aggravating coworker, boss wanted me to share my LinkedIn login, and more

by Alison Green on October 25, 2024

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

1. How do I stop being so aggravated by a coworker?

I have a coworker who is a kind person with a lot of great qualities. They’re good at their job and an asset to the team. There is, of course, a big BUT: I find them to be a ton of emotional labor to deal with. I’m not looking to change their behavior; it’s pretty benign if exhausting, and definitely not causing any real work problems. I’m hoping for ways to respond, better framing, or personal mantras that will stop the slow creep into BEC territory.

They like to show enthusiasm by asking to participate — everything from “That looks good, you should bring me a bagel next time!” to “The complicated costume piece you’re making is so cool, make me one?” or “A picnic with your friends on the weekend sounds great, where should I meet you? Haha.” Logically I know they aren’t expecting a bagel, costume piece, or invitation to a picnic with my friends who they’ve never met, but I have no idea how to respond! I’ve tried deflecting with things like, “Oh, I’m never making another one!” or responding with a clear no or not responding and changing the subject. Mostly I’ve resorted to just sharing less to avoid it, which opened a can of worms of the “we never talk anymore, what’s up, are you okay?” variety. Clearly, I need to find a way to be okay with the interaction and move the conversation along.

They are also a big sharer, which I don’t have an issue with, I also like sharing what’s going on in my life as a way to connect with coworkers. The problem is that they start a conversation with a carousel of “Remember my weekend plans from three weeks ago? With Parker? Where we argued but I hadn’t talked to them since?” I probably remember the plans vaguely, but the details slip away quickly! I’m more than happy to have the conversation this is opening, or even listen to a “on the previous episode” recap, but the quiz makes me feel like a terrible person who doesn’t care about my coworkers.

They’ve self-disclosed with some neurodivergence and struggles with anxiety, and they interact this way with everyone at work. I just need to find a way to let it roll off my back like it does everybody else.

You are over-thinking it and making it harder than it has to be! From this point forward, when this coworker invites themselves to participate in future bagels/sewing projects/picnics/etc., your strategy will be to assume they aren’t serious and respond accordingly — which means much more lightly. You say that logically you know they’re not really inviting themselves along or making a claim on your bagels or sewing time, but you’re still responding as if you have the emotional burden of fending them off anyway. Give yourself the gift of treating it with less seriousness! So:

Coworker: “That looks good, you should bring me a bagel next time!”
You: “Ha, yeah, they’re good.”

Coworker: “Make me one of those costumes?
You: “Sure, just find me the 3,000 hours it takes to do them!”
or
You: “My favorite part of it was…” (In other words, you don’t need to engage with what you’re hearing as a request. You can take it as them just expressing interest and enthusiasm and continue as if they’d said, “Oh, cool!”)

Coworker: “A picnic with your friends on the weekend sounds great, where should I meet you? Haha.”
You: “Haha! Yeah, the weather is supposed to be nice. So (topic change)…”

Similarly, you don’t need to put so much weight on not remembering small details they shared previously. You can say, “I don’t remember — fill me in?” or “I think so? Tell me anyway.” You’re not a terrible person for not remembering everything and I doubt they think you are either; that’s something you’re putting on yourself. They clearly like you and aren’t offended; you’re borrowing trouble by wanting to ascribe negative meaning to it!

The whole theme of this answer is: lighter. Receive them with more lightness, and respond with more lightness. It’s only a big deal because you’re framing it as a big deal. You can choose not to.

2. My boss wanted me to share my LinkedIn login

Last week’s question “My company wants me to share its posts on my personal LinkedIn” reminded me of a situation I was in a few years ago, and I’m wondering if you have some thoughts on how I could have better managed it.

I was in a role that was sales-oriented: I would meet with prospects, pitch our company’s business, write proposals, etc., but the job description did not include prospecting for leads.

We had an outside group to generate leads for us. Their one and only lead generation tactic was leveraging LinkedIn. They asked me and other folks at my company for our personal LinkedIn account login credentials, so that they could pose as us and reach out to people via LinkedIn to see if they were interested in hiring our company.

I said absolutely not. My boss didn’t understand why, but ultimately didn’t force me to share my login. Instead, my boss told me to use the scripts developed by the outside group to reach out to people myself (who I did not know or have any real connection with) to “grow my network” and prospect for leads.

Extremely reluctantly, I followed directions. This meant scouring LinkedIn for people with titles that seemed like the sort of folks who would be hiring our company, who also had something else in common with me. I’m talking the most tenuous of connections — we both attended the same massive university, or lived in the same giant metropolitan area — by saying something like “hey, I’m building my network, can we connect?” and then if some sucker actually said yes, it was off to the sales pitch.

Needless to say, this sucked and was not productive in any way. I made very few contacts and we never got one legitimate lead from this. And I felt super dirty doing it — my personal LinkedIn is supposed to represent my actual network, not a bunch of people I cold called.

Anyway, I pushed back a lot and we finally stopped, but my boss was unhappy that this wonderful method for finding new business didn’t pan out. When we had layoffs, I wound up being on the list, and I can’t help but think this was in part due to my not being a team player with the LinkedIn stuff. But this was bananapants, right? What could I have done differently here?

Yes, bananapants — particularly expecting you to turn over your login so someone else could pose as you and say who knows what to people in your network.

I don’t love your framing of “what could I have done differently?” because you’re not to blame for not thinking up a way to convince your boss that this was both slimy and ineffective. I suppose you could have simply not done what they were asking but reported that you had (how would they know? I’m not a fan of lying but I’m also not a fan of pressure to misuse your network this way) or you could have told your boss you were getting angry messages from people who were then blocking you so you couldn’t continue without decimating your network. Or you could have held firm from the get-go and said you weren’t going to use your account that way, and pointed out that lead generation wasn’t part of your job (although I suspect you had the type of boss who would have responded that lead generation is everyone’s job).

All this was really about was that your boss sucked.

3. Navigating a vendor relationship after escalating an issue

I work in a high-profile scientific library. At the end of each year, we update our collection of journal and service subscriptions for the next year. It’s a busy period and involves a lot of negotiation with providers, agents, scientific societies, and so on, as well as internal budget negotiations. I handle both, but I’m not a manager, just a librarian.

Last year, one of our long-standing vendors didn’t respond to my invoice request for 1.5 months. I tried several approaches: (1) emailed their only salesperson, Jane, from different email addresses to ensure my message wouldn’t go to spam, (2) emailed the head of the sales department and tech support, (3) called their sales and general public service line—this was very difficult as we are in opposite time zones, and I had to make the calls late at night but I reached voicemail, (4) sent direct messages to their social media pages, and (5) faxed them.

Despite all these efforts, I still received no response. Time was running out for budget planning, and my manager wasn’t helpful. She told me she didn’t know what to do but emphasized that we needed their materials.

I decided to email their C-level executives using the email addresses provided on their website. I got my manager’s approval and wrote an individual letter to three people, apologized for taking an unusual and desperate step, didn’t mention Jane, and simply explained that I was having trouble reaching them and asked for assistance. I emphasized that maybe it was me who was doing something incorrectly here.

The next day, I found about 15 emails from C-level executives. They were apologetic, cc’d sales and other people I don’t know, and promised to help. That same day (night for me), Jane finally responded and her email had a very sad tone. I could sense how bad she felt. In the end, we renewed our subscription. I thanked both the C-level executives and Jane and that was the end of it. However, I feel very badly that I might have caused harm to Jane. I’m not sure if there were any consequences for her, but I know she didn’t lose her job.

Now I need to repeat the negotiation process with them for the upcoming year, and I’m unsure how to proceed. My manager has quit, so I have no one to consult with. Should I reach out to Jane again (she’s still the sales contact) or should I approach it differently?

You don’t have anything to feel badly about. You made repeated efforts to reach someone who could help you, including some efforts that were truly above and beyond what most people would do. This is a company offering a subscription for sale, and it’s reasonable to assume that they will be set up to respond to requests for it without you having to go on an onerous quest to make it happen. And judging by their executives’ immediate response when you escalated it to them, it’s clearly something they want their organization taking care of.

You didn’t go to Jane’s boss after she didn’t answer you within a day or because she sounded a little tired on a call or something else minor. You went to her boss after truly unusual efforts to reach her weren’t successful. (Social media messages! Faxes!)

Who knows what was going on with Jane — maybe she’s overworked, maybe it’s not her job anymore, maybe she was on a three-month bender. You don’t need to figure it out! You’re just someone trying to buy their product. Whatever problems occurred on their end, they can handle those internally.

For the upcoming year, follow whatever process they’ve laid out for you to follow. If that’s contacting Jane again, contact Jane again. You don’t need to tiptoe around what happened last time; if anything, Jane should be bending over backwards to get you helped quickly this time (and likely will after last time).

The only thing to do differently this time is that if she doesn’t respond to your email, don’t resort to multiple email addresses, late night calls, etc. — that’s way too much. Instead, if you don’t hear back in a reasonable amount of time, go back to the C-suite execs who got it handled last time and say, “Apologies for bothering you, but I had trouble getting our subscription renewed last year until you stepped in and I’m concerned the same thing is happening this year. I emailed ADDRESS on DATE and haven’t heard back yet. Can you let me know how to take care of this, both for this year and for future years?”

Separately: any chance you have a pattern of being excessively deferential in situations where it’s not called for? It really is okay to deal with people straightforwardly and to escalate when you’re not getting what you need from a vendor, without blaming yourself for problems that were clearly on their end.

4. Should people be able to prove summer jobs they worked decades ago?

I had a politics conversation this week, specifically about Kamala Harris’ claim that she worked at McDonald’s in the summer of 1983, and the Trump team claiming that’s a lie. This person said he thought it must be a lie because how could you not prove you worked at a job?

I tried to point out that this was a summer job from decades ago before everything was stored digitally, and I absolutely have jobs like that from only 20 years ago! Jobs where the company has since closed, or everyone who would have known me has left and the records aren’t kept, where I didn’t keep in touch with anyone, and I definitely haven’t held on to my old tax records from decades past. Even the IRS doesn’t promise to keep anything past six years, according to their website.

This person was still skeptical that anyone would be in that position, but it got me thinking! In your experience, how likely is it that people who have been active in the workforce for decades have an essentially unprovable past job? Are Kamala and I outliers, or is this common?

It’s extremely common. I am confident there is zero way I could prove I worked at TCBY the summer after I graduated high school, and that wasn’t as long ago as Kamala Harris’s McDonald’s job. Nor could I prove my Mrs. Fields’ Cookies job from high school, or the three months I spent being extremely cool working in a record shop at 17. You will just have to take my word for it that I ate a ton of white chocolate macadamia nut cookies and listened to way too much soft rock holiday music on repeat.

This was before everything was digitized, and who saves records from fast food jobs decades ago? It’s a ridiculous and impossible (and politically motivated) standard to hold anyone to.

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{ 642 comments }

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  1. Daria grace*

    #2. Never ever hand over your credentials to anyone, especially not an external firm. It could easily get your LinkedIn account suspended if LinkedIn notices suspicious patterns of activity. It also puts you at risk of identity fraud if they loose your credentials or play loose with details found in your account.

    #4, I’ve got short term jobs from 10 years ago (so well within the digital era) that would take a bit of hunting to prove. I don’t remember the name of my manager for the seasonal role and they were also a temp anyway who wouldn’t be locatable or remember me. My bank only provides access to statements which would prove my pay going back 7 years. Maybe in the back of my cupboard there’s a tax return document or in the deep recess of my emails maybe there’s something mentioning it but unlikely to be something confirming all the specifics you’d want about a very recent job

    1. Seeking Second Childhood*

      LW2 I suspect what your company originally asked would have violated LinkedIn terms of service.

      1. LinkedIn Lunatic*

        LW2 here. Terms of Service was the argument I made to my boss. I did not want to get banned from LinkedIn and lose all of my real connections from my 20+ year career! Plus, having a LI account seems to be a requirement when job searching these days.

        1. JMC*

          Exactly! I had someone hack my LinkedIn account recently and it was a nightmare to get it back again. That whole idea was just absolutely crazy and not something I would do at all.

          1. LinkedIn Lunatic*

            I thought I was in some kind of alternate universe! Nobody at my company thought it was a bad idea but me!!! I was like, this is mine! You can’t have it!!!

            The very first thing I did after leaving that job was to delete all of the bogus connections I’d been forced to make. They had zero value for me, networking wise.

            1. But what to call me?*

              There’s a pretty good chance that anyone who started working at that company and did object was gone pretty quickly, voluntarily or involuntarily, leaving behind only the ones who were weirdly fine with it by the time you got there. That or they felt weird about it in the beginning but felt like they had to go along with it and then let themselves be convinced that it actually was a good idea because that’s one of the ways humans justify questionable decisions to ourselves.

              1. Ellie*

                Yeah…. OP, you asked what you could have done differently. I would have started my job search the second I got any pushback for not giving them my linkedIn details. That is such a bizarre overstep I think a lot of people would have bailed at that point. Leaving those who were either ok with it, didn’t know how bad it was, or really, really needed a job.

                My second choice would have been to loudly talk about how terrific this outreach thing was and how much time I was spending on it, while secretly doing nothing. To a third party like you, I would have looked like I was onboard. It would have been a ruse to buy me some time so that I could find another job.

          2. Wilbur*

            There’s a story by Matt Honan back in 2012-he’s a tech journalist and his Amazon account got hacked. Something along the lines of someone had bought and old credit card number of his, used the last 4 digits to reset his password and gained access. That sucks, but you’d think it would just be fighting fraudulent amazon purchases and getting your account back right? Well, the hacker ended up getting access to his email, twitter account, and apple account through all that and wiped out the guys iphone, ipad, and laptop. He ended up losing every single family photo he had. I think some of the vulnerabilities in that particular case have been fixed, but there’s no way I’m giving anyone else access to any one of my accounts. I have no idea what kind of trouble someone could cause and I don’t want to find out.

            1. Bruce*

              I once got spear-phished over the phone, someone called me posing as a security agent from my credit card company (spoofing their real number) and talked me into giving them the verification code that popped up on my phone. While talking to them I realized what an idiot I’d been, I hung up and tried to login to my account, only to find they’d reset my password. I was able to reset it again, got in and upgraded all the security settings, then called the CC company. They did not steal anything but only because I reacted quickly once I realized I’d been scammed. A minute more and they could have changed the email address on my account and taken complete control. Phone spoofing is a huge failure of the phone system, it means we can’t trust that anyone who calls us is who they say they are. Since then I’ve experienced more attempts, as have other members of my family, but we are wary now…

              1. Jezza*

                Yeah, I had something similar happen this year. Someone tried to access my Amazon account, and I was getting repeated calls about my bank account information. Only after I repeated my card and security number over the phone (because, again, multiple calls about an information breach) did I realize that was a stupid thing to do, and immediately called my bank to report a hack and cancel the card.

                My mom fell for a different sort of scam last year too. It’s so easy to just catch someone when they’re tired or in a vulnerable.

                1. Ellie*

                  Vulnerable indeed. My grandfather who has Alzheimer’s fell for one of these scams. He would never have before his illness. Fortunately all they did was charge him hundreds of dollars for a bogus, one-off service, but it was still a massive pain to have to change everything.

        2. Where’s the Orchestra?*

          I had a job similarly ask me to do this on my social media (but they were going more for Facebook and Instagram advertising). I just kinda stared blankly at the manager pushing this and then asked them “are you seriously requiring me to go make social media accounts just to advertise for you and work for free off the clock?” (Because of course all social media was blocked on the company computers).

          Granted this was 15 years ago, but it blew his mind that a 20 something didn’t have a social media presence. In the end it went way up the chain before they decided they couldn’t legally force employees to create accounts and work for free off the clock….but why it took that month and a half to make that seemingly simple (and basic – you can’t force folks to work for free) decision was part of why I started looking when I did. Still got caught in layoffs – but at least my resume was already polished up.

        3. Richard Hershberger*

          Necessity of LI: I suspect it depends greatly on the field. I had a job search early last summer. I do not and never have had a Linked In account. I got about half a dozen interviews and two serious job offers. The one I ended up taking I got the old fashioned way: by emailing a professional contact from a previous job. The other I get through Indeed.

          1. Another LinkedIn Hater*

            Second this comment. The one job I’ve ever gotten through LinkedIn, I regretted.

    2. FashionablyEvil*

      Even the IRS recommends that you only hang on to tax returns for 7 years and that’s only if you have weird deductions.

      1. a clockwork lemon*

        I worked at the same independent boutique from ages 14-22, first on a services-trade agreement with the owner for private sports coaching and then later for real money. I got paid cash under the table and never even came close to the minimum threshold for tax filing. The only “proof” I have for this job is, like, a collection of really fancy napkin rings in a box somewhere at my mom’s house and a lingering shame ghost from shattering a whole Christmas tree’s worth of blown glass ornaments one year.

        Fortunately nobody has ever interrogated me on whether or not I REALLY sold nightmare-fuel Christmas fairies for pocket money when I was 16.

        1. MigraineMonth*

          Even above-board work can go unrecorded. I worked a summer at a toy store that was pretty clearly just the owner’s hobby (until she lost interest in it). I guess the creditors caught up, because it went out of business, I was unable to contact the owner, and I never received my W-2. I still don’t know whether she bothered paying payroll taxes that year.

      2. RHinCT*

        Not exactly. They require retaining things for 3 or 7 years, depending on circumstances, but they say nothing about ONLY hanging on to them that long.

      3. Global Cat Herder*

        The IRS actually says that an audit can initially look back 7 years. If they find something suspicious in those 7 years, they can look back indefinitely.

        So although chances aren’t high that you might need records going back further, they’re not zero.

      4. Freya*

        I do hang onto my tax returns and other records, but I’m pretty paranoid, and also the Australian Tax Office has the legal ability to investigate and prosecute people/businesses for certain things back to the beginning of time (eg superannuation), even though you aren’t required to keep records for more than 7 years.

        That and the Robodebt scandal mean my paranoia has some justification…

    3. Marion Ravenwood*

      I’m the same on #4. I’ve been job hunting recently and have had a couple of applications that asked for my full employment history going back to university, which was 15 years ago now. Some of the organisations I’ve worked for don’t exist any more, or I don’t necessarily remember the full names of my managers at those jobs for references (because apparently that’s a thing) – and that’s assuming they haven’t changed their name since – or other things that make it less than straightforward to confirm all this stuff. I could probably go back confidently about 10 years in terms of people still there knowing who I was/remembering roughly what I earned etc, but beyond that I’d struggle. And in those case I was in those roles for 4-5 years, so I imagine it would be much more difficult for someone who’d job hopped a lot or had more short term positions.

      1. Great Frogs of Literature*

        Heck, I don’t remember the NAMES of the people I worked for at my three-summer camp counselor job.

        Except Ilene. Because she was terrible, and got really frosty with me, a 16-year-old, for not magically knowing that it was Ilene and not Eileen. (Maybe she had it written down somewhere in her office? But I WAS SIXTEEN and didn’t spend much time in her office.)

        2. Thegs*

          I remember the name of my supervisor at Philmont, the Scouts summer camp, Mary Joe! But that’s because I had a crush on her…

        3. Elizabeth West*

          I can remember where the Golden Corral where I worked in music school used to be. This was back when it was a cheap steakhouse with a little salad bar. Couldn’t tell you what the manager’s name was, or any of my coworkers. There is no way I would have a W-2 from there, and I don’t expect the company keeps records that far back.

          I do remember that the manager was dating one of the waitresses. She was around my age (early 20s) and he must have been 50 or 60 at least. *bleah*

        4. Ellie*

          I did some office temp work when I was at university. I can’t remember the places I worked for, the people’s names, the agency I went through, or how long I was even there for. But I remember the terrible filing systems.

          I also did a bunch of work experience in high school. Apart from the fact it was at a lawyers because I was hoping to become one at the time, I can’t remember a thing about it. Except that their reference gave me the equivalent of an A+ in every area, except for ‘suitability for the job’. How right they were.

          Moreover though, does anyone really care if Kamala Harris, or Donald Trump for that matter, ever worked at McDonalds?

      2. 2024*

        I keep my tax returns for basically forever, because I am always suspicious I will need something, someday, from 10 or 15 years ago. I don’t think they go back quite 20 years though.

      3. rebelwithmouseyhair*

        I’m much the same age as Kamala and I vaguely remember the manager at the bakery where I had my Saturday job was called Mary. Her assistant manager who I reported to was Renee (but probably her real name was Irene). The bakery went out of business at some point. Then I worked at what we then called an old people’s home, no idea what the boss’s name was, can’t remember anyone’s name. My boss when I worked as an au pair had quite a reputation in his obscure engineering field apparently but he must be senile by now, no use asking him for a reference.
        Same goes for the boss at my first real job.
        I don’t remember much of some of the places I worked at, but I do have the full list of all jobs where payments were made to my retirement fund. France is bureaucratic hell, but they hang on to every single piece of information. I also have all my tax documents for at least the past 20 years.

        1. Panhandlerann*

          I’m several years older than Kamala. I wouldn’t be able to locate any of the managers I had as a teen or young adult as they’re dead, moved away, or something. In most cases, the businesses involved no longer exist.

          1. Just Another Cog*

            ^^^^^This! The Country Kitchen I worked at in 1977 has been out of business since the eighties…….I do remember my boss’s name – LeRoy. I’m pretty sure he and most of the older ladies I worked with are dead.

            I sorta do wish someone who remembers working with Kamala at that McDonalds would speak up about it, though, mostly because it would piss off the other guy. On second thought, if there is anyone out there who could vouch for her, they’re probably afraid to say anything given the vitriol they’d have to endure.

          2. goddessoftransitory*

            Yep: the oldest job I had was as a pear sorter for the warehouse that Harry & David used; they’re still around as a company but I can pretty much guarantee that any record of me is long gone.

            (Life hack: don’t buy the expensively packaged gift pears. Regular ones, the kind you can get at the grocery store, are sorted much more vigorously because any bruised ones just go to make baby food. But the fancy purple ones make a lot more $$$ as special gift type food, so ones that would be tossed in the “process” pile if they were “regulars” are wrapped in paper and tucked into nice boxes.)

      4. Rex Libris*

        Seriously. I’ve been in the workforce since the late 1980s, and I can’t even remember all the random fast food chains I worked at for six months. The grocery store I worked at is out of business. Most of my managers from that era are most likely dead.

        I’m amazed how easily people have forgotten that there was a world before the internet was tracking us 24/7.

        1. Beka Cooper*

          I commented on a Reddit thread sometime in the last year about wild turkeys making it onto the news near my mom’s house because they were chasing police around their car (I think I’ve posted that story here, too, when there was a thread about animals). Somebody responded asking for a video of the news clip, and I had to say sorry, that kind of thing wasn’t available online in 2003. Not quite yet, anyway.

        2. D*

          Virtually all of my job history has been since the advent of social media and I’ve had an email address since high school.
          I would not be able to prove that I worked the lunch line at my school, was a cashier at a fast food Hawaiian joint, or worked for a closed down Aldi-rival chain. I honestly don’t know that I could prove anything beyond the last 3 jobs with anything I could pull out of a file cabinet or an email attachment.

        3. Chili*

          As someone who has worked in wage and hour litigation, this kind of thing is still really common to find if an owner doesn’t know, doesn’t care, or wants to hide things easily. Sometimes at companies that seem big enough to keep records.

