It’s five answers to five questions. Here we go…
1. I found weird “detox” propaganda in the office kitchen
I work at a small nonprofit of under 30 employees and we share one small kitchen. Articles relevant to our field or other interesting items are often left in the center of the table for us to read. I walked into the kitchen the other day and found a seven-page printout about “superhuman brain shakes.” I looked into the group that published it and the doctor behind it, and what I found did not sit well with me.
The guy talks about “detoxification” and peddles supplements, all while vilifying prescription drugs and doctors. As someone who takes a prescription drug every day for my mental health, I don’t feel comfortable with something like this in the work kitchen. Would whoever put this information in the kitchen be appalled or look down on me because I take a prescription drug (which is needed in part due to the job, but that’s another story for another day)?
On top of this gross pamphlet, we generally have a problem with people vilifying sugar, fatty foods, carbs, etc. I know these topics are pretty common but these beliefs are starting to feel endemic.
Obviously this isn’t formal-HR-complaint level, but is it out of line for me to say something to the person who serves an HR function in our office? Or do I just conveniently hide this somewhere in the kitchen when no one is looking? I would love to just toss it right in the bin, but I know that’s not the way.
Tossing it in the trash is the way. Someone left something gross in the kitchen, and putting it in the trash is appropriate.
It sounds like the bigger issue in your office is the culture of moralizing about food, but that’s much, much harder to address. (You can still try, though! Advice on how is here.) But this one pamphlet? Trash it and be done with it.
If you start finding more materials left for general reading that push a particular agenda, at that point it would be reasonable to suggest to your HR person that they put a stop to that, since common areas shouldn’t be used that way (and if they don’t stop it at diet moralizing, it’s very quickly going to spread to other topics as well).
2. I made a huge political mistake at work
I’ve done something worthy of a Corporate Idiot of the Year award, and I’m mortified about my spectacular misstep with my new boss.
I’m a team lead (no HR responsibility) who was recently told I’d be focusing on one shiny new initiative while giving up a current team. The colleague inheriting my team already juggles two teams and, to put it diplomatically, isn’t a strong team lead. Instead of gracefully accepting fate, I launched a one-woman crusade for “better alternatives” – suggesting other names, directly approaching my colleague (who was predictably uninterested), and escalating to both my boss and his boss.
When communication about these changes moved at glacial pace, I prodded about timelines in a group chat, accidentally triggering a premature announcement from a Scrum Master rather than leadership. Brilliant move!
This morning, my boss (who has only recently joined the company) pulled me aside and essentially lectured me about inappropriate meddling and how influence works in large organizations. He’s right, of course, and I sat there wondering if my keyboard shortcuts included “undo career damage.”
I’ve scheduled a meeting with him to address my corporate mutiny, but I’m so ashamed and genuinely concerned about lasting damage. Is this relationship salvageable, or should I start looking for a new job? What specific steps would you recommend to repair trust while still eventually establishing myself as someone with valuable input?
I’m going to take your word for it that this was really as bad as you say, but I think it’s worth considering that your boss sees this less as Devastating Mistake That Should Haunt You Forever and more as just a misstep that required some coaching.
But if it’s really as bad as you think, then it’s worth reflecting on how you got there: do you have a pattern of overstepping your role or was this a one-off? If it’s a pattern, what is it stemming from and how can you manage those impulses differently in the future? Did any of this stem from legitimate frustrations with how your organization or team runs and, if so, are there conclusions you should draw from that (which could be anything from “if I’m going to stay here, I need to accept X” to “X is so messed up that it’s ruining my professional norms and I need to get out”)? Do you need better mentors to bounce things off and, if so, is that something you can put energy into cultivating? Have you had bad role models for how to handle this kind of situation and that played out here? There are a zillion interesting questions that could stem from this, all of which have the potential to turn this into something pretty useful for you!
Assuming you do that, I see no reason why this wouldn’t be salvageable. Tell your boss you heard him loud and clear, you see where you misjudged, and you appreciate him pointing it out to you so candidly. When someone messes up, those are the things a halfway decent manager is listening to hear, and hearing them without prodding can be extremely reassuring.
These may help too:
how to rebuild your credibility after messing up at work
how should you decide which battles to pick at work?
3. My coworker got an expensive baby gift and I got nothing
I am part of a work group with two offices in different cities. Our group is around 10 people and we have the same boss who works in my office. We do some work with the other group and hold monthly Zooms together, but around 75% of the work my office does is independent of the other office. I am well-respected in my organization and love my job and like my team a lot.
I had a baby about 10 months ago, and a colleague at the same level as me in the other office just returned from maternity leave. I found out during our latest monthly Zoom that before her leave, her team had collected money and given her a several hundred dollar gift. I don’t know for sure, but because of the cost, I suspect that people she manages gave money toward the gift. Knowing the team, I doubt they felt pressure to donate, but as I learned from you, it’s still not appropriate and gifts should not go up!
I did not get a gift when my baby was born and I can’t help but feel a little hurt by finding out about my colleague’s gift. Small gifts aren’t completely unprecedented in my office so I figured at most, I might get a branded onesie, but didn’t really care when I didn’t. I would not have wanted my team, especially my reports, to give their own money for a gift for me. But considering the price of her gift and my experience buying *a lot* of expensive shit for my baby over the past year (why do so many things I can only use for a couple of months cost an arm and a leg!?), plus finding out about the gift during a call with our entire team, it just kinda stings.
I’ve been considering raising my feelings with one of my trusted superiors/mentors, but I can’t figure out what I’d say without sounding greedy and hurt and I don’t even know what, if anything, I’d want them to do about it. I know with certainty that my bosses wouldn’t have deliberately decided to give one person a gift and exclude me. Honestly, they may not even know/remember that I got nothing since it’s been almost a year at this point! So I figure maybe it’s worth a reminder about being fair with gift-giving within our team?
What do you think? Do I leave this alone and just get over it? Or is it worth bringing up and if so, what the heck do I say?
The difference is almost certainly just because you’re in two completely separate offices. Different offices have different customs and norms; one might have bagels in the kitchen every Tuesday and a cherished costume contest every Halloween, while another has no weekly bagels but provides ice cream sandwiches every Friday in the summer and a “talking shrimp” at every meeting. Gift practices differ from office to office too, and that’s almost certainly all you’re seeing. The best thing to do is to chalk it up to that and leave it alone.
4. How do I brag about myself to my boss?
I am in upper management at a smallish (~80 employees) company. I recently was featured in a vendor’s quarterly publication about successful folks in our industry. My bosses know I was asked, but now that I have the completed article back, I’m freezing on what to say when I share it with them! But I do want them to see it because, well, I want to be valued, and it would be silly not to!
What’s my script? And can I ask that it not be shared company-wide? I cringe at the thought of staff reading it, even though I make several references to our staff and their feedback being a source of success. I can’t help but compare it to “manager wins the prize raffle at the holiday party” snafus (even though this publication came with no monetary reward).
I just don’t want anyone to think I’m shouting “look at how great I am!” (Except maybe my bosses who sign my paychecks.)
Forward it to your managers with a note saying something like, “Wanted to share this with you!” You’re allowed to be excited about it, they’ll likely to be happy to see it too (it reflects well on them as well as on you!), and it won’t look self-absorbed to simply send it along in a matter-of-fact way.
But I would not ask that it not be shared company-wide unless you can point to some specific reason for that (like there’s currently tension over something you talked about in the interview or it reveals some specific detail about your private life that you’d prefer not to be circulated). This isn’t anything like managers claiming the best prizes in company raffles! You didn’t elbow other employees out of the way in order to get coverage for yourself (I assume). It wouldn’t be cringey for your company to share the article internally, and it’s normal for companies to share employees’ successes. That said, if you’re really uncomfortable with the idea of it, you could say, “I feel awkward about sharing this more broadly but wanted you two to see it.”
5. When should I tell prospective employers I’ve been laid off?
Until two weeks ago, I worked for a federal contractor. All of the contracts I worked on were DOGEd at the beginning of February, and I was laid off, along with hundreds of other employees, about a month later. Between the contracts being terminated and my being laid off, I applied for a number of positions with my former position listed as current since it was current at the time. When should I tell prospective employers that I have been laid off? I am assuming it is unnecessary to send an email if I haven’t heard anything from the employer, but should I tell them during the interview? I don’t want to be misleading.
You don’t need to proactively announce it, but you shouldn’t talk about the job in the present tense in interviews or otherwise imply you’re still there. If it comes up, you’ll just matter-of-factly explain what happened. You don’t need to go out of your way to hide it or to make sure they’re aware of it.
I wouldn’t think the amount of money you spent on your baby has anything to do with your coworkers or employer.
Who wouldn’t feel stung when a co-worker was given a several hundred dollar stroller say and you could nothing, not even a branded onsie?
But this isn’t what I would consider a coworker really, this is a person that works in your company, not even in the same office, imo coworkers are the people in your office/team that you work directly/regularly with.
It’s a different type/level of coworker, if you just define everyone that works for the same company as a coworker.
This was a different team and even office that did this not the company itself.
I’ve worked in places with teams that did the same thing in different offices that covered different areas, and yes different teams/offices do things differently. I would be super upset if we were told we could not have a baby shower/gifts in our office because we didn’t give people in other offices the same thing. It’s not our responsibility to provide for other offices.
Heck even now I am part of a team on one floor and there are teams on other floors (in the same office/location), we do things among ourselves for birthdays, baby showers etc, I would be upset if we were told to stop because other floors/teams didn’t do the same or because we didn’t do it for everyone else on other teams/floors.
Sometimes there are natural borders/demarcations that are okay to do things differently based on it. Different locations/teams are a great reason/way to differentiate.
It’s fine to wish you had gotten the same, but feeling “stung” IMO is an overreaction, because the other and your team don’t have a duty to do something for you.
It’s reasonable to say if Team A does something for Jane on their team they should do it for all others on Team A, but unreasonable to think expect that they need to do it for James on Team B, or expect now that Team B has to do the same as Team A.
Exactly this. Sure, it’s a sign of a toxic company culture if members of the same team/coworkers who work closely together are treated differently, unless it’s because a team member doesn’t want a birthday celebration or baby shower at work. Some people don’t celebrate their birthdays for religious reasons, some because they don’t want to be the center of attention, and some because they’re in denial about aging (sometimes for a good reason in a particularly ageist environment). Some people prefer to keep baby showers in the family, and some If that’s the case, someone opting out is not a good reason to deny other members of the team their celebrations.
The person who’s most likely to not have their life events celebrated at work even if they want the celebrations is the admin who’s generally responsible for ensuring that other people’s life events are celebrated. That’s unfair, and a good manager will ensure that this doesn’t happen on their team.
This is all very logical, but sometimes emotions can really ambush you without checking in with logic first. This other manager may not be on the same team as OP, but OP clearly sees them as their closest counterpart and is wrestling with how differently their teams have treated them both. I can see OP is trying to take solace in the idea that gifts don’t flow upwards on her team, and she’s proud that culture and pressure doesn’t exist in her team. However, if we take her word for it, pressure doesn’t exist on the other team either; they just spent a load of money on the manager because they wanted to (but I would argue that some pressure is always inherent with your boss). In other words, I can see why OP wants to process this stuff here anonymously.
Which is understandable – although then it’s arguably no longer a work question.
Still, LW, if you needed to hear this from someone: none of this means that you or your baby is worth less or deserves less appreciation than the person in the other office and their baby. Your coworkers don’t think so either.
It’s not a value judgment, it’s a question of there being one person around who says ‘hey, we should have a shower, I will go around with an envelope’ and does not stop because ‘no gifting upwards’ / too much work on their plate / whatever else.
Do people write to AAM to “process stuff anonymously”? My impression is that they mostly look for a unbiased, analytical response. People responding to OP by pointing out that “fair gift-giving within our team” is irrelevant because by OP’s own account, it’s not really the same team [also the many assumptions in the post, from the cost of the gift (it could have been something someone found on sale) to the subordinates contributing (which OP doesn’t actually know happened], is pretty much the point: an opinion that puts OP’s emotions into persepctive.
I think it’s probably both.
I agree that I think a lot of people do both – especially for issues that can feel petty or small.
I used to work on a team that had a “pass the hat” dynamic for all birthdays. And when that team was about 10 people, I’m sure that worked – but I joined when the team was 20 people and soon became over 30. The end result was that the most senior leaders on our team and the people who’d been there the longest would get very large gifts and newer hires wouldn’t. And we were also getting hit up for birthday money all the time.
All being said, I felt very small and petty to be bothered by how small my acknowledgements were, when in reality I wanted to stop being asked for money for over 30 people. Being able to type it all out and send it off can be therapeutic, even if the end result is basically to do nothing.
