns. How would they be able to ensure the safety and privacy of their associates and clients with such a high profile person present?

      1. AvonLady Barksdale*

        I believe it’s more this than anything else. Security, privacy, and disruption to the rest of the firm. And I would be shocked if it were malicious in any way– her life is going to turn completely upside down for the foreseeable future, so it’s just a sound decision for everyone. Doug Emhoff left his firm too; he speaks often about how much he loved his job and how difficult it was to leave, but ultimately he had to do what was best for himself, his wife’s career, and his firm.

        1. Lady_Lessa*

          I’m sure that she and her husband talked about this during the selection process and that they are both on board with the decision.

        2. NotAnotherManager!*

          Yes, it would be incredibly disruptive to have a high-profile individual in the office, particularly with press interest and security details. I think it’s pretty standard the spouses of presidential/VP candidates to either leave their jobs or at least to take a leave of absence until the campaign is over. I’d be really surprised if this was not a voluntary departure.

  21. Chrysoprase*

    I feel like people are being a little quick to dismiss LW1’s concern here. I agree that a smell one day alone isn’t enough of a reason to report to anyone, but just having that suspicion could put LW in a difficult position. Where’s the line? If the coworker was obviously wasted that would be one thing, but what if they just start regularly smelling of alcohol at work, or seem “off” in a non-specific way? And what’s the best way to approach it if OP did need to report it? In one of my previous jobs it was actually written into the policy that I had to report to HR if I “suspected” – not knew, suspected – any coworker to be under the influence of anything at work, and let them handle it from there. Luckily I never had to, but it would have been a difficult situation to deal with – you don’t want to jump the gun with a really serious subject, but if there’s some incident and someone asks “did you ever see any signs of this” and you have to say yes, that’s tricky too.

    1. Ellis Bell*

      While different workplaces have different policies, there’s not really enough here for anyone to do anything. It’s a little odd to drink a lot at a work function, but really people only care about how you conduct yourself. It’s definitely an additional concern to smell vodka in the daytime but it’s not strictly verboten in a lot of places to have a drink at lunch, or even a hangover cure in the morning. It’s a worry but you can’t take the same approach that you might with a friend. I would say the line is anything were it’s affecting employees or the work, or safety.

    2. Nodramalama*

      It’s not that people are necessarily dismissing it, but it’s like Alison said – theres nothing actionable from the story. All the evidence is that at one work event coworker drank a lot, and once LW smelled something they THINK is vodka on coworkers breathe. It’s not a pattern and she hasn’t been “caught” doing anything.

    3. Earlk*

      It wouldn’t be fair to report a coworker because she once may have smelt of vodka and had some drinks at a work party. It could cause all sorts of problems for that coworker an there really isn’t enough information to suggest that they had actually drunk alcohol at work. Also, the LW only noticed it when they were sat very close, it’s not like she wandered in smelling like a brewery.

      If their behaviour was inappropriate it’s a different matter, because then you can signal to the behaviour that happened without starting rumours.

      But as nothing bad has happened how would this remotely effect LW? HR aren’t going to start an investigation and start interviewing people about a different colleagues issues.

    4. bamcheeks*

      It depends enormously on your workplace and the type of work you are doing. If you worked in healthcare, for example, any suspicion that someone is under the influence of substances at work would either be “report immediately” or “address directly with colleague immediately and ask them to step away from work”. Similar rules will apply in other contexts where there is a lot of risk, such as construction or warehouses where machinery is being operated. And that should be an expectation that anyone is familiar with, and even if the answer is, “I’ve just used a alcohol-based mouthwash, it’s fine!” that is something you should be able to clarify with the co-worker (and escalate if you aren’t convinced)– and it should be absolutely clear across the board that a false alarm taken seriously and investigated is much better and safer outcome than a real danger which wasn’t reported.

      If you’re doing standard office work and your job isn’t safety critical, the bar is much more likely to be, “what impact is it having on your own work?” If Sarah seems spaced out around clients or isn’t getting back to you on a normal timeframe, that’s something you can address with her directly or discuss with your manager, depending on your relationship with Sarah. But you don’t have have to speculate on the reasoning– you can just report the impact.

    5. WellRed*

      We had some one that started smelling of alcohol at work. Problem solved when she was busted for drunk driving in front of the office.

      1. ferrina*

        I wonder if it was someone inside the office that made the call to tip off the cops. If so, I’m not mad.

    6. Nodramalama*

      Is it dismissing a concern of just agreeing with Alison that nothing actionable has happened. LWs coworker hasn’t acted inappropriately, been obviously impaired or done anything at work. She drank a lot at a work event, and OP smelled something. If LW saw the coworker taking a drink at work it would be a very different conversation.

      1. The Bunny*

        Exactly. And OP didn’t. In fact OP was meeting with the coworker and didn’t notice anything until they got close together to look at the same thing.

    7. The Bunny*

      No one is going to ask “did you ever see signs of this” and gold anyone accountable if they did or didn’t. Coworkers aren’t detectives.

    8. Jessica*

      What?

      Literally what?

      LW said it’s not affecting the coworker’s work or how she interacts with colleagues (and LW doesn’t know for sure that the coworker was actually drinking before the meeting—there are, as other commenters have pointed out, any number of reasons one might smell like alcohol).

      Unless there’s an actual negative impact on her work or interactions with her colleagues, it’s none of LW’s business.

    9. Observer*

      Where’s the line?

      The line, in a context like this is bright and clear – when the LW sees a negative effect on their behavior or work, that’s the line.

      If the coworker was obviously wasted that would be one thing, but what if they just start regularly smelling of alcohol at work, or seem “off” in a non-specific way?

      Not the LW’s place to report anything. If they were friends, I could see having a conversation. But just being “off”? Not in the least bit. Especially since the LW is not in this person’s chain of command.

  22. Coyote River*

    LW3, I think firing an employee due to their spouse’s political affiliation would be an extremely bad look, even if it isn’t a protected class. I can’t imagine firing one of my employees if I found out their spouse was a politician, even if I disagreed with that political party.

    However, as Alison says, I can certainly see there being a conversation between her and the firm, about how to part ways amicably.

    1. General von Klinkerhoffen*

      I think firing someone for the political affiliation of a family member would usually be wrong.

      But here we’re talking about a potential Second Lady. The level of potential conflict is far greater.

      For better or worse, the partners of presidential (or indeed gubernatorial) candidates and running mates are a big part of a campaign. Generally speaking one wouldn’t be able to pick out the partners of individual House representatives/ MPs/ etc out of a lineup, and wouldn’t even necessarily know if those politicians were coupled or single.

      1. TPS reporter*

        agree it might not be strictly about political beliefs and more about the attention on the firm with a high profile employee. also conflicts are a thing and they could conflict out of a lot more business with that kind of employee. especially as a firm in DC taking fed related cases

    2. Yeah...*

      The potential first or second spouse of the United States stepping away from employment (assuming they were working in the first place) is not new.

      Current US First Lady Jill Biden is the exception.

      1. NotAnotherManager!*

        And she teaches at our local community college; she does not work in a political or legal organization.

        1. Observer*

          Right.

          If she were in a business context? That would be a major problem.

          Even a lot of Biden supporters will admit that Biden should have told his son to not take that job with Burisma. As one political commenter put it: She did not believe that there was any actual influence peddling (and she provided the reasons for that, which I don’t remember) but he was extremely stupid for not telling his son to cut it out. My point is not whether there was actually influence peddling or not. But that the *perception* was certainly so reasonable that even people who thought it hadn’t happened were appalled that Biden did not recognize the optics.

          In this case, a similar issue applies. Both Vance and the company have to realize just how sticky the whole thing could get. Even if they all are perfectly appropriate 100% of the time, there will be no way for them to avoid the appearance of conflict of interest. No one needs that.