        4. pocket microscope*

          Yeah I’m 20 years younger than Kamala Harris and there’s still no way I could prove I worked my first teenage job. The owner has died, the site has been sold to developers, and no one was keeping digital records of this stuff back then. It’s gone.

      5. Baunilha*

        I had two short stints working retail when I was younger. (About 15 years ago, and I wasn’t very diligent about keeping paystubs and tax records back then)
        One was a huge chain store that had and still has so many employees that, even though I’m sure they try to keep careful files, mine could’ve easily gotten lost or fallen between cracks.
        The other was a small boutique that closed down shortly after I left, and I have no idea who the owner was. (Even if I did, something tells me they didn’t keep employees’ records anyway) My manager there had an unusual name and I could try track her down, but that’s assuming 1) she didn’t change her name, 2) has an online presence and 3) still remembers me.

      6. Tippy*

        There’s no way I’d be able to verify my first job. It was a single attorney law firm when I was 16 (over 30 years ago). I didn’t earn enough to file taxes, the attorney has since retired and moved, the paralegal aka my mom, died 20+ years ago.

        The next few jobs I’d have to go to the companies and hope they had records because I damn sure don’t and I’m lucky to remember my current coworkers names, much less ones from my 20’s.

      7. Scholarly Publisher*

        I can tell you what fast food chain I worked at for one summer 35 years ago, but now that the building’s gone I couldn’t tell you the address other than “somewhere on this four-mile-long main road”, and while I can picture a couple of the managers I don’t remember any of their names.

      8. Kay*

        I vividly remember it was a fast food place as my first “kid in high school” job. I don’t even know the COMPANY, but I remember it so well because I only lasted a few days. I decided my life was in danger and I had to quit after hearing all the coworkers talk about their recent prison stints and current criminal endeavors. For quite a while after I seriously wondered if this was normal, if I just had no idea what life was like in the wild and whether my life was in danger because I now “knew things”.

        It was wild, it definitely happened, but I have no way to prove it.

    4. Hats Are Great*

      #2, in some states, it is illegal for your workplace (or a prospective workplace interested in hiring you) to ask for your social media passwords or to ask to view your private social media.

      obviously anything you post publicly is fair game, and if you’re sharing racist memes with your pals on discord and someone leaks them to your boss, these laws do not prevent you from being screwed.

      I was asked that once in an interview, and I promptly informed them, “That’s illegal for you to ask me in this state, and I assume you only asked me to find out if I was the kind of person who would hand out company passwords to confidential data. Which I am not.”

      1. LinkedIn Lunatic*

        (LW2) that’s really interesting! I figured it was against LI’s TOS but I hadn’t considered it being actually illegal.

        1. LinkedIn Lunatic*

          and a quick google confirms that it was, in fact, illegal in the state my company was based in. Hah!

    5. Georgia Carolyn Mason*

      Yeah, I’m trying to imagine what it would take to “prove” my college job at a now-defunct beauty and skincare store in the mall! Certainly, politicians of all stripes like to emphasize (and sometimes inflate) their humble origins, but “can’t prove it” doesn’t equal “lying” on something this old.

      1. RetiredAcademicLibrarian*

        My first job was in a small regional chain restaurant in a mall – the chain no longer exists, the mall has been demolished, I can’t remember the manager’s last name and the owner would be 100 years old if he is still alive. Don’t know any way I could prove that I worked there.

    6. Texan In Exile*

      I worked at Woolco when I was in high school. They paid me in cash every week at the back of the store. I got $37.50 after taxes, which, I promptly spent in the record department, which I had to walk through on my way out.

      Woolco is not in business anymore. I don’t remember my boss’ name. I don’t even know if they sent me a W-2.

      But I remember those hours standing at the cash register, counting change back and hoping I didn’t mess anything up.

    7. RedinSC*

      Back in 1984 my friend and I were employed to sit in front of Sears and sign people up for the Sears credit card. I don’t think I was a Sears employee. I was 17 years old, AND I didn’t earn enough to even pay or report taxes as it was either a summer job or maybe over holiday break (the Christmas shopping season)? I really don’t remember.

      BUT I can prove I did this, because I still have a set of the free steak knives we gave out to people who signed up! Right? That counts as proof, right?

    8. A perfectly normal-size space bird*

      Yeah, I worked as a dishwasher one summer back in the 90s when I was 17. That resort still exists but I doubt they still have my records. There’s no way to get records from pretty much any short term job I worked at. The pizza restaurant changed hands, the landscaping company owner retired, the post office contract station was absorbed into a larger post office, and the monument association went through so many mergers it doesn’t even come up when I Google the name of the company. And even for those that haven’t changed hands, it’s just been so long that they’re not keeping records beyond what’s required by the IRS or state. Even in jobs I worked at for a while, records might not exist for similar reasons. The notorious flea market from hell was one of my most memorable jobs but it has been out of business for 15 years (20? It’s been out of business so long I don’t even remember how long it’s been out of business for).

    9. Orv*

      The job before my current one, from 20 years ago, is one I had for almost five years but I doubt I could prove it now. The company folded, my manager went who knows where, and I don’t generally keep tax documents for more than 10 years.

    10. Caro*

      The summer job thing got me thinking of the wonderful, happy summer jobs of my extremely idle youth. I could, I suppose, get hold of people who I knew at the time who witnessed me working, but neither establishment is there anymore, sadly, and I am now on a different continent.

      What a ridiculous and desperate thing to be harping on from a man whose relationship to truth is quite interesting. (THEY’RE EATING THE DOGS!! LOL, still makes me scream with laughter.)

  2. Annie Edison*

    I was just thinking about the question of proving old employment recently while filling out job applications! I worked a retail job 20ish years ago at a department store chain that no longer exists (shout out to Mervyn’s!), and it’s been long enough that I couldn’t tell you the name of a single supervisor, let alone find contact info to verify employment. I’ve moved several times since and while it’s possible I have an old pay stub tucked away somewhere, the odds are slim to none that’s the case. That’s just going 20 years back; I have no idea how you’d prove employment at McDonalds in the 80s!

      1. Cozy Times*

        I’m snuggled in the remaining threadbareness of my Mervyn’s thermal blanket as I write this! Wish I’d cached 3 dozen pairs of their cotton undies before they went out of business.

        1. Chili*

          I still have towels I bought from there more than 20 years ago. They were on deep discount and have held up better than fancier towels I go more recently. Mervyn’s was the best.

      2. Awlbiste*

        I have a large scar on my leg from sitting on a Mervyn’s display bed (that was put together incorrectly) when I was a kid that will ensure I never forget that store. We still kept shopping there!

        LW4, I worked at McDonald’s in 2007 even and I have zero way of proving that nor do I remember the names of anyone I worked with. It still happened.

      3. Lydia*

        Mervyn’s today
        Will help you find a way
        To make your shopping day
        A little easier

        I cannot believe that jingle is so easy for me to pull up.

      4. LunaLena*

        I still have an ancient teddy bear and a few towels from Mervyn’s. Loved shopping there when I was a poor college student!

        Also every time I watch reruns of Friends, it never fails to amuse me that Joey’s Hugsy penguin plushie was actually from Mervyn’s.

    2. Artemesia*

      I could not provide any evidence or employment details for the greasy spoon I worked for as a teen, the college fashion board and retail job at Penneys or even the summer I worked in an institution for the developmentally disabled. All this long before computerization and I doubt anyone has those records anymore. And of course the second point ‘she never put it on her resume’. Sheesh. Who puts that on their resume once out of their teens?

      1. anne of mean gables*

        Honestly can you imagine being a mid-career attorney and putting your high school fast food job on your resume? Or, more pertinently, Alison’s response to a mid-career attorney asking if they should leave their high school fast food job on their resume?

        It actually becomes *more* imaginable as you get into “running for political office” territory (see! she’s just like us!), but also I don’t think Kamala, or someone at her level, has gotten a job with a standard resume in years if not decades.

        1. Emikyu*

          As a mid-career attorney, I can honestly say that I haven’t put my part-time job working for Petco on my resume in well over a decade. I’m pretty sure I would get some weird looks if I did. That would look like I’m not great at figuring out what constitutes relevant evidence – a skill you definitely want in a lawyer!

        2. Cat Secrets*

          Not an attorney, but I have been a professional in my field for 15 years. I was recently asked by an interviewer to revise my resume to include my college and high school jobs (irrelevant to the field or work I do now) and provide contact information for my old managers in those jobs. The interviewer complained to me that the hiring process was slowed because they were unable to get in contact the person who supervised me when I worked part-time at Wal-Mart 20 years prior. That woman is either retired or dead and I cannot remember her name. It was a bonkers hiring process and I thankfully do not work there.

          1. Summer*

            @Cat Secrets
            This is wild to me! Why would they even need your high school and college jobs when you have 15 years of professional experience? I just don’t understand the thinking there. I worked at a Dunkin Donuts in high school that is no longer open and a restaurant that closed down years ago – I don’t even remember the names of my managers. And how would that info even be relevant? My mind is blown that you were asked to furnish that information.

            1. StephChi*

              That makes absolutely no sense to me, either. I had a bunch of retail and waitressing jobs as a high school and college student in the mid-’80s that have absolutely no bearing on my professional life. The managers of those jobs, if they a) even remembered me, or b) are even still alive, couldn’t possibly shed any light on me today, 40 years later. For my part, I don’t remember the managers’ names. On top of that, one of the places isn’t even open anymore, and another (one of the restaurants I waitressed at) has had different owners for at least 20 years and isn’t even called the same thing.

      2. Gumby*

        I do not remember the *name* of the store that I worked at for 1.5 weeks over the winter break from college. It was children’s clothes and a madhouse because everyone was doing Christmas shopping. The fact that it was crazy busy is also the only reason I even got a job where my value proposition was: “I’m in town for 3 weeks, can you use extra coverage? I have tuition coming up.”

        I could, however, probably prove the summer job at an amusement park that I had in 1995 but that is because I am a paperwork packrat and I really need to work on that.

      3. goddessoftransitory*

        I can just see her meeting with Biden about the VP position and it all hinging on her being able to prove that she worked in a McDonald’s forty years ago.

    3. UKDancer*

      I worked on a small gift shop when I was 16 as a Saturday job in the 1990s. It was owned by 2 ladies. The shop has been closed for years. One owner is deaf, the other is probably dead (she’d be over 100 if still alive) so no proof and I’ve no payslips (and can’t even remember if I ever got any).

      I worked in a Tie Rack shop near university as a student. The chain went bust over 10 years ago. I can vaguely remember some of the others but not well. No idea if records exist. 25 years is a long time.

      None of this goes on my CV because it’s got no relationship to my current job.

      1. Marzipan Dragon*

        In 1983 I was working at a mom and pop deli. They are both long dead and their only child’s house burned to the ground so any paper evidence that may possibly have been retained is ash. All my coworkers were older and even if I remembered any of their names would be in their 70s and unlikely to remember a teenager they worked with for a couple of years so long ago. I guess I could get my mom with Alzheimer’s to vouch for me.

    4. perstreperous*

      In the UK, [corporate] employment records are recommended to be destroyed six years after employment ends although you can “withdraw consent for processing”, invoking the GDPR, so that records are destroyed immediately. I do not know if that implies that even a simple “was perstreperous employed by you?” before late 2018 would draw a blank.

      Never mind that, the (large) company which employed me for 18 years failed and no longer exists in any form. Good luck in finding anyone who could prove that I was employed at all before 2012!

      1. londonedit*

        Two of the small companies I worked for in the early part of my career have long since been bought up and subsumed by big publishers, and I doubt they have any record of me having worked for the previous incarnation when it was an independent company! Not to mention the fact that no one I worked with at the small publishers is even still working for the big companies. I guess I’d have to track one of them down and say ‘Do you remember when we worked together at Small Publisher 20 years ago?’

        1. bamcheeks*

          You never know, they might have an internal archivist! I worked with an archivist from Barclays Bank, and they have all the archives of every bank they’ve taken over and swallowed going back to the 1700s. Amazing stuff.

          1. perstreperous*

            That is an extreme outlier. In my experience, if the company is taken over the records are handled correctly (with the caveat about destruction over time) but, if it fails, it’s anyone’s guess.

            My ex-employer had all the computers summarily wiped and sold and the paper records were eventually got into a warehouse and managed properly. However, the other assets were sold or taken (stolen). As nobody else wanted them a colleague took the original artwork and proofs for the corporate logo, including some on materials such as stainless steel or enamel, and they still reside in his garage. Unfortunately, there is almost no interest in corporate history – yesterday’s company is about as relevant as yesterday’s newspaper.

            1. bamcheeks*

              Exactly! My job was to try and persuade postgraduate historians to use their archive for their research!

          3. Texan In Exile*

            My 19-year-old grandmother, who worked at the library after she finished school (8th grade), shows up in the Milwaukee 1926 City Directory as “page Milwaukee Public Library.” So I guess she could have confirmed her employment almost 100 years later?

            (My grandma lived at 1078 26th St with her parents. She met my grandfather, who appears in the directory as a “mldr,” because he was renting the garage apartment at 1076 26th St.)

    5. mreasy*

      Didn’t think I’d see a Mervyn’s ref here today but here we are! Sometimes I like to talk about how their line for “mature” women was the unfortunately named (after quite a swanky Hamptons hamlet) Sag Harbor.

      I couldn’t prove my first job in my industry with anything… and after that it would all be just asking past managers/colleagues. I don’t have pay stubs from the pre digital era!

      1. Sloanicota*

        I too have always laughed at Sag Harbor for a mature women’s brand. Apart from the idea that the woman herself is saggy, it’s also not a quality I look for for in clothing!

      2. TeaCoziesRUs*

        I grew up as a kid in the 80s and 90s… it just clicked right now why that might not have been a great brand name.

        back to my coffee

      3. Leia Oregano*

        LOL, I’m in my late 20s and had no idea where the Sag Harbor brand originated, but I love, very specifically, their size 14 petite blazers/suit jackets and I scour thrift stores and online secondhand markets for them. They just fit so perfectly! I didn’t know that was their “mature” line, and what a name for it lol.

    6. kicking-k*

      Even for less humble jobs it can be hard! My graduate traineeship had been at the National Archives, not a fly-by-night organisation and one you’d expect to keep very full records, right? And they do. But they don’t keep employment records for more than six years after the person leaves. The next job I had, I held for seven, and when I wanted to get a reference, one of my bosses had retired and the other moved on and I was hard put to find any personal contacts who could provide a reference. Best I thought I could do was prove I worked there… but they didn’t have me in current records. I was contemplating waving the book they gave me as a leaving present, but then I did manage to contact an old colleague who confirmed it for me.

      So no. I don’t find it hard to believe that there might not be documentation for a summer job in the pre-digital era.

      1. Frieda*

        I’m delighted by the example of the National Archives as a place that keeps employment records for a limited period of time. Like if the *National Archives* has a clear period after which employment records will be destroyed, probably also McDonalds is not going to have them!

      2. I work so my dog lives like a princess*

        If you worked for the National Archives, wouldn’t there be an SF-50 through OPM you could seek out to prove your employment? I don’t know if OPM follows the 6 year rule especially since government employees get an eOPF file with all of their documents.

        1. AF Vet*

          I’m curious myself. I’ve saved all of my SF-50 and DD-214s so that I can accurately calculate time in service of I go civil service again. I’ve been out since 2016.

          1. Foyer Office*

            SF 50s are definitely permanent records. The agency would hang onto them for some amount of time, then they should be transferred to NARA. There is other stuff in your eOPF that gets removed after some period of time.

    7. ReallyBadPerson*

      Mervyn’s was my favorite store when I was a teen. Their clothes were affordable on my lifeguard/Burger King/babysitting wages.

    8. Turquoisecow*

      Yeah a lot of my previous jobs are at companies that have since gone out of business and I would have no way to contact the previous manager or anything like that. From 2008-2015 I worked at a fairly large office that has gone out of business and ceased operations. Thankfully it was a large enough company that any new employer would recognize the name and that they’ve closed, and I do have some connections to people I used to work with, including several managers (we’re all still in the same industry, working at a competitor now), but the little curtain shop in 1999? Nope.

    9. Jackalope*

      This has been a fun jaunt down memory lane! My very first job I might be able to prove still – it was at my university and (I just checked) the professor that oversaw me still works there. But my first retail job had a supervisor whose name I don’t remember, and not only the store but the entire mall has closed down since then. Another job the entire company has gone under, at least a decade ago. And the individual store that I worked at closed at the end of my time there (which is why I left); I remember even at the time thinking about how hard it would be if I needed to hunt someone down for a reference later, because my boss’s name was super common – think something like Jane Smith – and I knew that in less than a year I would no longer be able to reach them.

    10. Worldwalker*

      I worked for McDonald’s in college. I seriously doubt that any records from that era still exist. My teenage coworkers from that job probably have grandkids now, and the top manager has likely died of old age. I don’t remember a single name of a single person I worked for or with. It’s been decades! (I do, remember, the official way to push a mop … yes, there is one)

      At least three companies I worked for no longer exist. Two more have been sold repeatedly, and I doubt that the records went with the sales.

      And then there’s Tandy Leather. I was a store manager there (the Azusa CA location). But you could ask the Tandy Leather HQ about me and they couldn’t tell you anything. Why not? Because it’s not the “real” Tandy Leather anymore. What most people who hadn’t been part of it don’t know is that about a decade after I worked there, Tandy went bankrupt and liquidated, and its assets (particularly including trademarks) were bought by a rival who adopted the name. One thing I’m pretty sure wasn’t sold at the bankruptcy auction was the old employment records; those likely went into the shredder. (everything except ordering was on paper; we didn’t even have cash registers) This is a company for which I worked at a moderately high-level job (above me were only my regional manager and the company president), and I was a high performer, and they couldn’t tell you today if I ever worked there. Or, probably, that my store even existed.

      This is not at all uncommon. I’d be more surprised if McDonald’s could confirm Kamala Harris’s employment than that they can’t.

      1. Anon Again... Naturally*

        I worked at an Orange Julius in high school back in the late 80s/early 90s. The owners sold the franchise the year I graduated high school. BUT I do have a picture of me working the counter that somehow made it in to my high school yearbook- think that would count?

      2. Orv*

        Especially since she would have been hired by the franchise owner, not McDonalds corporate, and franchises go under or have messy ownership changes just as often as any other small business.

    11. Llamarama*

      This got me thinking about my souse, who has worked a true potpourri of jobs though his long career, including several in high school and college where he was paid in cash and they likely weren’t keeping strictly to the legal requirements of employment record-keeping (ahem manual labor and restaurant jobs). Then again, they’re hardly positions anyone would expect to put on a resume at this point in his life.

    12. Area Woman*

      OMG! I also worked at a Mervyn’s!!! Terrible store to work at… there was a reason the prices were so low. We always had to hawk the credit cards. But at least I got employee discount at Target!

    13. Rex Libris*

      I worked at McDonalds in the 80s. The franchise I worked at was closed and the building was demolished about 20 years ago. I suppose my manager might still be alive but I can’t remember his name, so unless someone filed him under “Arrogant ass with over-moussed blonde mullet” I’d have no way of locating him.

      1. Jessica*

        And even if his employee record were correctly labeled, how on earth would you distinguish which AAWO-MBM was him?

        1. Violet*

          Not sure what was happening with my previous posts, but I wanted to tell Rex Libris and Jessica that I think that exchange is hilarious! And so, so accurate.

    14. Helen Waite*

      I can’t prove I attended a particular tech school pre-Internet. They no longer exist and getting transcripts would require access to a time machine.

      If I included every pre-Internet job on my resume, there would be a long trail of companies that went under and took their records with them, making my early career look like The Highly Skilled But Cursed Employee.

      1. Hats Are Great*

        it’s possible that those records actually do exist in microfiche at a state archive. many states have laws requiring all educational institutions in the state. keep physical records of students for I don’t know 15 years or something, and then all those records must be transferred to microfiche and the microfiche must be given to the state archive, specifically so they can look up things like this when a school vanishes.

        not a lot of people know these archives exist, except the people who are responsible for doing the archiving.

    15. ThatGirl*

      In HS and college I worked at a Chuck E Cheese, a video store (I’m sure that isn’t around anymore), babysat for my cousin/his wife, did some part time data entry at an insurance agency, worked at a furniture store, interned at a newspaper…. I am quite sure I couldn’t prove any of that beyond, say, my parents vouching for me or something.

    16. Anne Elliot*

      Shout out to a Pizza Hut in small town Montana circa 1989. I may not remember any of your names but I have very fond memories of the nine hundred personal pan pizzas I consumed while covering phones in the back on my “lunch.”

    17. JMC*

      Aww man I miss Mervyn’s. But yeah I have tons of jobs from the 80s and 90s that I can’t prove because they no longer exist. Speaking of defunct department stores I worked for I Magnin in the SF Bay Area in the 80s and they shut down long ago.

    18. Another Kristin*

      I used to work for a very small business that closed when the owner retired. I asked the owner for a written reference in case I needed one when she was unavailable because she was having too much fun being retired (or, I didn’t say to her face, in case she died before I got another job), so I suppose I could use that if I ever needed to prove that I worked there. However it’s just a piece of paper, it’s not notarized or anything, and even if it were, it wouldn’t prove anything to someone who was determined to believe I was lying. And that place closed down in the mid-2010s! Can’t imagine trying to prove that I worked at an ice cream shop in the mid-90s or any of my other teenage part time jobs.

    19. L.H. Puttgrass*

      I worked for a Savings & Loan in the late ’80s—which probably tells you all you need to know about whether that particular employer still exists.

      When I applied for a license to practice law in DC a few years ago, they wanted a reference every job I’d worked since I was 18. I hadn’t stayed in touch with anyone from that job over the nearly 30 years since I’d worked there. But DC insisted that they needed to talk to someone (who wasn’t a family member) who could tell them that I worked at this defunct S&L, where even the building I worked in is now gone. So I contacted one of my oldest friends and asked if she knew where I was working back then. “Um, I think you worked for a bank or something?”

      That was good enough for DC.

      I also tended the salad bar at a Big Boy for a few weeks when I was 16 (until I realized that the job wasn’t paying for the gas to get there). There’s no way I could prove it, though, even through references from friends and a generic statement from the Social Security Administration showing that I earned $189 in 1983.

      1. Not The Earliest Bird*

        I had a similar situation when trying to get a government job. Trying to find someone who could vouch that I was a day camp counselor (and not a very good one) when I was 16. When the camp itself no longer existed and the person who got me the job was long dead. I didn’t get the government job. I wonder now if it was because I couldn’t prove my 6 week long summer job… not really.

      2. hummingrose*

        I had a similar experience applying for the DC Bar at the age of 40 after becoming a lawyer later in life. Before I went to law school, I worked in theater, which meant that aside from one part-time job, I had pretty much never had a job that lasted longer than a few months at best. For the better part of 20 years.

        One summer stock company I had worked at had gone out of business ten years earlier and I had to rely on a college friend who vaguely remembered me being in that part of the country that summer for support. I couldn’t even remember the name of the temp agency I worked at for a year after college and just chose one at random, guessing that even if it still existed it wouldn’t have records anyway. I was otherwise lucky in that most of my work over the years had been in the same community and I was (and am) still in touch with quite a lot of them. But it’s really an absurd requirement when you’ve been in the workforce for that long! And after all that, I’ve had about five cases in DC in the past ten years…

        1. hummingrose*

          Oh, and I had also spent six months working out of the country at a bookstore chain that had gone belly-up fifteen years earlier and lost touch with all my co-workers because email wasn’t quite a thing in that country yet. I honestly don’t even remember what reference name I used on the application for that one.

