is “hey” rude, did our coworker fake-retire, and more

by Alison Green on February 12, 2025

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

1. Is “hey” rude?

I have a former boss who asked all staff at a tiny nonprofit not to use the greeting “hey” to her. I think this is imperious and out of touch, at best. What do you think?

It’s a bit much, but there’s a fairly outdated belief that “hey” is rude — remember those teachers and other elders from your youth who would respond to “hey” with “hay is for horses”? Was she a “hay is for horses” person clinging to old rules around the word, or was she more of a “don’t speak casually to me, peons” person? The former is a little eye-rolly, but whatever; the second is much more obnoxious.

2. Did our coworker fake-retire?

I worked at a hospital where a long-time employee in my department retired— she was over 65 and had worked there for 30+ years. The department held a retirement party with the boss’s own funds since the hospital didn’t provide discretionary funds for this kind of stuff. It was a nice send-off and everyone wished her well.

Then about a month or so later, word gets around that actually she wasn’t retired and had just gotten a new job at the VA, which is where many of the folks in this department try to get to because the pay is so much better there. No one in leadership mentioned anything about it but you could sense that people were really annoyed and felt like they’d been duped. I know many people get jobs again after they’ve retired, but this was so immediate that it was obviously lined up beforehand. What are your thoughts on the optics of this?

Any chance the departing employee was using “retiring” in the sense of “I am retiring from this job where I have worked for 30+ years” and not in the more traditional sense of “I am retiring from the workforce”?

There was an interesting discussion in the comment section on Monday about whether “retired” can simply mean “leaving this job,” not “leaving the workforce.” It typically does not — but when someone is around retirement age and leaving a job they’ve been at for a very long time, it does sometimes get used that way. (You generally need both those factors to be present though; no one is saying a 35-year-old is retiring when she leaves a job she’s been at for eight years. The age and length of tenure both seem to be prerequisites for the usage to work.)

Anyway, it really depends on whether your coworker went out of her way to deceive people. If she was talking about how much she was going to enjoy not having to go to work every day and her plans to spend her time gardening and taking Elderhostel trips, all while knowing she was just moving to another full-time job, then yeah, that’s obviously pretty crappy! It would also be unusual for someone to do that just in order to get a retirement party. (Any chance there was another reason she might have wanted to keep it quiet, like worrying about a manager at your hospital torpedoing her chances at the new job?) But if it was just an announcement that she was leaving, and others were the ones who framed it as “retirement” out of an assumption based on her age … well, she might have figured she was retiring from this organization after 30 years so didn’t see any need to correct anything.

Either way, you’re all better off just looking at it as a goodbye party for someone who had worked there for three decades.

3. Frustrations with business voicemail and a claims process

I have been dealing with my insurance company for a claim I filed. I received an email (from a do-not-reply account) that my case was assigned to “Mary Smith” and I would be receiving a call from her on such and such a date between 9:30 am and 11:30 am from a specific phone number. On the bottom of my account page with this company, her name is listed as my claim manager.

As I had a dentist appointment that day at 8 am, I called her number and left a message to please call closer to 11:30 as I had an appointment that morning. My concern is her voicemail was a very generic “the person you are trying to reach is not available, please leave a message after the tone.” No mention of her name or the company’s name.

She called me later in the morning that day, never mentioned anything about my message that I had left for her, and we conducted the interview. She needed some clarification on some dates and asked me to call back when I had that information. I called back a day later with the info and the same thing, went to voicemail with the generic greeting. I didn’t hear anything from her confirming she received the information. Four days later, I called and left another message asking if she got the info and to please call me back to confirm. Nothing.

A few days later, my account was updated to “claim review in process” and I received an email saying a decision should be made with in five business days, and day days later the claim was approved.

How do you deal with a situation like this? I still have no idea if my messages were being received by the case manager or even if it was her voicemail I was leaving the message in. Or am I being “needy” by expecting at least some response following any contact to her?

Maybe a little needy, yeah, if you’re still dwelling on it now. It sounds like their process worked as it should: you left a message asking her to call you in the later part of your assigned window and she did that. You followed up with info she requested, and she used it to process your claim, which was approved in the timeframe you were told to expect. It sounds like it caused you some extra anxiety not to get any acknowledgement of either of your messages, whereas on her side the “acknowledgment” was likely that she used the info you provided to move things forward.