      2. Coyote River*

        Whilst this is true, the question isn’t asking about “stepping away”, it’s asking about firing. It is a very different set of optics. “She stepped away to focus on her responsibilities as Second Lady” is very different to “her employer fired her because of her husband’s politics”, which I believe is what the letter writer was asking based on their comment about the firm’s progressive policies.

  23. pennyforum*

    In Re:#3
    Not a USA-ican so I might miss a nuance but from what I understand from pop culture.

    1) Lawyers don’t nessecarily have to agree with the client/the arguement they are posing, they just have to argue the law. Not all lawyers working a large case will argue it in court, so trial optics aren’t nessicarily a worry. So I doubt it was a values/political opinions based decision.

    2) As I understand it, the First Lady and Vice President and so presumably the Second Lady too, either independently or with her spouse have duties during a campaign and after; glad-handing, baby-kissing, launching ships, opening supermarkets, promoting various initiatives.
    Lawyers often work long hours. Possibly, Una Vance had a conversation something like I’ve taken on new family commitments/volunteer duties and won’t be able to do the work at the level needed.

    3) Presumably, Una Vance will now be recieving a Secret Service protective detail. Its possible the firm, Secret Service and Una Vance together assessed that if she continued to work, the logistics of her protection during and after the campaign would be either be impractical or overly disruptive to co-workers and clients.

    TL;DR theres all sorts of reasons why Una Vance might have resigned that have nothing to do with political disagreements

    1. Kevin Sours*

      Lawyers don’t need to agree with the client. But they do need to avoid conflicts of interest or the appearance of the same. DC is a very political city and a lot of the legal work there touches politics. If you were a Democratic campaign or NGO that Republicans do not favor would you feel comfortable with Ms Vance handling your case work — including a great deal of confidential information?

    2. BubbleTea*

      The firm Usha Vance worked for was well known for taking on cases like representing the families of Sandy Hook victims, or Breonna Taylor’s boyfriend, in civil litigation. It’s a fairly political firm.

    3. Earlk*

      I also thought it may be to do with the amount of time she’d need to take off for campaign events. FWIW I hate the idea of a spouse being relevant in a political campaign, unless theyve done sometime particularly opposite to what their politician party is supposed to stand for, but for some reason they are.

      1. CTT*

        I’m a lawyer and my first thought was “well, she’s definitely not going to meet her billable hour requirements this year.” A high-profile political campaign is a lot of travel and long hours and I don’t see how someone could balance a legal career with that. There’s also the ethical implications – can she zealously represent a client if she’s out of the office so much?

        1. NotAnotherManager!*

          Exactly. I think people who do not work in legal also do not realize how stringent the deadlines can be and how inflexible legal schedules can be due to external deadlines and your ethical obligations to meet them regardless of what you have going on personally. You can’t just blow off a hearing (or prep) or filing deadline to go to your spouse’s political rally, and 9.9/10 judges aren’t going to change their schedule to match yours.

      2. Zoe Karvounopsina*

        It’s been incredibly annoying, in recent years, to watch the UK press try and make First Ladies happen. No! This is a baby kissing niche filled by the royals!

        The wife of the new PM has said she’s going to continue her job.

    5. Kesnit*

      You make a good point about Secret Service protection. Attorney-client privilege is a thing, and having people in dark suits with guns standing in the conference room while you talk to clients would cause huge issues. (And if she did any criminal defense work, that would be a nightmare.)

      1. NotAnotherManager!*

        The Secret Service could easily stand outside the door and not interfere with attorney/client privilege. No attorney would have a third party in a client meeting. The Secret Service can identify safest locations, pre-sweep, and then be stationed outside of rooms/residences. They do not have to follow the protectee into bathrooms, medical appointments, consultations with their own counsel, etc., especially when the protectee is not the president. Families are usually consulted about how their protective detail will function.

    6. Hyaline*

      Yeah my first thought was definitely “she’s leaving this job for another one, namely: being a running mate’s spouse and possibly promoting to Second Lady.”

    7. Nonanon*

      Honestly, and this might be me airing on the more positive outlook, it’s possible she would have resigned had her husband been running on a ticket that aligned with the lawfirm exactly for reasons 2 and 3. If she’s on the campaign trail AT ALL (which she likely will be since politicians love showing off their spouses), she’s not going to be able to have the time to devote to something hours heavy like practicing law, and since she’s now a political figure, coordinating a security detail may be excessively burdensome for the firm (especially in light of the Trump assassination attempt; to my understanding, security is beefed up after major events like that).

      Compare this to George and Amal Clooney (I believe she was still practicing after they got married; I admittedly don’t keep up that much with either of them): Both of them (to my knowledge) have the same philosophical leanings, but if she decided going to film festivals and royal weddings and other “celebrity” events was too much, she could resign from her practice to devote more time to them. It would probably be less of an issue if she told George “nope, I’m out, enjoy Sundance on your own, I have several big cases.” If George expressed opinions contrary to Amal’s practice, it would be a dick move for the firm to fire HER, since, well, she doesn’t share those beliefs.

        1. SnackAttack*

          Haha I do have to laugh a little when people don’t want to say American because “it’s technically part of the Americas.” I mean, it’s true, but I’ve never heard a Mexican or Canadian call themselves American, lol.

          1. Butterfly Counter*

            Hmm. I’ve gone down a thought rabbit hole.

            I’m sure that if it was “The United Provinces of Canada” we would still call them “Canadians.” But what if they were “The United Provinces of America?” Or if any other country in North or South America was “… of America?” That might be tougher to decide who gets the “American” moniker.

          2. Kevin Sours*

            On the other hand I was rather directly told to use “estadounidense” instead of “americano” when traveling to Latin America because doing otherwise could make people cranky. Mexicans don’t call themselves American because it’s rare that you refer to your residence on a continent rather than a country. Doesn’t mean that people aren’t miffed by the implication that the US is all of America.

  24. Despachito*

    What struck me as weird was OP 1’s concern that it may be held against them if they do not tell the higher-ups about the coworker’s assumed drinking problem.

    I cannot imagine how this could happen. It sounds absurd that any boss would tell them “you did not tell us you smelled vodka in Jane’s breath, you are in trouble”.

    As several people pointed out, there can be other reasons a person can smell of alcohol than drinking. I don’t think there is another option for the OP than just let it go (and maybe be attentive of other signs if they appear) as there is nothing actionable at the moment.

    1. 1LFTW*

      I don’t know OP’s work history, but I’ve certainly heard of crappy workplaces where a person’s close colleagues can expect to be interrogated and possibly fired for not reporting something like this. The assumption is that if I work with Ferguson all day, every day, I *had* to have noticed he was under the influence, or stealing product, or illegally accessing the TPS database. If I say I didn’t notice, I’m assumed to be lying or inattentive.

      It’s not fair, and it’s not reasonable, but it does happen.

  25. Hannah*

    Munger Tolles is by no means a progressive enclave. Like all very large law firms, it provides defenses to big companies to shield them from liability. Similarly, Usha Vance is herself not progressive in the slightest. She voluntary left to
    support her husband as basically all candidate spouses end up doing (see, e.g., Doug Emhoff). This isn’t a work related question.

    1. Cj*

      if the question was why did she leave her law firm, it won’t be so much a work question. but the question was could she have been fired if she hadn’t voluntary left, and not even her specifically but someone with a spouse in politics, which is a work question

      1. Dr. Rebecca*

        Agreed, and also it’s Alison’s blog, she gets to decide what’s work related. Like, I love it when she answers questions about fictional characters, for example.