    20. Hats Are Great*

      The bar exam application asking for every job I’d had since I was 16 and legally old enough to work was quite an adventure, and I was only about 26 at the time. but I worked a lot of summer jobs on part-time school year jobs, sometimes for camps that didn’t exist anymore or stores that have gone out of business, and I don’t remember the last name of the asshole manager who refused to let me take lunch breaks when I was 16! I spent a lot of time with my mom trying to reconstruct the timeline of when I worked where by remembering that, “oh, that was the job that wouldn’t give you a shift off to go to the homecoming dance so that must have been the year you were dating Bobby.” and sometimes having to call my mom’s friends or my friends from high school to try to pinpoint a year and months.

      I had to swear it was true and correct under penalty of perjury, and then the bar examiners came back to me saying there was a discrepancy in what I reported and what my fucking law school reported, because when my law school carelessly filled out my summer internship for a professor, they neglected to put that I continued working for him for the next semester, which I had correctly put on my bar application. So I had to call the bar examiners and call the school and call the professor and have the professor tell the bar examiners that actually I did work for him through December that year, and have the school dig out my W-2 that they just lazily entered wrong and almost got me booted from taking the bar exam, the giant assholes.

      1. Georgia Carolyn Mason*

        Ugh, so annoying. I think my state only required 10 years of employment? But, even then one of the places had gone under. As far as I know, they never confirmed any of it anyway — I had given some old bosses the heads-up, mostly so they wouldn’t go “who the hell is that?” when asked to confirm my employment.

        Without getting too political (if this comment has to go, I get it) I struggle to imagine a voter saying “I won’t vote about someone who might have but probably didn’t lie about working at McDonalds 40 years ago, but the other candidate pretended to work at McDonald’s for 10 minutes with a closed store and served three of his supporters, so that’s definitely who should be president!”

          1. Georgia Carolyn Mason*

            Thanks. I thought it might get bounced, but wanted to write it out — not necessarily to convince anyone, but just to see if it looked as weird and counterintuitive on the screen. YUP!!

      2. Orv*

        I had a similar experience when I applied for a state gaming license. They wanted everywhere I’d lived for the last decade, too, which involved a lot of dorm moves. I had to attach extra sheets of paper to give them the whole list.

    21. Pay no attention...*

      Mervyn’s for the win. I still reference their commercial from the early 90s “Open Open Open Open Open.”

      1. wendelenn*

        And why would they have a record? Please read everything above. Just because they don’t have a record from 40-plus years ago doesn’t mean she didn’t work there.

        1. goddessoftransitory*

          And why would McDonald’s the traded company have the records of one franchisee from forty years ago?

      2. Forrest Rhodes*

        dirmvk, I believe the vast majority of McDonald’s locations are franchises, and not under direct McDonald’s ownership, right?
        So if anyone had a record of a part-time seasonal employee from 40 years ago it would be the individual franchise and—considering how often franchise locations change owners or cease to exist—even that would be unlikely!

      3. A perfectly normal-size space bird*

        There’s a McDonald’s near me that’s had four different franchise owners and the most recent owners were the ones who moved it from its original location to its current location. The chances that the newest owners of the new location could provide records from 40 years ago about an employee who worked at the original location under owners four times removed from the current franchise owners and before digitization was a thing is nil.

      4. ReallyBadPerson*

        I doubt Burger King or any of the other jobs I did as a teen and young adult have any record of me working there, either.

      5. Orv*

        No, Trump said McDonalds said that. There was no official statement, and it contradicts a memo they sent out after he did a campaign stop at a location.

      6. JB*

        You mean this quote from McDonald’s?

        “Though we are not a political brand,” the message reads, “we’ve been proud to hear former President Trump’s love for McDonald’s and Vice President Harris’s fond memories working under the Arches. While we and our franchisees don’t have records for all positions dating back to the early ’80s, what makes ‘1 in 8’ so powerful is the shared experience so many Americans have had.”

        Don’t be a rube.

      7. Names are hard*

        I work for a hospital that opened in 1950. We do not have employment records going back to the 80s. Where would we keep them? We didn’t start keeping digital records until just 2 years ago. We’re not required to keep records for people that would have been terminated 40 years ago.

      8. whingedrinking*

        So? So what? McDonald’s has said they basically have *no* records going back that far, and people were certainly working there then. Why on Earth would the Vice President of the United States lie about working at McDonald’s?

    23. Wendy Darling*

      I had to provide proof that I’d worked for a temp agency for 3 months in 2013 for a background check and THAT was hard! The temp agency was tiny and poorly run and had since folded. Because they’d folded they were no longer paying their bills at the company that provided pay stubs online, and I hadn’t thought to download mine (oops). I ended up having to provide my tax return from that year to show I’d claimed income from them, which only worked because it was 2013 and I had a PDF of my tax return.

      There is absolutely no way to prove that I worked at my first job in 1999 — I was an hourly employee for a small startup with bad bookkeeping. It went out of business in like 2002 and there’s basically no evidence it ever existed anymore.

    24. The OG Sleepless*

      Social Security has no record of me working the summer of 1985. I had a full time job that summer. At a state park. I have no idea how my info didn’t get reported to SSI, nor do I much care, but I would never be able to prove I spent the summer as a cashier at the golf course.

      1. bleh*

        “In 2018, one-quarter of state and local government employees—approximately 6.5 million workers—were not covered by Social Security on their current job. The Social Security Act of 1935 excluded all federal, state, and local government employees from coverage because of constitutional ambiguity over the federal government’s authority to impose Federal Insurance Contributions Act payroll taxes on public employers and because these employees were already covered by defined benefit pensions (Internal Revenue Service [IRS] 2014).”

    25. Meep*

      I worked at Safeway in my teens about 13-14 years ago. Only included it as experience for a part time job at the University’s science center when I was 19 (so ten years ago). After that it was off my resume. Unless you are working retail or have relevant experience (i.e. the science center has a planetarium and a telescope and I have a minor in Astronomy so it was relevant in my career) there is really no reason to keep retail on your resume.

      What does flipping burgers have to do with signing in laws to effect? Proving you’re detailed oriented is a stretch, no?

    26. A perfectly normal-size space bird*

      I remember the name of one manager from all my short term jobs and that’s only because she was absolutely awesome. Who knows if she remembers me at all. Plus I changed my name since I had all those jobs and my birth name is so common that she probably wouldn’t be able to tell me apart from someone with a similar name.

    27. Spooz*

      There is absolutely no way I would stick my head above that parapet. You are inviting all sorts of wild accusations in the press and online from people who will think you’re a paid stooge and will do anything to prove it. You’d have to be mad to volunteer for that.

    28. Chirpy*

      I mean, this is legitimately my problem- I do not have a way to contact almost any of my past jobs! One has closed, one moved, and three have had complete turnover within even 5 years of my leaving. And I’m much younger than Kamala Harris.

    29. Drago Cucina*

      Late replier,
      LW 3, as a librarian I feel that pain. I once had to beg for 9 months to get an invoice from our ILS (integrated library system for non-librarians). Then I received a snarky email asking for payment. I forwarded them my many, many emails.

      They were also notorious for sending emails stating, “Please pay the attached invoice”, when that was a computer virus in frequent use.

      On the flip side for LW4.

      My husband is in his 70s. Sixty-years ago he spent a summer working for a Salvation Army Hospital in NYC. When he turned 65, they sent a verification letter to our current address and started sending him a $75 a month retirement check. We were flabbergasted that they had records of his employment from the 1960s, and after leaving New York in the 1970s they took time to find him.

  3. Theda Marinelli*

    I think it’s odd that, given the press this has received, that no-one has come forward and said “oh, yeah, I worked with her” or “yes, I was her manager” or “I was her friend at the time, and she did”.
    Clearly, however, a non-public-figure person would have trouble proving any short-term jobs even less old than that.

    1. Ariaflame*

      Given the right wing’s propensity to send death threats, I can imagine people being unwilling to do so. Plus, it was the 80s. There’s a good chance people who worked with her didn’t pay enough attention to remember who all their co-workers were, especially if turnover was high.

      1. coffee*

        I can’t name a single person I worked with at my high-school fast food job, and that was less than 40 years ago. It’s the kind of job where your shifts change a lot and you work with a lot of different people.

        1. allathian*

          I can’t name a single person I worked with at the job before my current one. I’ve been here for 17 years and I’m on my 6th manager at this job, so I severely doubt it’s an issue.

          I’m in Finland, and the legal requirement for employers to keep employment information is 10 years. For normal security checks that’s the period they’re looking at. It’s only if you’re into Top Secret territory that they’ll look further. It helps that we have mandatory direct deposit, as in companies are breaking the law if they pay in any other way except by bank transfers, and they’re legally required to withhold income tax. The corollary is that a poste restante is sufficient to open a bank account, and it won’t be closed on you even if you lose your home.

        2. Tea*

          I also don’t think I could name a single person from my high school job either, at least not with enough confidence to go public with it. And I left that job in 2013, not the 80s.

          1. Butterfly Counter*

            I can name two people from my high school Taco Bell job!

            One because he was my first boyfriend (everyone dated everyone in my Taco Bell).

            And the other, I remember his first name because it was the same as I had named my pet bird.

            Could anyone there I worked with currently be in national politics? Yes. And I still wouldn’t remember them. I can’t even tell you the name of my managers who were all very nice to me.

        3. Quinalla*

          Really? I don’t think it is odd at all. I don’t remember the names of anyone I worked with at these kinds of jobs. I worked at the dining hall at my university and can’t remember a single person’s name from that job whatsoever and likely wouldn’t recognize them either. Same with the summer job I had at a camp. The only person I remember was someone I knew for years before, no one else.

          I do think part of it is not understanding how easy it was to forget and lose touch with people pre-social media. You couldn’t add people to facebook or linked-in, it took effort to keep track of contacts so folks that you really didn’t care about, you just didn’t make the effort /shrug. Now it is so low effort, you can just friend everyone you’ve ever met and plenty of folks you haven’t met, it did not used to be like this :) You had to write letters or call on expensive long distance. Eventually email and cell phones with plans that didn’t charge you for long distance, but email and cell phones are both fairly new too even though it doesn’t feel like it.

        4. AF Vet*

          Same. I worked in a restaurant in high school. Some of my coworkers were also fellow students at my high school and it was a small town. I couldn’t name anyone except the owner’s wife… and wouldn’t recognize anyone from there either.

        5. Turquoisecow*

          I can remember several of the manager names from my last retail job (roughly 2002-2008), and a couple of my coworkers because I worked it so long, but I couldn’t tell you any of their surnames, aside from one manager. There were two Johns so they had to be referred to as John LastName, but I only remember one of the Last Names. The other John has since retired anyway. But I have no idea what he’s doing now or how to contact him or even how to spell his last name.

          Shorter term part-time jobs before that? Nah.

        6. Rex Libris*

          This. And also, it was McDonald’s in the 80s. The chances are if you were a teenager, you worked there for a month or three at least.

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

          Heck, I can’t remember the name of the owner of the shop in high school that I did my school to work program at and she was a distant relative!

        8. Zombeyonce*

          The only person I could name from my high school job was the person I had a crush on, and I couldn’t tell you anything about them but their first name. I’m sure I wouldn’t even recognize them if I passed them in the street tomorrow.

        9. Halloween Cat Lady*

          I can’t either. I worked three summers in the aughts at a huge, month-long tent sale that a homewares company put on to clear their overstock. The company still exists, but I have no idea if the tent sale has continued, and the only fellow employees I could verify are my brother and one of his friends, whose mother’s job in corporate was how we all got hired. Some of their other friends might have worked there too, but I couldn’t even swear to that.

        10. Lydia*

          I can name three people, but that doesn’t mean they can name me or would remember me. Okay, one of them probably could because we dated for a long time, but anyone else? I would be completely shocked.

        11. LL*

          Yeah, I didn’t work in fast food, but same for my high school/college jobs. The only people I remember working with are the ones that I either went to school with or worked with every summer. And I only remember first names for most of them.

        12. B*

          For real. I’m the same age as JD Vance and if he and I had worked together at Kroger for a summer, I would not be able to tell you.

      2. Pink Sprite*

        I worked at McDonalds in the 80’s. I couldn’t tell you one of my coworkers, minus my boss. That’s it. And I do know that there were fellow high school students who worked there, but ask me who? No idea.

        1. miss_chevious*

          I worked there for three years in high school and only remember my manager’s name and the name of my friend who got me the job. I’m sure my co-workers would have an equally hard time remembering me.

          I do have my old name tag in a box, though, so I could, theoretically, prove I worked there if I ever decide to run for president.

      3. Fishsticks*

        I… genuinely don’t think I could tell you anything more than the first name of coworkers at my first genuine job. And I probably wouldn’t recognize most of them now.

        1. Nix*

          my manager at my first job was named Dave; I don’t remember his last name, so I couldn’t even attempt to find him for a reference!

        2. JustaTech*

          I can’t remember the name of anyone at my first retail job. I can tell you the assistant manager liked to eat canned salmon, and that he liked the author Roger Zelazny, but I could not tell you their names.
          I also couldn’t tell you the names of anyone I worked with at my second retail job. It was a holiday season job, and one guy’s girlfriend was a landscaper who did roller derby. But names? Ha!

        1. Texan In Exile*

          Shoe/fits. I am friends with my (D) state legislator. She cannot do doors alone in the middle of the afternoon because of all the rape and death threats she has gotten. I have gone with her on bodyguard duty before.

          1. Middle Aged Lady*

            Several of My own relatives posted on FB that I should be held down and have my teeth kicked in for voting for Obama in 2008. Needless to say, we don’t have contact anymore.
            You can’t love guns and glorfy violence and misogyny and be trusted. You just can’t.

        2. JB*

          Does “there are a large number of people who send death threats to anyone they perceive as opponents of the right” sound the same as “every single person who considers themselves right-wing sends death threats” to you?

      6. AVP*

        They didn’t know they had Kamala Harris, future VP and pres nominee, in their midst! Someone that I worked with for a year at Mandee’s in 2002 could literally be the president of the United States right now and I would have no idea, I don’t remember a single human from that job except that the store manager’s name was Maria, no last name.

        And that was after an entire year! I can actually corroborate that worked for a record store for a summer after that, but only bc I dated another employee and we’re instagram friends.

      7. Chirpy*

        I know the first name of my manager at my high school job, and that’s it. I do not remember the name of even my favorite coworker, and only have a vague idea of what she looked like (blond? slightly taller than me?) despite working with her for months. Unless she ran for office and told a specific story about the cookies, I wouldn’t recognize her at all.

    2. Daria grace*

      I don’t find it odd at all. I mostly have a decent memory but in jobs I’ve worked with high turn over much more recently than that I couldn’t still tell you for sure who many of my co-workers were. As for friends I knew back in high school days I’m sure some worked at McDonald’s but I couldn’t tell you now in my 30s which ones it was.

    3. KaciHall*

      I live in the same small town I went to high school in. I worked at an ice cream shop that hired mostly high school girls. (Which, in a small town, means I probably knew all of them, or was friends of a friend with them.)

      I can name 4 of them, first and last names. There were probably 20 girls on the schedule at any given time, and the ones I remember are someone I’d been in every class with since second grade, my best friend’s cousin, and two girls who were absolutely insane and made every shift entertaining. (Though honestly, I could have their last names mixed up.) And that’s from only twenty years ago. make it 40 and I probably won’t even remember them. How many people would?

    4. Forgetful Fanny*

      If I was one of them and I remembered (doubtful in and of itself) I wouldn’t say a word as that would only invite unimaginable scrutiny into my life with ppl trying to prove me a liar and digging digging digging. And even people who believed me might be bothersome, asking what she was like, what I remember… Nah.

      Also, and I’m trying really hard not to break the rules and be political so I hope this isn’t crossing the line: in the context of the choices, that’s not why someone would not vote for her in my humble opinion. Even if that’s what they tell themselves, it’s not.

      1. Daria grace*

        Absolutely. If it were a non-controversial celebrity you might tell people about it as a fun fact. It would make no sense to do so about a politician in a very toxic election season unless you remembered things incredibly relevant to their candidacy

      2. Reality.Bites*

        And of course even if someone did remember working with her and was willing to talk about it, the same thing applies – they’d have no way of proving they worked there either! So people who don’t believe Harris wouldn’t believe that person either.

      3. Lily Rowan*

        Seriously — I can imagine people thinking, “oh, was she that college girl that summer? maybe she was! do I want to get involved in any of this? HELL NO.”

      4. Smithy*

        I think your point goes really well with the point about folks not remembering – that even if someone did remember working there with her, they might not remember much or anything else.

        I went to high school with someone who’s an Olympic medalist, and just about any follow up question about what he was like, I wouldn’t be able to answer. We sat next together in one class, and the anecdotes dry up really fast after there. I have no memories about him academically, he was neither particularly nice nor snarky to me, and I have nothing positive nor negative to say about him. And in working situations I can easily see this being magnified where you remember them being there but not much else.

        In a situation if a journalist were to find one person with that kind of memory but no corroborating source, and that person had such little else to add….I can see both someone not wanting to bother, but also a journalist not feeling like they could say “multiple sources confirm xyz” and also not feeling like it was a story.

        1. NotJane*

          Yeah, I went to elementary and high school in the 80s with someone who is a celebrity (not super-famous but you’d probably recognize the name) and I really couldn’t tell you what she was like, even though we had multiple classes together.

      5. Rex Libris*

        Even if they remembered, what are the chances they’d have anything to say? I went to high school, multiple decades ago, with a famous country music performer. Did I know him? Not really. Do I remember him? Sort of, vaguely. At the time he was just “other random guy in math class.” Nobody pointed out that he was going to be famous in 20 years, so I better take notes or something.

        1. KateM*

          I taught someone who is now a locally famous music performer and all I could say would be “she was average in math”.

    5. Magdalena*

      If one of my coworkers from a short time job twenty years ago suddenly became famous, I’d never realize bc their name and face would no longer ring a bell for me.

    6. Irish Teacher.*

      I dunno. I doubt I’d necessarily remember somebody I worked with for a few months 40 years ago.

      Heck, I know I worked with our Minister for Education only 8 years ago but I only know that because I read what school she worked in and I subbed there for a month or two. Thinking about it, I do remember an English teacher I THINK had her surname (I might have borrowed her copy of School for Rock to do for film studies with a class) but I couldn’t say for sure. She does have a super-common surname and a not uncommon first name and looks like the stereotype of an Englush teacher, which makes it harder!

      1. TeaCoziesRUs*

        I’m not sure if Englush was a typo or not… but now I’m occurring someone dressed like Dolores Umbridge (movie version) walking around like the forest scene, staggering just a little… “hmm hm” squeaks… a suspicious scent wafting from her tea cup.

        thank you for some Friday morning joy!

    7. Agent Diane*

      I worked at a KFC in the late 80s. I can remember incidents. I can remember the people in a non-specific way (big fry cook, mousy girl unsuited to the front counter). I couldn’t name a single one of them even a year after I quit, let alone now.

      Can you name people you worked with 30+ years ago?

      1. bamcheeks*

        I worked in a shoe shop in 1998. I remember the numerical codes for black, blue, brown, leather, suede and patent; one person’s first name and surname (she doesn’t exist on Facebook sadly!); six people’s first names but not surname; Tracey’s bright blue mascara (so not the thing in 1998); a really gross story the assistant manager told one lunchtime which meant I’ve never been able to eat KFC since (can’t remember his name though); and that my hourly pay was £2.14.

        1. Arrietty*

          Things I remember about my first job:

          * eating chip butties for lunch
          * playing Denise Lewis Heptathlon on the computer in the extremely frequent quiet moments
          * taking card payments over the phone from people who didn’t want to place orders online… and placing them online for the customer through the same website they could have used
          * earning £3.30 an hour

          Things I don’t remember:

          * anyone’s name

          2. Kit*

            I’m sitting here trying to recall, and I think my manager’s name was Judy, but I would not swear to it in a court of law! I remember exactly one coworker (Dominique) and that’s because she and I were friends and classmates before we started working retail. I have extremely vivid memories of:

            * the awful concrete floor while we were undergoing a remodel
            * the equally awful carpet both before and after
            * folding so much underwear (I worked in the lingerie department)
            * filling in at the perfume counter twice (because it meant I could theoretically ‘earn’ commission – I did not)
            * the time a customer yelled at me for being the only person on the register and I had to ring up the next several with tears in my eyes
            * so much food court Chinese. so. much.
            * other assorted retail nightmares

            My other coworkers’ names and faces? Ha, nope! Not even sure I’d recognize D if I saw her now, it’s been twenty-plus years.

        2. Magenta*

          I was getting £2.50 an hour delivering leaflets for an estate agent in 1996, mind you I’m guessing there were fewer dogs in the shoe shop.

          I worked for McDonalds through school and uni at two different stores between 1998 and 2003, there is no way I could prove it at all, it was before emails and the payslips are long gone.

          I remember smoking in the restaurant after closing, the faces of the employees that dealt drugs on the side, hiding in the cleaning cupboard to avoid work, the face of the trainer when the guy with me on my hygiene course picked the answer that said that rat eggs were a sign of a rat infestation, but the only name I can remember are the first names of two store managers, one area manager, plus the shift manager I had an argument with.

        3. Lenora Rose*

          First Job: Christmas sales at an Inuit Art store that hasn’t existed for decades, no idea what anyone’s name was.

          Second job: Fry place in a mall. I remember mostly that the manager had his hand on the ass of the cute blonde counter server one day, and that I was at the time too scared to ask her if she was okay or speak up to him. No names. The cute blonde could’ve been Sarah Michelle Gellar for all I’d know. (Though locationally Anna Paquin would be more realistic).

          Third job: Caribbean fast food kiosk. I remember the name of the boss because it was the name of the company. I remember the name Tattoo Mike because he’d previously worked at a place with 7 Mikes and that was why he used the nickname. I remember the other guy’s name was pronounced Reece but might not have been spelled that way (Nor was it the Welsh Rhys), and not a single other person’s name who worked there at the time. And both of them were gone a couple months before I quit.

          I remember quitting the second time my cheque bounced, and that I immediately put in an Employment Standards complaint because he paid time, not time and a half, for overtime (So a year later I saw some more money). That’s the first place which is even still there, but the turnover has been absolutely complete; management is a woman now and has been for ages. I wouldn’t recognize the boss, or Tattoo Mike or Reese if I saw them.

          1. Grimalkin*

            First job: Halloween store. Got the job through some semi-distant relative, who became my manager; I think I know which one and could dig up contact information, but I’m not positive it’s the right person. I’d know absolutely nobody else there. The store itself is naturally no longer around; I don’t remember its exact name, or whether its corporate entity would still exist.
            Second job: Goodwill. There’s one person who I remember because she was kind of a jerk and seemed like she thought she was better than me because she’d been there longer, but I don’t remember her name. It might have been Emma? Even if that’s right, that’s not narrowing things down much. I barely knew manager names at the time, let alone now. I’d have a better chance remembering regular customers than coworkers, and even then it’d be recognizing their faces rather than names.
            Third job: Nonprofit office work. I know my boss and somebody else in the food chain’s name and info, but I was in a weird little side department and I wouldn’t remember anybody from outside that department at all.
            Fourth job: Tax place. I know my boss and grandboss’ name and info. I’m honestly not even sure if the other people worked for the same company or if it was a shared suite with other businesses. No way I’d remember anybody else there.
            Fifth job: Nonprofit doing project-based work remotely. I don’t remember a single person’s name off-hand, though I might be able to dig up names if I needed to. Might.
            Sixth job: Generic corporate office-type work but remote. I think I remember my boss’ name. Not positive on the surname. Definitely don’t remember coworkers.