If things weren’t moving and your messages were going unacknowledged, that would be a lot more frustrating — but since things did move as expected, there was nothing to “deal with.” You would have preferred more communication, but it sounds like the case manager knew, likely from experience, that things could move smoothly without it. (In fact, it’s even possible that things moved so smoothly because she doesn’t stop to return every message people leave if she doesn’t need to.)

To be clear, I don’t think it’s unreasonable that you expected more communication while this was ongoing — but once you saw that everything went smoothly and your claim was approved, why not just think, “Okay, that worked fine”?

4. Coworker keeps coming into my office and distracting me

One of my coworkers who works for a different company comes into my office multiple times per day and distracts me from my work. I hung a “please do not disturb” sign but that didn’t stop him, so eventually I switched to a sign that says “do not disturb — please send an email and I’ll respond when I can” but this doesn’t stop him either, even though my door is shut and locked. He knows the PIN to enter my door because my boss gave it away a couple years ago to someone who wanted to decorate my office. I can’t change the PIN and my boss knows this is happening. I have not directly asked him to stop because he will drag it on and on for days and it makes me uncomfortable . Every time he’s done something that’s made me uncomfortable and I’ve said so, that’s what happens.

How do I get my coworker to leave me the F alone? He is stressing me out so badly that it’s impacting my personal life outside of work. I can’t complete as many things in a day as I would like, because he won’t stop bothering me.

You can’t get him to leave you the F alone without directly telling him to. Communicating by sign clearly isn’t working, so you’ve got to speak up: “Please stop entering my office without being invited. It’s breaking my focus and disrupting my work.” And then if he keeps doing it, address it in the moment: “I’m on deadline and can’t talk right now” and “I’m really busy so can’t have you in here.” If he reacts badly to that, then talk to your boss, cite the disruption to your work, and ask to have the PIN changed.

Also, you said he works for a different company. Unless he’s his own boss, can you have a word with his boss over there? Continually using someone’s PIN to enter their office against their will multiple times a day is something any reasonable manager would be glad to put a stop to if asked.

5. Asking about a job that hasn’t been advertised yet

An employee of a company has mentioned that a job may be coming up that might be a good fit for me. I have researched the job on their website but the job has not been posted and I have questions regarding whether I have all the skills for this job.

Would it be showing initiative to inquire to the manager about this possibility and request visiting the site to learn more about the position?

Asking to visit the site to learn more about a job that you haven’t been invited to interview for yet — and which hasn’t even been advertised yet — would be way too much. If they want to spend time talking with you about the position, they will express that by inviting you to interview after you apply and they’ve reviewed your materials and determined you’re a strong enough candidate to move forward. But none of that has happened yet.

If you felt more certain that you would be a strong fit for the job, you could maybe email the hiring manager with your resume and say you heard that job might be opening up and you’d love to be considered when it is … but with a job where you’re not even sure you’re qualified and which hasn’t been posted yet, and you really just want to learn more about it, that’s going to feel like overkill, not initiative (or at least not appropriate initiative, which is an important modifier on that word). If you know the employee who originally mentioned the job, you could ask them if they know when it’s likely to open up, but otherwise just keep watching for it.

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{ 45 comments }

{ 45 comments… read them below or add one }

  1. Certaintroublemaker*

    To LW2, it also makes a big difference if your workplace has a pension/retirement benefits program. Then it doesn’t mean “golfing & book clubs” so much as “eligible for benefits.”

    I work at a state university where we get vested in the state retirement system. It’s very common for people to retire from the university when they’ve reached the requisite years/points, and then go on to another job. I think it’s even more common in the military, where retirement can happen at 20 years of service, and you can go on to have a complete other career afterwards.

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    1. Samwise*

      Came here to say just this. If you resign, you don’t get access to your pension or your retirement account (such as TIAA CREF). You have to actually do all the retirement paperwork.

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    2. hummingbird*

      As former military and someone who has worked at companies that have eligible for benefits at certain age + years of service, today’s question (answer).and yesterday’s discussion surprised me. Another example of things varying by industry or company size.

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    3. allathian*

      Yes, or in the (publically funded) arts. The Finnish National Ballet has a mandatory retirement age of 45 for dancers, with a state pension. A few years ago, a former prima ballerina went viral with her announcement of a post-retirement baby. She had stored her eggs, retired at 45, and got pregnant almost immediately afterwards. I don’t think anyone stops working when they retire at that age, though. The state pension and free college tuition mean that many of them go to college after retirement to do a whole new career until they really retire, given that there are only so many ballet-adjacent jobs (choreographer, teacher, etc.) available.