Honestly, I think “feeling stung” is an incredibly minor emotional reaction and normal in a situation like this. It’s hard not to have some negative feelings when someone else got a large gift and you in the same circumstance got nothing. Not to say that the OP’s reaction should have been bigger than what she felt, but I think feeling stung is understandable and reasonable.
(Note that this is not me making any suggestions one way or another on what she should do next; I just want to affirm that her emotional reaction makes sense and I feel for her.)
“you in the same circumstance got nothing.”
But the issue is she is not in the same circumstance, she is on a different office/location AND team, I would say just one is enough to justify the different treatment.
Same team, but one half is on office/location A and other is in office/location B.
Or different teams but both Team A and Team B are in the same office/location. It would be fine for one team to break away to have the baby shower for a person on their team and not do it for a person on the other team.
Yes they are similar in that they both had a baby while at the company. If the gift had been from the company I would agre the company needed to do it all the same, but it wasn’t it was individual people/team.
“Same team, but one half is on office/location A and other is in office/location B.”
I feel like every comment I read pushes my team further apart so I just want to note that the scenario here is actually this one, and not different team/different office. The 75% of our work thing is actually between the colleague and I, not the team.
That said – I found out last week (after writing) that someone on a different team who is IRL good friends with the colleague initiated the gift and baby shower for my colleague, so I can confidently confirm that this was truly a specific office culture thing and it had left my consciousness until I saw this letter on AAM today.
LW3 here and for what it’s worth we are considered coworkers. We are on the same “team” and do the same work, sometimes together, while operating in different offices. I don’t have a lot of work overlap personally with the other office, but people who are lower down in our hierarchy do.
I’d definitely assumed it was just a difference in office culture and happy to hear Alison’s advice to do nothing about it!!
It’s understandable, but I think the better response is to think about all the money LW is saving by not having to contribute to everyone else’s elaborate gifts in their office.
Good point, from a purely financial point of view if probably evens out… (unless you’re the unlucky one who doesn’t have any life events the office considers significant, in which case LW’s office policy would actually be much better for you!)
Agreed. I’ve been in offices where the “Sunshine Committee” was constantly collecting for gifts and it really adds up.
While it’s nice to get one big office gift, it’s probably best to leave it to individual co-workers to individually decide to give gifts unless the actual workplace is funding the gifts.
(In my current office, my boss’s boss always pays for baby gifts from the team from her own pocket and the present says “from all of us” which is great)
This was my reaction. She and her coworkers aren’t circulating the same $200 around, pointlessly, forever. No one has to spend time on the money collecting, the gift choice, the parity questions when someone else has a major life event, the feelings-managing when inevitably someone gets offended… I’m exhausted just thinking about it.
Are they really coworkers though?
If they were on the same team, it would be odd.
But once you’re in different teams/groups/divisions, it’s really not unusual.
the gift was given to that coworker by other coworkers, not the company. The LW can feel hurt, but she CANNOT ask her colleagues to use their personal money to buy her a gift or even imply that they should have just because another coworker in a different office got one. Alison’s advice to chalk it up to office cultural differences and move on is correct
LW3 here and I want to be clear that my letter says I would not want my colleagues to do that and I’m not sure why your comment implies I did.
She’s just saying that receiving a gift from work would have slightly eased the burden of all the money she spent preparing for her baby, because if she’d received a gift similar to her coworker she’d have spent a few hundred dollars less of her own money buying that baby item.
LW’s feelings are not anyone else’s problem to solve. LW is having “Big Feelings.”
The feelings are not for anyone else to manage.
I don’t see what is actionable in the letter for the other co-worker at the same level or that person’s team are to do as they are all on a different team. Nor do I see what LW’s team is to do.
LW says she feels “a little hurt” and “kinda stung”. She doesn’t say it’s anyone else’s to manage, she’s just trying to work out whether their is a work issue here around fair gift giving.
This is pretty unfair and borderline condescending. OP isn’t asking anyone to manage her feelings. Arguably she’s asking for advice because she’s unsure if she’s on the right side here. Pretty sure she’s very cognizant that her feelings may be clouding her judgement.
She’s literally asking about whether something that feels unfair, is unfair in the sense that it’s a workplace issue. And while it’s not, it’s also understandable that it would sting a little bit. It’s okay to acknowledge both, kindly.
Thank you. It’s hard being a letter writer when your words are misread in such a negative way. There’s nothing I want to happen *for me* here and my main concern is actually because I am a person with influence, I could raise it if there were a true work fairness issue.
I’m honestly glad to hear this wasn’t a work fairness issue because the idea of saying “hey why did Josie get something when I didn’t” is MORTIFYING.
There is nothing that is actionable for LW’s coworkers and she’s not asking for action from them.
Your reading of this letter seems very unfair to me.
Eh, I think OP is more expressing just how freakin expensive it is to have a baby, and it feels frustrating/hard to see someone at work getting a pricey gift when they’ve gotten nothing.
OP, unless your employer typically has parties/gifts for big life events and you got left out, always assume it’s not personal. BTDT, I always figured my coworker’s friends had kicked in and since they weren’t my friend-friends (friendly co-workers but not friends), there was no reason for them to kick in for me.
It’s ok to feel hurt, but do *know* that it’s not a slight.
I sympathize somewhat with OP because other people had babies around the time I did. We were in the same building and their baby shower celebrations were definitely bigger. It wasn’t that I was ignored, but I did realize how few office friends I had compared to the other new parents. It wasn’t that my baby was less important but that my social circle was outside the office.
That said, I’m team “it wasn’t personal” because it’s a different team and different office. If the culture at OP’s office is not the same as the branch, then it stands to reason that there would be different celebrations and social groups. Maybe what OP is really seeing is that her office is not a close knit or fun one. Whether or not that is a problem is a whole different discussion, but not about babies.
Yeah, that part stood out to me– there seem to be 2 issues. One is the discrepancy between what OP and her coworker received, but I agree with all those who noted that they are on entirely different teams that have different gifting cultures. The gifts are from different people. It’s like being jealous that your coworker’s fiance got her a nicer engagement ring than you got. Reasonable and normal to feel some envy, but not reasonable to complain or try to make it “fair”.
The other seems to be frustration or sticker shock at the cost of buying baby stuff. I found that Buy Nothing and other similar free gifting groups and parents’ reselling groups were a huge boon. I got baby stuff cheap or free, I later got to clear out space in my own house once i no longer needed the stuff, and I got to meet and befriend other new parents in the neighborhood. So instead of feeling like acquiring baby stuff was a big drain on my finances and a frustrating stressor, it ended up feeling almost like a fun scavenger hunt with magical fairy godmothers along the way.
Tangentially, I was very amused to be on my local Buy Nothing yesterday and see the Boppy (nursing pillow) I had given through the group was out in the wild again, getting passed on to another family. Those things are expensive so I’m glad it’s getting a long life!
Yes, I received a Boppy as a hand me down from a neighbor, found that it didn’t work for me at all (I’m apparently too tall), regifted it to another neighbor, and was very glad I hadn’t paid cold hard cash for it.
Yeah – I’m going to throw out there “once upon a child” and other second hand stores can also help a lot in trying out various baby swag, especially stuff that doesn’t really have to be brand new and/or you aren’t sure you like it. I believe I got some harnesses/wraps there for way more than half off – and it took me a while to find one I liked and/or get used to them – there’s just SO MUCH STUFF and advice out there it’s hard to know which is actually helpful and sucks to buy a bunch of new pricy stuff then realize you hate it.
^^ This. It’s not actually your colleagues’ responsibility to subsidize new baby expenses.
That being said, I understand feeling stung by what feels like inequitable treatment, and this would be a different response if you were in the same office and gifts were being coordinated by the same person, but Alison’s response is spot on.
This discussion thread suggests a reframing for OP1:
The fact that you perceive this as unfair is natural if the office communities you are comparing have the same level of social engagement and operate by the same rules.
But have they? do they? And should they?
You have a policy of not encouraging gifting upward (stated to your team?), so not getting a baby shower from them is a sign that your policy is being respected.
The other manager is either not following a similar policy, or is not having it respected.
Also: You didn’t get a baby shower at all, and that justifiably sucks, and it justifiably feels especially unfair if you’ve been contributing to other baby showers on your team. But this (and a new baby!) is perhaps an opportunity to reconsider your work-life balance, and a signal it’s time to develop friend or interest groups outside your workplace (or at the very least, outside the team you manage). Though of course it’s not necessarily great timing to be starting that now, with the possible exception of new parent support groups.
The comment about a company-branded onesie makes me think that at least part of the sting is the discrepancy in *acknowledgement*.
When I had my kiddo it absolutely stung that my VP mentioned another coworker’s baby in a departmental meeting, but not mine. Now, that’s different from this case because that was not my team (my team was great) but my VP, so coming from above.
Human emotions are not always entirely rational.
Re: 4, upper management would always want to see mentions of the company in media. So think about it less as promoting yourself and more about sharing company news.
“Hi, now that the interview is out I wanted to share it with you so you had a copy.”
Just to add to this, LW4, I work in communications. Every time someone from our organization is featured or quoted, we share it with the company. Usually on a Slack channel. It’s not as big of a deal as you’re making it. It’s more like “for info, Jane Doe was featured in Industry Magazine talking about our X initiative.” This is less of a big deal than it’s becoming in your mind :-)
As someone who works in comms, I’d absolutely agree with this.
Although, as a caveat to that: if OP4’s work does any kind of employee newsletter or other updates, it might be worth flagging that they don’t want it shared as part of that. But a good boss should say “are you OK if I forward this to the comms team for the next roundup?” first, even if OP4 doesn’t specify they don’t want it to go wider in the original email.
So: I see that OP4 is terribly anxious about anyone thinking they (OP) are showing off or taking credit for others’ work or something. Obviously no need to override their wishes if about sending the article forward.
Something to consider though: it’s very, very, very normal to be featured in industry publications. If the article is in any way accessible to the public, it’s not a secret, it will come up with internet searches of the company name etc.
I personally would find it weird if it was considered something not to be shared in-house! It’s great, it obviously is not only about the person in particular but also about the work and the company and the team. I would not override anyone’s wishes on this, but I would want to flag to OP4 that – unless they are working in a toxic place – people will be happy to see stuff like this!
And definitely send it to your boss!
Yes, especially since it sounds like it is complimentary to LW’s coworkers, too. This feels way weirder right now than it is.
As a manager, I totally want my people to share such things with me! I’d send it up the chain too.
This exactly! Your PR or MarComms team definitely wants to promote this, because it’s an excellent way to promote the company :)
OP #4 here.
Thank you for this framing, this is helpful!
I was promoted into this level rather quickly in my career, so there’s often things I feel like I’m pretty blindly navigating.
This blog has helped a TON even though nothing beats experience, and all I can do is keep making that day by day.
Years ago I was part of a team who loved to have little celebrations (one colleague had amazing party planning and decorating skills and delighted in taking on this role). I wonder now how staff outside our team would have reacted if they knew we had a “baby shower” for a team member’s mare when she had her first foal.
The world should have more whimsical celebrations like that
I got a very sweet card from a coworker when I adopted my first dog. I also threw myself a “bra-dal” shower when I got breast augmentation and my friends gifted me bras in my new size.
That being said, I’ve never been married or had children, so my friends never had to shell out for a bachelorette party, bridal shower, attending a wedding, traveling to a wedding, paying for a bridesmaid dress that you absolutely can’t wear again no matter what the bride tries to tell you, wedding gifts, baby shower, baby birthdays, and the thousand-and-one events the married and childed throw for themselves.
I’m getting my tubes tied in 2 months and the girls are planning an anti-baby shower for me. We also celebrate 35th birthdays a big deals because it’s the Presidential Birthday (in the US you have to be at least 35 to hold the office of president). We also hold houseaversaries, celebrating your move in/purchase date. Just let your shower thoughts become reality.
I think a baby shower for the 1st foal is fine, but absolutely not for the 2nd or 3rd foal, at most a baby sprinkle. and only if you did it for all other coworkers in your team who had their first foal also.
Wow- the size of that onesie! The diapers would cost half the earth, and a stroller would be hell to push.
The stroller would be okay. It would have lots of horsepower.
“a stroller would be hell to push.”
I think that’s because you are putting the cart before the horse, or rather the horse in the cart, instead of letting the horse pull you in the stroller.
I’m crying laughing. Good job, everyone!
Please tell me I’m not the only one who literally just googled “how much does a foal weigh at birth”…
100-150 kg doesn’t sound impossible to push though (like, it’s possible to push an adult human in a wheelchair?) but they do grow up fast…
I read this as “push through” 0_o LOL
OW
I’m not awake enough to have thought of that, but I’m glad you did and that you shared!