            …and this is all from “only” a decade or two out now–my work history started around 2008! Give it another couple decades and I wouldn’t put money on me remembering even the people who I still remember now.
            And this is from a work history that’s admittedly more geared towards office jobs than retail or food service or call centers or other industries known for their high turnover!

      2. Nightengale*

        I am known for a really good memory. Names, events, obscure trivia, what year I saw Fiddler on the Roof at the Wang center in Boston as a kid. People routinely comment on my memory. I’m a physician and will see a new patient name on my schedule and say OH yeah I saw them at my old practice 7 years ago, I think they came for 2 visits and here are a few factoids about them. (law says they count as “new” after 3 years.) I once saved a kid from a head CT they didn’t need because I remembered having taken care of the kid a year earlier and that another hospital HAD gotten a CT.

        I taught at a kids’ summer program for 3 years in high school, starting in 1992. It was very exciting for me because most of the teachers in the program were real teachers and I was 16 when I started. I remember. . . the last name of the husband and wife who founded the program and the first name of the wife. I don’t believe either are still with us. I had to google to see if the program still existed (it does.) I do not remember the names of any of the other faculty. I remember the first name of 2 of the 100 or so kids I taught.

        Since then I have worked at. . . 5 different places? And worked with dozens to hundreds of people at each place. Kamala is an unusual enough name in the US that I MIGHT remember if I had previously met or worked with one 40 years ago. Maybe.

        1. GammaGirl1908*

          I am also pretty good with names and faces and remember people who don’t remember me. And I also wouldn’t have this level of detail about a long-ago colleague, especially if they kept their head down and didn’t make waves, or we didn’t work together closely.

      3. fhqwhgads*

        I remember their faces but not their names, but they were adults and I was a teen. If one of them had been someone who became well-known 20 years later, I doubt I’d make the connection. Maybe maybe if they had a particularly unique name it’d ring a bell and I’d be like…wait a sec, is that?… But I still wouldn’t want to step into that.

      5. Arts Akimbo*

        I remember literally no one’s name from my first job (1990). I could have been working retail with the queen of England for all I know. From my second job… my manager was maybe named Dennis? Though I couldn’t swear to it.

        I do remember people from my third job, because I was employed there for three years. But any people I was employed with for less than a year left no impression on my long-term memory.

    8. andy*

      If I worked with her in that McDonald, no way I am coming publicly forward. There is absolutely nothing to gain for anyone – not even Kamala Harris. And there is a lot to loose.

      The right with media outrage machine is uninterested in truth. None of them would be convinced or cared. Plus, I would become target of attacks and smear machines. I am not someone experienced with fighting these, so I would make missteps Harris herself does not need at all.

      1. Tea*

        I don’t even publicly say I plan to vote for her IRL, because there are people in my life who would be verbally abusive if I said anything anti-Trump. If people I know personally make me so nervous to discuss politics, I can’t imagine feeling safe revealing my political leanings to millions of strangers. Politics has become extremely toxic in the US- If I had worked with her, no way I’d get involved either.

      2. Irish Teacher.*

        Yeah, the kind of person who says “she must be lying ’cause she didn’t put it on her resumé” probably isn’t going to admit they were wrong if some random person says, “oh yeah, I worked with her, well, I think it was her anyway. I had a colleague that age and I think her name was Kamala.”

      3. fhqwhgads*

        Yeah, it’s like…the same assholes who didn’t trust or believe an actual legal birth certificate sure aren’t going to stop their harassment due to someone saying – or even providing a photo – of them working at McDonald’s. The ship has sailed on logic and reason in this particular context.

      4. Indolent Libertine*

        THIS THIS 1000 TIMES THIS. No effing way am I putting myself and my family in the cross-hairs of the MAGA fanatics (and yes my choice of “cross-hairs” is extremely deliberate, thank you).

    9. perstreperous*

      I worked with a double murderer nearly 30 years ago and, when I saw his name in the media, could only dredge up the most vague details about him …

      (His murders were 20 years after I left the project we were on).

      1. Oryx*

        Yeah I think a lot of people are taking for granted that because she and her name are so well-known now, of course they would easily remember that from decades ago.

        1. Irish Teacher.*

          Yeah, like I mentioned above, I worked with our Minister for Education maybe 3 years before she became minister (she was appointed a minister the first time she was elected, having come straight from teaching) and yeah, on hearing she’d taught English in that school, I thought back and was like “oh yeah, I think there WAS a Miss Foley and I THINK she was the one with short dark hair, which fits. Can’t remember her first name, but it COULD have been Norma.”

          But yeah, I didn’t recognise her until I thought it through and that was only a matter of a couple of years. I didn’t know at the time she was going to be a minister so no reason I should pay any more attention to her than any of the rest of the staff.

    10. kicking-k*

      Beyond my boyfriend (because I married him) I have no idea what my friends did for summer jobs, and I am sure they don’t know what I did! And with the exception of a few memorable characters, and people I’ve bumped into since (who were mostly permanent employees, because that’s how I met them again) I have very little reliable memory of my co-workers from short-term things. I just don’t. Other parts of my life felt more interesting to me then (I was young…)

      1. Jackalope*

        I remember the short-term job of exactly one of my friends. And that’s because a) we’re still in touch today so she’s remained relevant in my life, and b) I had a brief visit to her workplace that caused a fight with a family member (for not very interesting reasons), and that fight caused minor but permanent damage to my relationship with that family member. Otherwise I would have no clue.

    11. Insert Clever Name Here*

      I worked at a daycare for two summers 20 years ago and aside from my best friend who also worked there could not tell you the name of a single other employee, including the director of the daycare or the head teacher of the class I worked in. One of the kids in the class had a name starting with “A” if that is of interest, though?

    12. Seashell*

      I don’t know the details, but I have read that a friend of hers confirmed it.

      Aside from my mom, I have probably 2 people who I know, could find, and would remember me at each of my teenage jobs, and that’s only because I reconnected with them on Facebook later in life. If they died in the interim, I would be out of luck on that front. I have an old t-shirt from one of them somewhere in my house, but I imagine McDonald’s doesn’t let you keep their stuff.

    14. doreen*

      I don’t think it’s odd at all – after all, she wasn’t famous then, and wasn’t any sort of public figure until about 20 years later. If I worked with someone at McDonalds in 1980 and they became well known in 1983, and stayed in the public eye until now, I would probably remember them because I was constantly being reminded of their existence. But someone I worked with in 1981 could absolutely be the attorney general of some state other than my own – in fact , I couldn’t swear that the attorney general of my state didn’t work with me at some point. If a very close lifelong friend worked there with me they would remember me. In fact there are two people I worked with there who I am certain remember me working there- my husband and one of his friends. What would be the point of them coming forward? If someone doesn’t believe me, why would they believe my husband and his friend ?

      1. Falling Diphthong*

        *looks up AG of my state*
        Yeah, I could not swear that I have never worked with this person.

        AG is too young to have had 80s jobs, but the lieutenant governor is the right age to have had teen summer jobs in the 80s, and whether or not she and I encountered each other, at those jobs or elsewhere, is a mystery. Maybe someone has old surveillance footage that they saved, and would recognize that the LG and I stood in line at a 7-11 in upstate New York in our young 80s personas, discernible under the shoulder pads. But I don’t think she or I will be any use at the confirmation.

        1. Reality.Bites*

          Now I’m picturing Joan Collins and Linda Evans being forced to proved they were on Dynasty. ;)

          1. Jam on Toast*

            “I was the one who wore the large purple amethysts and the wide-shouldered wrap dresses?”
            “Uhh…?”
            “I sneered and looked down my patrician nose at you a lot?”
            “Maybe…but no, not really.”
            “For heaven’s sake, I threatened to expose your dark secret, before seducing your husband and you’re saying you still don’t remember me?”
            “Sorry, I’ve had a lot of husbands since then. After a while, they kind of run together.”

            1. GammaGirl1908*

              **throws glass of champagne in your face**
              “…hmm, maybe?”

              **tosses you in pool**
              “Oh, yeah! It’s coming back now!”

    15. Sloanicota*

      I think it depends on where you live. In a smallish town, I would probably be able to do a decent FB dive to find others who lived there at the same time who might remember coworkers who also lived there, from the parties we all attended or who lived in the one apartment building, or whatever. If I could find them I could probably refresh their memories and they would realize I was *that* little brunette who once left the back door unlocked after shift, or whatever … and even that would still work better for 90s jobs or early millennium jobs, when more people connected on FB, versus the 80s. If it was a big town like LA, forget it.

    16. Falling Diphthong*

      As a teen in the 80s I provided childcare at a church and a gym. I could not tell you the names of these places, nor a single thing about the other people who were there beyond my friend Kim, who I’d gone to church with for the previous decade. In college I worked for IBM on the summers and I could not tell you the name of a single person I worked with. Anyone hoping to demonstrate that they were really working in the same area of the building by having me attest to it would be out of luck–I recall no names and the haziest of faces.

      I don’t know how long IBM keeps those records, but I certainly don’t have pay slips from ’86 floating around.

      I am certain that the high school jobs never went on any resume.

      1. bamcheeks*

        ahaha, you’ve just made me think about my own teenage volunteering. I can’t remember the name of the woman who supervised me, but I can still picture where in the village she lived (my dad still lives in that village, so I go there pretty regularly) AND which house the woman her husband ran off with lived in. Memory is so weird!

        (nobody says “ran off with” any more but it was the only way marriage breakdowns were ever described in the 80s and 90s. I think the concept of just ending a marriage because you were unhappy hadn’t been invented, so I only ever remember couples splitting up because someone ran off with someone else, and I still picture them holding hands and skipping into the sunset.)

      2. HistoryChick*

        Before reading your comment, *I* forgot that I worked for a church nursery in college every Sunday for 3 years. So I certainly also forgot the other person who worked with me, the boss, and all of the kids. My other college job was at Blockbuster video and the only co-worker I remember was my best friend who also worked there and (vaguely) one of the mangers b/c he was dating my best friend’s sister. My OTHER college job was at a Jo-Ann Fabrics and the only thing I remember about that job was we kept getting shut down b/c we didn’t have enough staff to unpack the boxes and corporate headquarters wouldn’t stop sending us shipments of things, and the 2 managers were my age and I felt really bad for them because I knew I didn’t want to be dealing with the crap they had to figure out. So…I forgot I even had a job until reading this post and I certainly don’t remember co-workers from all my college jobs – and that was all in the 2000s.

        1. Llama Lamma Workplace Drama*

          I worked for a Blockbuster Video in college and I couldn’t tell you a single person I worked with. The only thing I remember is that someone there went to high school with P!nk (even brought in her yearbook to prove it). I also worked at a McDonalds, a Burger King, Fashion Bug and Ames Department Store. Can’t name a person at McDonalds, Fashion Bug or BK but can name a few from Ames.

          Ames and Blockbuster are both out of business. None of these jobs are on my resume of course.

    17. Lacey*

      The only person I would be able to name from my first high school job would be my bff who recommended it to me. I don’t remember my bosses name or any of my coworkers.

      From my second high school job, I only worked with one person and I don’t recall her name. I don’t even remember her busines name anymore! Of course, she intentionally paid me under the table, which I didn’t realize was illegal at the time – so there are no records.

      In college it gets a bit better. I’m sure my classmates remember working with me. But for my summer job at Old Navy? Oooh. I remember one guy was named Chris. And a girl named Ashley. Do I remember a last name for either? I do not.

      Would I magically remember if one of them ran for office. No. No I wouldn’t.

      The first two businesses are closed. And I don’t even know if that Old Navy location exists anymore. I might still have pay stubs because I’m TERRIBLE at going through old papers and getting rid of them, but I bet a lot were thrown away by my mom, because I still lived at home!

    18. Oryx*

      Is it that odd? I couldn’t give you the single name of a person I worked with when I worked at McDonalds nearly 30 years ago

    19. YetAnotherAnalyst*

      I don’t think it’s all that odd, to be honest. Like everyone else is saying, I don’t really remember coworkers’ names from my first (or second, or third…) jobs, and mine were more like 30 years ago than 40. I’ve also had the interesting experience of having college acquaintances whose names I did remember run for local political positions years later, and not realizing they were the same person.

    21. AngryOctopus*

      The only people I can recall working at CVS with were people with whom I remained friends for years after that. All two of them. Otherwise, no idea at all. If my mom said “didn’t you work with X?” I’d shrug and say “maybe??”.

    22. TiffIf*

      I don’t find it odd at all. I don’t remember the names of my coworkers from my high school job at Walmart One Hour Photo – I remember there were two women I often worked with. One was Afghani and the other had dark hair. My boss was blond with glasses. That is literally all I remember. If someone told me their names today it wouldn’t even ring a bell. This was a little over 20 years ago. if it were 40? forget it.

    23. Cascadia*

      I worked at a children’s shoe store for 3 months one summer in high school in the early 2000s. I can’t remember a single coworker I had, nor do I even remember the manager. If someone came up to me and asked me if I worked with a young Kamala Harris I would have no idea!

    24. learnedthehardway*

      Not really – I worked in the Army Reserves in Canada while a teen, and literally the only 3 names I remember are 2 people with very unusual last names and someone I was outside friends with from high school. I don’t remember the names of my division officer, my commanding officer, or any of the other 40+ people I saw on a regular basis. And that’s despite spending intensive time with these people – doing weekend military exercises, etc.

      I recently completed a huge background check to be a volunteer for our local Cadets branch, and I had assumed the Canadian Forces were able to check my employment dates with them from when I was a teen, but come to think of it – why on earth would they keep those files or digitize them?!? They probably did NOT look them up. They probably don’t even have them.

      My husband worked at a name brand fast food place (equivalent to a McDonalds) when he was a teen, and he just laughed at the idea that his employer at that time would have any records of him. For one thing, it was a franchise – like McDonalds. Does anyone seriously expect a franchise operator to keep employment records from 40 years back?!!? I don’t think so.

    25. Jennifer Strange*

      You do realize she wasn’t a famous politician when she was working there, right? She was just a random young person making a living. I also worked at McDonald’s in my teens and for all I know any of the folks I worked with could now be incredibly famous.

    26. Ellis Bell*

      I think it’s more odd that people would respond with disbelief, like working retail is some kind of exotic accomplishment that hardly anyone managed to do. I worked a lot of retail jobs and they tend to be very short stints with other people who are also passing through and it’s all first names. I honestly don’t think I would recognise anyone now.

      1. YetAnotherAnalyst*

        I think there’s a sort of essentialism underlying a lot of the modern Republican worldview. They talk as though people were always whatever they were at some set point in their lives. You can see it best when they’re talking about crime – like being a “criminal” is somehow a separate question from whether or not a person is believed to have committed a crime – but it comes up with class, too. If you own a farm, you’re “working class”, even if you’re a multimillionaire, own the means of production, and all your labor is executive-level management. If you work in fast food or retail, you’re a “college dropout” (and thus don’t deserve a fair wage), even if you’ve got an advanced degree or are currently pursuing one. If you’re running for president, you’re “elite”, and therefore could not have worked fast food, retail, or any other “low class” job at any point in your life. QED, she must be lying.

        It’s a very strange way to view the world, but there’s a certain internal logic to it once you start looking.

    27. Someone Online*

      Someone I worked with a few years ago sent me a message this week asking about my high school. It turns out I graduated with her now husband and she found out because she saw me in the year book. I have no recollection of this man. Don’t remember his name. I apparently knew him for years. Oops. So no, I don’t find it strange. There are lots of people living in a fog like me.

    28. Another Kristin*

      Do you remember the full names of every acquaintance you had as a teen working food service jobs? Even if someone remembered the name “Kamala” as one of their colleagues from 41 years ago it’s unlikely they’d remember her last name or connect that person with the current VP.

      I last worked food service in 2002 and don’t think I remember anyone’s name from that job, even the girl who used to leave jugs of milk on the espresso machine frother and walk away. I remember HATING her but I couldn’t pick her out of a lineup now.

    29. Trout 'Waver*

      “I think it’s odd that” followed by a hyper partisan conspiracy theory designed to delegitimize a political opponent is pretty typical for propaganda. Knock it off.

    30. NMitford*

      Actually, it’s not not true that no one has come forward. Per an article in the New York Times, one of her oldest friends has confirmed that she did indeed work at McDonald’s while in college.

      But, you have to remember that she wasn’t a public figure back then. She was just one in an undoubtedly long line of short term, part time employees who passed through that franchise all those years ago. It’s not all that surprising that her coworkers don’t remember her, and I agree with the poster who said that the behavior of Harris’s opponents may inhibit any of those who do from coming forward.

      1. Panhandlerann*

        Yes, and it does absolutely no good for a co-worker from that job to come forward. The accusers just say the co-worker is lying, and the co-worker may well get harassed or vilified.

    31. Hats Are Great*

      literally no idea of the names of any people I worked with at my first job. if one of them turned up in the news as of murderer, I would have no recollection. like the news article could name the specific store we worked at in the specific year, and I would squint at the picture and say “maybe I remember that guy?”

      I actually did get contacted by a political campaign that was vetting a candidate with whom I went to college, and I actually worked with pretty closely for 4 years in an extracurricular we shared, but boy did the campaign have to provide me a lot of prompting that we went to college together and were in that particular extracurricular together before I could dredge anything about him out of my brain. and basically all I could come up with was, I never saw him sexually assault anyone, he wore a stupid Minnesota Twins hat that had clearly never been washed everyday and we all made fun of him about it, and I think he talked about going duck hunting with his dad but that might have been another guy.

      1. MigraineMonth*

        “I never saw him sexually assault anyone”

        The campaign: “Hooray! We’ve finally found the perfect candidate.”

    32. lost academic*

      I don’t think I can actually name almost anyone with whom I worked at a summer job under the age of 18 and they were good jobs, not fast food. I can name my first boss, but I worked at the Y for years where we’d been members since I was a young child. In my small town, at that. It doesn’t at ALL surprise me that someone can’t remember a teenage line cook at a McDonalds 40+ years back. And while my friends might remember some details, I wouldn’t want them to come into any sort of public crosshairs about it.

    33. Destra N.*

      Let’s say I worked with Harris at McDonald’s in the 80s. (For clarity, I absolutely did not, I would have been 8 years old). Given the current political climate, would I even WANT to, knowing the deluge of unwanted attention that would bring down on me and my family? Would I be prepared to weather the inevitable accusations of being paid to lie, the right-wing armchair sleuths digging up every little facet of my life, and the resulting doxxing and death threats? All for speaking up, especially when I, too, likely cannot provide physical evidence of having worked there?

      Besides that, drawing on my ACTUAL experience in fast food work, I could have worked the fryer next to pre-fame Beyonce and I would not remember it, I literally have no recollection of any of these people who I worked with 30 years ago, before phone cameras and social media came along to prevent those fleeting acquaintances from fading out of my life. Social relationships were so different back then — when you moved on, you moved on from those people as well.

      That’s why I’m 100% NOT surprised that no one has come forward to corroborate it. Even if you did remember (and you probably legitimately don’t), it’s not worth the inevitable harassment.

    34. jenny*

      This is silly.

      In the 1980’s no one knew she was going to be California Attorney General, a Senator, or Vice President. She was just another McDonald’s worker. There would be no reason to remember her over me (someone who is not at all famous).

    35. migrating coconuts*

      Do you honestly think if anyone did remember her, they’d come forward? The way trump worshipers love to dox and threaten people? Or maybe they’d claim they did and then bad mouth her. I am the same age as Kamala, I had a job in the early 80’s at Roy Roger’s fast food. I couldn’t tell you a single name, or the name of the managers. I doubt they remember me either. And if any one of them is famous, I have no clue. Most people I know don’t hold onto paystubs that far back. Maybe now in this tech age, a company might be able to track down info so you could prove you worked somewhere as a teenager, but back then? Not a chance. Guessing you’re not that old, and it makes no sense to you. Regardless, I don’t think anyone is going to base their vote on that.

    36. Orv*

      I don’t know about you, but I didn’t make a habit of writing down the names of everyone I worked with so that I could periodically check later and see if any of them were famous.

    37. Bitte Meddler*

      I worked at a pizza place in high school and the only two names I remember are the owner’s (I had a ton of funny stories about him that I’ve retold for decades, so his name stuck with me because of that), and a guy named Xavier.

      There is no amount of money in the world you could offer me or threats you could make to me that would cause me remember Xavier’s last name.

      If a man named Xavier was one of the presidential candidates, it wouldn’t even occur to me to ask, “I wonder if it’s the Xavier I knew back in 1983?”

    38. Kay*

      Do you actually remember the names of the people you worked with that long ago? I’m shocked, because I can only vaguely remember I may have worked with a girl named Jen and perhaps the creepy manager was named Jeremy? I sure as heck wouldn’t put my name behind it on a good day, especially not in this political climate.

    39. SimonTheGreyWarden*

      Eh. I remember first names of people I worked with at my first job (some of them). I sure don’t remember last names and I don’t remember much of what any of them looked like (for example, maybe Grizelda had black hair? I think Wakeen was the tall one?). Ask me if I once worked with a Wakeen Franklin and I’d probably give you a blank stare.

    40. HSE Compliance*

      I could not tell you any of the names of the people I worked with at Dairy Queen, nor honestly the majority of my high school friend’s fast food etc. jobs. I remember we all worked somewhere and that’s about it. That was only about 17ish years ago. About the only person that could say “yeah, HSE C *did* work at DQ in high school!” would be either my parents or my in-laws, because my father-in-law’s favorite thing to do was to stop by Saturdays for lunch at DQ and say hello (Hubs and I had just started dating). I’m also pretty sure no one on the loudly complaining side would likely that take as a serious confirmation if I were in Kamala’s shoes.

    41. Michelle*

      I worked at McDonald’s in the 90s and I couldn’t tell you the name of anyone I worked with, including my neighbor who got me the job. She could literally run for president and I wouldn’t know it was her.

    42. GammaGirl1908*

      I think it’s odd that, given the press this has received, that no-one has come forward and said “oh, yeah, I worked with her” or “yes, I was her manager” or “I was her friend at the time, and she did”.
      ***
      Maybe so, but that just still isn’t proof of a darn thing, in either direction. I’m not even a lawyer and I can tell you this entire line of questioning is some paper-thin circumstantial evidence. This is a weak and terrible distraction tactic, at best.

    43. Cat Secrets*

      I worked part-time at Wal-Mart 20 years ago. I cannot tell you the name of my manager at that time. I remember she was well into her 60’s then, wore a lot of makeup and bleached-blonde hair, and was in an old lady motorcycle group. I cannot tell you the name of any of my co-workers from that time, either. I remember there was the lady with 6 kids, the teenager who was emancipated from her parents, the young woman who wore brightly colored contact lenses, and the older man who had worked there for a decade. I worked with dozens of other people and I can’t picture them in my head or tell you anything about them. If any of those people ever became famous for any reason in those 20 years, I couldn’t tell you that I’d worked with them.