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    4. Can’t think of anything clever*

      I worked for local government for years. When people were vested in the pension plan the people who managed the plan would try to persuade people to “retire” rather than “resign” and stay vested in the plan. After all, you never know where life will take you and in a few years you’re back in a government job. That way you didn’t have to start over. Still couldn’t collect a pension for a long time though.

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    5. GammaGirl1908*

      Coming to say this. To me, retirement means [taking advantage of certain benefits that come with leaving a position], not necessarily [never going to work again]. Plenty of people intentionally line up retirement jobs.

      People also retire for a number of reasons that aren’t about age. People retire from the military after a certain number of years of service. People can retire medically from jobs or other positions. Athletes retire from competition, both individual events as well as their careers, and sometimes they are, like, 25 when that happens.

      It means they’re going to stop doing this thing for some reason, but I wouldn’t split hairs about how soon they get to do something else.

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    6. SarahBee*

      I had the same thought- at our hospital, you can’t collect on your 401K unless you quit working here completely. So some of the staff will “retire” and then find another job to supplement their retirement income.

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      1. 401k*

        You can collect from the 401(k) after retiring? It’s not supposed to work that way. It’s supposed to be strictly age based.

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  2. Higher-ed Jessica*

    I think another thing that might be going on in L1 is that “hey” has two senses, one of which is a regionalism. There’s greeting “hey,” which is functionally equivalent to “hello.” Then there’s attention-getting “hey,” which is often (outside of such emergency usage as “Hey, your shoes are on fire!”) seen as a rude interruption.

    People who don’t use greeting “hey” tend to interpret it as attention-getting “hey,” and thus always think it’s rude, which is a weird interpretation of a friendly coworker just trying to say hello to you. But it happens.

    I would be very strongly inclined to give a person like this one round of polite explanation of how I was using the word, why they had misunderstood, and that it is a common usage where I come from. All subsequent rounds would involve firm pushback about their regional prejudice.

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    1. Tiger Snake*

      Yes, that’s a good way of thinking of it. Hey may not be rude, but it is abrupt.

      That means it works well as part of a head-nod greeting to your coworkers as your power walking to the coffee pot, but that if you’re trying to ask a question you’ve completely ignored the social niceties to see if this is a good time to be interrupted.

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      1. Zelda*

        “Greeting hey,” as I have met it, is a Southern thing, meaning that it is the opposite of abrupt. It’s a softly drawn out vowel that lasts longer than a New Englander’s entire “Hello, Bob,” and visits a few different pitches along the way.

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        1. Silver Robin*

          from the northeast and absolutely use greeting hey. it is certainly not drawn out but it is pretty similar to hi, just a smidgen more casual. At work, the two get used pretty interchangeably with a slight divergence on formality at the edges of the distributions. I would likely not use hey for anyone above my boss and it took a minute before I even did it with him while our relationship was established.

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    2. Greyhound*

      Good point. When I was at school a million years ago and used to get the ‘hay is for horses’ thing ‘hey’ was not used as a greeting, only to get attention. It’s quite likely some people have just not caught on to the more modern usage. I can see how it could be seen as rude – not to me, I use it all the time – but some people just don’t adapt.

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  3. Person from the Resume*

    As a military veteran and federal employee, we (my colleagues from both groups) use the term retired to mean you left military/govt service with enough years to earn your retirement pension.

    Those federal employees about to take early retirement with their resignation are retiring too – even if it’s early and only after 20 years of federal service … I think it 20 years and at least 50 years old.

    Military can retire after 20 years (as young as 38 for some) and almost all go onto other jobs, so they’re retired military and are not retired in the sense of not working but retired in the sense of getting retirement pay and served enough time to retire rather than just leave the job.

    After 30 years at one place I see nothing wrong with saying that she’s retiring from that hospital, and she’s has earned a send-off. But maybe that’s not your culture.

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    1. Tiger Snake*

      Plus, there are times where someone does retire, and starts getting their pension, and then something happens – a network link opened up some doors or just bad luck – that just means that they couldn’t pass up the opportunity.
      They start working again, the pension pauses, and then they retired again. The first retirement wasn’t deceptive; the situation just changed.

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      1. Indolent Libertine*

        There’s nothing deceptive even if the pension doesn’t pause! Many pensions don’t stop if you continue having some type of paid employment. “Retirement” in this context just meant deciding to leave this particular job after 30+ years. There’s no implicit promise to one’s coworkers not to get paid work anywhere else, and I’m mystified why the coworkers feel like the retiree somehow owed them that because they gave her a party.