Foals can get up and run within hours of birth so by the time you got the stroller assembled, it would no longer be needed, anyway.
Foal booties?
Don’t google this, but foals are kind of born with booties. They’re hooves are soft and feathery (seriously don’t google it, it’s a horror show) and then they dry out and harden up.
While I agree heartily with that warning, horse feet are a bit of a horror show at the best of times. Just the idea that a horse has to step down on its hoof to be able to squish the blood back up so it doesn’t just pool in the legs is like – how do horses even exist?
Which just makes it harder for humans to think of appropriate foal shower ideas.
Eh I see plenty of kids that can walk/run for hours and then get tired they want/need the stroller.
So let the foal run wild then put it in the stroller when it gets tired.
Right? If this foal-shower didn’t have the baby horse there I would be so sad!
I’m now imagining my former team member pushing the foal in a huge stroller and the image is most amusing. (Team member a gruff Arnold Schwarzenegger type in his forties.)
Personally I want a Sip ‘n See for the foal party! Bring the baby horse!
If I were on the other team, I would initially be miffed, but I’m sure I’d forgive the first team if I got to pet the foal and also the mare.
We did a puppy shower one time!
I ALWAYS send new puppies presents when I hear about them among my coworkers. (I at 44 was among the five youngest people in my previous department, so baby showers didn’t come up often.)
This delights me, especially right now when we are in full Foal Season. Am I a proud partial owner of a very leggy colt with the fuzziest ears? Yes. Would I happily share a brownie and a cup of coffee with a coworker and ooh and ahh over photos said leggy, fuzzy colt? Also yes.
Would like to apply where you work just to do that, tbh…
Why look a gift horse in the mouth? It’s just a NEIGH-borly thing to do.
And it’s not as if it SADDLES you with any more obligations! In fact, you have free REIN to do just what you please.
Okay okay that’s enough TomFOALery, everyone back to work.
hey now! I really like the tack this is taking! Nobody’s trying to stirrup trouble here…
For #4 I feel like just some basic, genuine humility in the announcement (not to the point of self-deprecating), along with keeping it short and simple, would go a long way toward helping it not feel too braggy.
“Hey everyone, just want to share: I’m honored to be featured in the latest Teapot Innovators Magazine. Here’s the link; would love if you take the time to read it.”
This, and also I wonder how many lower level staff would even bother to read it.
I say this because at my most recent job, we were inundated with emails about this, that, and the other thing, and some of them were interesting or involved our coworkers, but whenever I asked my teammates if they’d read this and such, the answer was usually no.
Because they were busy doing actual work and didn’t have time to read… if it’s like the jobs I’ve had.
Yeah, this seems like the kind of thing that gets featured in an internal newsletter or posted to the company intranet, then largely ignored
I got in the habit of reading the things from working as an admin in a university department where it was just expected that everyone would read the “Daily Headlines” that came out from the university communications office. They would regularly ask faculty and staff alike if we had read such-and-such news item, so I got into the habit of at least skimming it each day, and I think all the other staff did, too.
When I moved departments, I could tell that this wasn’t such a work-culture expectation in these places, and most of the staff didn’t read the articles at all, so now I just skim for mentions of people I know or events I might like to attend — now that I’m not expecting a pop quiz about the Daily Headlines in the hallway.
#5, my company’s been interviewing federal employees, contractors, and recently laid off federal employees and contractors for our positions. Alison’s advice is good, and if it’s a reasonable company, they’ll completely understand.
and if it’s a reasonable company, they’ll completely understand.
Any company that would not understand is probably a place you want to avoid if you can.
Just in general I think that employers understand that resumes (and other application materials) should be accurate to the time they are distributed but are subject to change. Even without special circumstances it would be weird to hold that against a candidate.
One potential way to handle it is to wait for an interview and provide a current resume to the interviewer without specifically flagging changes. In person it would be a breezy “here’s a current copy” and hand over a hard copy. I’m not sure what the equivalent would be for a remote interview.
Letter 4 – interviewed for vendor publication. I didn’t really get a sense of what you want to communicate to management in sending them this, I think being clear about that in your own mind will lead to the words. They were aware you were doing it so is it “here’s the final result”? “they’ve written about all my achievements (and I want to remind you, bosses, of them)”? etc. Whatever you want them to do with the information, write the words accordingly. Are you sure they don’t already know about it though, because often these vendor/industry publications work closely with the company ‘providing’ the interviewee and the company knows in advance what will be published.
I find it almost comical how OP is tying themself in knots because they are not clear what they want to communicate. Is it was as simple as “Here’s to confirm I did not embarrass the company”, OP likely would have done that already.
OP, it is ok to brag! This is a great opportunity and you can be proud of this. But at the same time, there WILL be people who roll their eyes or who are envious. You cannot please everybody! Have a breezy non-committal reply prepared for those and everything will be fine. “Yes, they really value us as customers. I am happy about the relationship that we established!”
Huh, I think it was very clear what they wanted to communicate.
“I do want them to see it because, well, I want to be valued […] I just don’t want anyone to think I’m shouting “look at how great I am!” (Except maybe my bosses who sign my paychecks.)”
They want the bosses to see that their opinion is valued in the field, that they’re valuable, great at their job, and that their compensation should match that.
I think “Hi, I’m excited to share that the article is out now, here’s the link in case you’re interested” should be sufficient.
Somehow you totally missed the OP contradicting themselves repeatedly. They’re proud! But they don’t want to brag. They want everyone to know! But they don’t want to seem self-aggrandizing. They want to share it! But they don’t want to share it. They literally do not know what they want.
Also, OP, it jumped out at me that you say you want to be valued. You sound as though you think the company currently does not value you, but the successful industry interview will somehow force your bosses to see you in a new light or something. But also, you don’t want that! You need to work through all of your feelings about the job and your role so you can comfortably handle this and things like it in the future.
We live in a society where you’re expected to advocate for yourself but also stay humble and not seem like you’re full of yourself, especially if you’re a woman. “I’m proud but I don’t want to sound like I’m tooting my own horn” might not be easy to execute gracefully but it’s not an uncommon or convoluted thing to want.
As a writer of these business articles, most people don’t know when they’ll publish even when it’s about them so it’s definitely something to forward to the boss when you have it. Be proud but humble OP!
Letter 2 – political mistakes, “meddling” – You see now that it was politically wrong to do this, and need to say so to your boss. However there must be a genuine reason behind it as to why you’ve acted like this. Do you truly believe that the colleague isn’t a good person to take that team forward, if it’s for specific reasons rather than just a “feeling” I think it is legitimate to take those to your boss.
Why did you take it into your own hands and advocate for searching for alternatives rather than take it to your boss in the first place? If the answer is “I don’t trust the boss to take the right decision”, that is still a conversation you can have with the boss but needs to be approached very carefully (and honestly, given the nature of the mistakes I am not sure if you could pull that off).
I think the most serious mistake here though isn’t that you tried to find alternatives for running that team or asked repeatedly about timelines. It’s that you don’t seem to have confidence in your management structure to do things right, and that is a much bigger conversation.
I find it almost comical how OP is tying themself in knots because they are not clear what they want to communicate. Is it was as simple as “Here’s to confirm I did not embarrass the company”, OP likely would have done that already.
OP, it is ok to brag! This is a great opportunity and you can be proud of this. But at the same time, there WILL be people who roll their eyes or who are envious. You cannot please everybody! Have a breezy non-committal reply prepared for those and everything will be fine. “Yes, they really value us as customers. I am happy about the relationship that we established!”
*nesting fail*
So I read OP2’s letter three times now and I am still not sure I understand what actually happened: she says she suggested other names, directly approached someone (presumably a better candidate?), and escalated to both her boss and his boss (not quite clear to me if this is boss’ boss or better candidate’s boss).
So in principle OP discussed this with her boss but… ignored what he said? Anyhow, I agree with you Metal Gru that this is a bigger issue however it rolled out. Which does not mean it destroyed your career or something like that; it’s just inadvisable in a lot of cases and contexts.
OP, something else to consider: you say you triggered a premature announcement – this I find even worse a sign as your crusade was public enough that others felt they needed to react, again without consideration for hierarchy. Although it sounds like the announcer also acted here without higher level approval, which is not great from them either.
Does it happen often that you decide to pursue things without considering possible outcomes like this? It’s something to look out for!
I am equally confused about what happened in Letter #2, especially since I have never heard of Scrum or a Scrum Master. I tried Googling it, but I am still just as confused. Could anyone care to explain, in laymen’s terms, exactly what happened?
When I read that LW made a huge political mistake, I thought for sure that she mentioned something about the current POTUS.
I have a family member that is a scrum master and from what I can gather (because it is only ever spoken of in very corporate jargon terms) it is project manager-ish.
Scrums are just a type of structured workflow tech teams use, basically. In my opinion, it’s just a renaming of a normal project with lots of small milestones. A scrum master is the project manager and the scrum is the project.
“Scrum” as a noun is the name of the framework.
It’s also an adjective applied to anything and everything – “Scrum Master” for project manager, “Scrum Team” for the delivery team, “Scrum Project” for the project, “Daily Scrum” for the daily status meetings most agile processes call “standup (meeting),” etc.
Scrum is one of the most structured, prescriptive agile processes, to the point that the originators put out a whitepaper listing things they caught teams doing that they considered Not Scrum.
It’s essentially a title for an Agile way of project manager vs the traditional waterfall. It’s very prevalent in tech.
In a nutshell, a Scrum master runs the scrum (kanban/artifacts) and works to keep it all clean and protected to help give devs the time to build/test/fail/deploy in a timely manner.
A Scrum Master is like a very specific kind of project manager for teams/companies that are using the Agile Scrum project management framework.
LW2 here :-)
Yes a scrum master is like a project manager in a way – the point being that they really did not have the authority to make that announcement, but they may have thought that it was already decided.
I assumed the team lead reorg was not already decided exactly because nothing was announced yet, which is why I *tried to* escalate to two levels up but no one replied. That sould have been my cue to leave it alone, but alas, I… didn’t.
I just loved working with my old team so much, it might also have been a bit of reluctance to let them go, even though I’m going to work with another awesome team!
I did talk to my manager the day after, ensured him I fully understand that it should not have happened, that it will not happen again, and apologised to my colleague as he requested. He has been new in the company for less than 2 weeks and he’s filling a huge communication gap, so I really believe things will be more clear going forward.
It’s just… whyyyy did I do this…
It’s a super common thing to get too in your head/personally invested about a management decision and get overly involved. I wouldn’t stress since you’ve listened and pumped the brakes as you were told to do. Just keep doing good work and show that this was a blip.
LW, I remain concerned about this great question: “Did any of this stem from legitimate frustrations with how your organization or team runs and, if so, are there conclusions you should draw from that (which could be anything from “if I’m going to stay here, I need to accept X” to “X is so messed up that it’s ruining my professional norms and I need to get out”)?”
Often we find ourselves in the soup because we react instinctively. Our instincts are not always wrong. They may be correct or maybe just not aligned. I continually had these “WTF WAS I THINKING” moments at a place many years ago, and after a string of them I finally stepped in one I couldn’t get out of. In retrospect, I had huge issues with the way the company was operating. I spent 4 years trying to contort myself to their way of “normal” before I was forced out, and then 18 months kind of resetting my own internal levels of accountability afterwards.
Were you truly in the wrong here, or were you just doing it in the wrong place?
Thank you TQB for the first hand experience. There’s definitely some of that going on, and I have a hard time letting go of all the stupid decisions. It would be much better for my mental health if I was better at not meddling with what’s not strictly my business
LW 3 –
It may help to keep the part about you being fairly certain that some of her direct reports donated in mind. As you accurately point out, gifts *should* not flow up, so in fact neither you nor your coworker ought to have received a gift of the size hers was. (And although you say you feel sure nobody felt pressured, pressure can be subtle and can come as much from teammates or social expectations as your direct lead). If patting yourself on the back about how you’ve managed to successfully demonstrate professional boundaries to your direct reports wrt gift-giving helps you get past the sting of exclusion, that might not be a bad thing.
The lack of so much as a company-branded onesie is a different thing. Honestly, I think the company offering a small care package for new parents is often a nice gesture – last job did this and although I never had a kid myself, I did like that they did it and felt it improved morale and showed support for parents – but it seems yours doesn’t do that, and that could be either a deliberate decision or an oversight. I think in *some* offices you might have room to suggest it to the benefits team going forward (with a “having my kid made me realise there’s a lot of disparity here depending on team culture and I’m concerned that some new parents might feel excluded or their teammates unduly pressured to contribute to a private collection” reasoning, so it doesn’t come off as about your hurt feelings or wanting this retroactively). But this is going to be so dependent on the company culture, your role and your social capital, how open they are to these sorts of suggestions, how concerned they are about employee morale, the financial situation, etc. etc. that I’m hesitant to really propose doing this.