    44. Nopity Nope*

      The thing is, she’s a household name NOW, but back then, she was just another teenager/young adult. I could have worked with any number of now-famous people back in my teens/twenties without knowing it. I can’t remember a single person from my make-college-money jobs, and I only vaguely remember a few first names from any but my last job, where I worked for over a decade. And honestly, after 5 years away, that’s first names only except for my immediate team.

      It’s weird to me that anyone thinks that her co-workers would remember a random person from 40 years ago, much less expect that anyone can prove where they worked 40 years ago.

    1. Juicebox Hero*

      Up until last summer, we used our fax machine all the time. We only stopped because when the offices were renovated and shuffled around the phone company forgot to run the line for it to its new home. It sat in my office unplugged and dusty until I snuck it into the storage room in January and no one’s even noticed so far.

    2. Sara without an H*

      We kept one at my last employer, Tiny College Library. There were various state government agencies that some of our students had to submit documentation to that would only accept faxes. Go figure.

      We ditched the actual fax machine when we got a new copier that had a fax function included, if you wanted to enable it. We dug deep into the start-up manual and set it up. It was easier to use than the stand-alone fax machine, but still–it was a fax.

      All this in the first quarter of the 21st century…

    3. Bitte Meddler*

      My manager, who worked in Munich, Germany for the past 10 or so years told me that not only do the doctors’ offices still use faxes, but that they don’t have a patient portal you can log into to request a prescription or ask a question. You have to call in. And if it’s for a prescription, you then have to go to the doctor’s office *in person* to pick up the paper prescription.

      I would love for any Germans on her to verify if that’s a universal experience or if it was just her doctor.

      1. Dahlia*

        That sounds about right from what I’ve heard from my friend who lives in Germany. Although they are working on a new system that apparently no one likes, I believe?

        In Canada, a lot of medical stuff is still done by fax, too. It’s more secure.

  5. Audiophile*

    I love it when people say they’re skeptical of Harri’s claim she worked for McDonald’s. There are so many better, more exciting jobs to make up than McDonald’s.

    I’m pretty sure I couldn’t prove that I worked most of the retail jobs I did, and this was less than 20 years ago. My first retail job said all I needed to do to resign was fill out one piece of paper with my end date and sign. I did, and years later, when I reapplied for a different role, the company claimed they couldn’t prove I’d ever left.

    1. The Prettiest Curse*

      A while back, I had to compile a list of every job I’ve ever had for UK state pension purposes. If I hadn’t still had the payslips, it would have been impossible. There were so many temp office jobs I had 20+ years ago that I did for a week or two that I didn’t remember at all! If I totally forgot about the job, the chances of me remembering anyone else who worked there are non-existent.

      1. EllenD*

        Goodness – I graduated in 1983 at a time of high unemployment in the UK. I spent nearly two years doing temp jobs some for a couple of weeks – mainly through the JobCentre, but I can’t remember them all and I certainly don’t have payslips. But I know I was paid with payslips, so my national insurance contributions should record this. In the 1990s my father had to spend hours talking to the pension people about where he was working & when to sort his entitlement, but that was because he spent most of the 1950s as a casual construction worked moving to towns across England & Wales ever few months.

      2. London Calling*

        Can I ask why you had to do this? (I’m assuming it was for the Dept of Works and Pensions). When I applied for my state pension they didn’t ask for anything like that because all the jobs where you paid national insurance should be on your NI record.

        Same for me with temp jobs. In exjob I went temp to perm and HR used an external reference checking company. They wanted every temp job I’d had for 14 years – some of which for various reasons weren’t even on my CV and/or I couldn’t remember. They wanted details of what I was doing for every period I wasn’t working 2003-2017. I ended up ignoring them in the end.

        1. The Prettiest Curse*

          I had to do it in order to make up my state pension contributions for the years I was working in the US. Basically, they needed a list of my entire employment history in both countries so they could calculate how much I should give in make-up contributions to get my full state pension for the years I was out of the country.

          It was a really time-consuming process – I think it took me 3 days in total! If you haven’t taken a break from the workforce, had periods of unemployment or worked abroad, you don’t need to do that process. I don’t know why they couldn’t just look up my NI records for the years I was working in the UK, but I did send them copies of all my pay slips too.

          1. London Calling*

            Oh right, that makes sense (well, insofar anything to do with British bureaucracy makes sense). Looking up your NI record seems the obvious and easier solution, of course, but bureaucracy…

      3. rebelwithmouseyhair*

        Reading this, I’m glad I moved to France. When I hit 50 the retirement fund sent me a recap of all the jobs I’d ever had, and how much each contributed to my fund. I can go on their website and use a simulator to see when I can retire and how much I’ll get, because they have All The Information right there, I don’t have to prove a thing (unless I disagree with their info of course, but they’ve listed stuff I had completely forgotten about, I’m not arguing!).

        1. Empress Ki*

          I used to work in France (about 12 years) and I’ve never received a recap when I hit 50. Would you mind sharing which website ? I may need to investigate.

    2. ChattyDelle*

      I’m slightly older than Ms Harris. I worked at Kentucky Fried Chicken, but I don’t know if that was the summer between high school and college, or the summer after my freshman year in college. It’s a tiny detail about an insignificant job over 40 yrs ago. Lots and lots of middle class American kids worked these jobs. It’s a Nothingburger except for people desperate to find a “gotcha”

      1. Bookworms*

        Exactly. I worked at a fast food restaurant and a grocery store in high school, and a bunch of part time jobs in college. Couldn’t tell you anything about coworkers. This was 40ish years ago for high school.

      2. Falling Diphthong*

        And any time someone does engage like these people have good will and want to listen to facts, the conspiracy theorists can swap on a dime. Got a W-2? That’s fake. Someone remembers her? Who remembers people they worked with in a summer job in ’83–clearly fake. The concept of McDonalds? Clearly fake.

      3. Marny*

        I’m slightly younger than VP Harris and I worked briefly at Bed, Bath and Beyond one summer. I couldn’t tell you the name of a single person I worked with and I don’t think the brick and mortar store even exists anymore. It was sometime in the 90s, before Al Gore invented the internet. I truly cannot think of any way I could prove I’d worked there.

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

        Except, it’s very much not- if Obama had not been born in the US, he might have not had a legitimate claim to run for president. It’s also much more racist, as it’s paired with xenophobia and religious intolerance. Even if Kamala Harris lied about working at McDonald’s- which I fully believe she did, why would someone even lie about a job at MCDONALD’S?!- all that proves is that she lied about a job. He’s racist and misogynist toward her in other ways, but the McDonald’s thing is just bizarre.

        Considering everything the former president has lied, I find it weird that this is even a topic of discussion amongst the media. He could have just said it, the press moved on, and not given him oxygen about it. Instead, we’re bombarded with this nonsense.

        1. Lenora Rose*

          Except there was nothing and nobody saying Obama wasn’t born in the US until someone decided to invent the lie, which was itself INCREDIBLY racist. And when he did release his birth certificate, it seemed like hardly anyone who had been spreading the lie changed their mind. So yeah, it’s exactly the same.

          1. Falling Diphthong*

            Fun fact: Immediately after the most recent presidential debate, Fox vowed to send investigators to Hawaii to find the Real True Certificate. So you could tell how the anchors thought it went.

            (I do actually believe that any number of investigators would offer to go to Hawaii and spend a few months searching, from the golf course to the top rated restaurants, following up leads about how someone had seen the document in a very expensive private resort on Maui.)

        2. Cat Tree*

          It’s hard to twist my brain into a pretzel to understand his intent, but I *think* they’re trying to claim that she’s an imposter, pretending to salt-of-the-earth working class when she secretly grew up rich and can’t relate to the people who will vote for her.

          And therefore they should vote for him who is ostentatiously rich in a gaudy, obscene way? Here’s where even that tenuous logic falls apart again.

        3. Clisby*

          Well before Obama, George Romney (Mitt Romney’s father) ran for president, even though he’d been born in Mexico. Ted Cruz, born in Canada, ran for president. John McCain was born in the Panama Canal Zone.

          I don’t think there’s any compelling argument that you literally have to be born on US soil to be president.

          2. RVA Cat*

            This! Obama’s mother was a U.S. citizen, so he could have been born *in space* and still be a natural born citizen.

      2. Orv*

        The Obama birth certificate thing also proves why there’s no point in her trying to dig up evidence she worked there. Obama had ironclad evidence he was born in the US, and it only made people argue harder that he wasn’t. We’re in a post-truth society.

    4. AngryOctopus*

      “I didn’t leave? I guess you’d better cough up the back pay for all that time then.”

    5. L.H. Puttgrass*

      Right? If you were a teenager in the ’80s, what are the odds that you didn’t work at a McDonald’s at some point?

    6. len*

      I mean yeah but that’s the idea, right? She’s not sharing stories to seem exciting, the whole point is that it’s an unglamorous, “regular” job that will be relatable to many people. I have no dog in this fight but it’s not like a politician has never exaggerated their regular person credentials.

      1. Georgia Carolyn Mason*

        I don’t think she’s lying, but I can imagine a strong desire on the part of a candidate (or their PR team) to accentuate their more humble origins. Particularly when they’re up against someone who was born with a silver foot in his mouth, to steal from the incomparable Molly Ivins (speaking of GW Bush, I believe). Trump’s was probably gold to match his toilet, though.

    7. Spooky*

      A lot of the people promoting that skepticism have never had a real/retail job in their lives. They’ve never had pay-the-bills jobs to stay afloat so they don’t know what it’s like to put together a resume and (for obvious reasons) omit your fast food service and other unrelated jobs.

  6. Pink Sprite*

    Re: letter 2: No one. Absolutely no one gets any of my passwords. Especially at work, especially my boss.
    My very own sister (my closest relative) doesn’t have any of my passwords. She knows where to find them should something happen to me, but now? Heck no. I love and trust her, but I don’t share passwords. The same goes for her.
    To give such information to a colleague or boss is unthinkable.

      1. KateM*

        I *think* my husband knows some passwords of mine, so in case of getting hit with a falling brick he would be able to notify people who could possibly miss me.

        1. Jackalope*

          My spouse has mine for similar reasons, and I have one password I share with people – think wifi password that I share with people at our house. Beyond that they’re my secrets.

    2. Gen X Jen*

      I’ve been working since I was 15. There is no way I could prove any of my high school or college jobs and I couldn’t tell you the full name of one person I worked with except for the guy I met at a job during the summer of 1991. But I’ve been married to him for 30 years so there’s that.

    3. The Phoenician*

      “I’m talking the most tenuous of connections — we both attended the same massive university, or lived in the same giant metropolitan area“

      OP’s boss is wrong to demand his LinkedIn password.

      But reaching out to people on the basis of alumni connections or shared geography is good networking. In China alumni connections are considered “guanxi.”

      And people donmarketing on LinkedIn all the time. My profile generates a lot of cold calls.

      1. Hastily Blessed Fritos*

        I would think it’s very weird for someone to connect based on “we both live in the same metro area” (so do a million other people) or “we went to the same university ten years apart in different fields” (like LW, I went to a large school; I can see that being different for a smaller one). It may be the cultural norm in China, but it isn’t in the US.

        1. Great Frogs of Literature*

          There’s a scifi writer who works in the same male-dominated field I do, who’s employed at my alma mater. I’ve considered sending her a connection request, but haven’t done it because the connection feels too tenuous and I think it might be weird.

        2. The Phoenician*

          I must disagree — this is the kind of thing that really separates great networkers from the merely adequate ones. The “go above and beyond” types are the ones who build up
          powerful (virtual) rolodexes.

      2. LinkedIn Lunatic*

        OP #2 here. I think it’s one thing to request a connection, based on the idea that you might have something in common. But this was a bait and switch situation — “hey, let’s be friends because we both live in Boston… and now I’m immediately going to try to sell you something you’ve shown zero interest in!” That’s not networking, it’s cold calling, and it’s an absolute waste of time.

        The very first thing I did after getting laid off was I deleted every single one of those bogus LinkedIn connections. They were utterly meaningless.

      3. Pastor Petty Labelle*

        They do marketing, but does it work?

        There are a lot of complaints about people accepting connections then immediately getting pitched. Networking is about building connections, not hey we went to the same university, wanna check out my product?

        Not surprised it failed miserably. Boss was wrong. Lead Generation Company was terrible and not doing their job. Even leaving aside the impersonation. That’s just scammy.

        OP I know being laid off sucks, but you were better off out of that place.

        1. Slow Gin Lizz*

          Yeah, cold calling is completely ineffective. I worked in marketing over a decade ago and my company’s president actually trained people in a specific kind of marketing. He knew and told his trainees that cold calling is ineffective; you need to have some kind of strong connection with the people you’re marketing to. The marketing firm that was pushing this on OP’s company was really terrible, akin to the so-called career counselors who recommend showing up at a company to drop off your resume with a fancy cake to show you have gumption.

          I actually went to a pretty small women’s college, which means that not only do I feel personally connected to every alum from my school but also alums from any other women’s college (and esp a Seven Sister school), but even that wouldn’t be enough of a connection to market to them if it were our only connection. Mostly what happens IRL is that I meet someone, find out they went to my school or another women’s school, and we get excited about it and only rarely bring it up ever again. It’s like finding out someone grew up in the same small town you did, a decade after you did. It’s like, oh cool, we have something in common, but it’s not like you’ll be forming a close personal friendship based on that fact alone.

          1. LinkedIn Lunatic*

            (LW2) Thank you for this feedback. I honestly submitted this letter just for the validation that this was a totally terrible plan from top to bottom. I’m so glad that both Allison and some of the commenters agree that this was bad, bad, bad.

        2. HoundMom*

          I would love to see a column discuss cold calling. I work with clients and tons of companies want me to bring their products to my clients. I get two or three connection requests weekly. Most of them state we should be friends because we are both women or something else. But anytime I have accepted I have gotten hit with a sales pitch.

          I always wonder if this idea works with others.

    4. amoeba*

      I mean, my Netflix password is, er, more or less public knowledge at this point, but apart from this, I agree.

      1. I went to school with only 1 Jennifer*

        Just so long as it’s not in any way similar to your banking password…

    5. Nobby Nobbs*

      That first MMO RPG I played back in elementary school trained me well. They really banged the drum about the password thing, and I’m forever grateful!

    6. Sloanicota*

      It’s also a bad plan by the company. They’re losing control of these leads when OP leaves. Why not set a company affiliated LinkedIn, or even an assistant profile if they’re determined to subvert the LI standards, who can do the lead generation? And if I was OP I’d be paranoid someone would use my account to do something gross or inappropriate. How are you going to explain it wasn’t “really” you, with your account login info and the location being your work? What if they change your password to keep those leads as I mentioned? To be fair, I also initially thought I *must* be misunderstanding when my boss told me the only way to manager our company FB was … through my own personal FB account. Turns out that one’s true :(

      1. LinkedIn Lunatic*

        (OP2) Yes, these are all fantastic points. I mean, if any of the “leads” had been any good anyway lol. But yeah, I could never let someone else speak as me on social media. It was a hill I was willing to die on, and I definitely used up a LOT of capital doing so… but ah well. I’m in a far better role now anyway.

    7. TiffIf*

      My mother will tell me her password when I am helping her with something on her computer. I am deeply uncomfortable holding this information and endeavor to forget it ASAP.
      Though…I do still share my streaming services passwords.

      1. Aww, coffee, no*

        I know my grandad’s PIN for his bank card; he told me when I was about 14 and it was cleverly memorable. When I was 19 and he again sent me to get money from the cash machine, he was impressed that I remembered it and pleased that I’d thought it was a clever PIN.
        That was… some decades ago. And since grandad is no longer with us I have now co-opted the PIN for my own use.

        Otherwise – I don’t want to know your passwords, your PINs, nothing. And if it’s a work password I will be horrified that you offered it to me.

    8. Slow Gin Lizz*

      No one gets any of my passwords, even myself. Thank goodness for password managers, because there’s no way in heck I could remember any of mine. Hopefully I never forget my actual computer login password, because that’s the only one that can’t live in the password manager. (Although I suppose I could contact the IT dept using my phone and they could reset it, but I bet that’d be a total pain.)

    9. MigraineMonth*

      I was in the thrift store the other day and came across a “password book”, which is basically an address book for, you guessed it, every one of your website passwords. I burst out laughing at what a terrible idea* it was. Another shopper didn’t know why I was laughing, so I showed it to her. She said she had one herself, for if anything happened to her.

      *I will say that a password book is far better for security than password reuse or very short/insecure passwords, especially if you keep it in a secure location, since many more people can get remote access to your computer than can get physical access to your house. It’s still not great to have all of your security keys in a single unencrypted location.

      1. Grimalkin*

        The worst ones are the ones that say “password” right on the book itself in big letters… so anyone snooping around can clearly identify what’s in there… and yet that’s a distressingly common design element for such password books.

  7. Certaintroublemaker*

    On Allison Gill’s Daily Beans podcast Monday, she actually tried to verify employment of her own high school McDonald’s job and got caught in the endless loop of 800 phone number menu trees and websites that referred her back to places that couldn’t help. So, no, Kamala is not going to be able to verify that job unless she is a hoarder of tax documents all the way back to high school. (I guess I won’t be able to, either.)

    1. doreen*

      What I’m actually pretty shocked about is the number of people who don’t understand the concept of a franchise. They either think McDonald’s owns every location ( and therefore the tax records will say McDonald’s ) or that McDonald’s has records of everyone who ever worked for one of their franchisees.

      I’m also kind of surprised about people who swear they remember the full name of nearly every co-worker from every job they’ve had over the last 40 years. I mean , maybe they do – but how would they know if there were 20 ( or 40) people they didn’t remember?

      1. CommanderBanana*

        Right? Almost all McDonald’s are franchises – in the US it’s over 90% of all McDs.

    3. Yes And*

      I also came on to reference this. I am not at all surprised by the overlap of the Allison Gill/Allison Green fan base.

  8. Random Academic Cog*

    I’m younger than Kamala Harris (though not by much), and I absolutely could not locate the Burger King and McDonald’s I worked at while I was in high school. And except for the one coworker I ended up dating, I couldn’t begin to tell you who any of the rest of them were. I think that’s pretty darned normal for those types of jobs, especially when we’re teenagers.

  9. What can I say, I love movies*

    I have no idea how I’d prove I worked at three Blockbusters this many years later. LOL

      1. juliebulie*

        I worked at a Woolworth’s too!
        I realize many people did, but it’s still exciting to see it mentioned.
        Woolworth’s is my sole retail experience, and I really liked working there, except when they made me work the snack bar/Halloween aisle, which felt like a punishment.

    2. Anonymous from Long Island*

      Nor I for my stint at Fotomat. I’m not even sure which towns I was sent to work anymore.

      (1 cashier per micro-store, and as newest I covered everyone else’s PTO…. at least 4 locations in my 2 month summer job.)

        1. Bossypants*

          Awwwww, Fotomat! They were tiny little buildings (usually in parking lots???) where you drove up and dropped of camera film to get developed.

        2. doreen*

          It was a kiosk-type place where you dropped off film to be developed and could pick up the photos the next day. This was before 1 hour photos , when the alternative toFotomat was sending film off to be developed and getting the photos maybe a week later.

        3. juliebulie*

          It was a tiny booth, usually in the parking lot of a strip mall, where you could drive up to the window and drop off the film for your camera. Then, a few days later (I guess – I don’t remember the timeline) you drove up to the window again and picked up your photos.

          When I think of all the people-driving-into-buildings accidents I think I would be absolutely terrified to sit in a Fotomat booth.

        4. Trixie Belden was my hero*

          Fotomat at was a major chain of film developing mini shops where you had to drop off your film for processing and pick it up 3 days later and there would be only 3 photos out of 24 that turned out “good” but you had to pay for all 24 to be developed.

          They were so small only 1 person could physically fit in the store. A bit bigger than a toll booth and you could drive up to a window to pick up/drop off your film.
          There were no coworkers or bosses that could prove you worked there since you had minimal contact with anyone.

      2. Bitte Meddler*

        My dad was so enamored with Fotomat that he thought someone with “gumption” could make a mint with a Fax-o-mat. Same concept as a Fotomat, but you’d hand over documents to be faxed and/or drive up to the window to pick up documents that had been faxed to you.

        In the late 1980’s, I worked in the print shop for BizMart (a precursor to Office Depot and Office Max), and we had three fax machines just for that purpose. So, not quite as convenient as a Fax-o-mat, but same concept.

    3. Cazaril*

      I’m the same age as Harris. I worked at a candy shop at a mall. Not only is the shop gone, so is the mall!

        1. doreen*

          Probably – but maybe not. My SS records don’t have earnings for my very first job – I looked it up and found out that in the past kids under 18 didn’t pay SS taxes for that particular job. Don’t know if there were other exceptions.

          1. Sloanicota*

            I believe I recall signing off on specific exceptions to be able to work starting at 14. I now suspect those were agreeing that the job would not count towards SS. I don’t know what age/level of employment the SS kicks in.

    4. Lenora Rose*

      I didn’t even work at a Blockbuster’s. I worked at the single-location video store across the street that had a fractionally lower rental price.

      So… yeah.

    5. Emotional support capybara (he/him)*

      Same–I worked for Circuit City before the turn of the millennium. (yes, I did bail before they decided to fire all the commissioned sales folks)

    6. badger*

      same. I remember first names for 4 coworkers but only one last name, and that only because we were Facebook friends for awhile in like, 2006.

      I had to list out previous employment on my bar application and the temp agency I had briefly worked with after college still existed but no longer had an office in my hometown. I ended up going with the best info I could find for their national office and an explanatory note. I’m sure I wasn’t the only one in that situation, especially among the non-trad students who didn’t come straight through from undergrad. It was fine. It was Not A Thing. Kind of like how I also had to get a driver’s record check from my home state; it had been so long since I’d been licensed there that they had no record of me anymore.

      …on the other hand, I have a box of stuff I just cleaned out of my file cabinet that includes my tax returns going back to 2002, so…

    7. Sara without an H*

      I had summer/winter break jobs at a local department store. That store is now long out of business, and the manager I worked for is dead. I might be able to prove my employment from Social Security records, but it would take A LOT of investigation.

  10. Honoria Lucasta*

    I think the advice to letter writer #1 is spot on. By replying to the tone/intent of the coworker’s remarks rather than the literal words, it’s much easier to treat the comments as un-frustrating.

    I sympathize, though, especially when the coworker uses “should” language. I’ve tried to stop using that myself in the last few years, i.e. “I would love to get coffee with you sometime” instead of “we should get coffee”. I noticed that it annoyed me, especially when coming from one particular person I knew who I’m not close to anymore, so I resolved not to impose it on others.

    1. NforKnowledge*

      That’s a very good point, I will also be more mindful of “should” phrasing in the future!

      Though I think the coworker is being even more rude in their phrasing by not just saying “we should” but “YOU should”; the first is commonly interpreted as a request but I can’t interpret the second as anything but an imperious command (though presumably in jest). Maybe it’s having toddlers but I would get sick of being jokingly bossed around SO fast

      1. duinath*

        Yeah, it would rub me so wrong. Get me this, make me this, I’m inviting myself to this, I expect you to remember every detail of everything I tell you… I believe LW that this is a person who means well, but I’m in BEC territory just hearing about it. I don’t think they’re very funny jokes, I guess is what I’m saying.

        1. Sloanicota*

          Sure, but OP wants to be able to get along with this person and believes that they are well meaning, so the question is, what can be done. It’s probably easier for OP to mentally rephrase what the coworker is trying to convey – which is probably, “I like you and want to share mild anecdotes about my day!” – versus dwell on the image an imperious toddler bossing her around.