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  4. Fitzie's chew toy*

    #1 I think it’s a bit “imperious” to complain about your boss not wanting to be addressed as “hey.” This column is full of examples of people saying “just address people how they want to be addressed.” If she doesn’t like “hey” don’t use “hey.” Same goes for pronouns, nicknames etc. Sounds simple enough to me.

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    1. office hobbit*

      But the salutation you use when greeting someone isn’t at all the same as the name and pronouns someone goes by. If I greeted you with “Hey, Fitzie,” you might complain that I was abrupt or informal. If I greeted you with “Good morning, Jimothy,” my salutation is plenty formal but who am I talking to?

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    2. Ma pwes*

      Personally, I think “hey” is a bit rude (or at least abrupt) as an e-mail salutation.

      I definitely would not bring it up with someone more senior, however. And I’d probably not even bring up with someone more junior. It’s just overreaching because too many people will disagree.

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      1. Lurker*

        I detest “Hey” as an email salutation at work. I think it’s too casual. (“Hi” is fine; or even just my first name.) I don’t mind it in personal correspondence, although I don’t ever use it myself. I’ve had people who report to me use “hey” and I didn’t say anything but every time I saw it, it made me cringe.

        (I guess it’s kind of like how some people feel about “gentle reminders.”)

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    3. Ellis Bell*

      I don’t think greetings directed at people are exactly the same as terms of address, but yeah we can retain the spirit of respecting people’s preferences nevertheless. I do think if you’re going to object against very common language usage, and you’re a leader, it can help to just contextualise it a bit as to whether it’s generally unprofessional or personal preference. An old former principal asked us all to stop using “guys” because she considered it gendered and female students didn’t like it. In this case the boss might consider it too casual or she might read it more as an exclamation than a greeting. Either way, I think OP should just respect the instruction.

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  5. Pickles*

    I’ve worked places were they through a going away party for me when I was just there for 2 years. 30 years of service is worth a cake and sparkling cider

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  7. nnn*

    This is Monday-morning quarterbacking, but in situations like #3 I find it can be effective to check in on your communications channels while you’re actually talking.

    So at the end of the interview, as you’re wrapping up, I’d say something like “By the way, I tried to leave a voicemail for you about our interview time today, and I’m not sure if you got it or if that was a generic inbox?”

    Or, when she asked you to call her back with the additional information, you could ask something like “If I can’t reach you directly for whatever reason, is the voicemail I used before an effective way to leave you a message? If not, what is the best way?”

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  8. Withheld*

    #2 I don’t understand why it matters to you. She’d been there 30+ years, the boss paid for the farewell party. Neither you nor the hospital are out of pocket. She doesn’t owe you any explanation about her plans after leaving the hospital. She no longer works there and is free to do absolutely anything else she wishes to.

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    2. Irish Teacher.*

      Yeah, that is my thought too. If she lied (and I wouldn’t consider just using the wrong word to be LYING, but if she went on about how she is looking forward to be free of work and enjoy her latter years and so on), it’s a bit weird, but I don’t see how the party is relevant.

      From the point of view of the company and staff, it’s really the same thing either way – a long-term colleague leaving and I would expect it to be celebrated in the same way.

      I will add that if she is eligible for a pension, that is generally considered retirement.

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  9. AgreeableDragon*

    Good grief LW2, she worked there for THIRTY YEARS, and is over 65!
    She earnt that party. I’m feeling sad for her that she has to keep working at that age.

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    2. Just say oui*

      Hey (my nod to LW1), I’m over 65 and I love working! My parents worked until well into their 80s and I plan to work until I can’t anymore. I think the difference for us is that we have rewarding creative work, which unfortunately isn’t the case for everyone over 65 who is working.

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  10. VeryAnon*

    I’m not recommending this. When I had a PIN code door I couldn’t get changed after months of requests, I googled/YT’d how to change it. Brought in tiny tools. Disassembled the lock and changed the pin. No one has noticed in 3 years.

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    1. Sue*

      I was thinking of chair under the door knob orextra furniture pushed up or even a bolt self-installed. But all of that is a little wacky when stern words should work.

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      1. allathian*

        Indeed. The LW’s boss should care that a former employee who now works for another company in the same building has access to her office and keeps barging in even though she’s told him not to.

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    3. GammaGirl1908*

      I am recommending this.