    2. Dr. Rebecca*

      From what I’ve seen, the reason is not always to support their candidate spouse; sometimes it’s the fact that the secret service would very much prefer that someone so high profile has a day job where they’d either meet with unvetted people, or they’d have to vet everyone they meet with.

  26. Introvert girl*

    OP 2: make sure you have this request on e-mail. Then write back asking if an intern can’t do it or if your manager really wants your team of engineers to use their time for it? This with HR in cc. When you get an affirmative, do it as slowly as possible and write down the hours it took you. Then send an e-mail with how many hours it took to your boss with HR in cc to show how much this stupid thing cost the company.

  27. SAS*

    OP1: after I saw a TikTok about vodka in a spray bottle being an alternative to dry cleaning, I did it to all my coats and blazers (and was happy with the results!).

    I didn’t notice any residual alcohol smell but now I wonder if it’s like smokers who kind of can’t smell it on themselves.

    If I were in your situation and it became a repeat occurrence, I might chance a “something smells like vodka?” comment to see if she has an alternative explanation.

    1. Freya*

      Typically, vodka spray (as used by theatre costuming departments worldwide to disinfect and deodorise costumes that can’t be washed every day during a production run) doesn’t leave any residual alcohol to be smelled, once the fabric is dry. If it did, it would be a fire hazard.

    2. Lab Boss*

      Vodka in the bottle (or misted onto clothes and not fully dried) has one smell, which is pretty neutral. Vodka on the breath has a metabolized vodka smell, which is different in a way that’s kind of hard to describe. If you caught the barest whiff you might not immediately know the difference, but anyone who has spent much time around heavy drinkers can probably tell breath-vodka from spilled vodka (and, related, if OP has been around people who habitually drink vodka specifically, it’s not surprising they can pick it out from a generic “liquor” smell).

      1. OP #1*

        This is exactly it! I sat next to her for a few minutes without her speaking and there was no smell. Then when facing each other she started talking, I smelled it very clearly.

        And I do have a close family member whose drink of choice is vodka, I didn’t even think of that.

      2. lunchtime caller*

        Thank you for explaining this! Bless the people who think hand sanitizer could be easily confused for vodka on the breath, once you smell it enough it’s truly so distinctive.

  28. Martine*

    OP 1 hits hard this morning. Years ago I twice smelled alcohol on a colleague at early morning meetings. Colleague has struggled with various things through the years. The alcohol issue has come to a head in the last year or so with extended absences. There was a long absence last summer and apparently a serious talk. A period of sobriety. Absences in the fall and winter, another long absence since the spring including an out-patient rehab. He’ll be back soon, I doubt for very long. The sober intermezzos seem to be getting shorter.
    I don’t have any advice, I don’t fault myself for not reporting him. I’ve followed Allison’s advice to report issues that affect my work and since I don’t work closely with him, there haven’t been any. And I’ve advised others to do the same.
    We had a company culture with a high tolerance for alcohol – bubbly at noon, when there was something to celebrate, a beer or two on the roof terrace after work, occasionally wine at lunch. As of recently the policy is “no alcohol unless specifically authorized by upper management”. (They don’t want to completely eliminate the celebrations.) It was about time.
    (Before anyone mentions drinking and driving: On the whole the drivers abstain or drink very little. Most of us cycle.)

    As it happens, a friend sent a text yesterday saying her sister-in-law had died either in the course of a detox or after a detox that “didn’t work”. Not sure of the details. She was 59.
    And I’m thinking of a friend these days who would have been 64 on Sunday if he hadn’t died of the results of alcoholism 9 years ago.

    I wish for OP1 that their management acts sooner and more decisively than ours has. And that Janet is more receptive than my colleague has been.

  29. ChurchOfDietCoke*

    I’m finding it hard to understand how fixed positions for equipment such as computers and phones would be compatible with health and safety and disability access needs. People of different heights, body sizes, sight and mobility might have wildly different needs about where they place, for example, their monitor(s) or keyboard!

    1. Allonge*

      They are likely not.

      I am sure there is the one in a million place where the standard placement of screens is more important for some very specific reason than ergonomy. But in general, it’s a very strange thing to spend time on (from the management perspective).

    2. TPS reporter*

      I could see wanting to label where you like your things to make sure those things aren’t moved by let’s say a cleaner.

      it’s hard for me to imagine why the COO would mandate the arrangement other than some clear business need related to the valves they work on. that doesn’t seem to be the case here. OP could ask why??

    3. NotAnotherManager!*

      When we moved offices several years ago, we found that the office furniture selected did not allow for any sort of customization, and I absolutely hate it. I routinely work with confidential information, and the only way to angle my screens away from the wall of glass (with no frosting) is to contort my screens and myself in an ergonomically unfriendly way. If I could, I’d rotate my desk 90 degrees and totally solve the problem.

  30. r..*

    LW2,

    this is completely bananas.

    It will most likely will develop into what sometimes is called a “resume generating event”, because the judgement displayed by the new COO is so poor that I don’t quite see how one would develop someone who thought *that* would be a good idea into someone who would be a COO that doesn’t end up driving out talent, let alone be adequate or even a good COO.

    Unless corrected your company *will* lose people over this, either the COO, or other people (you yourself included or not) who’ve decided that they won’t put up with that type of inanity.

  31. Retired Vulcan Raises 1 Grey Eyebrow*

    #1 Unless there is a safety issue, MYOB and stop monitoring her party intake.
    If she is hindering your work, discuss only the work issues with her, or if that doesn’t help, then your manager.

    May be different in the US re attitudes to drink/drugs – e.g. we don’t have pre-employment tests for these except in a few jobs.
    I would not have been expected to report a coworker just because I suspected she had been imbibing unless there was a possible safety issue.

    “making sure she is safe and getting help”
    Not unless she asks you for help. Unsolicited health “help/advice” from a coworker is a gross oversttep.

    1. Welp*

      This is where I come down as well. OP does not know enough to intervene and is not in a position to do so as merely a coworker. I understand the concern, but people often cite “concern” when they want to interfere in something that is actually not their business.

    2. Sneaky Squirrel*

      This is my take. We know she drank a lot at a party based on OP’s comments but that was a party and doesn’t imply that she doesn’t know how to hold herself outside of that setting. Some people use a party as an excuse to go all out.

      If she’s coming into the office smelling of vodka, but this is the only hint of concern plus her one time at a party, I don’t think OP has enough justification to take action. Presumably she’s meeting performance expectations and generally acting as a sober person would.

      1. The Bunny*

        This. OP said in a comment that they met for a bit but she didn’t notice it until they got closer together.

        So if she was drinking (which we absolutely don’t know for certain) it wasn’t enough to impair her or enough to be able to detect the smell of until they got really close.

        Roots definitely lives in MYOB world, especially with all the other things it could be.

  32. Retired Vulcan Raises 1 Grey Eyebrow*

    #2 Very intrusive micromanaging and specifying positions of everything may be ableist too.

    At FinalJob we had to label every test component or material sample that was in our office/cubicle, but that was for a good reason: to rule out the tiniest chance that a substandard part could somehow reach a production line (they were on the same site) and be used there. Computers and screens also had number labels, for IT.
    We didn’t have to label anything else, because there was no reason.

    1. Bellis Coldwine*

      I initially read “FinalJob” as the name of a company and was surprised you listed the company you worked at!

      Clearly my plan to go back to sleep after dog o’clock is well-founded.

    3. Random Bystander*

      Yeah, number labels for computers make sense–it’s an inventory control sort of thing. Or helpful when something goes wrong with a particular work station. (For some reason, two rather important desktop shortcuts changed to non-functioning today. After conferring with my co-workers that this wasn’t something universal–in which case I’d wait it out because a fix would likely be coming–I had to open a ticket with IT. Part of the ticket required fields is the workstation number.)