        2. Crencestre*

          Given that this colleague is neurodivergent, she almost certainly does not realize that this habit is grating for some people (like the OP.) It’s likely her way to connect with others socially – a very real challenge for the neurodivergent, who generally find social subtleties beyond them. This is NOT to say that neurodivergence is a “get out of adult responsibility free” card (it isn’t!), but it could explain the verbal habit which the OP finds so irritating.

          1. Orv*

            I think Allison’s advice is good but you do have to be careful. I have neurodivergent friends who say things like, “we should do [X]!” and then interpret any vaguely positive response as a plan that you’ve committed to, which they’ll then take offense at you breaking. Sometimes it’s better to just be blunt.

          2. Telephone Sanitizer Third Class*

            Yeah. Some ND are extreme introverts, some like to socialize. And a lot of neurotypical people do the same thing to make small talk. It’s a matter of picking up on and respecting (or missing) other people’s preferences.

    3. Six Feldspar*

      I also stopped using should (replacing it with could/need to/must) and it’s done so much for me mentally.

      1. Grant*

        This makes sense for a lot of contexts but I’m having trouble imagining replacing “should” with “might,”“need to,” or “must” to suggest getting coffee together.

        The results are either odd (“we might get coffee sometime”), too urgent (“we need to get coffee sometime”), or hard to pull off unless winsomely British (“we must get coffee sometime”).

    4. Sloanicota*

      I saw myself a bit in #1. I don’t know if OP has ever looked into “attachment styles” but I am *strongly* the avoidant one, so people being “clingy” (and they don’t have to actually be all that clingy for me to FEEL they’re being clingy) puts my back up too quickly, like alarm bells going off. Perhaps something like that explains why others aren’t as bothered by this coworker as OP, and sometimes just having a name/explanation helps defuse the tension. I also realized the people I find “clingy” are sometimes sent into Anxious Attachment Overload by my increasing gruffness, which put a name to something I hadn’t understood before. Again, it all just helps me bring my shoulders down from around my ears and remember that nobody’s trying to be a jerk (not even me).

      2. restingbutchface*

        This is a lovely comment. #1 hit a soft spot in me because I recognised parts of myself in the coworker. The idea of my coworkers thinking or saying the same of me is heartbreaking. Like, I’m trying guys! I’m doing my best!

        It’s fine not to like someone for no good reason, but it obviously bothers OP, so your recommendation on attachment styles are super helpful.

      3. OP1*

        It’s funny you mention “clingy” and I didn’t make the connection between these requests and how I’ve always reacted. I even dumped a high school paramour for telling me one too many times they missed me after I’d logged off MSN for an hour hahaha

        This is absolutely a behaviour type that’s always gotten under my skin, which is actually kind of helpful to recognize.

        1. Slow Gin Lizz*

          My grandmother was clingy in this way and it’s a lot harder to deal with in a relative than a coworker. Dear ol’ Grandma would make everyone feel guilty for not inviting her to things. If it were just Mom and me or if my mom and aunt wanted to do something together without her, she would act very hurt if she weren’t invited. Added complications being that mom and aunt and I live closer together and Grandma lived 30 minutes away and didn’t drive, so it’d be two hours of our time to pick Grandma up and deliver her to our neighborhood and back home again and somehow Grandma never understood how much of an impediment that was to the rest of us, even if we’d switch up who drove her which way. Often we’d plan to do something in her neighborhood but that wasn’t always possible if it were an activity in our community. There was one year that I actually did live pretty close to Grandma and she tried to invite herself along when I went grocery shopping (she loooooved grocery shopping, for some reason) and I was like, well, I go shopping at odd hours of the day because of my weird job schedule, and when I do, it takes me 20 min in and out. If I take you along, that’s going to take way longer (she would wander about for over an hour) and I’m sure you don’t want to go at 9:00 at night anyway. Rest assured, she had other methods of going shopping, including a bus that’d take seniors to the store once a week, and food delivery and such. She was not starving.

          We basically learned to do what you do with your coworker, OP, which is to stop sharing info about things that we were doing together that we couldn’t invite her to. But it made us feel pretty guilty, all the same. In your case, you could probably say something to your coworker about how you don’t mix work/personal activities and maaaaaybe that’d get her to stop? I think that just laughing it off in the way AAM recommends would work but that doesn’t stop the way you feel about the situation.

          Although, here’s a thought: if the coworker brings up “we never talk anymore” again, maybe you could use this as an opening to kindly say that you’re always a bit uncomfortable when they say things like “you should bring me a bagel next time!” Like, that you know they’re just making conversation but you feel like it puts a lot of pressure on you. I dunno, maybe that’s a bad idea….I’m ND myself and am not great at reading some social cues, but I’ve seen comments here from a lot of NDs that being direct with them is actually appreciated so they know not to bug you with unwanted comments. It could trigger your coworker’s anxiety though, so I suppose if you do this, tread carefully. And definitely only do it if they ask about not talking anymore; don’t do it in the moment when they tell you to bring you a bagel.

      4. Blue Pen*

        Yes, this is me too. Thankfully, I have found a way to work through it in social settings so that I’m more of the warm and friendly-private type vs. avoidant and aloof a-hole.

    5. Olive*

      I think this is good advice when you actually want to do something with someone, but if a coworker, even one I liked, said “I would love to join a picnic with your friends on the weekend”, OOF that would make it even worse.

      1. Sloanicota*

        But I think it’s intended as humor, in the “bring me in your checked luggage on your vacation!” vein. Now, it’s possible the coworker WOULD actually love to come, just as the comment about the vacation suggests the speaker would actually love to join on your trip to France – but, without any expectation it will happen. Nothing OP says indicates that the coworker is genuinely presuming they will be invited* (such as following about the time etc).

        * If they *were,* then yes, this would be a violation of the neurotypical expectation that friendship has “level” that have to be proceeded through more or less in order, and you can’t propose “skipping” from workplace acquaintance level to weekend hang level without a sense of violating the rules. But again, I’m not even sure that’s what’s happening. Coworker is making awkward jokes that are irking OP.

    6. hohumdrum*

      Re: LW 1, for the thing where coworker goes “remember my thing with Parker three weeks ago??”, if it helps wrt mentally reframing things:

      Sometimes I start stories like that because I genuinely can’t gauge how much my listener knows/recalls and I personally hate getting repeat info/find it condescending sometimes. I also know I repeat myself a lot/can’t always recall who I told already. So if I’m about to tell you a story that builds off background info I usually start with a quick ask of what you already remember/heard so I don’t bore you to death and take up even more of your time.

      Not saying that’s for sure what your coworker is doing, but perhaps if you think of it like “Oh, she’s giving me a chance to politely request less story by saying I already know part of it” it’ll feel less obnoxious?

      IMO for a personal story that isn’t about work stuff you actually need to remember, it’s totally fine to say, “Oh yeah for sure, that rings a bell” even if you don’t really remember just to move it along. I mean if you really don’t want to talk obviously you can just say you’re too busy to chat or whatever, but I’m just saying if you’re ok for a little chat and she’s winding up for a saga and she stops to ask if you already know the first installment, that is a gift to you. Like playing a card that lets you jump ahead in a board game. “Yeah, the thing with Parker! No I remember you talking about this last week- what’s new with Parker this week?”

      1. learnedthehardway*

        Also, even if the OP does NOT remember the thing with Parker 3 weeks ago, they can still say “Sure do! What’s the update?” just to circumvent the rehash of the context. I mean, the person is going to tell them anyway, and this just saves some time.

        I’ve done this myself, and figured out the details as the update progressed. Much more efficient than listening to the entire thing from the start.

        1. Jackalope*

          And the nice thing about this is that if you discover during the condensed retelling that there’s an important detail you aren’t remembering, you can always say, “Wait, he gave you an engraved business card? I forgot about that bit,” and get more details on that one tidbit.

    7. HannahS*

      I think that Alison’s advice was both kind and practical; part of what I hate about being annoyed is that it takes so much energy!

      I recently had a colleague with [diagnosis redacted] complain of being socially excluded in her department. She was then made some pretty intrusive personal comments about me, and continued down this weird, boundary-crossing path of conversation despite several attempts at redirection. I was kind of baffled and angry, and then reminded myself–this is the part of the issue for her! She inadvertently offends people and then doesn’t understand why other people don’t want to spend time with her. That really sucks! She was trying to be nice to me, and I generally find her to be well-intentioned; the conversation we had was her way of trying to find common ground. It doesn’t mean that I’m not allowed to set boundaries, obviously, but it helps me to take it more lightly. I kind of translated it–“Oh, H is trying to be friendly and doesn’t realize how it comes off,” and then I was much less annoyed.

      1. Olive*

        This is a good point given that one of the LW’s main issues was that this is already taking so much energy.

      2. EC*

        In that case isn’t the kindest thing to help the person instead of indulging them? Tell them that you know they aren’t trying to be rude, but most people don’t want to be asked intrusive personal questions. She’ll just keep offending people if no one has an honest talk with her.

        1. HannahS*

          I really disagree. I’m not her close friend, family member, or teacher. She wasn’t asking me why I thought she was having social difficulties. I’m not a social skills coach. If I was deeply offended, I would have set boundaries in the moment, just as I would with any person.

          Saying saying “people don’t like intrusive personal questions” is meaningless feedback to her, because the whole problem here is that she can’t identify what is or is not intrusive.

          1. MigraineMonth*

            I think both of you have good points. The kindest thing is to lay down the boundaries that keep her from offending *you*, but you certainly aren’t responsible for teaching her how to not offend people. It’s good to set boundaries before you’re deeply offended, though; “I’m not going to answer that” or “I don’t discuss that at work”, said in a warm tone, can be deployed as soon as she veers into private territory.

    8. Smithy*

      First of all – I totally get that with individuals in our life. That the “shoulds” can be this horrible middle group of noncommitment. And also, can catch you completely unaware when one someone pushes ahead to plan on a should “i.e. we should go to Vegas sometime!” – and then suddenly there are flights/hotel booked without any further conversation.

      But I think at work, I do wonder if this has become this person’s work social shtick. Similar to the much less safe for work phrase “that’s what she said”, that after a while the actual meaning is so far lost to the person saying it.

  11. Thommasina*

    The Internal Revenue Service and Social Security would have a record of employment history for those jobs paid other than in cash or kind.

      1. Seashell*

        I believe your My Social Security account will show your earnings history. Not sure if it gives the employer.

          1. Falling Diphthong*

            Just checked. It shows the amount taxed for SS and for Medicare for the decade of the 80s and the decade of the 90s.

            Just to note that no one out there actually cares, in the sense no one is actually going to say: “Look, she agreed to play the game and provide evidence! And there it is. I definitely won’t claim this evidence must be fake. And the truth of the claim, demonstrated with this evidence, shall be the one issue on which my vote is based.”

            Recognizing the insincerity of the people asking for evidence is a good thing–because the evidence will never be adequate.

            1. PP*

              Falling Diphthong, Yes indeed, recognizing the insincerity is a good thing as “the evidence will never be adequate.”

              Just like what happened when Obama’s long form birth certificate was released.

          2. Clisby*

            That’s what mine shows. They might very well have the employers on file, but they don’t show that in the annual report.

        2. Grogu's Mom*

          Mine gives the employer as well as the person who signed the checks for every job I’ve ever had. But my work history only goes back to 2000 so perhaps My Social Security doesn’t go back as far as the 80s? I have been confused about why she can’t just log in to get the proof when it would be easy for me to do so, but it’s interesting to hear that others don’t have the same info in their My Social Security.

          1. Grogu's Mom*

            (I did have to click around a bit to find the additional info: Review your full earnings record now > Take a closer look > View Details on each year.)

            1. Lily Rowan*

              OK, I just did that, and in the 90s, I see several places I’ve never heard of in cities I was not working at that time as well as some information unavailable. I’m guessing the first thing is because of parent companies or mergers or something, but who knows.

            2. doreen*

              I click on review your full earnings record now, and then my choices are
              Review your earnings record carefully
              Limit on Taxable Earnings for Social Security
              Why would earnings be missing from my record

              No where to click to get details of a year, or the employers name. Not even for 2022. I guess different people have different info available.

            3. Parcae*

              There is no “Take a closer look” link in my My Social Security account that I can find. My work record goes back to 2001, so we are of a similar era. Perhaps the SSA is testing offering more details on some accounts?

              1. doreen*

                Must be – I found this on the page about the form/fees to get detailed info

                You can view your personal Social Security Statement (Statement) online by creating a personal my Social Security account with us. Your online Statement displays your yearly earnings history free of charge but does not show any employer information.

              2. Just Moi*

                Interesting that it differs – after clicking “Review your full earnings record now” and using the ‘Not sure if you need to request a correction? “Take a closer look”‘ link at the bottom of the list of years, I can find employer name, address, and EIN details every year from 1979 – yikes! Lots of employer names seem to have changed following acquisitions and consolidations.

            4. Bitte Meddler*

              Woweeee. I just learned that I used my own SSN when I worked at Dairy Queen and Ron’s Krispy Fried Chicken… when I was 14 (!!).

              All these years, I thought I’d given a fake SSN because my mom didn’t get me a social security account until I was older. But I guess it was before I turned 14. :-)

    3. Lily Rowan*

      Can you imagine the backlash if the Vice President of the United States asked the IRS or Social Security to do her presidential campaign a favor and look that up?

      2. Grits McGee*

        It would be the National Archives stuck with the job (at least for tax returns), because if those records still exist they would almost certainly be in a Federal Records Center. (Not sure where SSA maintains their own records storage facilities.)

    4. learnedthehardway*

      Even if they did maintain those records, I highly doubt that they’d be willing to dive into their files to find them. Surely they have better things to do?

    5. Empress Ki*

      I worked a few months in Mac Donald’s in 1990. I still have the payslips. I might have a hard time to find them, somewhere in the attic…but I could if I had to.

    6. Good Enough For Government Work*

      Even if she didn’t earn enough to get taxed? I didn’t earn that kind of money for any of my weekend/evening jobs as a teen or student.

      2. doreen*

        You pay SS and Medicare tax no matter how little you earn – there used to be an exception for those under 18 who delivered newspapers (and I suppose there might be for some other occupation) but it wasn’t based on earnings. I made $1800 or so in 1980 from my first fast food job – which I only know because I did pay SS tax and it shows on my SS records.

        You used to be able to avoid IRS withholding if you didn’t expect to owe any Federal tax – not sure what the current rules are.

  13. Snoozing not schmoozing*

    I had a job for six years, from my mid 20s to early 30s. Other than showing up on my Social Security records, I’d have no way to prove those years; the company no longer exists, anyone in management is dead, and I have no idea what happened to any of the younger workers, even the few whose names I vaguely remember. If I weren’t retired, it would probably be a pain to get the SS proof. There are brief jobs I had before that that I could never remember enough details to prove.

  14. Captain dddd-cccc-ddWdd*

    OP1 (“you should invite me to your next picnic”, etc) – I feel like they have internalised the “x sounds good. Jokingly suggest including me next time” format and is just over-applying it in an attempt to be friendly and just slightly missing the mark. I’m sure most of us at some point have had an interaction with someone like “oh where are you going on your vacation?” – “Italy” – “ohhh have you got space for me in your suitcase?”

    So yes, just take these remarks in the “being friendly script” spirit they are intended. I might play along (although conscious of whether they would “get” it), otherwise just continue the ‘script’ using the format of “friendly acknowledgement of the joke – next conversational turn”.

    1. Anglonemi*

      Came here to say exactly this, thank you Captain!
      This is a brilliant example of the “double empathy problem” – OP, if you didn’t know the person was ND, would you be concerned about their (over)use of this conversational trope or responding as if it was a serious request?

      1. OP1*

        I can’t lie, I only included the ND note to avoid the unhelpful commentariat rabbit-hole asking if they were ;)

        After reading a few comments, I can confirm it’s how I handle and interpret requests for things I could do, but absolutely do not want to.

    2. londonedit*

      Yeah, some people have a ‘standard quip’ that they’ve discovered is mildly amusing, and they wheel it out in any and all situations.

      I also have a friend who does the ‘Remember I told you about Parker? And we were going to meet up? No? Oh, well let me tell you the whole story anyway, even if you have no idea who Parker is and none of this is actually relevant…’ thing. Interestingly enough she also has anxiety, and one of the ways her anxiety plays out is that she cannot bear silence and has to talk talk talk talk talk to fill all the time. It’s just stream of consciousness and she’s there telling me about XYZ that has absolutely no relevance to anything. If I’m honest I just smile and nod and try to move the conversation on a bit if I can. I think Alison’s advice is exactly right – don’t engage with the ‘funny’ quips, just make a neutral ‘Yeah, it’s nice’ sort of comment and leave it at that.

    3. Olive*

      I think part of the problem might be that saying you want to go to Italy with someone is obviously a joke, whether or not someone finds it very funny, but a “joke” about wanting to come to the next picnic is a lot more ambiguous. If the LW doesn’t want to invite her, treating it like a joke is the right thing to do. It feels like coworker actually might want an invite, and especially if she’s neurodivergent, I’d be concerned that my soft no wasn’t landing.

      But wasn’t there a letter where a coworker or boss actually did try to invite themselves on a LW’s vacation?

    4. OP1*

      This is actually an interesting point, when it’s clearly hyperbolic like “pack me in your suitcase!” I have no issue breezing past, but when it’s something that I *could* do but very much don’t want to it pings differently in my brain.

      1. Emmy Noether*

        I’m with you – these were not recognizable as jokes to me. Maybe if they were said in a exaggerated jokey tone, but otherwise they’re not impossible/absurd enough to be jokes.

        But then I’m German, and there’s like a whole trope of Germans taking American’s “you should come over to my place sometime!” as an actual, actionable invitation. So definitely a culture of taking things at face value.

    5. anonymous anteater*

      Something this reminded me of is that in English speaking countries, many (not all) people say ‘Hi, how are you?’ but they don’t expect you to tell them how you are, or to just say ‘good’. When I first visited the UK speaking the language but not at an immersive level, this really threw me. You walk into a store and there is a greeter, saying ‘Welcome, how are you?’, but then immediately drop eye contact and move on to the next person. When I tried to answer, they would seem flustered. It felt so weird! Why do they ask if they don’t want to know? DID they want to know and I should have answered faster? What am I doing wrong in this social interaction?!
      I’ve now lived in the US for years, and there is now an automatic translation running in my head, that just converts ‘Hi, how are you?’ into ‘Hello, greetings!’. It sounds trivial, but it has taken away a lot of the mental toll on these interactions.
      Maybe you can also reframe and be freed from this obligation!

  15. Elsa*

    LW1, the advice given is excellent, but if it were me I’d probably push back hard, once or twice, on the assumption that I’m supposed to remember details of my coworker’s life:
    “Remember my weekend plans three weeks ago?”
    “I don’t even remember *my own* weekend plans three weeks ago!”
    Or:
    “Remember my weekend plans three weeks ago?”
    “Nope! I don’t remember anything if I don’t write it down!”

    1. Seashell*

      Yeah, I would be tempted to say, “I’m lucky if I remember what I ate for dinner last night.”

    2. hohumdrum*

      Oh, see I think this misses a gift being given by coworker.

      Or at least for me when I start a story by asking if they remember stuff from before I’m trying to make sure I’m being mindful of their time/interest level. When I start a story that relies on previous lore I always want to do a quick feeler to see if my audience is interested in a “previously on” or if they’d prefer I skip ahead.

      To me, I have no emotional attachment to either response- if you say you remember that’s great! If you don’t, I’m still happy because I love another chance to workshop a good story (I love repeating myself and love storytelling, hence why I have tried to be mindful of the fact my audience might not want to hear a bit for the 1,000th time).

      So it’s not meant to be an ego thing of expecting you to remember my life, it’s meant to be a polite fast forward button. I also think it’s totally fine to say “Yeah, Parker rings a bell, go on!” even if you don’t remember in order to move the story along. Or if you feel weird saying you don’t remember you can always be like “Hmm…I think so but refresh my memory!”

      Reframe the ask not as entitlement of expecting you to know her whole life story, but as a gift that allows you to choose how much story you’re sitting through in this session, and it might feel less annoying.

      1. OP1*

        This may hit on an important point, I know this co-worker takes a *lot* of pride in remembering minute details about everyone around them. Where normally I’d respond exactly like that “Rings a bell, what’s up?” knowing they take remembering as a value statement it feels more loaded than it probably is.

        1. bamcheeks*

          You know, these comments are really bringing home what you mean about doing a lot of emotional labour about this!

          If you have a good friend and you know that “remembering details” is A Thing for them, it’s nice to keep that in mind and try and live up to it, OR just appreciate it and apologise and explain, “I don’t keep details the way you do! You’re so great at it!” But I think you legit don’t have to do that with a co-worker. They’re an adult even if they are neurodivergent, and they can handle the fact that other people process those details differently. (Even if their way of handling it is feeling a little hurt and then complaining to their other ND friends that this is one of the ways work is tiring for them: I don’t think that you personally can compensate for all the ways work is exhausting for them, especially not if it’s taking you into BEC territory.)

          I think you will find this easier if you let a bit more authenticity into your relationship with them, and you’ll probably find it easier to be warmer in your way rather than constantly pushing yourself to conform to what you perceive they need from you. Maybe there will be a few mismatches and bits where it’s awkward: that’s ok, and you can survive them. You don’t have to take on the task of managing their emotions and smoothing everything out for them.

          1. Elle*

            This is great advice. Love the bit about letting authenticity into the relationship- IMO this is the key to enabling genuine warmth.

        2. hohumdrum*

          oh yeah, as someone who is also ND and an adult I am very aware that my brain operates differently than others and I don’t expect them to act/think like I do! Just because I remember something doesn’t mean you will.

          And relatedly, it’s very annoying when others make assumptions about what my brain *should* do or is doing! So when I approach others I try to not assume things like whether they remember my hiiiilarious story from last week and would rather just ask so they can let me know what detail they prefer. It’s very possible this is exactly what your coworker is doing.

          TBH, without knowing anything else about your coworker besides this letter, I get the vibe that she’s just kind of an intense communicator overall, which clashes with your style. I think it’s very likely that what feels to you like overbearing/overwhelming pressured words, actually feel very mundane to her. Your “MAKE ME A COSTUME!!!” is merely her “hey, that’s neat”.

          now, if your coworker *does* seem offended if you don’t recall her exploits with Parker or want to make her a costume, then she’s a problem and absolutely is being weird and entitled. but if she’s unruffled by your not remembering etc, then I think you can safely just assume she’s just a little intense in how she talks

    3. Saturday*

      To me that actually sounded like a “on the previous episode” recap that the LW said she wouldn’t mind.
      I wouldn’t really see anything to push back on because she’s saying,”remember?” not “you must remember or you’re an unkind person,” but people are going to react to this differently.

      1. elizelizeliz*

        yes, this is what i was thinking–that it’s a conversational way to do the “Last week, on *Sister Wives*” intro to something where it’s fine if all you get is the vague outlines of this. Then if it becomes clear later that you need more detail, you can get a more detailed recap (rather than looking it up on the wiki like i would for my fave ex-AUB reality show, you can ask a question)–or just decide that you don’t need it and you are just vibing through the conversation!

  16. Jay*

    I wish I could somehow prove that I was the A&W Bear standing on the roadside and enticing drivers by to come have a hamburger or hot weiner some 30 years ago.