I really don’t agree with the whole gifts don’t flow up approach. To me the appropriate response is leads/managers get treated the same as team members for gifts.
If you’d do a whip round for your colleague’s baby/wedding/graduation gift why would you exclude your manager in the same circumstances? My managers have been very much part of the team. We sit together, work together, socialise at work together (chat at lunch etc) I wouldn’t exclude them.
To me not gifting up is about not getting your manager gifts because they’re your manager. So you don’t do a birthday cake for the boss, but not the rest of the team.
The big exception is that work gifts FROM the boss don’t obligate you to reciprocate. But otherwise treat them as part of the team.
because managers shouldn’t be taking money for something that they already planned and budgeted for (weddings, babies, etc.) from people who make half their salary and can’t always even afford weddings and babies themselves
You shouldn’t gift up because 1) people higher up the chain make more money, and the lower paid person shouldn’t need to give money to a higher paid person and 2) no matter how good of friends/colleagues you are with someone who manages, you, they still have power over you in the workplace and there’s no way to fully remove that power dynamic. That means there’s no way to fully remove the pressure to give or a risk of bias towards people who gave bigger gifts to their manager.
Good points. I received a music box from the company for our baby, and found it sweet. A Onesie would only work if the recipient could choose the size (and even then, it would have to be after the birth). Our baby was size 3 months from the start…
Who would even put a branded onesie on their baby, except for the obligatory photoshoot for the giftgivers??
Eh, some babies soil their clothes faster than you can wash them, so there’s a point where anything clean will do. They may also be wearing another layer over the onesie.
Yeah, in my experience everything gets worn eventually! Some days everyone is beyond caring what it looks like, you just need them clean and warm.
Yes, definitely. I also put the clothes that I liked the least in the diaper bag or as back-up clothing at daycare, so a few extras get used that way.
Why wouldn’t you? My kids got all kinds of branded onesies, including from my company. They wore them like they wore any other clothing item. Which for a baby means wearing it for about 6 hours before it gets dirty and they get changed into the next one.
Babies whip through sizes, and it’s normal to happily put them in any items about which you have neutral to positive feelings for the few months those fit, then put them in a bag to donate to some slightly younger baby in your circle.
Also as Emmy says, with some babies you are constantly changing their clothes, at which point you get much less interested in the fashion statement embodied, and more that this onesie doesn’t have barf on it yet.
Ah right, my problem was that I was in one of those baby clothing rotation circles and the amount of clothes was HUGE, so I put the weird ones straight back into the box they travelled in.
Lemme tell you, babies stain clothes from every orifice. I thought, I’m never going to use all these infant clothes. Ahahahahahahaha! I shoulda bought stock in Clorox.
Anyway, you put the baby in the branded onesie for the first visit to the office to show off the baby.
Me… Why not?
Because they are ugly? And I actually even read something that warned new mothers off putting ugly-in-their-eyes clothing on their babies, saying it could cause problems with bonding (if you look at your baby and think “ugly”).
I’d need to see peer reviewed research on parents having difficulty bonding with babies due to company branding on onesies. That feels like an incredibly odd statement.
I said *ugly*, not necessarily branded. The suggestion was to dress your baby in clothes you find cute (and when you bring your baby to your MIL to babysit, put the clothes that your MIL finds cute). If you find your company’s branded onesies beautiful, then by all means dress your baby in them; I just dislike in any kind of logos or messaging on clothes so would consider them automatically ugly.
I have had myself a clothing item (gifted to me of course) that absolutely each time I happened to see myself in mirror, I shuddered involuntary. Now imagine being a new parent who has not bonded with their baby yet having this reaction each time they see their newborn baby (and you see your baby a lot more often than your own clothes).
Dude you are trying Way Too Hard. Just say you didn’t want to use the branded onesie and move on. Not everything has to be done in favor of what some authority says is best. We don’t have to appeal to authority over absolutely everything. We can just make decisions about our children.
What if the baby itself is ugly? You can’t really avoid looking at your own infant, and plastic surgery isn’t recommended for someone so young
So when you say “I actually even read something…”, you mean that you’re just talking about yourself? Like, you read the inside of your own mind?
We almost put our middle child up for adoption until we exchanged an ugly Carter’s onesie for an adorable Hannah Anderson powder blue one. And that has made all the difference
That seems like a serious stretch. Parental love is powerful enough to endure poo explosions, torturous sleep deprivation and repeatedly being vomited on. I’m certain it can also survive a branded onesie.
hahaha very nicely put.
Read an actual study? Sounds more like clickbait to me. A search brings up nothing.
It’s fine to just say you don’t dress your kids in clothes you think are ugly.
I…don’t think that’s a thing. Babies themselves are honestly kind of…not that objectively attractively looking, especially as newborns. And they scream, cry, expel bodily fluids everywhere, etc…they put parents through A LOT. But parents still manage to bond with them. So I don’t know that a 2 month old wearing a Downtown Bank onesie is really going to somehow prevent that.
You read something that said that? Friend, I think you may need to brush up your media literacy skills.
The pamphlet about detoxing is also something a person could read – does that make it reliable or true?
If a parent is experiencing revulsion looking at their own child, the failure to bond is *already happening,* and that is addressed by medical intervention for PPD, not cute clothes.
I my experience, the onesies are usually sized at least 3M or 6M, so that the baby is fairly likely to grow through that size at some point. A lot of babies never wear newborn sizes, or grow out of them within about a week.
Where I am, baby gifts are usually given after birth (I think pre-birth gifts are traditionally considered bad luck?), so by the time work is notified of the birth and has sent the package, clothing should definitely be sized up.
I got a branded baby hat (which you can put on the baby to take a photo even if it’s slightly oversized at that point). The second time I got a nonbranded, very nice sleeping bag sized 9M which I was thrilled with.
My previous employer had an animal as their logo, so they gave branded plushies.
The bad luck thing is cultural. I’m Jewish and was raised to not give gifts before the baby comes – my mother was horrified when she found out my SIL (who is not Jewish) had a baby shower when she was about 8 months pregnant. In my mother’s day, this extended to the parents-to-be not buying anything before the baby came. Luckily for her this was back when new mothers stayed in the hospital for a week. Mom ordered the crib, etc, and while she was in the hospital her mother arranged for everything to be delivered and set up.
Since we adopted our daughter, our baby showers were all after she arrived and Mom didn’t have to worry.
My parents had to secretly put together my nursery before I was born so my grandparents didn’t find out. My parents just couldn’t imagine the stress of having to do it after!
Similar in Britain – traditionally you don’t give gifts or buy things for babies until they actually arrive. Baby showers have become slightly more of a thing here over the last 20 years or so, thanks to the internet, but even so it’s nowhere near on the same scale as it is in the US, and some people would still feel more comfortable about just bringing a card or something for the parents to a baby shower, and giving a gift for the baby after it’s actually born.
yes, i think baby showers sound a bit like a gift grab to us – my american friend suggested organising one before my daughter was born which we obsolutely didn’t want. my work did give me a lovely lunch and gifts (I believe they all put money in and the company did too), and a couple of people sent small gifts once she was here.
Yeah, I don’t think I ever put my youngest in a newborn-sized onesie and my oldest fit them for less than 2 weeks.
If you want to give a truly useful gift for a new parent, buy them a subscription to a diaper service or a very large gift card for a food delivery service that they like. Everyone and their dog wants to give you a cute little onesie instead, but when my kids were babies I got so tired of people showing up with clothes when I was struggling to keep up with more basic things.
And then there was my baby, who finally grew into some of her “new baby gift” clothing sometime after her second birthday. (No, she wasn’t a preemie! Just below the 5th percentile throughout her childhood. Now she’s taller than me. Bodies are weird.)
Babies come in all shapes and sizes! I also always err on the side of bigger clothes, just because they’re likely to be useful for longer, but you really never know.
I try to do bigger sizes too; even if they’re too big now, they’ll fit eventually!
My go-to shower gift unless I know very specifically what is wanted/needed is size 12 months clothing. It will fit sometime.
Yeah, I also always give larger (6-12 months ish) clothes, appropriate for the season when the baby will (hopefully) be around that size. We got absolutely flooded with teeny cute newborn and 0-3 month clothes, and then were in for a rude awakening when she started to outgrow them all (which seemed to happen in the blink of an eye – how do they grow so fast??)! The few hand-me-downs we had in larger sizes were a lifesaver while we scrambled to get clothes that were the right size, so I always try to make sure I’m giving folks something that will hopefully save them in a pinch six months down the line.
Who the hell wants a company-branded onesie? I would not put that on my newborn when actual cute baby clothes that don’t remind me of my job in my personal time are fairly cheap. I don’t agree with companies creating a bunch of random branded junk that will just pollute the environment when they’re inevitably thrown out instead of used.
I would have laughed and laughed to put branded onesies (from my company or my spouse’s) on my kiddo, because I think it’s funny.
And if I was mad at my company, I would have laughed and laughed when the onesie inevitably got soiled.
Then again my spouse wears almost exclusively branded T-shirts from his company, so I’m just kind of used to thinking of that stuff as “clothes” rather than “branding”.
LW1: I think you’re reading a lot into someone reading or even sharing something you don’t agree with.
People can look into complementary (and even alternative) health care without thinking there’s something wrong with a person who requires prescription medication. Even a person who might choose not to use prescription medication for the exact medical conditions that you choose prescription medication for does not necessarily think poorly of you for choosing differently.
Someone may have been interested in the article without even looking into the background of the author. Someone might have printed the article for themselves and just left it cause someone else might be interested/because they forgot it/because someone else did express interest.
I think you are massively overthinking the potential impacts on you of this article event if someone does deliberately share it.
For context – pwd who uses (or used) prescription meds, complementary healthcare AND alternate healthcare in combinations that I’m comfortable with.
Nah, sorry. “Alternative” medicine (homeopathy etc.) isn’t medicine. If it works, it’s just medicine. If not, it’s dangerous pseudo-science and COVID (and now people like RFK Junior…) should have shown us where being tolerant of that kind of thing quickly leads.
Yes, completely agree.
That stuff is harmful and people shouldn’t be subjected to pseudoscience at work. It’s reasonable to be dismayed if one’s employer is tacitly accepting it.
Yes, I totally agree. This has bothered me for a very long time, but the real turning point for me came before COVID. It was when stores like Walgreens and CVS started shelving homeopathic and other non-clinically tested products right alongside legitimate OTC medications. Boiron Sinusalia and ColdCalm do not belong on the shelf right next to acetaminophen and guaifensin.
On which shelf should they put phenylephrine?
In the trash, which is where it goes now. (Turns out it works fine as a spray, it’s just pointless as an oral medication, which is why FDA pulled the approval. It just took way the heck too long.)
I’m one of those weirdos for whom it actually works as an oral medication! Not as well as it does in a nasal spray but sometimes I can’t use nasal sprays. It does nothing for my husband at all, so he gets pseudoephedrine, which does nothing for me.
(I also find that betahistine helps me with the issues that I am prescribed it for, and that’s another one that the FDA recently withdrew approval based on it not being effective. Fortunately, I’m in Australia, where it’s still OK)
Phenylephrine has been a huge failure of the FDA approval process, but that fact that we know that is a point in favor of rigorous testing with transparent results, not a point in favor of treating untested, pseudoscientific “remedies” as equivalent with real medicine.
+1
In the past I would have agreed with you. But now with all the vaccine-denial doing real damage, I think spreading misinformation can have serious consequences. I think throwing the pamphlet is about right in terms of response – no need to escalate to HR, but make it clear that not everyone agrees with anti-science propaganda.
Yeah, a printout left in the break room puts it into rougher territory for me. I have zero problem with people using complementary medicine if they’re aware of the facts and not using it to replace actual medical treatment. (My sister swore reiki helped her through chemo. She knew it was 100% pseudoscience, but she found the process relaxing and that helped her anxiety and stress around nausea). But I have less tolerance for that when you start trying to convince others of your beliefs, especially at work.
Yeah, my mother does acupuncture regularly, she finds it relaxing.
She also has no problem getting things checked out by the doctor, and making sure they know any supplements she’s taking in case something has a conflict with medication.