  34. Retired Vulcan Raises 1 Grey Eyebrow*

    #4 Sorry to hear that, OP. They were disgracefully rude, inconsiderate and unprofessional.
    I haven’t job-hunted in dceades, but is that common behaviour nowadays, or just in fields with 100s of applications?
    An employee’s market generally brings courtesy, but even an employer’s market is no excuse for being jerks.

    FinalJob didn’t ghost applicants nor do I know anywhere that does – Germany has too few working age people and there is paricular demand for suitably qualified applicants in engineering. A serious demograhics problem.
    Every business website, shop, office block and even delivery van in my area has adverts wanting to hire & train people. Literally saying drop off your resume or come in to talk. A real estate agent is offering a free flat as well for trainees.

  35. Testerbert*

    LW2: I’m positive that this was a Dilbert cartoon years ago, with even the person verifying the labelling had been done having a label.

    I’d want to stage the ‘picture’ of the work area to have a picture of the work area in it. Repeat this process a few times to create a nice optical illusion.
    And then find another job ASAP.

  36. EngineeringFun*

    At a manufacturing startup, the were label ed bins with all the parts to assemble complex machines. Fantastic. On desks were half made machines being built with tools and parts. There were travelers (sheets that documented all the repairs) for each machine. Amazing. The problem was the CEO thought it was a mess! He would keep coming in and asking us to clean up????? Boeing could learn a bit from this shop!

  37. HailRobonia*

    My husband has asthma and told me that the inhaler he used when he was younger smelled strongly of alcohol and he got accused of drinking several times in school.

  38. Turingtested*

    I’m surprised that so many people take 7 drinks at a work function as no big deal. That’s about 3x typical consumption for my industry and it would definitely stick out. I’d keep an eye on the person in case they got sick or were acting inappropriately and needed a (one time) hand.

    1. melissa*

      I agree— seven is a LOT and I would notice. No, I’m not counting drinks, so if a colleague has one or two refills, I’m not going to notice. But seven is almost double what the CDC calls “binge drinking.”

    2. Alton Brown's Evil Twin*

      True, but often cocktail-hour events have really small glasses (or even those plastic things) that hold just a few ounces, not a full 5- or 6-oz pour that you’d get at a restaurant. Still concerning, but I’m not going to assume she polished off 2 full bottles.

      1. Happy meal with extra happy*

        OP has said in the comments that it was over a bottle’s worth.

    3. Nodramalama*

      I mean if LW wrote in saying they’d had 7 drinks at a fancy work event I think most of the commentariat would say that was not advisable or very professional. But IMO unless she was ACTING out of pocket, it’s really not LWs concern.

      Also, industries differ, events differ, people differ. I have gone to many of a work event where people have made great use of the free alcohol. They don’t have drinking issues.

      1. Welp*

        This. If it were the person drinking who wrote in, the advice may be different. Approving or not approving of the person drinking’s choices is not the question (although people love to make judgments when things like this come up) – it’s whether LW should get involved. Given that these two instances don’t seem to be affecting LW, it’s best to leave it alone because it’s likely that LW does not have the full picture.

        1. Nodramalama*

          Yeah, like maybe if LW had seen the coworker walking around with a suspiciously large glass of orange juice, or it was affecting her work, or it was happening a few times, that would be different. But at this stage it’s really just speculating about someone’s life style

      2. Turingtested*

        I’m not saying LW 1’s coworker has a drinking problem or drank before work, just that I think noticing drinking a lot at a work function and later smelling alcohol on the person isn’t an absurdly intrusive thing to note.

  39. HailRobonia*

    In my old office I named the labelmaker “Patti Label” (after Patti LaBelle).

      1. HailRobonia*

        people would say “has anyone seen Patti?” if they were looking for the label maker.

  40. chellie*

    L2: I would be sorely tempted to take the directive very, very literally and cover EVERYTHING with labels. Think, “top of desk”, “drawer”. One for the wall, the floor, the toilet. Pen, pencil. A large “engineer” label for myself.

  41. AndersonDarling*

    #2 I’m imagining the engineering space being used to film a children’s educational program at night. When the lights go off after work, a crew of puppeteers come in and teach children to read.
    “Desk. D E S K That spells desk! Good job!”
    I’m go full on Letter People labeling. Giant, colorful, lettering for each item’s label. Make it really obvious to anyone walking in to the department that the COO is bananas.

  42. HailRobonia*

    Malicious compliance: label your desk: DESK.

    Then label that label: DESK LABEL

    Then label that label: DESK LABEL LABEL

    until the universe is 99% labels.

  43. Delta Delta*

    #2 – There are some people who cannot be trusted with a label maker, and who will label literally everything. Find those people, and trust them to do their work. Doors, carpet, toilets – you name it, it’s getting labeled.

  44. Harper*

    LW#2 – is the COO, by chance, using the terms 5S or 6S to describe his organization project? Limiting the items in the area, labeling each item, and posting pictures or diagrams of where things belong is actually a pretty common practice in Manufacturing, using a program called 5s (sometimes people add a 6th “S” for “safety”). It sounds like he may be implementing a version of this, but just explaining or executing it very poorly?

  45. Megan Perry*

    The manager in question 2 is taking 5S to an extreme. Hopefully he’s just new to it and will calm down soon. We had one guy who used electric tape to outline where his personal cell phone went and then where his work phone went and labelled them as such!

  46. Grey Coder*

    LW4 — I had a similar experience but it turned out the interviewer was sick that day, and it was a small enough place that there wasn’t any backup. It annoyed me of course, but I knew it was a small company and they did get back to me. I would give it a couple of days and maybe try a different contact method.

    1. Person from the Resume*

      I do suspect LW4 has been ghosted, but I did think it could be the interviewer was out sick the day of the interview and didn’t ask a coworker to alert the LW or was too sick to remember that they had an interview that day. At a small company that could fall through the cracks.

      My recommendation is to move on mentally, but also not to get upset and contact them in a complaining way in case the missed phone interview was a mistake or emergency on their part.

  47. Ratted Out*

    I had a coworker about 10 years ago come to work smelling like alcohol. Decided to speak to her supervisor, as there were also performance issues. She went to rehab and has now been sober for 10 years. YMMV.

  48. OP #1*

    Since tons of people think I have nothing better to do than count my colleagues drinks at a party, I will clarify that she and I were seated immediately next to each other for the event (2.5 ish hours). She drank an entire bottle of table wine (no one else wanted any) and then went up to the bar multiple times.

    I mention the event because it happened only six weeks before this moment.

    2. TPS reporter*

      it’s one thing to notice something and another to mention it in a way that harms someone. this is her livelihood. unless there truly is a safety issue or something about your work is affected by her behavior, or you are good friends and you could say something to her very discreetly, please just don’t say anything for now.

      1. OP #1*

        Thanks, this is why I brought it to AMA. I realize how seriously it could impact her life and (shockingly) I’m not out to get her. She is one of our best team members, we’d be up a creek without her. Which is why I didn’t want to take immediate action without checking with others.

        1. AZ Torch*

          Switching to anonymous for this one because I post under my real name. I never came to the office smelling of alcohol, but I *was* the guy who’d have five or six drinks at work events. Do you know why?

          It’s because I had a drinking problem.

          For various reasons I quit and have been quit for over a decade and a half now. All I can say is that getting to the point of admitting the problem is an incremental process made up of dozens of small hints. Would one person commenting on it have made me quit? Probably not, but it would be another scratch in my armor of denial. Enough scratches, and the armor falls apart.

          Saying something might make them dig in and get defensive, and they might dismiss you.

          But, down the line, it might make a small difference.