    2. ScroogeMcDunk*

      A friend of mine was the Grabba Java Coffee Cup standing on the side of the road and enticing drivers to come in for a latte some 25 years ago. He tripped and fell into a ditch and couldn’t get up because he couldn’t get any leverage with his tiny little coffee cup arms, and that was the end of his mascot career.

  17. Former Summer Lifeguard*

    I’m suprised by your response to #4, about summer job history. I recently started trying to track down my job history to start planning for retirement, contacted Social Security, and received a print-out in a matter of weeks with a list of everywhere I worked, including dates and amounts of pay. Admittedly I’m a bit younger than Kamala so my records only went back to the 90’s, but still, I live abroad and was able to access my full history in less than 3 weeks, including interim work.

    1. Magdalena*

      If she worked as a teen it means it was the early 1980s, which makes a huge difference in terms of records.

    2. emmelemm*

      Yeah, most of the companies I worked for before my current company (which I’ve worked for for 20 years) have long since ceased to exist in any form, and I don’t have all my tax records that far back, so I’m just counting on getting W-2 info from the IRS if/when I look for a new job and have to get background checked. The IRS says you can do that!

    3. Jordan*

      The job I have been in for the last 10 years doesn’t do social security. They have a pension system that pre-dates Soc. Sec. so I have not seen anything from them in a decade.
      Also, one has to make a certain amount to be taxed, recorded. The jobs I had before college wouldn’t show up either I suspect.

      I can tell you what I learned being exposed to new people and ideas, or that I got stung by half a dozen wasps because I didn’t look before jumping over a fence, but I can’t come up with the names for either company.

    5. doreen*

      Are you sure it had that much detail ( and if so , how did you get it because I’d like to get it for myself) – because what I get from SS has how much I earned in any particular year. It doesn’t have any employer information or dates I worked at one place or another , it just says 1980 – $1904.

      1. Snarky McSnarkerson*

        I just did my own list. Once you get to the list of years, right above it, there was a link to “have a closer look.” Then these little boxes popped up and when you click on them, it shows all the employers and amounts for that year. It’s a little ponderous to go through each one individually, but the information is there. Mine goes back to 1982. I made almost $500!

        1. Sack of Benevolent Trash Marsupials*

          I am on the site right now looking at my earnings list and there is no link for me for more detail. Just wondering what browser/device you are using?

    6. Bumblebee*

      I think many people are missing the point – the point is that people are now distracted worrying about Kamala’s teen job while her opponent has gone bankrupt numerous times, run businesses into the ground, discriminated against people of color in housing rentals, and sexually assaulted women. The point is not CAN you prove you worked at a random fast food restaurant 40 years ago, it’s why is she being asked to do this while her opponent is allowed a pass on all of the above?

      2. Pyjamas*

        *In your experience, how likely is it that people who have been active in the workforce for decades have an essentially unprovable past job?*

        Respectfully, that WAS the point. Kudos to Ask A Manager to answer it without getting on a soap box

    7. Silicon Valley Girl*

      I’m Harris’ age & recently had to look on the Social Security website for some old job history, & while it had some of my early teen/college records, it was incomplete! A large retail chain store (that’s still in business) & several small local shops I worked at didn’t show up at all.

  18. Irish Teacher.*

    LW1, jokes like those tend to make me quite uncomfortable. Like you, I know the person is joking but it still bothers me for reasons I can’t fully articulate. I am very literal (possibly autistic) and can’t avoid hearing the literal meaning.

    Not sure this changes the advice in any way, but just to say I get the discomfort.

    And I also have a coworker like this, though my coworker also has a tendency to say things that are completely inappropriate, like commenting that two brothers new to the country and very motivated to improve their English “probably get slapped at home.” I’m not sure if it was some king of racist stereotype about their home country or if she thinks 14 and 16 year olds couldn’t possibly see the benefit of being able to talk to their classmates, understand their teachers, etc without the threat of corporal punishment but either way, what the flip?

    And yeah, I was talking to another colleague about getting tickets to a play for my birthday and she interjects with “so, when are we going?” I’m sure she just wanted to be part of the conversation, but…

    LW4, yeah, it seems unlikely one would be able to prove that. Those aren’t the kind of jobs that are likely to retain the same staff for 40 years and even those that DO…well, I doubt I’d remember a student-teacher from 40 years ago. It just seems a weird thing to doubt too. It seems to me there’s some being out-of-touch involved, like they assume a politician would never have worked a part-time minimum wage job.

  19. OP 3*

    Hi, the LW 3 here. Apologies for any grammar mistakes, English isn’t my first language.

    Thank you for the advice, Alison. I will approach the vendor as if the last year disaster never happened and look on the outcome.

    Faxes: yes, faxes. Not even digital email-based version, just big ol’ biping fax machine. We still use it quite regularly and I treat it with great respect, because it has some serious seniority over me.

    Me being over-the-top deferential: yes, Alison is right here. I used to work for people with enormous egos and tend to tip-toe around anyone. Basically I always assume that my work is less important then next guy’s one, and said next guy will be offended if I make him loose even 1 minute of his precious time.

    1. Middle Aged Lady*

      The same thing happened to me with a vendor when I was a database librarian. I had to get the information for my budget and I tried and tried to reach the rep, but had to move the request up the chain. I kept imagining things going wrong for the rep and felt very badly for him. Something was obviously off. I hated to do it, but the business office needed the contract/invoice approved. The next year everything went smoothly. Good luck!

    2. perspex*

      Good luck, OP 3! And I laughed about the fax machine having seniority. You seem like you’d be a fun colleague as well as a diligent one!

    3. Sara without an H*

      Hi, OP3 — Fellow librarian here (retired). I used to be in charge of journal/serial/database subscriptions, and I feel for you. Have a sales rep not reply when you’re trying to send them money is maddening. You did nothing wrong, and you probably did the vendor a huge favor by alerting them to the problem, whatever it was. (Although I kind of like Alison’s suggestion that Jane was on a major bender…)

      I suspect that your invoice will come through with lightening speed!

    4. All Too Familiar*

      Know that most of these vendors have been a mess in recent times. Decreased revenues, layoffs and high turnover. It’s a miserable place. People working in that field are incredibly stressed. I agree with Alison’s response. Go straight to management if you’re not getting what you need in a timely manner. You are the customer. No need to tiptoe around it.

      1. Sara without an H*

        +1. Higher ed is undergoing a serious contraction, and the associated industries (publishers, database vendors, etc.) are feeling the effects. Do not hesitate to ask for what you want and need, because it’s in their own best interests to give it to you.

  20. WS*

    Job history has been a big, contentious thing in Australia under the previous government because they decided to go back 10 years in the records of people who had, at any point, received unemployment benefits and demand full accounting for hours and wages. It was called Robodebt, because they used an averaging method that was not the same method used to calculate eligibility for unemployment, or that the tax office used. (There has since been a Royal Commission and all money paid back to 470,000 people, but very little actual action over the people who illegally did this.)

    Legally, businesses and the tax office only have to keep records for 7 years. Individuals only have to keep them for 5. But if you couldn’t bring those records, it was thousands of dollars to pay back. People committed suicide over it. For small businesses, it was requests to go back into old records to try to confirm exact employment dates for people who had worked there briefly 10 years ago. Many businesses had of course ceased over the last 10 years.

    And that was just 10 years of information. Kamala Harris is looking at 40 or so.

    1. Literally a Cat*

      The Robodebt situation is horrendous, and I’m furious that real lives were lost, and people responsible for it never even received a real fine, let along prison time.

      I’m terrified to think this rapid jumping to LLM based welfare assessment was taken from Robodebt as a “good idea” to destroy the less fortunate more. And I suspect the recording of past work would be intentionally made harder just for this purpose.

      1. Sloanicota*

        Wow, I’m looking this up now, had not heard of it. It reminds me a bit of that British Post Office Scandal, by this description.

        1. Literally a Cat*

          They are frequently compared to side by side. I feel like, at least the mainstream narrative is willing to address how atrocious British Post Office Scandal is, however with Robodebt, because it targeted the most vulnerable people it people just ignored them.

  21. londonedit*

    I had a summer job at uni which was in the office of a small hotel/restaurant/wedding venue near where my parents lived. In the intervening 20+ years I think it’s gone through at least four changes of ownership, I wouldn’t have a clue how to contact the people who owned the place 20-odd years ago, and it’s fairly unlikely they’d remember me anyway. I really don’t see the point of ‘proving’ something like that – why would someone lie? What does it matter?

    1. Ellis Bell*

      I really agree with your last point. Even if I had a way to prove a detail like this, I’d be more inclined to just go “Eh, no.” It’s a completely unremarkable and believable statement.

    2. DJ Abbott*

      It doesn’t matter. It’s just political games. Kamala’s opponents are making a thing of it to try and make her look bad. It’s not about the actual job at all.

  22. pandop*

    I have worked in library acquisitions before moving over to cataloguing. It always baffled me how difficult some companies made it to give them money in exchange for stuff.

    No part time job I had before I left university (except the one in my local library) appears on my CV. The ones I had before I went to University were cash in hand, and as I was under 16 when I started working, not even NI records would exist, and the businesses certainly don’t.

  23. Keymaster of Gozer (She/Her)*

    1. There’s a technique I use for people who are annoying but not offensive and that is I convert their speech to text in my head.

    So I hear something from annoying person and my mind pictures it as a block of text. Totally removes emotional response to it and gives an extra second to respond.

  24. RussianInTexas*

    LW#3, I manage customer accounts, and sometimes I have to resolve their issues, and sometimes I have to resolve issues with their unpaid/underpaid/late invoices, and yes, sometimes things have to be escalated, and it’s ok. You are not creating extra work by doing this, this IS work. Doing this work is also not an inconvenience or annoyance (I mean, it can feel like this, but work may have meant annoying parts, but still work), so please, don’t feel bad about your escalation.

    1. OP 3*

      Thank you for support! I am so glad I’ve wrote this letter to Alison: I am relatively new in the area and comments here are giving me some prospective.

  25. Literally a Cat*

    I’m younger than Kalama Harris by a good few decades. And the McDonald’s I worked in as a teen was destroyed in Christchurch earthquake.

    However, apparently I do make burgers that tastes quite McDonald’s like, if I get this request. I also strongly dislike McDonald’s food so I never eat it unless people request a home made “just like quarter pounder” burger. Does that count?

    2. Panhandlerann*

      I have visited Christchurch (my daughter lived there for a time), and the hamburger I had in a restaurant (not at all a McDonalds) there was very, very different from the usual American hamburger. I wonder: Did the McDonalds in NZ make typical McDonalds burgers or bow at all to what New Zealanders would expect of a burger?

      1. Literally a Cat*

        Most burger places traditionally did the kind of burgers that grew diverged out of its UK fish and chips history. The patties tend to be seasons rather than pure meat, the bun huge, and eggs and beetroots are common.

        Past ten years or so the “American style burgers” became more common. Generally speaking getting burgers from local fish and chips shop or getting American style burgers would prime my mindset to something completely different.

        McDonald’s is… McDonalds. I wouldn’t call it typical for anything except McDonalds.

        1. Grimalkin*

          Relatedly, as an American studying abroad in London, I noticed a significant difference in the taste of hamburgers there… except when I grabbed one from a Burger King on a whim. It tasted like a Burger King hamburger, for better or for worse.

  26. Turingtested*

    LW 1, I’m from SW Pennsylvania and “include me” jokes are a common way of saying “that sounds fun.” I tried it in Michigan and people took me seriously and it was embarrassing for everyone.

    1. Lady Lessa*

      I’ve noticed a lot of things that are regionally specific, since I’ve bounced around the US, from the South to Southern California to the Midwest to New Jersey and back to the Midwest.
      Fascinating, but I agree, potentially embarrassing.

      1. Turingtested*

        The funniest part was that the person was insulted that I invited myself over and was insulted I didn’t actually want to come.

        Real smooth of me.

        1. hohumdrum*

          tbh I think that series of events is more on the other person at that point, if they’re mad you invited yourself and then mad you didn’t invite yourself *they’re* making it weird at that point.

          Part of being a polite person is taking other people’s missteps in stride and not blowing it up into something bigger than it is. Being able to bear a little bit of discomfort/uncertainty while maintaining assumption of good intent from your conversational partner is one of the most important aspects of good manners. When you indicated you weren’t seriously inviting yourself that was their cue to laugh off the awkwardness, not increase it by taking offense.

    2. Sloanicota*

      Fascinating! I’m going to test this out. Being from Michigan, many of us are afflicted with a bad case of Midwest Nice, and these jokes as described would rub me the wrong way (although obviously I’m familiar with the “pack me along in your suitcase!” version if you’re going on a nice holiday). Perhaps this idea that it’s a regional joke can relieve OP of any further sense of obligation.

    3. londonedit*

      I don’t think it’s regional but I have a friend who will, without fail, respond ‘Phwoar, lend me a tenner!’ whenever anyone mentions having done or bought anything even remotely extravagant. It ties in with the whole British piss-taking sense of humour, and is usually used for things like mentioning you went to (upmarket supermarket) Waitrose, or you bought the posh biscuits, or you’ve just booked a weekend away. Can also be used ironically, though. Anyway it’s just his ‘thing’, and while it is a little bit wearing when you’ve heard it a million times, it’s just his running joke and people just say ‘Ha, you’d be lucky’ and move on.

    4. I edit everything*

      Oh, yeah, the “Can I come?” or the “I’ll carry your luggage” when someone is talking about a trip is just a way of saying “Fun! I’d like to do that someday.”

      On the flip side, when people ask me about my parents, I tell them that they were the type of people who would say “You should come!” when someone expressed that kind of enthusiasm, and they *really meant it*.

    5. Falling Diphthong*

      This is an interesting take! All sorts of things can become social rituals that are not literally meant, and then you switch contexts and no one understands the code.

      1. PhyllisB*

        Yep. In the South people would say, “Come see me sometime!!” to random people they were chatting with. Person would say “sure will ” and that was it, social niceties have been observed.
        I wonder what would happen if Random Person actually showed up at their door!!
        This almost bit me one time. I was chatting with a woman I was vaguely friendly with and she commented that we should get together with our hubbies sometime. I just said something like sounds like fun, and she said “what are y’all doing tonight?” I had to come up with Something on the spot. That’s the only time I ever had that happen, but it made me be sure not to make comments like that in the future.

        1. SocialNiceties*

          Yeah, this would read as a genuine invitation to me, although I’m socially reticent enough that if I were reaching out about it later I would include language like “if you were serious” – but my expectation would be you meant it at the time even if you’re no longer interested now.

    6. sb51*

      Yeah, maybe just mentally file it as “translating from an unfamiliar culture”. Like, in an actual cultural translation issue, some of my colleagues from an international office use a phrasing that can come off to to me is “how you talk to your toddler who just drew all over your walls, when you’re furious but covering it with politeness because you’re not going to yell at your kid” and not remotely appropriate for the workplace. But it *is* a plain, unmarked, polite statement from them, and I have to take my poor raised hackles and brush them off, give them a kiss on the forehead, and gently place them back where they belong.

      And they might feel similarly about me *not* using that phrasing, I don’t know!

      Politeness rituals and social scripts vary so wildly, and almost none of them mean exactly their literal meaning, but we don’t notice it until we trip over an unfamiliar one and take it literally in the absence of a translator of the “real” meaning. (Even for fairly literal ones — I once read an article about whether putting the “please” at the beginning or the end of the sentence will come off as sincere (vs overly obsequious/sarcastic) depending on US vs UK English usage.)

  27. JPB Gerald*

    I cannot prove that I sold James Gandolfini some soap on Christmas Eve while working at Sabon in 2007, but it happened.

  28. Michelle*

    LW1: my husband and I both feel awkward when we don’t remember each other’s stories. One thing that helps me is when I summarize what I DO remember “oh right, that guy you haven’t talked to since?” and let them fill in the relevant details. Husband and I don’t expect each other to remember – we’re more just introducing the topic again and groping for a place to start.

    Another option: “Yeah I remember talking about that, refresh my memory?”

    Give coworker a jumping-off point for their follow-ups (assuming you’re interested in the conversation!); that’s probably all they’re looking for.

    1. KitKat*

      My husband and I do this too! “Right! I remember you telling me about that [but remember absolutely zero details], remind me what the deal was with it?”

  29. A Girl Named Fred*

    The last note to OP3 intrigues me because I do the same ultra deferential/blame myself when I know I wasn’t in the wrong thing. I’m working on it both personally and professionally, but I also think I’ve been better received when I include some sort of politeness/“greasing the wheels” language, especially with certain bosses/colleagues. Any advice on how to walk that line to get stuff done without going overboard?

    1. Middle Aged Lady*

      I say something like “I know it’s a busy time for everyone.” That means, “I am not angry and I understand things fall through the cracks.”

    2. H.Regalis*

      I don’t have any advice.

      I’ve done that a lot in the past—sometimes it did really help, especially in jobs with asshole managers or people who are really sexist—but more recently I’ve started typing something along those lines and had this feeling of, “I am so fucking sick of this” or “OMG shut up shut up” and then didn’t do it, and . . . it’s been fine. I wasn’t rude, I still got what I needed, and I stopped wearing myself about doing all this bullshit ass emotional labor and performative nonsense.

  30. Seashell*

    I wouldn’t want a random coworker using my log in to anything and sending out messages on my behalf. They could be obnoxious, they could be reading my other messages, or they could be misspelling things. Hard pass.

  31. Lorax*

    #2 is explicitly illegal in some states. Or at least it is in my state. Employers can’t order an employee to turn over personal social media login information, log on to personal accounts in the presence of an employer, turn over specific content from personal accounts, change privacy settings, or connect with specific people. They could legally order the employee to create a separate account specifically for work purposes or use a company-owned account. But employers in my state have zero legal right to an employee’s personal account. So I guess this is a PSA: if this ever comes up again, check your local laws!

    1. PP*

      Also, check the contract terms which you signed up to follow!

      No doubt, LinkedIn’s terms include that an individual’s account is personal, not some kind of “joint” account that you can share with whoever (like your employer’s contractor!). Terms of use normally make you personally liable for harms caused related to your use.

  32. DJ Abbott*

    #4, expecting Kamala to prove she worked a summer job in the 80s is obvious political games. No reasonable person could expect proof from so long ago.

  33. I should really pick a name*

    Remember my weekend plans from three weeks ago? With Parker? Where we argued but I hadn’t talked to them since?

    Think of this as a transition to a conversation topic, not an actual question.

  34. Insert Pun Here*

    In case this is useful to anyone — if you (for whatever annoying reason) need to prove you were employed somewhere, there is a company called The Work Number (a division of one of the credit bureaus I believe) that may have this info. You are entitled to see what’s on your record and it’s fairly straightforward to request. In my case, my two large employers do report to them, but one small employer I briefly worked for doesn’t. But it does go back further than the standard 7 years. Obviously this is not going to help Kamala Harris prove anything about where she was working in the early 80s, but it might be helpful for someone here!

    1. Snow Angels in the Zen Garden*

      Definitely! One of my recent employers doesn’t verify employment anymore. They direct everyone to The Work Number.

      1. PP*

        Good info, Insert Pun Here.

        And as a relevant aside, it not about VP Harris proving or disproving that she worked at McDonald’s as a teenager. The questioning of it, politically —not just those who truly have honest curiosity of how one could show where one worked — it is akin to people saying President Obama was not a U.S. citizen…no amount of proof will be sufficient.

  35. Curt Sawyer*

    #4 – I guarantee there is no way to prove I worked at Tastee-Freeze in Virginia in 1987 or that I played piano for a tiny local church on Sundays from around 1986-1987 (see, even I don’t remember exactly!). The church paid me in cash (I think it was $5-10 per Sunday), and I’m not sure that Tastee-Freeze even exists any more. I’ve moved 8 times since then and any paystubs / tax returns I may have had are long, long gone.

  36. Bill and Heather's Excellent Adventure*

    LW2, they should never have asked you to share your log in details, that would be a serious data breach for LinkedIn and you were right to refuse.

    1. LinkedIn Lunatic*

      (LW2) What I was most astonished about was that this was the external lead gen company’s ENTIRE business plan. Cold call randos on LinkedIn, using someone else’s account credentials. It’s mind boggling!!!

      1. Another LinkedIn Hater*

        That is really, truly nutty, right up there with your boss being so terrible they couldn’t comprehend any of the many things wrong with it.

        1. PP*

          Yeah, the external lead gen company had to know that there are database services one can get subscriptions to for the very point of sales gen! They were that cheap and/or incompetent.

  37. RagingADHD*

    #3, if the journal has only one sales rep and the head of sales wasn’t following up to make sure renewals were getting processed, then the C-Suite should be apoplectic. The head of sales manages *one person* and can’t find time to return an email for months?

    #4, I have to wonder how old your friend is and whether or not they are a hoarder (physical or digital). Even with everything digital, records retention periods exist and companies go out of business.

    I couldn’t get a 1099 from a job I did in 1Q2023 because the company imploded so thoroughly in 2Q2023 that there was nobody to get it from.

    1. Six for the truth over solace in lies*

      Yes. Records management principles and regulations determine not only how you store and secure data, but also when you destroy it, and “keep it forever just in case” is frequently not the recommendation/requirement. If nothing else, the more personal data you keep around past the point of needing it, the more exposure you have if subject to a data breach.

      Just because it’s relatively easy for a company to keep a digital document forever doesn’t mean it’s a good idea—in many cases, it isn’t—and there are whole genres of software dedicated to managing digital records across their lifespan, *including* planned destruction.

  38. I edit everything*

    T-shirt shop, two summers. We did iron-ons and crappy lettering. Honestly, I’m surprised we didn’t cook grilled cheese sandwiches in the heat presses. But the store closed decades ago, and I have no memory of anyone else’s name, coworkers or managers or the guy who set up his airbrushing stand in the back corner. I haven’t thought about that place in years.
    I can’t believe this is even an issue.

    1. DJ Abbott*

      It’s all about Kamala‘s opponents trying to make her look bad. It’s not about the job at all.

  39. KitKat*

    #2 Linkedin letter: Unfortunately LinkedIn has recognized that this type of prospecting does have value and started monetizing it for themselves through their paid sales prospecting tools. I get a TON of cold outreach, both through LI’s paid sales messaging features, and also through randoms adding me “to expand their networks” as you were asked to do. I can report the latter, though it doesn’t seem to slow them down (I sometimes wondering if reporting them just puts them on a list for LI to pitch the paid tools…)

    I guess what I’m saying is, if it’s any comfort, you would not stand out among the many, many people doing this all day every day.

    1. LinkedIn Lunatic*

      (LW2) I agree. Back when LI started, you were ONLY supposed to connect with someone if you actually. had some sort of real connection to them. But now it’s a bit of a free for all. I get cold messages all the time, and I just ignore them.

      It really seems like a terrible way to drum up new business, but I guess it’s a numbers game. If you reach out to enough people, SOMEONE is bound to respond.

      But I was not interested in diluting my network to that point!

  40. HonorBox*

    LW3 – I would only make one suggestion as you proceed, beyond what was already suggested above. Send an email, and if you don’t hear back within a week’s time, send a follow up. That’s it. I’m sure Jane is probably similarly busy this time of year, but that’s not something for you to worry about or manage. Maybe she misses the first one. She shouldn’t especially after her goof up last year. But maybe… When you follow up, just forward your initial message and put SECOND REQUEST in the subject line. And then if you don’t hear back that same week, escalate again. Don’t let it drag on for too long, and don’t put in as much effort as you did last year to get to the answer you need.