The thing with the placebo effect is that it is a real, measurable effect, and is even stronger or weaker depending on the way the medicine is administered and the set dressings (like, IIRC green sugar pills work better as a pain reliever than red ones, sugar pills in a fancy branded box work better than sugar pills in a generic one, and they all work better if a person wearing a white lab coat gives them to you saying they’ll help. And saline injections generally work better than sugar pills. That sort of thing). Especially if someone is dealing with something that isn’t easy to treat via actual evidence-based medicine but potentially amenable to placebo – like many chronic pain conditions, say, or managing chemo side-effects like you mention – it seems honestly really reasonable for them to try to get the maximum benefit from it, and a lot of “alternative medicine” approaches excel at maximising placebo. And anything that involves treatment with a practitioner also involves the ability to talk to someone who offers a sympathetic listening ear and, quite possibly, a better bedside manner with more time to spend per patient than the actual medical doctors – also something conducive to your health and quality of life.
If only there weren’t the pseudoscience aspect, and if only it didn’t so very, very often edge into pushing pseudoscientific treatments in place of actual medical treatment when the latter is absolutely called for. Like, oh, to pick an example at random: vaccines.
Yes. Maybe we should not put pamphlets at work. We all have our beliefs, but if I put up a flyer saying ” the beach is gonna get the body you give it” people would be very insulted and telling HR how we’re all going to die if we just relax and don’t obsess about food, so why coddle people who are pro infectious disease?
It sounds like the pamphlet was specifically anti-science propaganda though. From the way the LW describes it, it doesn’t sound like it was just an advertisement for a shake of some kind. The LW says it was vilifying doctors and drugs.
Yeah, people have the right to try various options and if somebody finds something helpful, even if it is just due to the placebo effect, good for them, but pamphlets that vilify actual medicine are dangerous misinformation and there is a concerning overlap between the people who would bring something like that into a shared space and the people who would harass somebody with a medical condition about how they should be using “natural” medicines instead of trusting doctors. Especially as a lot of those kind of shakes are linked to MLMs. Of course, it’s not certain that this person would harass the LW. It’s probably more likely that they wouldn’t but the overlap is high enough that I think it is a legitimate concern.
Nah, I think leaving the material does endorse the views behind it. If the person didn’t look into the background… well, they should have before leaving it in a work common area. By which I don’t mean that one has to look up the CV of any author of an article, but you do have to have at least superficial knowledge of who is publishing the material. One can’t leave a clipping of an extreme right newspaper, for example, without being thought to sympathize, and one can’t leave promotional material for a company whose whole shtick is antivaxx without being thought antivaxx.
I don’t believe in alternative medecine, but I’m fine with people using it (the placebo effect is a thing, so it may even work for them). I do get mad when they deny science, or support science deniers.
Re: your last lines – that’s the core of it to me. Plenty of practices that most of us think of as alternative/not medicine (e.g. reiki) have at least some support in the literature for exploring their use. You don’t have to believe in the philosophy behind a practice to understand that when a patient feels that a certain practice is beneficial for managing their stress, fear, pain, etc., it may be at least somewhat beneficial as an additive piece of care.
The difference, and where it gets harmful, is when “alternative” practices are presented with the argument that they should supplant medicine.
Toss that pamphlet in the trash, OP, and don’t look back.
Also, there is actual science to things working differently for different people, including that if you measure blood sugar after a banana, and after a slice of whole wheat bread, two people can have quite different responses. Some people see their health issues improve when they go vegan, or cut out certain foods, and that can just be down to bodies not actually being one standard issue that reacts in the same way to the same stimulus in every circumstance.
Based on the health battering I took in the last few years, my opinion on trying alternative medicine has changed, as I saw a lot of cancer patients turn to things like Ayurvedic diets and acupressure, not to treat the cancer, but to try and deal with all the damage post cancer treatment.
When they’re saying regular medicine is wrong it’s not “complementary.”
That’s the thing, for me. I’m a doc. Many of my patients use supplements and pursue other forms of complementary/alternative medicine. I want to know about that and only intervene for things that are harmful (megadoses of Vitamin A or E, ephedra, etc). Marketing or promoting alternative treatments is one thing. Vilifying scientific medicine and people who take prescription medication is a whole other and much more pernicious thing.
I’m particularly amused* by the way purveyors of supplements and such claim that MDs are in it for the money and that we’re all in cahoots with big pharma when in fact it’s those purveyors who are making money off ignorance and fear.
*I’m not amused.
This all day.
I have a friend who is big into chiropractic and acupuncture, like to the point of taking nutrition advice from their acupuncturist. I find this weird! This is a person with a graduate degree in a scientific field! But it seems to work for them, so I say nothing … because they are not trying to give me advice, just mentioning things about their own life. They are free to manage their health the way they want to and I am free to manage mine the way I want to and we don’t argue about it.
If this friend were doing the long-distance-friendship equivalent of leaving detox pamphlets in our mutual break room, that would break our tacit agreement and I would not hesitate to throw the pamphlet in the blue bin.
Agreed.
“I looked into the group that published it and the doctor behind it, and what I found did not sit well with me.”
OP1, it’s excellent you did that. I think it far more likely that whoever dropped the printout in the kitchen DIDN’T, and just swallowed clickbait at face value.
“we generally have a problem with people vilifying sugar, fatty foods, carbs, etc. I know these topics are pretty common but these beliefs are starting to feel endemic.” Indeed this is the pervasive, even mainstream, view. Even if you feel there’s a moral imperative to oppose such views, you must consider whether it’s worth risking your earnings and career over – because you will be risking it by standing up to the majority.
If we think someone was reading it on their own break, and accidentally left it behind, then I agree with you. But the OP says that based on where it was placed, it seems to have been left out for others. Which I agree is inappropriate; it’s like coming to the break room to find a stack of religious pamphlets. Throw them out.
Please don’t toss the girl scout cookie order form
Normalizing anti-science quacks because they have “some” “reasonable” things to say is how we get anti-vax conspiracy theorists in positions of massive power.
Social media also spreads false information quicker than ever before. Before the internet, the only ways to get information available to the general public were print media, television, and radio; all of which fact-checked and edited everything before making it public. Now, anyone with an internet connection can post anything to social media, and within seconds, it can be copied and re-posted and seen by millions of people.
I’m not disagreeing about the power of social media, but I think we need to remember that the National Enquirer and its ilk were a thing, and vicious gossip columnists (look up Hedda Hopper) were a thing, long before even aol.com existed, let alone modern social media. Not all print media was fact-checked.
Yeah, but those tabloids usually had a disclaimer saying they were for entertainment only and not to be taken seriously.
Presumably people would have the same reaction if someone left a pamphlet extolling the virtues of Ozempic for promoting weight loss. Or a flyer promoting a local gym with a program “lose those extra pounds before summertime!”
Not at all the same. Ozempic and working out at the gym are both weight loss approved by medical doctors, so it’s not spreading false information the way the pamphlet in the letter was.
And if your concern is that it’s fat-shaming, I disagree. It’s not like someone directly handed a pamphlet to an overweight coworker and said “I noticed you’re fat, and I thought this could help you lose weight!” Simply posting an ad for Ozempic or the gym in a common area isn’t fat-shaming. It’s no different than ads for Ozempic or a gym on TV, the subway, or the internet.
I mean…I don’t want any ads for medication left in my office break room.
Now you mention it, I don’t want any ads for anything left in my office break room. Coupons, maybe. Seven-page lectures on any topic, nope.
I don’t either. Especially when there are now websites that will give you a quick telehealth appointment with one of their providers and then prescribe it. Easy-peasy.
I looked into Ro, one of these sites. I took their assessment and they said that I was a good candidate. Then I looked up possible drug interactions based what I have prescribed. There were several moderate ones and one high-risk. I should not have been cleared for this.
If I saw a pamphlet for it, I’d trash it. I’d trash the cleanse one too.
I’m automatically suspicious of anything so heavily advertised. Entire train cars with only their ads, as well as every second or third commercial on TV. It’s everywhere.
To be fair, when my docs and I were rejigging my medication regime a bit over a year ago, they made a few suggestions of alternative meds which I researched and said no to based on potential interactions.
(one was a suggestion to replace my panic attack meds with sertraline, which since I remembered titrating off of it when I got medicated for ADHD and no longer needed medication for generalised anxiety caused by untreated ADHD, I chose to titrate off the panic attack meds and not replace them with anything. Another suggestion was to replace my melatonin with something that does some other things I’ll benefit from, and one of the other doctors wanted to replace that replacement med with something that interacts with sertraline AND with my asthma medication)
I think the overthinking starts well before the content itself–it was left in a common area, where sometimes people leave stuff intending others to see it. But it could just as easily been a printoff intended for one person, or someone’s lunchtime reading accidentally left behind, or something set in a random spot by one person by accident that another person put in the “reading material” pile because on first glance that’s what it looked like. And even if OP wishes others wouldn’t read this stuff or print it for others, that’s the definition of “not your business.” The right response is just binning it, and only consider it an issue if these kinds of articles keep cropping up in a common reading material pile, which suggests intentionality to putting the stuff there and a misunderstanding of what the pile is for (from what OP said, industry-related stuff).
Commenting rules ask us to take letter writers at their word. You’re making up a viewpoint that isn’t in the letter.
Even if it is genuinely helpful to someone, work isn’t the place for medical or health talk. It simply isn’t.
LW1
I totally agree with Alison on this.
Put it in the trash.
If you are worried, sneak it out to sonewhere else and trash it.
Absolutely not. The rise of orthorexia and people taking drugs designed for completely disregulated insulin production for weight loss is has not arisen out of nowhere.
People selling potentially harmful diets while pointing at evidence-based medicine and saying *that’s* the scam (drug companies suck and MDs are variable. That doesn’t mean suddenly requiring evidence of efficacy is… bad?) are truly awful, whether they buy their own marketing or not.
There are complex social issues behind the current level of anti-science, anti-medicine, anti-vax sentiment, some of which I am very sympathetic to. That doesn’t mean it’s not incredibly, measurably harmful on a population scale.
#2 Just want to say that the answer to this letter is brilliant text-book coaching approach. Anyone would be lucky to have a manager or mentor who would encourage them to reflect systematically in this way.
Does it actually matter what they think?
You don’t know who this person is.
They’re aware that the vast majority of people take prescription drugs.
Why does it bother you that someone who has already exhibited poor judge *might* look down on you?
Humans are social animals. It is entirely natural for us to care about what other people think about us. And particularly in a work context it may actually matter if someone has a poor opinion of you; even if they have poor judgement their opinion may affect how they treat you, and how they speak of you to the other people you work with.
Other people’s opinions are the water in which we swim, and it’s naive at best to think they don’t ‘matter’.
It can be incredibly offensive to “blame” someone for their health problems, ie., if people with cancer ate organic only food, they wouldn’t have cancer.
I got told once if I prayed I wouldn’t have allergies.
I got told (not directly; they thought they were being “nice”) that I wouldn’t have thyroid problems if I weren’t so fat. To be clear: I am fat, and it is not because of my thyroid problems (I know that kind exists because I can get thrown into tremendous weight gain if my meds are wrong, which has happened before). However, being fat also didn’t CAUSE my thyroid problems. There are risk factors that I have for my thyroid disorder, but weight is not listed among them.
But hearing someone say that they are sure that if I just lost some weight, I wouldn’t need to take a pill every day is soooooo annoying.
It doesn’t matter what they think if they remain quiet about it, but…it’s not that uncommon for people who are so into this kind of stuff that they leave pamphlets bashing doctors and “conventional” medicine lying around for others to find, to be…pretty evangelical about it. And there are people who get really offensive or pushy. We’ve seen a number of letters here, the most egregious being the person who ended up coming to the LW’s house to harass them with their MLM products.
I’m not saying that the person would do anything like that and of course, we do hear the most extreme examples here because those are the ones people need advice on how to deal with so they aren’t representative of the usual train of events, but I think it is understandable that the LW might be concerned.
Because sometimes the people who have exhibited poor judgement may have power over you?
And what is your actionable advice?
OP preemptively feeling ashamed of their health and waiting to be fired every moment because some unknown person MIGHT be in a position of power over them and this unknown person MIGHT look down on them?
I am with I should really pick a name. OP doesn’t know that person, so it’s completely irrelevant what they are thinking.
Don’t really have any, other than “pay attention closely” rather than just being paranoid. The LW doesn’t really know who put it there, knows there a potential problem, therefore needs to just pay attention.
But there is not necessarily a problem. So far, this was a one-time occurence and it is not even clear if the person who forgot it there is supporting all the claims in the document or mocking them.
It doesn’t help OP to assume problems (or judgement from their coworkers) and to be on guard when there is no problematic pattern.
That person might sign your paycheck.
#2, be prepared to hear anything from, “your assessment was correct, the process of acting on it was sub-optimum” to “we suspect your team is more self-organizing than you give them credit for, or room to grow into being, so we actively want them with a more malleable, hands-off lead.”