          1. OP #1*

            Thanks for sharing such a personal story. Wishing you many more years of continued success in your sobriety!

    3. Alton Brown's Evil Twin*

      Whoops, well that negates my comment above.

      Finishing a full bottle, then going to the bar multiple times is a problem.

    4. JP*

      Sorry you’re getting jumped on in the comments. I think sometimes people are overly eager to play devil’s advocate.

      I’ve had a couple colleagues over the years that I strongly suspected had a drinking problem. I never mentioned anything, because it never got to the point where it seem worth bringing up. I agree with Alison that there’s probably nothing actionable yet, but your notice of the issue and your concern is reasonable.

      We did once have an employee who had a water bottle filled with liquor that she drank from all day while she was at the office. She passed out in the bathroom one day, blocking the door so that no one could get it open to check on her. Hopefully the issue never gets to that point.

    5. yet another anon*

      Thank you, OP. The discussion here really showcases our cultural sensitivities around alcohol consumption. You’re not fixated or inappropriately interested or creepy or weird for noticing; people just have a lot of anxiety & doubt around this topic.

    6. Czhorat*

      Yeah, that’s noticeable.

      Assuming that you aren’t an incorrigible busybody then an amount of drinking that others will notice IS a problem.

      If you noticed that it was 2 or 3 drinks that would probably be a you problem; if it’s six or seven that’s really an issue for them.

      The wine is a giveaway in this case, but I remember a time at a business dinner I got a third refill and another coworker raised an eyebrow from across the room. I was drinking club soda. Sometimes a trip to the bar is just a soft drink.

    7. Nodramalama*

      I don’t think it’s weird that you noticed, but I do think its not really your concern that she drank a lot at a work event. And I don’t agree with the conclusion that its part of a pattern of a drinking problem.

      1. Czhorat*

        To have anywhere upwards of five drinks at a business function – or really at almost any other time – IS a very likely sign of a drinking problem. That’s not a thing that normal, healthy, reasonable people would do.

        1. ChurchOfDietCoke*

          Tell me you have never been in a pub in the UK on a Saturday night without telling me you have never been in a pub in the UK on a Saturday night :)

          1. Czhorat*

            I haven’t.

            But this story didn’t take place in a pub in the UK on a Saturday night. It took place at a business dinner. The amount of drinking is far enough outside the norm to raise a flag. OP’s concern is justified, even if it isn’t actionable.

            1. Bella Ridley*

              Sure, it’s weird at a business dinner. But that comment was in reference to “really almost any other time,” which seems fairly ignorant of the way lots of people around the world drink.

            1. Nodramalama*

              I think it is relevant to be reminded that not every social and cultural group
              treats attitudes towards things like drinking, drugs, sex, let’s throw in cigarettes and vaping, the same way

              1. JP*

                Downing an entire bottle of wine plus however many drinks she got at the bar in the span of 2.5 – 3 hours at a work event is concerning behavior. Full stop. This is not cultural. These comments are unreal.

                1. Nodramalama*

                  Uh, the comment was in response to the idea that reasonable people wouldn’t do that any time, and the answer is, in a pub they probably are.

                2. Happy meal with extra happy*

                  Yeah, honestly, for some of the comments, I think we’re getting to the “doth protest too much” stage.

                3. Been there*

                  I’m surprised at how hard the commentariat is defending binge drinking. Because that’s what drinking more than a bottle of wine in 2 hours is.

          3. Rooby*

            Are you saying that UK pubs don’t have any alcoholics in them?

            Besides, in the US, 90% of the time people had to drive to get to and from where they are going.

          4. Orv*

            I used to drink heavily at work events and pretty much nowhere else. I was extremely introverted and Enforced Fun With Coworkers was pretty hard for me to get through.

        2. Ferret*

          Disagree really. And I also think that the AAM commentariat generally has an incredibly puritanical (and very American) approach to alcohol which means the responses to any letter mentioning it are always incredibly weird.

          I’ve been to various fancy restaurant recently which served 5 or more glasses of wine across the evening as part of a paring, based on your response everyone in the restaurant had a drinking problem. I’ve also been to work functions where people might have 3 glasses over dinner and then a couple more in the social/dancing bit afterwards which you seem to think means all 300 people were also incipient alcoholics.

          1. doreen*

            Some of that American attitude also has to do with driving. I think very differently about someone who has five drinks in three hours and then gets in a car to drive home than I do about someone who has those same five drinks in three hours at the bar down the block from their home. In much of the US, you can almost assume that any drinking away from home will involve driving.

            1. SnackAttack*

              Not necessarily. Ubers exist. The vast majority of people I know use those when going to work/drinking functions.

          1. Happy meal with extra happy*

            Oh yes, the legal field which is definitely known for its sobriety and lack of problems with alcohol.

            1. Nodramalama*

              It was just a light hearted comment. But yes, many lawyers have drinking problems. Many lawyers also just use events with free alcohol as an opportunity to let loose. It’s not always the same thing.

          2. Rooby*

            Whether drinking is a pattern of addiction or medically problematic doesn’t really go away if it’s “ just part of the ___ culture” though. (In this case, insert lawyer into the blank.)

            There used to be memes, and I think even shirts that said essentially, “it’s not a drinking problem it’s just college.” But a lot of those college students did in fact develop drinking problems.

    8. Happily Retired*

      OP #1: If it happens again, would this feel comfortable to you?

      “Whoa, what is that weird chemical-y smell? Does anyone else smell it?” (not hollered out to the entire room; only loud enough for those immediately preset) And then drop it and go on with the work discussion.

      People struggling (or not struggling) with Alcohol Use Disorder (AUD) are usually very worried about being “caught.” If she’s having a problem, this might make her realize that she’s not winning the battle of hiding her drinking. And that can be an important first step towards examining her relationship with alcohol.

      Before anyone goes all “we don’t know if she’s drinking maybe it’s mouthwash etc.”, yes, I realize. This is a neutral statement that can be made at the time.

      For those unfamiliar with the medical approach to AUD, this relates to question #4 on the CAGE screening tool:
      C – ever felt you need to Cut down on your drinking?
      A – ever Annoyed by people criticizing your drinking?
      G – ever feel Guilty about your drinking?
      E – ever felt the need for an Eye-opener (a drink first thing in the morning) to steady your nerves or to treat a hangover?

      [2 or more “yes” answers are an indication for looking into this more deeply (by the person taking the test, or by medical professionals, not by co-workers etc.)]

      1. Welp*

        The first three of those factors seem to be very dependent on your own individual culture and the people you’re around. American culture, for example, tries to play it both ways with drinking where it’s encouraged as a fun activity, but there’s also a prohibition-era holdover of linking drinking and morality (i.e. if you don’t drink you’re a better person than someone who DOES). This environment can lead to feelings of guilt or annoyance even if you are actually only a casual drinker.

        1. yet another anon*

          As a casual drinker, though, what’s the problem with thinking about how you’re using alcohol and how it’s serving you? Is that bad? Maybe you realize yeah, you’re drinking now and then because everyone else does, but it actually kind of throws off your morning run routine because of your disrupted sleep. Maybe you realize you’re starting to drink because you’re bored, or that… you’re actually uncomfortable that your four-year-old says “Mommy needs some wine!” (cue manic laughter from kid), when something goes wrong, because you yourself have said that enough. Maybe that’s while you’re having exactly seven drinks a week because health authorities say that more than seven a week is not healthy.

          And then maybe given that noticing, you’re fine with it and you keep on as it is. Or maybe you decide that you want to prioritize your run over drinking the night before and get an NA beer or mocktail instead.

          What’s the harm — or Puritanism — in that?