      Ugh, people who think it’s just hilarious to keep interrupting unwilling others at work SUCK, and anyone who can’t graciously accept a polite but clear and firm request to stop a thing they are doing SUCK EVEN MORE.

      In LW’s shoes, I agree that she probably can change the code with a bit of research, and I’d get on that. A door stopper or chair also could help, although he will think bursting through a chair or a door stopper is just hilarious and part of the game.

      But I also think LW needs to try a little harder to use her words, even if, as she noted, it doesn’t produce easy and immediate results. At the best, kindest, nicest possible interpretation of his behavior, he thinks you don’t mind his visits that much, and everyone is just having a bit of harmless fun, because you haven’t really done anything to stop him (…he may even think you’re flirting…). Fiddle with the door, for sure, but we also need an unmistakable order (not request) to stop opening the locked door, and a lack of positive response if he enters as the first step (because the response is his goal. He’s still getting what he wants).

      When he starts being a jerk about it, escalating to her boss is next. When he’s STILL a jerk about it, having her boss escalate to HIS boss is next.

      No, it won’t feel good, and it is hard, and he will act like you are overreacting, but some jerks need you to go to an 8 out of 10 before they know you mean business. You will have to ask yourself whether you want this to feel good or whether you want him to stop interrupting you. In order to get the latter, the former might have to bend. And after all, it doesn’t feel good now. If you put work into this, you might at least get him to stop interrupting you.

      Sigh. Jerks suck.

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  11. Artemesia*

    There is ‘hey’ to get someone’s attention which is rude and ‘hey’ as a variation on ‘hi’ which is a common current greeting and not rude. If the boss doesn’t like it, you don’t do it — but you aren’t rude to have done so.

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    1. allathian*

      It depends a lot on the tone of voice! It’s certainly rude if it sounds like a “hey you!” with the “you” omitted. Granted, I don’t normally greet people at work in English, but the greeting “hey” sounds very different and to me reads the same as a “hi” or “hello” on the formality scale. My perception’s probably colored by the standard informal greetings in Finnish, “hei” (pronounced like hey) and “moi” (rhymes with goy), as well as the Swedish “hej” (also pronounced like hey).

      I think that managers who insist on formal address (Good morning, X!) are a bit precious, though. If I had a boss like that, I’d certainly greet them as they wish to be greeted, but I’d also be judging them *hard* in my head and I’d be on the lookout for other signs of a boss who’s difficult to work with. It’s possible this is just a personal quirk, and if so, NBD, but it could also be a sign of a power-mad boss who loves lording (regardless of gender) it over their reports.

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  12. Bilateralrope*

    #4, I notice that you say that this coworker knows your PIN because your boss gave it to someone other than the coworker in question.

    The decorator shared it with one person who wasn’t authorized to know. You can’t know if the decorator shared it with anyone else unless they use it. Your PIN is compromised and needs to be changed.

    So you need to find out why your boss says that it can’t be changed, unless you already know. Maybe it’s just that nobody knows how, which means you might be able to research it. Maybe it’s a company policy that you can see another solution to.

    Oh and tell the coworker to go away every time he uses the PIN to enter your office.

    Reply ↓
    1. Bob*

      Word.

      Its bonkers to me that some random dude from another company has the code to your locked door, just comes in and annoys you, and throws a wobbly if anyone days anything to him.. and the boss doesn’t seem to give a crap.

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  13. Everdene*

    Today I’ve learnt that I would not get on well in LW1s office. I tend to greet my boss with any of this selection; good morning, hello, happy [wednesday], hi, hey, yo yo yo, ‘sup, what’s occurin’ or a friendly gif.

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  14. Matt*

    #3: for me as a dedicated “not a phone person” this is one of the cases that leave me wondering why, in the name of whoever, why, do businesses insist on using the phone for things like that. That would have been so much easier by email. I get the argument that you have to talk in person as soon as the topic reaches a certain level of complexity, but I still think the optimal way to handle issues like that would be to do the basic getting-in-touch by email and then schedule a personal appointment (or a phone call, but at a fixed time, not a multiple hour window). Yet insurance companies, banks, etc. are notorious for insisting on the phone (even if they offer an online contact form, they’ll usually demand a mandatory phone number and respond only by calling you back).

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  15. Kiitemso*

    #4 If this person works for a different company, isn’t this a huge data security issue? My work made everyone do an online module about locking their screens when stepping away from their desk, and locking their office door when they leave for lunch. If it’s a different branch of the same conglomerate, that’s still weird how the code is handed out like candy.

    Reply ↓

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