It’s so easy to mistake “seeing something incredibly clearly” for “this is the singular reasonable take on the situation.” Yet (even if your vision is, in fact, closest to reality… the best informed… statistically most likely) your bosses are allowed to have a different vision or different goal or different chosen course of action. Unless you’re self-employed (and interestingly, sometimes not even then) do you get to agree with the boss 100% of the time.
What my boss told me the next day was: this was not yours to decide and once you brought it up to leadership you should have left it alone. Very true! I know this and rationally agree with JSPA that in the end I just need to agree with the boss.
Unfortunately the case is more like “this team is very self-organising and high performing and the new team lead will micromanage them to death”. But now I just get to see how it plays out – from a safe distance and not involving myself at all, I swear ;-)
In which case they may be using the very competent to break the new lead of bad habits? (It’s harder to convince someone to back off from micromanagement if their team(s) have some legit weak spots.) I suppose it’s also possible the bosses confuse “adequate management” and “micromanagement.” But in that case what you have is a greater cultural / philosophy problem.
Also, inside your head, you don’t need to agree with anyone, but in a chain of command, you do need to support decisions. Functionally, that means working for the desired outcome (as defined by them) of their desired process. You’ve let them know that if the new guy doesn’t stick well in this role, you loved it, and would be glad to return. Now you have to be supportive and cooperative if he’s sent to you for support or pointers. It’s a new start for him; wish him well, treat him like you’re on the same side, do your own work excellently, and let some time pass to see if be rallies to the task… fails dramatically enough that everyone knows the score…or is just really good at blowing smoke up your bosses. Then proceed accordingly.
JSPA, this is such a good take: It’s so easy to mistake “seeing something incredibly clearly” for “this is the singular reasonable take on the situation.”
It’s so incredibly common for all of us to make this mistake. I see my angle very clearly, but that doesn’t make it the only possible right outcome.
I think as AAm said iin #3 it’s probably just the difference in offices. One thing I’ll add though is that the “Gifts flowing upward” is just a general suggestion, not some iron clad rule that can never be broken.
While nobody should ever feel pressure of course, there’s really nothing wrong with getting your boss a baby gift!
Yes, I also think a baby gift could be something where the ‘gifts only flow downward’ rule can be put aside. Obviously there should not be any pressure, but I would certainly treat it differently if my boss had a baby than a birthday or whatever.
Baby gifts offer “Oh! A chance to look at very tiny hats! And the hats have teensy ears!” which turning 37 or retiring do not.
yep, there were a ton of gorgeous baby clothes that I never bought for my kids because a) I was on maternity leave and had no money and b) I pictured them being covered in … stuff within twenty minutes of putting them on, so the joy was diminished. Buying them for other people has neither of these downsides. \o/
There’s a certain type of store that I think of as “baby gift” stores. Everything’s adorable, everything’s incredibly nice to touch, very bougie. SO much fun, but you’d go bankrupt trying to wholly equip a baby there.
I love when friends have babies because I get to buy them all the soft, cuddly stuffies that I feel way too old to buy for myself.
This. My daughter was very taken aback when her friends started to have babies in their early 20s. I was delighted to have a legitimate reason to browse the baby clothes in Target.
I can never resist those tiny socks.
Even though I know enough about babies to realize how impractical they are. They are just SO CUTE.
(I’m curious why your daughter was “very taken aback” by her friends starting to have babies at a very typical age to start having babies? Most of my friends started having babies in their early 20s, too. I was the outlier with fertility issues who didn’t have mine until I was 28 and then couldn’t have any more.)
What’s typical really depends where you are! The youngest of my friends to have kids were late twenties. The mean age for first children in the UK is around 30, which means rather more than half of children are born to parents over 30.
(I once read a whole Facebook thread of people being confused that Bandit and Chili in Bluey were kids in the 80s and had children who were 6 and under in 2018– if Bluey was born in 2012, that’s Bandit and Chilli having their first child in their early thirties, which seems extremely normal to me, but the thread was full of people would couldn’t work out why they’d wait that long!)
I mean, I know this varies among cultures and countries. “Very taken aback” just seemed like an extreme reaction I guess. Like I can 100% imagine being very taken aback if your friends all started having babies in high school! Whereas anywhere from early 20s to early 30s just seems … completely unexceptional. (Among people I know IRL, the most common options seem to be “first kids in your 20s” and “no kids”, with “first kids in your 30s” being an unusual, though not unheard of, choice.)
Early twenties would definitely have been “taken aback” in my circles. I think the first of my peers to get married were around 25-6, and first definitely-planned pregnancies were a couple of years after that. If anyone in my peer group had got pregnant in their early 20s we would absolutely have assumed that was unplanned.
If I do the math for my circles, it looks like this: Germany does schooling late (and a year longer at the time), so one would graduate highschool at 19 or 20. The boys had military service. Then go to uni and do at least a master’s. Which puts one at 24-27 to graduate. About 3 years to get established in a career and save up some money. So 27-30 to start thinking about kids. Later for those who got a doctorate (30-36).
Some I knew from high school circles that didn’t go to uni did start with kids in their mid twenties, and they seemed like aliens to us. Having kids during one’s studies, on purpose, would definitely have seemed quite unusual (except maybe during the doctorate. But I worked with radioactivity, so that was a no for pregnancy at that time).
In parts of the US kids that young is apparently normal enough. Someone was shocked that I was 30 because I only had two kids, so they assumed I was 20.
Hah, I’m *still* thinking “oh my God, but you’re so young??” when there’s pregnancy announcements in my circle and well, I’m 36!
(The average age here was very clearly 30+, I’d say for most of them between, like, 32 and 38 or something? But a lot of my friends are also from the same field as myself, which means you finish your PhD at 28 or so if you’re quite quick, then maybe postdoc, maybe a longish job search… almost nobody lands their first “real” job before their early 30s.)
Also, for most people who go to university, early 20s is very much still about the student life and thoughts of pregnancy are *very* far off (except for being afraid of unplanned ones, of course!)
Yeah I had my first at 26 and was the first in my friend group by far. Everyone was politely baffled that I would do such a thing. Then I moved cities, made new friends with other parents of toddlers, and suddenly I was the oldest in the group. It varies hugely.
i’m in the UK and there’s 3 months between me and my sister in law. she has adult working children in their late 20s as she had her kids in her early 20s (and was very much the young mum at school drop off). my daughter is at school (6th form) as i had her in my early 30s. I’d say that was kind of average for my friends.
Personally, I think the best way to do this is get a big pack of blank onesies and some fabric markers, grab some grocery store cupcakes and have everyone meet up in the lunchroom to eat cupcakes and decorate onesies. It’s cheap, the onesies turn out much cuter than a corporate branded one, you get more of them for essentially the same money you would pay to have one screen printed, and everyone gets to go eat cupcakes and do a craft during the work day. It is my favorite baby shower activity because it is introvert friendly and actually accomplishes something useful.
Yes, my boss is pregnant after a long battle with infertility and losses. She’s only been my boss for 2 years, but I’ve worked with her for over 10, so I went in on a gift for her with two other coworkers in other departments who have also been here for a long time.
I could’ve contributed to the larger group gift, but I really wanted to get her something separate. I generally don’t gift up, but this felt different to me.
I agree. I think for truly rare experiences, its a bit different.
While I may not be inclined to give chip in for my boss’ birthday lunch, I’d have no problem throwing in for a wedding gift. Hell, at my last job, my boss’ dad had a major heath issue, and she was spending a lot of time at the hospital. Our team threw in money and got her an Uber eats gift card. I didn’t feel that was inappropriate at all.
Just because they are your boss, doesn’t mean your humanity goes out the window and you can’t do something kind for them at times.
An appropriate baby gift for someone you know thru work is a hat or a blanket, not a $700 stroller (or whatever it was).
I don’t entirely agree, many parents might have way more hats and blankets than they could possibly use, and might be very grateful for a bigger piece of gear, and if a team of 15 people is all chipping in $10-$20 each, then a couple hundred dollars is not crazy. Yeah, $700 is a lot, but a $250-ish backpacking child carrier is a nice gift that the office gave to my coworker for her first kid. I think it was from the company, I don’t recall being asked to contribute.
#1- completely agree that the pamphlet should be trashed and this is cause for concern, especially if it happens again.
Suggest that you not just put it in the break room trash, though. Then whoever left it, or anyone else who wanted to read it, could take it out of the trash. Suggest you take it with you off the premises – I would take it home – and either put it in your recycling or tear it up and put it in the kitchen trash.
I lean toward tearing it up and mixing it with food scraps so it’s unreadable. Just in case anyone else finds it in the recycling.
I lean toward tearing it up and mixing it with food scraps so it’s unreadable. Just in case anyone else finds it in the recycling.
It’s a dumb pamphlet about Shakeology, not your tax return.
Why spread more bad influence if it’s not necessary? It’s a small thing, but it will help prevent others from finding it and possibly spreading pseudoscience even further.
I would hope the office has a shredder.
Shredding it seems like overkill. Also, nobody is fishing things out of break room trash cans.
Are you completely sure about that? Suppose the person who left it finds it in the trash can and gets offended? That would make a bad dynamic worse.
If it’s taken off the premises to be discarded, the person who left it will assume someone liked it and took it with them.
https://www.askamanager.org/2019/06/im-in-trouble-for-re-sorting-a-coworkers-trash-and-im-enraged.html
Based on past letters here we can say with certainty that some people do in fact fish things out of office garbage cans.
Under desk trash cans and lunchroom trash cans are a whole different kettle of fish. Especially in that one of them could have literal fish in it. Crazy people will go through under desk trash cans that mostly have papers in it, but it takes a level of unhinged that we usually don’t see to go through the trash can that’s filled with food scraps and coffee grinds.
IME it depends on the office. The trash in my office break room often only has wrappers and food boxes in it, not actual food scraps. So going through it wouldn’t be that unsanitary.
There are at least three “going through the trash” letters here:
https://www.askamanager.org/2014/10/my-coworker-went-through-my-trash-can-to-get-me-in-trouble.html
https://www.askamanager.org/2019/06/im-in-trouble-for-re-sorting-a-coworkers-trash-and-im-enraged.html
And this one includes taping ripped up pieces of paper back together (!):
https://www.askamanager.org/2022/04/my-coworker-went-through-my-trash-using-bereavement-leave-for-a-vacation-and-more.html
A reasonable person wouldn’t fish things out of a break room trash can, but anyone who is promoting pamphlets like this one has already proven that they aren’t reasonable.
I wouldn’t shred it myself, but I would trash it in a different location.
I see you’ve never met a zealot.
Dump it in the kitchen trash with used coffee grounds artfully arranged across it.
Exactly! Bonus if there are wet vegetable scraps, too. :)
You do understand this isn’t the only copy in existence, right?
But it will be one less, and potentially at least one person who doesn’t find it later and get misled.
I believe in making a difference by doing small things when I get the opportunity.
Who pulls things out of the lunch room garbage?? I don’t care how tasty the shake looks, I have much better ways of finding reding material.
Tinfoil Garbage Cans
The LW taking the pamphlet home with them to destroy it like it’s uber sensitive financial or medical information–tearing it into tiny pieces and mixing it with food trash, for example–or mixing it in with the food trash at work is NOT the best way to be dealing with this. There are countless letters on this site about people who have gone through the trash at work, redone the recycling sorting at work, made a huge to-do about office composting, etc…and in every one of those letters, the people doing the actual trash-picking are never coming off as rational, level-headed, high-caliber employees. Even if they’re the letter writer (there was a recent 2024 reprint of the “I got in trouble for sorting the recycling at my office” letter. Its original 2019 letter had a 2020 update that was even more depressing because the LW was STILL clueless and obstinate).
The LW is worried about the slim chance that a coworker may find out they’re on some kind of mental health medication but they should be more worried that–if they follow the advice of burying the pamphlet deep in the office trash can or even just taking it home–they will be subsequently known as Madison That Weirdo Who Threw Out My Thrive Smoothie Recipe Under Used Coffee Grounds and Banana Peels. And depending on the size of the office, that news will come out.
And frankly–as someone who is also on mental health medication (depression and anxiety among other things)–continuing to involve themselves in this maybe might not be such a good idea for the LW. By that, I mean, sneaking the brochure out to dispose of it, or trying to destroy it in the office without anyone seeing it, etc. What might be a better idea, for the LW, is to work on strengthening their “this is not my thing, I’m going to go about my day,” muscle and save their “gotta right the injustices” motivations for other, better-deserving problems. There’s probably a few out there right now.