        2. Rooby*

          There are also more objective medical standards, too, though. If you feel guilty about drinking two drinks a week, even though that’s not medically considered a problematic amount of drinking, maybe it’s still not serving you that well.

          Or you can look up information about how much drinking is considered problematic, and realize that you no longer feel guilty because two drinks a week is fine.

          Having a thoughtful relationship with your own amount of drinking, and checking in with yourself every once in a while, is normal and helpful. And if it makes you feel upset and defensive, maybe that’s some important information right there. Checking in on yourself and all kinds of areas doesn’t have to be some fraught exercise, it’s just part of being a mentally healthy adult.

        3. Happily Retired*

          This isn’t a magazine quiz. CAGE is a very quick assessment used by physicians in situations like emergency psych conditions and so forth to assess the possibility that AUD might be part of what’s going on. It’s deliberately broad, and it’s NOT diagnostic.

          So if for instance someone scored a 2 for C (cut back) and G (feels guilty), and the provider asks the suicidal patient about alcohol use, and the patient says “Oh God, a couple of months ago I drank three beers with friends, and I shouldn’t have done it, because I promised my mom I wouldn’t drink,” that medical possibility (AUD) would most likely be dismissed, with attention aimed toward other areas.

          Whereas if the patient says a couple of 6-packs a day, and they ought to stick to one 6-pack, and they had promised their GF they wouldn’t, then there is context for the score and worth more exploration.

    9. LMNOP*

      I’d have noticed too. I also have an alcoholic relative who favors vodka, and yes, despite some of these comments, I absolutely recognize the smell of it on someone’s breath. It’s sufficiently distinct.

      If you wrote in saying your coworker crashed a car into the building while drunk, too many commenters would be castigating you for not noticing the emerging pattern earlier. Sometimes there’s no winning with self-righteous internet judgement. You asked a fair question and aren’t out of line for noticing and wondering about these things.

    10. RagingADHD*

      Well, since a bottle of wine = 5 glasses, and you decided she drank “7 or 8” then it sounds like you were counting her drinks in the most literal sense.

      It sounds like you are itching to get involved here and determined to listen to anyone who agrees with you, while discounting the advice of the person who you actually asked.

      Whether she has a problem or not, bringing it up to management is going to cause problems for her. And bringing it up to her is very likely to offend her, as nobody likes to be monitored or (for want of a better word) concern-trolled.

      If you’re willing to trash your working relationship with her so you can scratch your itch to speak up, I don’t suppose anyone’s advice would make a difference. But if you do value that relationship, just bear in mind that your interference will overwhelmingly likely be unwelcome and offensive – particularly as you apparently are not personal friends outside of work, and there has been no discernable impact on her work or her behavior at the function you mentioned.

      1. Allonge*

        Could you please point out the part where OP is not listening to the advice given?

        The advice given is no need to report this. OP says precisely nothing about this.

        A bunch of commenters also felt the need to add ‘you are bad person for even noticing that someone drank a bottle of wine next to you at a work function, how very dare you to keep your eyes open AND to say they smelled of vodka when they smelled of vodka’. For some strange reason, OP might feel attacked by this part.

      4. perfect beasts*

        This is a very odd comment. LW wrote for advice. She’s not determined to do any one thing, she’s wondering what she SHOULD do, and she’s not ignoring Alison’s advice in the slightest. She’s merely responding in comments to some of the inaccurate speculation.

        You’re having an outsized kneejerk reaction here.

    11. Jessica*

      Not your business, unless you’re a close friend, it impacts your work, or you have evidence it’s putting others at risk (like if you knew she was driving home after drinking heavily at the event).

      Plenty of your colleagues are likely engaging in behaviors that might be harmful to them: smoking, having sex without protection, driving without their seatbelts.

      Your coworkers’ choices are not your business unless they impact your work.

    12. perfect beasts*

      OP1, I’m sorry you’re getting jumped on in the comments. I would have noticed both those things too. I noticed a colleague drinking something like 8 cocktails when we were out recently, and of course I’m not going to do anything about that – I don’t care how much she drinks on a night out, it just registered with me because she was sitting directly opposite and it’s an amount of alcohol that would put me under the table. If I then noticed a smell of alcohol on her breath at work, I’d definitely start to wonder if there was something going on. I still wouldn’t actually do anything unless I had further cause for significant concern. It’s not enough to go on, and voicing my worries to a superior could potentially impact her in a negative way. But noticing these things is not the act of a crazy obsessive, it’s just someone being aware of the world around them.

  49. Bill and Heather's Excellent Adventure*

    LW2, I can see the clouds of bananapants already gathering. I sincerely hope you know someone who can help you avoid the full brunt of the storm before this guy gets any worse. Otherwise, it might be time to start looking for a new position.

  50. Roeslein*

    Plenty of people use vodka to clean their clothes (to avoid frequent dry cleaning). That would actually be my first assumption if they were wearing clothes that can’t be laundered easily (business or evening wear, typically), unless I was close enough to smell their breath specifically which is unusual in a business setting.

    2. spaceelf*

      A lot of mouthwash has alcohol in it too. And it’s not always flavored with mint or whatever.

  51. werewolf*

    LW #2, you’re a better person than me if your first response isn’t malicious compliance. My labels would be so obnoxious. I’d blow up the picture of the “neat office” that’s supposed to remind you of how it’s “supposed” to look until it was at least 5ft by 5ft big.

  52. yet another anon*

    A previous comment I wrote didn’t make it through for some reason, but OP #1, I think it would be a kindness to mention it to your colleague. Folks get very sensitive about alcohol. You’d mention it if there were spinach in her teeth, right? So why not, “This is super awkward, but I feel like I smell vodka.”

    It’s just a data point. If it’s incorrect, she can throw it away (“wow that’s weird”). If she has an issue, it’s information about how it’s going.

    The comments here are weirdly combative, which isn’t surprising. I recently had an older family member stop drinking and of all people my brother was probing why and sort of anxiously asking, “But it’s only temporary, for a medical issue, right?” I also recently stopped and the comments I’ve gotten are fascinating. Lots of folks take it as a judgement on themselves and their habits. It’s really not, it’s about me and my heart rate and sleep and feeling present and so on.

    The question isn’t, “Do I have a big enough problem to have to stop?” It’s, “How is it serving me? How good could life be if I stopped?” If you’re thoughtful about this stuff, there are some great books that you can check out without making any changes in your drinking habits, including This Naked Mind and a ton of other “quit lit”.

  53. Almost A Shrimp*

    LW #1: I agree with Alison’s advice. I was once called into my manager’s office because someone said I smelled like alcohol in an early morning meeting. I certainly had not had any alcohol that morning (despite how tempting that horrible job made it!). But I had been out for a friend’s bday the night before in a smoky bar. I usually wore the same coat when I went to said bar, but it was absolutely freezing and I decided to wear a warmer coat and just wash it later. I suspect there was also some alcohol spilled on it. It stunk, tbh. When I went to the meeting, in another building, the next morning, I wore the coat. Someone smelled it and reported me. We got that straightened out fast.
    The next week, the same person again said I smelled like alcohol. I hadn’t had a drink in several days. When my boss confronted this evil troll, she admitted she made it up just so someone would look into it again.
    All that to say, sometimes things are not what they seem.

  54. SMH*

    LW #5: I’ve worked in both public assistance (SNAP, Medicaid, etc) and HR. Public assistance does not show up on any normal background check. Medicaid and SNAP enrollment lists are, AFAIK, not public information. TANF (cash assistance welfare) enrollment lists are technically public information, but there’s no commonly accessible database where you could find this information. In my state, you would have to go to the specific county the person receive benefits in and make a public records request.