Just in case anyone else finds it in the recycling…Why spread more bad influence if it’s not necessary? It’s a small thing, but it will help prevent others from finding it and possibly spreading pseudoscience even further.
Oh my god, it’s not a step-by-step on how to make C4, or the full text of AH’s biography, or even an all-photos edition of Hustler/em> sitting out in the breakroom. It is the Luna Bar equivalent of a Dr. Bronner’s soap label crossed with your third cousin’s latest Facebook pro-RFK memes. You have a higher likelihood of being exposed to the anti-doctor, anti-medicine rhetoric on the nightly news (via White House updates) than you do because Chad from Marketing got ensnared by his neighbor’s NeoLife MLM and now has to sign up up 20 people for his own downline, so he brought in his 5 catalogues to work (any more copies will cost him and he already sunk $2000 into his start-up fee).
Again: grown adults at work should not be messing around with the trash like raccoons (even sanitation workers generally do not do this back at the actual plant).
A “branded onsie” certainly says a lot here.
Costco, for example, has lovely Kirkland brand baby clothes that are well made.
As for the costs of kids, though I know it’s not the office question, second hand often has name brands at very low prices.
As to the office question, I wouldn’t want to contribute to a gift for someone who seems to be so concerned about the price tag of it.
Enjoy your baby and let this go.
I assumed that by “branded onesie” the LW meant a onesie with the company logo on it, not a designer-label onesie.
1000 %. My company does this. Our company logo is hideous and dated but it’s truly the the recognition that counts, here.
Definitely. My company loves printing its logo on things. They’ve given me a fleece, a vest, a baseball cap, multiple bags, several tee-shirts, several tumblers, mugs, beer kozies, and when my kids were born, onesies.
Ditto. I thought they were expecting a onesie with Joe’s Llama Grooming Supplies or whatever.
Like if AAM sold branded onesies that said “Wait, this one actually is illegal.”
Or “Your boss sucks and isn’t going to change.”
Or “I’m wearing bananapants”
That one would be a bright yellow onesie, yes?
I would 100% buy that one. It would be bright yellow and have a tasteful banana logo somewhere.
Or just actual bananapants with a small AAM logo somewhere!
Would the legs just be covered in banana print or would each of them be one big banana though? I guess with a baby, it might even be roughly to scale!
I mean — once we started weaning, my children were wearing bananapants 6 days out of 7. Had not realised how much banana stains until I had a baby.
Right. My company sends out a gift basket with a branded onesie, along with baby essentials. I’m not sure if LW’s employer also does this and she didn’t get one (if that’s the case, speak up!), or if they don’t it at all and she wants them to start to.
Agreed. My father-in-law’s company gives a company branded onesie to new babies or grandbabies of employees and asks for a picture of them in it to put up in the office.
Usually, people say “name-brand” when they mean what you’re suggesting, and “branded” when it has the company logo on it.
#4 – I totally get OP4’s wondering how best to handle their good press. If you work at a functional company where your co-workers/ higher-ups would be delighted to see good press for OP and the company, you share and say, “hey, look at this great thing!” If you work at a dysfunctional company where management …. isn’t that, you run the risk of alienating your managers and feeling some kind of unstated wrath.
I was once quoted as an expert in a nationally-syndicated advice column. I had serious trepidation about sharing with my boss, because he was so unpredictable that I had no idea if he’d be happy or scream at me. I shared and he didn’t care at all. That is, until he started getting emails from friends in other parts of the country who saw that his business got mentioned by this Very Widely Read columnist and suddenly what I did was okay. But, this invited wrath from The Office Bully Who Wished She Was In Management, because she believed I should have sought permission first and given everyone on staff a chance to weigh in.
LW1 – I wouldn’t go to HR unless it becomes a pattern and the contents in the pamphlets escalates. Not to downplay the fact that the context of this company is problematic, but I could see some pretty innocent explanations for leaving that specific pamphlet in the kitchen area. Maybe the coworker who brought it in was talking to other coworkers about their favorite protein shake recipes, or they really like the protein shake(s), wanted to share the recipe, and are clueless about the larger implications of detox shakes/ “Wellness” culture. That doesn’t make it okay, but I’ve worked with/known people who I could see doing something like this without sharing any of the beliefs with the recipe creator or even knowing them. That doesn’t make it an appropriate thing to share at work and I think throwing it out (somewhere the coworker won’t see it in the trash) is a reasonable response.
I agree with this. I love smoothies, I make my own lotions and deodorant. Unfortunately, a lot of the recipes tend to come from people who are anti-drugs or anti-science.
I simply would chuck the magazine away and move on.
Not that I’m defending the idealogy behind the brochure but there was definitely a thing for a while to praise BeachBody’s workouts while never getting involved in the non-workout aspects–the supplements, the smoothies, the overall MLM-ness, etc (and I’m not necessarily defending BeachBody either). And yeah, it is very much a thing to be like, “I know MLMs are not a great thing but the products themselves are usually okay!” without realizing to the extent why MLMs can be terrible (some in particularly can be very predatory).
And I don’t know that the scenario in this letter is actually an MLM but it’s a similar circumstance I’ve noticed where people might use say, Mary Kay makeup or Pampered Chef tools (or even Cutco knives) without really realizing just how messed up and exploitative the whole MLM business model is.
#2’s situation doesn’t sound unsalvageable, but you can’t target specific people like that. I think the kind of amused tone of the letter is hiding the fact that this was pretty bad. If I was that other team lead I might not fully trust you for a while
The LW said in a comment that her manager told her to apologize to the other team lead, so it was in fact pretty bad
LW1 – Is someone in your office shilling “detox” MLM type products? I saw some of this type of stuff show up in my workplace when one of my coworkers got into Herbalife or something similar. Dude even pulled me aside one day to try to sell me weight loss supplements. He was a jackass, but I felt kind of bad for him. I heard through the grapevine that he sold a lot of his personal property to buy into the company, and I’m sure he never recouped that investment.
LW1: With the current secretary of HHS suggesting people don’t need psychiatric meds, they just need to be (forcibly?) housed in remote areas to grow organic foods until they feel better, this seems a lot darker than it would have a few months ago.
WHAT??????????
Yeaaaahhh, I feel like this one escaped being noticed by a lot of people because of everything else horrible that’s happening.
He’s selling it as community-supported recovery for addicts, calling them “wellness farms” or “health camps,” and including any psychiatric drug. SSRIs, anything for ADHD.
Funded by a tax on cannabis sales.
Putting people in camps never ends well.
I just googled “how to move to Canada.”
As though taking a whole bunch of people with ADHD, off their meds or not, and putting them in a camp is going to result in anything other than chaos and escape.
The whole “addicts” thing is beyond offensive. Also, addicts don’t forget to take their meds.
RFKjr is awful and has been for decades.
RFKjr is awful and has been for decades.
He’s a racist MF as well.
LW1: toss it in recycling and move on.
LW3: different teams do different things.
I don’t really want anyone pushing health related stuff at work, even if it’s “regular” medicine. I don’t want to go to the breakroom and find pamphlets on Tylenol or Claritin or whatever else.
That said, personally I’d just ignore it. Doesn’t seem HR worthy but also sounds like there are other things going on in LW’s office
LW #3 thoughtful gifts at an office usually have one or two thoughtful people behind it. It’s not like everyone thought about it- 1 person did and organized everyone else.
It totally sucks that no one on your team had their shit together when you came back from leave. They suck. But I just wanted to put in perspective that it’s more of an issue of luck and probably not personal. I wouldn’t say anything-it’s just going to be awkward
Yeah, LW3 I resonate with the feeling of being hurt. I had my first baby about 2 months before another colleague (call her Anna) had her first (different teams, but we do work together regularly) and shortly before I went on leave I saw an email from someone (call her Beth, on yet another different, third team) circulating Anna’s baby registry and encouraging people to get her something from it. I was a little hurt at first that no one had done that for me, and initially chalked it up to the fact that Anna has a much longer tenure at our org than me. Later, I realized that Beth had also sent an email with Anna’s wedding registry when she got married (that was right as I joined and was still learning cultural norms), and did not do the same for another colleague who got married while I was on leave (and this one was on Beth’s team!). So now I’ve just sort of chalked it up to Beth having a really vested interest in supporting Anna for whatever reason and taking an initiative that isn’t actually a norm in our org. It stings less when you realize it’s not systemic, and not about you, specifically.
I think the same thing happens in social/friendship groups. It kinda depends on who your bestie is within the group and whether their nature is to organise that kinda thing. It’s effectively like having a “sponsor” to pull it together for you and you can absolutely be part of a friendship group but not have someone who is naturally your “sponsor” and so you miss out.
LW’s team doesn’t suck for not doing something that a team in a different office that she rarely overlaps with did!
Just adding that having a new baby is really hard and being a working mom is unbelievably hard. I wish we could all buy you some cute baby gear or espresso martinis or I could come watch your adorable baby for the weekend do you could sleep. My kids are cranky teens, I would love some baby cuddles.
Why “they suck”? If you insist on the team sucking because they don’t do baby showers, shouldn’t it be “you (all) suck” – to include OP who is after all also part of this very team? It isn’t like OP had written that they usually organize thoughtful gifts for others but didn’t get any themselves – it just seems that nobody organizes those things in their team.
her team does not suck for not wanted to spend their personal money on a coworker’s baby. a lot of people are going through it financially right now and I’m most definitely prioritizing my own bills over a gift for someone who isn’t even my friend, just a coworker. the LW is in a better financial position than most if she can afford a baby
OP2 – I’m pretty sure you’re going to be OK here. Unless your boss is wildly abnormal or the overreactive type, as long as you show the kind of understanding of the misstep in that meeting as you did in your letter, your boss will probably see that you know what you did and the ramifications of it.
Now, regarding your coworker… Depending on the tone of the conversation with your boss, you might consider going a little farther with what you say, regarding why you did what you did. You’ll have to be very careful, as you still need to show understanding of your role in what happened. But if there were delays or other issues created by your coworker’s lack of knowledge, attention to detail, etc. you might want to figure out a way to bring that up, so it doesn’t just appear that you’re vindictive.
OP1: I’d be tempted to stamp (citation needed) in big red letters on any of that health shaming stuff but I agree with Alison that yeeting it into the bin is less effort.
And it is shaming. To those of able bodies and minds this may be an annoyance at worse but to those of us told by society and doctors that we are to blame for what’s wrong with us it’s like pouring acid into a wound.
Hard agree.
Down to the bottom of the recycle bin. Rinse and repeat if it shows up again.
Hopefully it was a once-off, but if it keeps showing up, or if the pamphlets start to proliferate, then maybe consider at least keeping track of titles and the dates they showed up.
I worked between two sites that were across the street from one another. One had a practice of giving gifts, the other didn’t. Guess which one I liked more lol.
The one that didn’t?
… This sounds like an elaborate set-up for “Why did WritingIsHard cross the road?”
“Either in order to avoid giving gifts or in order to receive gifts”?
I don’t know…either one is a valid option!
OP #2: “I’m a team lead (no HR responsibility) who was recently told I’d be focusing on one shiny new initiative while giving up a current team.”
The question I’d ask myself is why you were told to give up a current team in order to focus on a shiny new initiative. Why just you and not your team? There may be a perfectly good explanation. But it could also be seen as an excuse to get you out of management.
It’s hard to say. But you were pretty clearly out of line here. Based on this story, I’d question your managerial skills, so it’s worth wondering if your managers were questioning your managerial skills before this story happened. If so, this story won’t do so much damage to you as opposed to merely confirming their already existing views.
In that case, you might want to ask whether you want to be a manager or are good at it. If you don’t want to be a manager, then you’ve probably convinced management that you should be put on the expert individual contributor path. If you do want to be a manager, then you may be in trouble. They took away your team before this story, and this won’t help any in getting you a second chance. I don’t think it’s a deal breaker per se, but I think they’re going to want to see improved judgement for awhile going forward.
Yeah this is also what I fear. I might have really shot myself in the foot here. The senior leaders (grandboss & up) went to great lenghts to tell me the new team I’ll be leading is super important etc, but the fact remains it’s just a horizontal move and not upwards. If only I had thought more about my own interests – it would not at all have reflected badly on me if my old team would start underperforming under a new team lead…
I misunderstood the situation. I thought that you were demoted so that you were no longer a team lead. I didn’t realize it was a horizontal move to a new team that’s super important and not as organized as your current team.
In that light, I’d be inclined to see the move as a slight promotion. Higher visibility and a harder challenge. Especially if they move your old team to a new team lead that’s now running three teams. Obviously that person isn’t going to be spending a lot of time with just one team.