  55. Sneaky Squirrel*

    LW5 – When we run background checks, we run a proof of education, proof of previous employment, a credit check which is a soft check, criminal checks for the past 7 years which usually runs the name through a list of national, federal, and county databases associated with the candidate’s history usually including government watch list searches, sex offender registries, court records. We also run an ssn trace which is used to confirm identity and it may pick up addresses the candidate didnt disclose. Staying in shelters and public aid programs likely wouldn’t show up in our search.

    1. spaceelf*

      Considering all the ways my data and identity has been stolen in the past, you’d likely find a ton of non-disclosed addresses as they wouldn’t have ever been mine in the first place. This is not uncommon. So how do you control for that?

  56. SleeplessKJ*

    Re #1 my work partner loves her morning kombucha – which smells strongly of alcohol. (my ex was a vodka—alcoholic and IMO vodka doesn’t have much of a noticeable odor.) Not saying it’s not possible, but I’m thinking kombucha is more likely. Especially if she’s “energized.”

  57. Am I old in the United States of America?*

    The potential first or second spouse of the United States stepping away from employment (assuming they were working in the first place) is not new.

  58. Garden Gnome*

    For LW #2, sometimes labeling office furniture like that is necessary for insurance policies. The furniture in my office is labeled similarly (they have numbers that correspond to a list kept of office purchases) because of insurance and also to keep track of firm expenditures. However, designating certain spots for certain items seems over the top.

    1. Observer*

      Asset management tags are a different thing. In fact, in many cases they don’t even have any human readable text, and if they do it’s often just a serial number or something like that. You do not manage inventory for insurance with labels that only identify the type of item it is (eg Chair or Table etc.)

  59. Apex Mountain*

    The COO sounds like me when my parents bought one of those old label makers. Of course I was around 10 at the time

    1. Juicebox Hero*

      Hah, same here. They were a trendy thing at my school when I was in maybe third grade and when my mother finally bought me one, I labeled everything that would stay still long enough to get a label stuck to it.

  60. MollyGodiva*

    #2 I see the value in this. I keep sitting on filing cabinets because they are not properly labeled. I also sometimes accidentally answer my desk when the phone rings.

    2. Anne Shirley Blythe*

      Thank you for this. I immediately envisioned John Cleese doing this and am better for it.

      1. Anne Shirley Blythe*

        “Hello? Hello? Is anybody there? I can’t hear you…” (with ear against desk) :)

    3. Juicebox Hero*

      I first tried to type this response on my tape dispenser because I couldn’t tell it from the keyboard.

      1. Anne Shirley Blythe*

        Don’t ya ha– — —- hate it when that happens?! Sorry, I was typing on my desk for a moment there.

  61. Anne Shirley Blythe*

    LW2, this Jonathan-Swift-and Joseph-Heller-level absurdity. Please provide an update if possible. If you understandably are driven to resign, last-day actionable items might include: wearing a tee-shirt with “RESIGNING EMPLOYEE ” on it (preferably with an arrow) or taking a picture of you in your workspace holding up a sign saying “I resign” and hanging it on the wall.

  62. Juicebox Hero*

    There was a cartoon in the early 00s called “Ed, Edd, and Eddy” about three tweenage boys who were best friends. Edd was an anxious, fussy kind of person who did, in fact, label everything in his bedroom – desk, light, sack (for bed) with sticky notes.

    I wonder if #2’s COO was a fan and got the wrong idea from it.

    1. H.Regalis*

      I loved that show! Cartoon Network had so many good shows in the late 90s-early 2000s.

      I can totally seeing Edd growing up to be this COO XD

  63. Czhorat*

    For LW2, I wonder if it’s a crazy reaction to equally crazy behavior/excuses for messy offices.

    “You need to clear out those boxes of hardware. Only chairs and desks in the office”
    “No, boss. This isn’t a box of random fittings; it’s really a second desk. I can put papers on it, see?”

    While the request is insane, in a battle between you and your boss the boss usually wins unless they ask for something literally illegal or extremely wasteful. This is stupid, but the kind of stupid it’s probably best to roll your eyes about and comply. Keep your powder dry for the REALLY egregious demands.

    1. Apex Mountain*

      I was thinking the only thing I could imagine that made even the barest bit of sense was if there was going to me an office move or cleanup and the COO just meant label things that need to be moved as opposed to personal items?

  64. mlem*

    For #5/background checks, you could check to see if any prospective companies list their specific policies openly, or if they list the agency they use and whether that agency lists their topics. For example, my company recently introduced recurring background checks (upon offer and then at least once every three years). Below is their list, which includes some industry-specific/customer-specific requirements. As far as I can tell, the background check agency just gave a pass/fail on the specific criteria to the company, rather than providing some kind of private-investigator narrative construction of the employees’ lives; I suspect that’s going to be the most common model.

    Which means I think it’s most likely that, for most companies, LW5’s friend doesn’t need to be overly concerned.

    “To the extent allowed by applicable law, background checks may include, but are not limited to:
    – Social Security Number Validation;
    – National, federal, and county criminal search;
    – National sex offender search;
    – Healthcare sanctions check;
    – Global watchlist;
    – Employment history dating back seven years, up to 3 employers;
    – Education verification (highest degree), as required based on role;
    – Professional license verification, if applicable.
    At times, (company)’s customers or prospects may require additional checks and/or request additional information (e.g. immunization records, drug tests, DMV records) “

  65. 3-Foot Tall Inflatable Rainbow Unicorn*

    LW2 – it’s up to you if you want to out-OCD your new COO, but my first response to the directive would be to send an email acknowledging the request and stating that I was willing to comply as soon as a few other details were clarified.
    1) What size label?
    2) What color label?
    3) What font for the label?
    4 ) What color for label text?
    5) What size for label text?
    6) Should desk photo be color or black and white?
    7) What size should the photo be printed out?
    8) What format did he want the photo delivered to him in?
    …and any other “no, this is important, I want to get it exactly right” question I could think of.

    And I’d cc this email to everybody the new COO reports to, including the Board of Directors. Let them know exactly what is going on in a manner that emphatically is not a complaint, but an attempt to comply.

    1. Czhorat*

      I get this is a joke, but assuming you’re at all serious is this where you want to spend your political capital? What if you “win” and the COO withdraws the request after getting a dressing down from the CEO. Now you’ve publicly humiliated – and made an enemy out of – a C-level exec. This is not going to do wonders for your long-term prospects for advancement, better raises, plum project assignments.

      You could push back directly and informally once; if the COO sticks to their guns the best choices are either roll your eyes and accept it or look to continue your career elsewhere. I’d only consider the latter if this is part of a pattern and not a one-off but of lunacy.

      1. ferrina*

        Yeah, I agree. It’s fun to joke about and create our hypotheticals and fanfic, but in reality, this is something where you need to weigh your political capital.

        I would probably go the route of vaguely conforming, then letting it fall by the wayside after a while. This is likely a passing phase from an executive with Big Bright Ideas! Usually you can smile politely, spend the minimum possible time, and they’ll chase the next shiny thing soon (in roles where I interact heavily with executives, I’ve learned to budget a certain amount of time for their pet projects- part of my job sometimes is to keep them from wasting other’s people’s time).
        In case this executive is a True Believer, the worst thing you can do is out them. They will come out blazing to defend their system, and they may be ready for retribution. Not worth being labeled a ‘trouble-maker’ early in the executive’s tenure.
        Ideally you’d be able to gently push back, but if the gentle overtures don’t work, think carefully about whether it’s worth the fight (even though this is absolutely labelled bananapants)

      2. Bruce*

        As a middle rank Navy officer my father received a written order to file a quarterly report with the Pentagon on progress in reducing the accumulation of un-needed files… this was to include a report on how many old files had been destroyed. He cheekily wrote back asking if these quarterly reports could be considered un-needed files… This was not a wise move. He did not advance in rank after that, almost got RIFed and barely hung on to reach 20 years to retire. In hindsight he thought this was just one of the times he’d not used his best political sense…

    2. pally*

      I think you are right!
      This is of such high importance that no detail should be left to chance.