Is someone on your old team close to a promotion to team lead? Because it would make sense for someone to be the new team leads assistant to help with the old team. And if you think that person just needs a little bit of seasoning, well, now they’ll have a mentor.
I don’t think you should root for your old team to fail. Management might decide to leave you in place next time if that happens.
LW1, I took great glee in tossing the multiple weight loss pamphlets someone left in my work’s lactation room a few years back. Post-partum women who are pumping milk multiple times a day at the office, in a bunker of a room in the building’s basement no less, have enough to worry about already without pressure to lose weight!
Plus, if you’re breastfeeding, you’re naturally going to gain weight, and it’s not because you’re eating too much.
One time I found Chick tracts in a rest area bathroom. They ended up in the menstrual product disposal cans.
Thank you for the proper disposal.
What are Chick tracts?
Small pamphlets telling you to accept Jesus as your personal saviour or you’re going to hell. They usually have little stories in comic form.
The one decrying Dungeons and Dragons is particularly amusing.
To be specific, HEAVILY Evangelical Christian Tracts drawn by one Jack Chick (RIP 2016), including not only the “D&D involves eventually learning Real Spells and Real Satanism” but also the “Devil’s Cookie” tract basically condemning the Catholic version of Mass as a horrible distortion of God’s word. (Evangelicals really don’t like Catholicism, but there were plenty of other digs at any other kind of Christianity that doesn’t conform to their extremely narrow box).
We got one in our mailbox once in an anonymous envelope – we spent a while speculating if they thought we weren’t Christians, or knew we were (in their eyes) the wrong kind of Christians, or if they were, despite the full address written out by hand, plastering all the block/neighbourhood with them.
In your mailbox? Damn. I usually got them under my windshield wipers, and the whole neighborhood or parking lot would be dotted with them.
Anyone can drop something in a mailbox, which is why the point that surprised me was handwriting an address, complete with postal code that would have to be looked up, on an envelope without even a stamp on it.
(Postal codes can cover as little as half a block in a Canadian residential area, so this involves looking up a lot of codes)
And as a new parent, you don’t have the time to drive out to a crossroads at midnight and set fire to them.
Love the callback!
For anyone who hasn’t read it:
https://www.askamanager.org/2014/05/what-was-your-worst-career-sin.html#comment-451577
#3 My office can’t figure out how to handle presents. One person went on maternity and got thing. The next one got self made onsies, giftcads, cards. Part-time intern left, she got a gift card. Another employee left the same day, it wasn’t aknowledges at all. He just left his laptop on the table. One person left after 40 years and got nothing whereas someone left after 10 years and got a cake. No logic. Other than if you happen to be friends with poeople who organise collections OR you’re managers fave.
When my coworker and I were going out on maternity leave about the same time our boss decided to throw a little party for us – snacks and cake.
The Big Boss said “No.”
When asked why (because we’d had plenty of baby showers over the years) the answer was “because not everyone can go”.
What? The one person who couldn’t come into the office was the Big Boss’s EA, but we’d thrown her at least one baby shower, and no one was trying to exclude her, so we never really figured that out.
So we just had the party anyway and spent our own money on snacks and cake. And didn’t invite Big Boss.
(We also had a time many years ago when a lot of people were leaving for a new semi-rival company where we were told we couldn’t have any more going away parties because “it sounds like you’re happy the person is leaving”.
OK, sure, whatever. So we started having those parties off-site and not inviting the big-wigs.)
WRT baby gifts and any other sort of workplace gift: they cause more trouble than they solve if the office isn’t careful to give equally. Wedding gifts, birthday cakes, years of service awards, welcome to our team lunches, all of that: if some people get nice gifts and others are forgotten it fosters resentment.
It’s not clear to me what actually happened in #2. What is a “scrum master”?
I also am unclear but with googling it seems like scrum is a method of team productivity/working, and the Scrum Master more or less handles how all of that gets done? I guess similar to a project manager?
There’s an explanation in a thread higher up. Basically it’s related to a specific work style but is similar to a project manager.
More like a team manager’s assistant than an actual team manager.
I know what a scrum master is and I was still confused. It was worded very strangely!
Same- I am acquainted with that term, but still overall the story was hard to follow. There was a lot of description that was unclear to me, but the big sin seems to have been “I prodded about timelines in a group chat.”
From that, it’s hard to tell how much you crossed the line. It sounds like you overstepped but it’s not clear if it came across as a total showdown where you were facing off against the powers that be, or could be seen more benignly as just asking questions to management about something you could legitimately be curious about.
And then there’s me — I forward anything like that to my supervisor, my director, and the directors of the two departments I work with/for (it’s complicated lol, I basically answer to three departments). This is in local government.
Got an email from a resident praising me for handling something so efficiently? Forwarded. Social media message thanking the whole department for the way something was handled? Forwarded. I don’t feel weird because I think of it as reflecting on all of us working toward a common goal. I’m just as quick to forward if I get things about others as well!
In my experience, “…under 30 employees” and “HR person” unfortunately do not usually go together.
For LW#1, I’m pretty sure I found the pamphlet she was upset about, and it honestly wasn’t as weird as she made it out, and certainly not garbage. It was five pages of really normal smoothie recipes that you make out of normal supermarket ingredients. Think spinach/kale, flax seed, blueberries, bananas, with a sprinkle of cinnamon kind of recipes. There was a tiny bit of promotion at the beginning (these smoothies will make you feel great!) and a short bio of the doctor at the end, but nothing that extreme. I would think the vast majority of people wouldn’t read those parts, and just look at the recipes, which were actually pretty great. And most people wouldn’t go down a long rabbit hole learning everything about this guy.
I do love a good veggie/frozen fruit/flax seed smoothie though. Off to go make one! YUM. I don’t make them to push a health agenda, I just literally would rather have a smoothie than a boring sandwich and chips. There is a reason they’re so popular, they are tasty.
I’m glad you like your smoothies, but you’re really minimizing OP’s concerns. We can look up anything on our smart phones in two seconds, so it’s not as onerous as you make it seem for her to have done some quick research on the organization/author. It’s not harmless recipe sharing when it’s being presented as health advice.
Do you work with LW#1? I’m wondering how you know what’s in the leaflet? Otherwise I’ll just take LW#1 at their word.
yeah this is a strange comment! Who assumes they know what pamphlets are out there?
There are a couple of weird comments like this. Maybe LW’s read Ask a Manager and recognized themselves.
*LW’s coworkers
honestly, if it is indeed the same pamphlet, this would make me more worried to see instead of less! a lot of scams or people of general ill intent are good at starting off small so they look reasonable, and then normalizing their rhetoric more and more until it becomes a problem. it is a recruiting tactic for the other stuff, basically. and the other stuff is indeed harmful. sure, being disabled myself, i tend to have my ears up more for spotting this kind of thing – you can even accuse me of being a little twitchy about it. but if it’s rooted in ableism, even if that ableism is something you only find clearly and overtly when looking up to see if the doctor promoting it is legit, it’s… still rooted in ableism.
so just dismissing concerns about it means covering for the nastiness it is driven by and has already developed into. it’s normalizing the idea that this doctor is a reputable source who should be listened to. that’s pretty dangerous to do for a quack! why cape for this guy? why let him attach his name and bio to the concept of “a smoothie is a nice treat with fruits and even veggies in it”? he’s just using that perfectly good sentiment as a Trojan horse so he can be seen as a good and reasonable doctor people should listen to for their health. smoothies are nice enough to not be sullied by someone trying to market their snake oil (because the bio at the end very much isn’t for decoration – it is marketing, and the next step of that marketing is for people to look him up and listen to all the other dubious ideas).
rebuke this in the name of the noble smoothie, lol!
more generally, it’s not that helpful to dismiss concerns when they’re brought to you in terms of systemic bigotry. you might not find it objectionable. you may think it’s totally fine. there are a lot of things where the eagles will sit around and say they don’t understand why their neighbors are so against the owl that has moved in, while ignoring that their upset neighbors are mice, and mice have different worries and lives than they do as eagles. there’s things where you may feel able to dismiss it as harmless because it doesn’t exist to harm *you*, but very much is there to harm others. so as a little disabled mouse… maybe trust our squeaking when we tell you this owl is up to no good, even if he’s perfectly fine to you as an eagle.
If you think introducing people to magical thinking around food* isn’t literally designed to be inoffensive, so people can slowly “do their own research” and get drawn into far less benign beliefs, you are much mistaken.
*Food can feel magical if you find and address an allergen or a serious deficiency/your diet was just extremely lacking in micronutrients before, but that is not remotely where this line of thinking stops.
LW1, listen to Alison instead of me, because my first impulse would be to toss it in the trash… and then print out some articles outlining how many of these supplements are dangerously under-regulated and not checked for quality so are often full of things you might actually need to rely on more than your liver to detox – like lead or cyanide. or maybe just some pass-agg flyers celebrating your wonderful liver and kidneys that work hard to do all the detoxing you need, aside from very limited circumstances where you need an assist from dialysis, chelation, etc… or even the beautifully snarky infographic listing all of the ingredients in an apple, full of chemicals with big scary names, but ultimately only as fearsome as being menaced by dihydrogen monoxide. (did you know that everyone who consumes dihydrogen monoxide will dieeeeeee?! and that it’s in your body riiiigghhhttt nnnooowwww omg!!) (hey, April fool’s day does approach, just sayin’…)
I think some people are over reacting to the smoothie recipes pamphlet/advertisement. The LW says once she googled the publishers she found the company was scientifically questionable. The pamphlet itself seems just to be smoothy recipes, I think she may be oversensitive considering some of her coworkers really seem to be into healthy living. I don’t think sharing recipes is necessarily a problem, and while the “science” here is questionable I would trust my coworkers enough with a this information – I can’t remember the last time I google the creator of a recipe. There are magazines in our breakroom, and I can’t imagine someone throwing them out based on the advertisements in them – which is essentially what the offending pamphlet is.
The pamphlet thing is fascinating to me because courts are regularly looking at whether health information you view online (eg, after googling) is your health information or just information. I see in this context that there’s reason to believe that whoever left the pamphlet meant to share it, and it’s reasonable someone meaning to share information agrees with it, but I would caution against drawing conclusions about the coworker if this was seen on a desk or accidentally left behind. People look into ideas that they don’t agree with, and sometimes they look into hard copy.
LW 4 read Likable Badass by Alison Fragale. it’s all about how to raise your status, why it’s important to talk about what the good things you do, and how to brag without sounding obnoxious.
#3 I’m side eyeing how this came up. I got a gift from my coworkers and was really careful to be quite about it in case something like this happened. I sent my boss a nice thank you and a picture of what I bought with their gift card and that was that.
The work advice is spot on but, Mom to Mom. I get it. Babies are crazy expensive, more expensive in the US than ever before. Even my parent friends with 5 year olds make comments about how they can’t afford another baby with today’s prices. And if your “village” didn’t show up I can see finding out that even a place where you should be treated equally failing to help you as much as they helped others stinging all the more. So consider your feelings validated!
I was very frugal, went without the modern things that make life easier like formula warmers or a Brezza. We did not buy the super expensive Bassinets or rockers etc. And abstained from any of the automated rockers, etc. Hand washed bottles, widened the nipples ourselves, opted to carry her in our arms etc. etc. etc. Even with all the cost savings, buying everything we could 2nd hand, her total cost (excluding medical) was $7k+.
What if the person looks down on me for taking a prescription
I mean, are you in the habit of telling your coworkers about all your prescriptions and private medical information in general, LW? Because you don’t ever HAVE to do that, you know. So like…just don’t go around announcing your Rx history at work, for starters.
PICK ONE:
1) You are well-respected … like your job … like your team … understand gifting “up” is not a professional norm … thought a branded onesie might be fun but NBD that you didn’t get one … but the best part? Baby!!! :-)
or
2) Despite being in different offices and having different teams you feel you should get a baby gift since you found out (way after the fact) that your colleague got a gift … and it should be of commensurate value … you understand it will sound greedy (and petty) to bring this up almost a year later but would still like a script to use with a superior or mentor because – fair, amirite? … you’re sure her team didn’t feel pressured to donate and since “small” gifts in your office aren’t unprecedented surely your team wouldn’t feel pressured to donate for your gift … if only someone would remind them you didn’t get a gift … almost a year ago … also: babies are expensive!!! :-(
PS: If you are barely a year into this raising an infant to adulthood thing and think a few hundred dollar gift is the tipping point on expenses, you are in for quite the sticker shock: The estimated cost of raising a child to age 18 in the US is around $233,610 to $331,933 (source: Northwestern Mutual). It’s all about perspective.
#5: I suspect by now if you say, “I was DOGE’d”, the vast majority of companies would immediately understand and not count it against you.