      What shape should these labels be? Rectangle? Square? Circular?
      Should the labels be of uniform size? Or can they be smaller and larger as per the item they identify?
      Adhesive type?
      Waterproof?
      And most importantly, what about fading? Do we have a procedure to counteract this?

  66. Jo*

    #1 I thought vodka had little to no smell?? Regardless, this could be a number of things. Unless OP witnesses something actionable, there’s nothing to be gained by speculating. And definitely not reporting.

  67. Jo-El*

    LW2-this is a common thing taught for 5S, which is a lean manufacturing idea. This guy probably read an article or took a 2 hour seminar and just ran with it.

    1. Bruce*

      That’s funny, because the COO people that I’ve worked with would have all found this hilarious, one of the early ones would have had very profane comments about it. I don’t mean that labelling work tools is insane, or having standards for how to maintain the office. But labelling desks, photographing the office and then posting it would invite derision.

    1. juliebulie*

      I specifically searched for that before posting. It’s amazing what you can find out from a bat-computer!

  69. Where we're going, we don't need Ethics!*

    #3 – It could also be a conflict of interest issue. Let’s say you work for a road construction company, and your spouse is elected to the local road commission. Ethically, your company shouldn’t bid on any projects where your spouse may have influence in the bidding process. I can easily say your boss saying “Sorry, we’ve got to let you go, because otherwise we can’t bid on anything local, and that’ll severely damage our business”

    (Yes, the spouse could recuse themselves sometimes, but there may be some situations where that’s not possible)

    1. Nancy*

      In that case, it’s on the local road commission spouse to file a conflict of interest or follow whatever rule their local government has for these situations.

  70. Chris*

    The labeling of furniture is actually something I’ve had at work. I work in a grocery store bakery and for a time corporate wanted everything in the department labeled. The oven was labeled “OVEN”, the glazer was labeled “GLAZER”, the freezer was labeled “FREEZER.” Anyone who actually worked in the bakery didn’t have a problem mistaking the oven for the freezer so I always figured it was the corporate dumdums who decided we were too stupid to know what our equipment was without printed and laminated labels.

  71. Sanity Lost*

    RE: the background check

    Has anyone else noticed an uptick in applications asking if you have ever used government assistance (such as SNAP or welfare)? I’m wondering if that may cause some of the issues that people are finding with getting interviews.

    Thoughts?

    1. JP*

      I haven’t been job hunting in some time, but I had not idea that was something that was being asked. That’s alarming.

      1. The Bunny*

        It’s asked as part of the WOTC that companies receive for hiring people who have been on assistance and it’s not asked until the onboarding process after hire. The document isn’t stored with the personnel file.

        1. Cat*

          Assuming you aren’t referring to the subsidiary of Hasbro that owns D&D and M:tG, what does WOTC mean in this context?

          1. Adult ADHDer*

            Work opportunity tax credit. It’s a federal tax credit awarded to employers who hire people belonging to groups that face significant barriers when seeking employment — veterans, ex-felons, TANF/SNAP recipients, etc.

  72. PinkCandyFloss*

    LW #3 you can fire someone if they have a conflict of interest that goes against your company’s ethics code, I suspect she may have left her law practice to avoid COI downstream rather than to avoid being fired.

  73. Hedgehug*

    #2 I feel like we’re missing a lot of information and context. No way this came completely out of the blue. He has to be reacting to something?

  74. FernLaPlante*

    #2 I would come in on the weekend, slightly rearrange the COO’s office and take a photo. Do this a dozen times and then every day put a new photo in their office so it doesn’t match and see what happens.

  76. Bruce*

    That reference checks often include credit checks is one way that poor people have extra barriers. It has not affected me personally, but I know people who have bad credit and who are trying to get back on their feet. I can see a few cases where it is appropriate such as people who handle money or finances, just like some jobs have safety related drug tests, but I think for most jobs it is an intrusive check.

  77. juliebulie*

    OP2 at least you get a trash can. We don’t. They must save a fortune on wastebasket-emptying contractors. At the end of the day, EVERYTHING must be removed from your desk. Including your laptop and any job aids/cheat sheets. Keyboards and mouses must be kept in a drawer.

    A client was visiting after hours and asked if anybody worked there during the day. I mean, I get the need for a clean desk but this is ridiculous.

  78. Texan in exile on her phone*

    #3 Years ago, after the Act 10 protests in Wisconsin, my engineer husband took a leave of absence to run for the WI legislature. I had been unemployed and started looking for a job.
    First question in interviews was always why are you looking for job now?
    WI was so polarized that I didn’t dare tell the truth: That my husband was on LOA running for legislature and I wanted us to have an income. I was afraid people on other side would hold politics against me.
    So I said I was bored, which BTW is also a very bad answer.

  79. Wattaboss*

    RE: number 1, I respectfully disagree with the response here. there is reasonable suspicion to explore this further. In California, we can send them for an alcohol test and in my organization, refusal can be grounds for termination (can be, not always is). I would have a second showboat or manager confirm your impression and go from there.

    1. The Bunny*

      Slow your roll here.

      The smell of alcohol (maybe) combined with absolutely nothing else definitely does bite meet any standard of reasonable suspicion…unless the person is driving a car.

  80. Donkey Hotey*

    re: LW2 (labelling)

    I don’t have the energy to wade through the 200+ comments. Our company does it for two reasons:
    1- teaching engineers how to label stuff. Don’t get insulted. I edit engineers’ writing every day. I’ve never seen one that didn’t need significant help.
    2- our company is hybrid on a very fluid schedule. Having the map allows a WFH person to navigate an in-office person through how to find something, rather than have them scramble everything to find a file, tool, etc.

  81. Nina*

    I wonder if LW2’s new COO has heard about 5S and is just really bad at it? In most 5S environments it’s normal to label where things go so for instance if you had a tray for valves that needed assessing, you might mark a tape rectangle in the place where the tray belongs, and label the rectangle ‘valve assessment tray’. The tray goes back there whenever it’s not in use, and nothing else gets put in the tray’s spot. Shadowboards for tools, and photos of the contents of drawers on the front of the drawer, are common too.
    But, the key is to label where things go and not what they are when what they are is blindingly obvious.

  82. GhostedNotGhosted*

    OP4: I was also ghosted for a first video interview a few yrs ago. I sat there waiting for the whole scheduled hour just in case someone showed up but no one did. It was explained later the person was out on vacation leave that day and just forgot to reschedule with me. I was annoyed and he’s that was rude of them, and disrespectful of my time, but glad I rescheduled and persisted because I got the job and it’s been great ever since. Maybe give them one more chance (if you can reach them and get them to respond).

  83. newfiscalyear*

    LW#4 – Based on how quickly HR returned your call, and then ghosted you on the interview time, I am getting a scammy vibe from the job listing. I’ve had similar experiences in my past with “jobs” like that. I hope I am wrong and it’s not the case for you.

  84. Marshmallows*

    #2 Clean Desk: sounds to me like a really crappy attempt at instituting 5S (google it if you don’t know what it is) in the office. In a space that utilizes 5S it is common to use shadow boards and labels and yes… even the picture to show what the space is supposed to look like. It’s usually used more in shared spaces where it’s important that everyone keep the area neat and things get put away. Trying to force it on peoples desks is silly.

    We use it (sort of) where I work and do have the pictures of what the space should look like in spaces that have been set up in that way (think supply storage area), but I would be pretty upset if someone tried to do that to my desk!

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