    You made repeated attempts to reach out (including by fax???) and didn’t get anywhere. Escalating was the right thing to do. You’re the customer and also the one making the repeated overtures to pay the company money. I assume they want your money, hence the quick follow up from C-suite folks. If Jane falls down again, it is in your best interest, as well as theirs, to say something. And if you do need to escalate again, rather than composing a separate email to those execs, just forward your SECOND REQUEST message and indicate that you’ve not yet heard back from Jane. If they want your money, which they do, they’ll get to the bottom of it again.

    BUT… I have to believe that Jane will probably be right on top of things this year.

    1. Sloanicota*

      Also, if this was me, I would have asked for a more appropriate contact if I couldn’t reach Jane in future, as presumably the C-suite is way overkill/unnecessary (although effective in this case!). Ask for the contact info of Jane’s boss if you find yourself in this situation again.

      1. HonorBox*

        Great point. I think if LW had to escalate again, it might be worth asking the execs who is more appropriate because I’m sure they’re busy doing more important stuff than providing information about a renewal.

      2. Productivity Pigeon*

        That’s a really good point!

        It would be really smart to ask for another person to contact, just in case…

    2. KitKat*

      Honestly… if they have a subscription requiring annual renewal, and it’s for a substantial amount of money, Jane should be reaching out to HER. This is pretty basic sales stuff… LW you did nothing wrong by escalating and are giving this sales person WAY too much, you are the paying customer in this relationship!

      1. HonorBox*

        This indeed. You shouldn’t have to fight at all, let alone as hard as LW did, to get a business to take your money.

        1. Anon lib admin*

          I’m a library administrator at a large university library with responsibility for the area LW3 works in. What LW faced is sadly not uncommon though at MPOW we don’t have time/energy to do a lot of invoice chasing – if the vendor wants our money they’ll figure it out eventually. In my experience the vendors who are the worst for invoicing are also not particularly prompt in turning off access so it mostly evens out. One thing that does help is working through a subscription agent like Ebsco or Harrassowitz, especially for small publishers, it’s much easier to let your agent chase the publishers for invoices than to do it yourself.

          1. carrot cake*

            We mostly use Harr. as a sub. agent in my academic library and they really do have fantastic customer service.

      2. Productivity Pigeon*

        Yeah, this is a whole lot of trouble for the privilege of paying someone for their product.

    3. OP 3*

      Thank you for the advice and some prospective. I very much hope this year communication will be easier on me (and Jane).

      1. Jack Russell Terrier*

        Your English is excellent and idiomatic. I hope you don’t mind me saying, but the word you’re looking for is ‘perspective’. I’m pointing it out as you’ve used it a couple of times and though your meaning is clear … .

        Prospective (Merrion Webster)
        prospective
        adjective
        pro·​spec·​tive prə-ˈspek-tiv also ˈprä-ˌspek-, prō-ˈspek-, prä-ˈspek-
        Synonyms of prospective
        1
        : relating to or effective in the future
        2
        a
        : likely to come about : expected
        the prospective benefits of this law
        b
        : likely to be or become
        a prospective mother
        prospectively adverb

  41. Gray Lady*

    For the employment history thing, wouldn’t there be tax records with an EIN on it somewhere?

    Not suggesting anyone should go digging for that, but it seems to there would be at least a potential way to track it down.

    1. Czhorat*

      It’s a stupid ask, and political theater. “Harris worked at McDonalds” is a reasonable biographical detail very much in line with her social class as a young woman.

      If she said “I clerked for a Supreme Court Justice as a college freshman” then you’d want proof. Attacking something like this is pure political theater. It’s the kind you get when one side has relatable experience and the other has something like “worked for a real estate mogul so racist that Woody Guthry wrote a song about how terrible he was”

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

      This was 40 years ago. The IRS doesn’t keep records indefinitely. Furthermore, that McDonalds location could be closed by now.
      There is a picture of her in her McDonalds uniform. I think that is enough evidence.

    3. RagingADHD*

      Let’s think this through.

      The IRS requires employers to keep employment tax records for four (4) years. Not 40.
      The recommendation for personal income tax is to keep your own records from 3 up to 7 years.
      A taxpayer can retrieve 7 years’ worth of of their own tax records from the IRS.

      If the IRS doesn’t even keep it, who do you think should keep it? Do you suppose that in the 1980s, a random McDonald’s franchise was paying to have all their defunct, unnecessary payroll records put on microfiche instead of shredding them? And then in the 1990s, pay again to digitize them? And then in the 2000’s, pay again to convert those files to a format that is currently readable?

      Or do you suppose businesses pay for archival, climate-controlled storage for all their paper payroll records for all of their employees back to the inception of the franchise? Even McDonalds doesn’t have that kind of money (or space). And unless you live in a hoarder house, nobody keeps 40 years of their own tax records, either. If you’re moving 20 or 30 year old boxes of income tax records from house to house instead of getting them shredded, you need an intervention.

      So, no. The only reason anyone would have a tax record for a part time job in the 1980s is if a franchise owner was horribly inefficient and wasteful at running their business, or the taxpayer were suffering from some kind of mental illness or disability that caused them to retain a giant fire hazard of boxes full of useless old paper.

      1. Clisby*

        Assuming you were legally employed, Social Security should keep track of it, but I don’t know how much detail they keep. I started taking SS last year, and until then I would regularly get SS reports showing what my earnings had been through the years. It didn’t break out employers, but for all I know they have that information.

      2. Gray Lady*

        I was thinking of the IRS having the record, as we have to report the contents of our W-2s when we file taxes. I was thinking it was a possibility that those records still exist in some digitized form. I wasn’t suggesting the employer would still have it and of course there’s always the issue of employers ceasing to exist.

        But it’s also quite likely that it’s not the case, and the IRS doesn’t keep those records. I was just a thought.

        At any rate, I wasn’t endorsing this whole controversy, I was just thinking about how in theory it *might* be possible to find a record of employment from that long ago.

  42. My Brain is Exploding*

    And now all those people/businesses we discussed in a previous thread (looking at you, MIL), are saying, “Well if she’d only SAVED every pay receipt…” Of course, if you were my MIL, you might HAVE it, but you would NEVER be able to FIND it.

  43. Curious*

    on #4, it’s even more difficult than it seems, because McDonald’s works on a franchise model. So, she–and every other person who remembers working at McDonald’s as a teen– didn’t work for McDonald’s, Inc. They worked for, e. g., McDonald’s of Yourtown.

    Is McDonald’s of Yourtown still in business, 40 years on? Possibly yes, but plausibly not. If they do, will they have employment records from 40 years ago? Well, readers of AAM know that companies that are packrats exist, but the likelihood is very low. And if they did, would they be accessible? Really, now, this is a … cowdung controversy.

  44. Chase*

    I swear I worked the concession stand at my little brother’s tee-ball games one summer, but they paid me in cash under the table, and there is no record of it anywhere. The most vivid thing I remember about it was the free Twix bars I got to take when my shift was done.

  45. Lorax*

    #2 is explicitly illegal in some states. Or at least it is in my state. Employers are prohibited from requesting employees share social media login information, modify their privacy settings, add specific people to their networks, log on to their account in the presence of an employer, or give an employer access to specific content. An employer could legally ask an employee to set up a new account for the purposes of work or use a company owned account for business, but they can’t compel employees to do anything with their personal accounts. So I guess this is a PSA: if this comes up again, check your local laws!

  46. Czhorat*

    I think #1 could also be a reminder to those of us with potentially irritating senses of humor to look in the mirror and realize that what you see as a lighthearted joke might not land the same with coworkers. Your work team is a pretty much captive audience, so if you keep irking them there’s really nowhere for them to go, so they’ll swallow it until they end up hating you for a thousand little jabs that are all meant in fun but build up resentment.

    Even if you aren’t at the level of the kind of “class clown” act that you should have dropped in grade school, try to read cues. If a coworker doesn’t joke back then maybe you should dial it down notch. Don’t be the pebble in someone’s shoe.

    1. Joana*

      I know OP said she wants to learn how to just deal with it rather than change coworker, but one thing about neurodivergence is that we can be (and often are) really bad at socializing. Even when it looks like we’re good at it, it took years of practice and often we don’t actually understand it, we’re just following the “rules” that we painstakingly figured out. This might be manifesting in the coworker having gotten a laugh for these sorts of jokes once and therefore thinking that they’re a hit forever. I admit I myself have over-told jokes. So while OP is in no way obligated to put forth the effort telling coworker “Hey, you’re running these jokes into the ground and they’re becoming irritating”, if no one has, that might be the answer.

    2. carrot cake*

      I mean, from the other side, I find it much simpler to just let these kinds of annoyances roll off. I cringe at even the thought of someone self-reflecting on why their joke didn’t land with me or that they might be a “pebble in” my “shoe.” We all miss some mark or other every day. I’d rather just accept that reality and move on.

  47. Exhausted*

    I have a copy of every pay stub and W2 I’ve ever received. My parents were really irresponsible with paperwork and it created a complex where I’m constantly sure I’ll need copies of everything. But that is not normal. Most people don’t, and shouldn’t have to, keep track of every paystub. And without getting too political, given the paperwork that is easily accessible and yet is not being shared, the whole McDonalds thing should really not even be discussed and I find it embarrassing that anyone would glom onto that.

    1. Wilbur*

      It’s a waste of time and a distraction. If they (McDonalds or Harris) produce paperwork (assuming it wasn’t shredded decades ago), people are going to say that it’s fake or that it was only a college job or that it was only X months and it’s not like someone who had to work there to survive. It’s a dumb fake controversy that will die out in two weeks. It’s especially dumb because regardless of what you think about either candidate, there are actual policy choices and platforms to criticize. I truly wish we had more journalists rather than “entertainers”, and every time one of these dumb things came up they would stop it and shift the conversation back to something that mattered.

  49. Alton Brown's Evil Twin*

    #2 – how much is your company paying these outside people to ‘generate leads’? This does not sound like a very productive contract.

    1. Czhorat*

      It’s a GREAT strategy for the consulting form to recommend. They get to take credit for any leads generated from contacts the team already has, and can explain away a lack of success as the individual members not trying hard enough.

    2. LinkedIn Lunatic*

      (LW2) I cannot speak to actual costs, but feel like it was tens of thousands of dollars, which would be a significant investment for a small company. It honestly felt a bit like a grift to me, but I wasn’t tasked with hiring vendors and had no say in the matter.

  50. Sara Adams*

    I listen to Dr. Allison Gill’s political podcasts, and she recently recorded herself trying to do exactly this-track her McDonald’s employment in Arizona in the early 90’s. Her game of phone tag eventually led her to “the work number” website. I suspect many on this forum know how useful that is.

  51. TheCountrysMediocreYogurt*

    I also worked at a TCBY in high school. I can’t prove it, nor would I really want to.

    But for question #1, what if the coworker does indeed suck at their job. They perform poorly and never stay in their lane. What then? Is it ok to despise them then? Because I do.

    1. OP1*

      It would be different if I didn’t like them as a co-worker and person, I’d be able to detach, stop engaging and move on to “polite but distant”. But since I do like them on the whole, just not these specific interactions, I’d rather find a way to move past it :)

  52. hiptobesquare*

    Honestly, if you exclude internships and college jobs, I couldn’t prove any job I had before probably 2011 unless the IRS got involved.

  53. Uhura*

    OP #1
    “Logically I know they aren’t expecting a bagel, costume piece, or invitation to a picnic with my friends who they’ve never met, but I have no idea how to respond! I’ve tried deflecting with things like, “Oh, I’m never making another one!” or responding with a clear no or not responding and changing the subject. Mostly I’ve resorted to just sharing less to avoid it, which opened a can of worms of the “we never talk anymore, what’s up, are you okay?” variety. Clearly, I need to find a way to be okay with the interaction and move the conversation along.”

    I used to have this problem with co-workers/people in general, then I found I was neurodivergent myself. The past couple of years I’ve really taken an in depth look and learned a lot about neurodivergence/autism, and one of the characteristics is to take what other people say literally.

    I realized I was taking everything people said literally, that when they asked me to make them a Halloween costume, I thought they meant it. That when they asked me how I was doing, I thought they were inquiring about my well being and wanted a through, deep answer as to my state of well being, but now I realize when a person asks “How are you doing?” in NT speak that just means, “Hello.”

    What I’ve learned is when people say things like this, they don’t mean them, they are just trying to make conversation. Even though they are asking questions, they aren’t really looking for an answer.

    1. Ellis Bell*

      Yeah, this is a thing that can be just communication preferences, but it can also affect people with autism. I have an autistic student who freaked out because he told one of the supply teachers about his holidays to Dubai and Australia and she replied “Ooh maybe I should start taking my holidays with you?!” That was a fun explanation, because he was super wound up and also, once you start explaining the joke, it makes zero sense.

      1. Summer Bummer*

        Haha, this bell rang for me, too! LW also feels on the neurodivergent end of things–taking emotional things literally and feeling personally responsible for every aspect of a social encounter are also my flavor of autism <3

        1. Uhura*

          Yup, I’m not trying to diagnose the OP, but I’ve also found that while ADHD and autism are both described under the neurodivergent umbrella, there are some key differences. I’m both ADHD and autistic but tend to be more autistic. A friend of mine was very much ADHD but only ADHD, and she did a lot of similar things that OP’s co-worker did that irritated me, like expecting me to remember what she did 3 weeks ago.

          Some people may lean more towards autism neurodivergence in that they take things more literally and don’t always understand when people are joking, and other people, like OP’s co-worker may be more ADHD because her hyperactivity is displayed by the fact that she is super talkative and tries to make jokes. Again, this is just all a guess based on the limited info provided.

    3. Irish Teacher.*

      I don’t take it literally in the sense of thinking they meant it literally, but…in some way, given how my brain works, I still hear the literal version and it makes me uncomfortable. Yeah, I reckon there’s about a 70% chance of my being autistic.

  54. Tech Industry Refugee*

    #1 – Jeez, I would love fun, upbeat coworkers like this one. Might you have issues of your own that cause you to view normal interactions as “emotional labor”?

    1. Joana*

      Maybe OP does, but I wouldn’t go to that immediately. There’s a reason the “BEC” thing is a thing. Sometimes when you already have a problem with someone, even the littlest thing can irritate you further. But I can also see having to deal with the same old joke every time you put forth something about yourself or something you did getting old really fast, and as someone else said, your coworkers are a captive audience and often don’t get to just walk away from it like you might a friend or some random person who’s running a joke into the ground.

      1. PhyllisB*

        Oh yes about the joke getting old. Years ago I had a friend who everytime he called would say “This is Ed McCann. I have your 10 million dollars.” (For people who don’t know this, Ed McCann from the Tonight Show was the celebrity person for Publisher’s Clearinghouse Sweepstakes.) Anyway it was funny the first couple of times but wore thin very quickly. One time I responded, “Great!!I want it all in pennies!!” He roared with laughter and didn’t say it again for two whole weeks.

      2. OP1*

        This is it exactly! Maybe it wouldn’t grate so much (or at all!) occasionally pulling out the “Let me join in!” but when it’s all the time, it’s tiresome to deal with.

    2. Uhura*

      I think the problem is OP #1 is taking what the co-worker is saying very literally. I’m the same way – I would struggle when someone would say things like this because I actually thought they wanted me to bring them a bagel/make them a costume, etc. The co-worker is probably trying to be joking, but I struggle understanding sarcasm and jokes, this may be the same thing with OP 1. And it is exhausting to have to figure out if someone is being serious or not.

      1. OP1*

        I find the “too literal” thing that’s come up else where so interesting because I feel like I have a decent handle on what’s sarcasm or joking (and do a fair bit of it myself) most of the time, or with most people. But as it’s been mentioned I suspect the problem lies in that these jokes aren’t hyperbolic (Take me to Italy!) and are things I could very easily do and don’t have a “good reason” no to, saying No constantly feels rude, even though “I don’t want to” is a perfectly good reason.

        The comments about seeing it more like “Hello, how are you?” being shorthand more than genuine query are actually really helpful!

        1. Uhura*

          I think because the comments are not extreme that’s why your brain doesn’t register them as jokes. If someone says “Pack me in your suitcase and take me with you”, you know it is physically impossible to fit them in your suitcase so you know they’re joking. But when they say something that you could actually do – like bring them a bagel or make them a costume, those are things you actually can do and that may be why your brain doesn’t register that it’s a joke.

          “No constantly feels rude, even though “I don’t want to” is a perfectly good reason.” That’s the thing I’m trying to explain, you don’t even have to say “I don’t want to” because I suspect she isn’t really expecting you to answer her questions. Try it next time she asks you something, instead of trying to answer her question, just keep talking about what you’re talking about. I bet she won’t even notice that you didn’t answer her question.

    3. Czhorat*

      Everyone draws lines in different places between “fun” and “annoying”. Sometimes the barrage of lighthearted jokes can just be an irritant. Where you might see fun and upbeat someone else might see grating and pestering; the challenge is that if you don’t like that kind of humor it’s hard to shut it down without escalating and making it into a bigger thing.

    4. HonorBox*

      I think part of the reason that LW is a bit irritated is that while the coworker does seem fun and upbeat, there are aspects that go from fun, lighthearted conversation to “I require more from you….” Even if presented as a “joke” the requests for bagels, costumes, picnic invites can come across as requests for the LW to do more than just converse.

      1. Tech Industry Refugee*

        Must be a cultural thing. Where I am from it’s very normal to joke, “oh, can I come?” or “Bring me a bagel next time!” It’s just cheekiness/sarcasm. Obviously if OP did not bring them a bagel and the coworker was actually upset, that’s a different situation.

        1. Save us from jokes*

          Constant cheekiness and sarcasm aren’t things that should be celebrated. Certainly not with a captive audience. They’re annoying and tiresome. The only “culture” I know that rewards being an annoying prat is tech bro – emphasis on the bro.

          1. carrot cake*

            Dictating to other people what should and shouldn’t be “celebrated” is pretty condescending.

        2. Happy*

          I’m so confused by the idea that “bring me a bagel next time!” can be a joke. To me it sounds like a very straightforward request (though, I can see how the tone would dictate whether or not the speaker actually expected the request to be honored). I can’t fathom a situation in which a person would say that and not actually want a bagel.

          Obviously this is a “me” thing, since you and Alison and lots of other people in the comments read it as a joke. And “take me to Italy with you” does read as a joke to me….but it’s just really interesting to me that this seems like such a routine joke to so many people here while I have absolutely no cultural understanding of it.

    5. Clisby*

      Maybe, but this doesn’t sound “fun” and “upbeat” to me – I’d think this person was incredibly annoying. At the very least, they’re quite odd.

      I wouldn’t likely think of it as emotional labor, though – I’d just be avoiding/ignoring them.

      1. Sammy Claws*

        Same! This kind of thing always gets me. Where I used to work, there were people I had to hide from to avoid hearing “You stopped for coffee and didn’t get me one!?” EVERY DAY. To make it worse, it was a superior, so the level of awkwardness trying to reply appropriately (b/c “Oh, I didn’t realize you’d be here/you liked coffee” is obviously ridiculous) was just annoying, especially first thing in the damn morning before I even got to have any of the coffee I’d gotten.

  55. Uhura*

    OP # 1 “Logically I know they aren’t expecting a bagel, costume piece, or invitation to a picnic with my friends who they’ve never met, but I have no idea how to respond! I’ve tried deflecting with things like, “Oh, I’m never making another one!” or responding with a clear no or not responding and changing the subject. Mostly I’ve resorted to just sharing less to avoid it, which opened a can of worms of the “we never talk anymore, what’s up, are you okay?” variety. Clearly, I need to find a way to be okay with the interaction and move the conversation along.”

    I too have this problem, people would ask or say things and I would struggle with how to answer them. If they asked if I would make them a costume or if I brough them a bagel, I’d stutter and stumble, worried about what to say. But in the past couple of years I’ve been learning about neurodivergence and I’ve learned that one of the characteristics can be taking what other people say very literally.

    I would have a hard time when people would ask me “How are you doing?” because I actually thought they wanted to know the state of my well being. I’ve since learned that “How are you doing” is actually NT speak for “Hello”.
    I’ve learned that most people when they ask question, they don’t really want an answer to the question, they’re just making conversation. I had to stop taking what they said so literally. It’s a work in progress.

    1. Good Enough For Government Work*

      Sometimes it’s not even only NT Speak! (Sauce: my neurospicy ass)

      Where I come from, the accepted greeting is “Alright?” if you’re simply passing each other in the street/corridor/whatever, and possibly “Hiya ‘ow you doin’ alright?” or some variation thereof if you have a bit more time. The most common response is to repeat it back to them, or sometimes include a “Yeah/Aye, alright?”

      It totally foxed some American friends who came over during uni.

  56. Productivity Pigeon*

    LW#3:

    I think you’re forgetting that you’re the customer here. Not in a ”the customer is always right”-kind of way, but in a ”you needed to take extremely drastic action to be able to pay this company”-kind of way.

    Most reasonable companies realize that’s bad for business. If Jane got into trouble, that’s actually…right. Something went seriously wrong on her end and you’re not responsible for any consequences.

    1. OP 3*

      Eh, I pretty much agree with you, but there is the quirk of our area: I can’t turn around and buy an equivalent of some materials from someone else. Some of them are simply irreplaceable. So it’s hard for me to feel like a customer.

      1. Productivity Pigeon*

        Valid point. It’s not my industry so I wouldn’t know.

        I do get the feeling your organization still has a little more attractiveness as customer than you might think, given the speed the C-levels reacted with.

        Hopefully there won’t be an issues this year :)

        1. WestSideStory*

          Well it’s been mine and I can offer that if the product itself is very specialized, there may not be that many customers for this specific thing. That’s probably why the C-suite exploded – losing any customer, particularly a years-long business relationship, is bad for its business.
          LW, you are a customer. You have been shown that top management of your vendor values your organization – puff up a bit and run with that, next time around.

  57. CeramicSun*

    #5 I almost got into trouble with a school application because the place I worked at one summer about 6 years ago claimed I never worked there. The job was just scanning records so I only spent time in the record room and never got to actually interact with any of my coworkers. Luckily it got cleared up with my W2 forms and the office manager sent another letter where she admitted she made a mistake. My point is these mistakes can happen even when the job wasn’t that long ago. I wouldn’t expect anyone to have proof for jobs 20+ years old.

  58. RagingADHD*

    #3, if the journal has only one sales rep and the head of sales wasn’t following up to make sure renewals were getting processed, then the C-Suite should be apoplectic. The head of sales manages *one person* and can’t find time to return an email for months?

    #4, I have to wonder how old your friend is. Even with everything digital, there are records retention limits and companies go out of business.

    I wasn’t able to get a 1099 for a job I did in 1Q2023, because the company imploded so thoroughly in 2Q2023 that there was nobody to get it from.

    1. OP 3*

      #3: based on the emails I got from their C-level executives, they very much took the situation as an emergency.

  59. Database Developer Dude*

    VP Harris worked at that McDonalds in 1983. Since I was 16 then, that would make her 19. That was 41 years ago. Who here has proof of where they worked 41 years ago? I too worked at a McDonald’s in 1983….and probably couldn’t prove it to save my life.

    Besides, who the heck would lie about that? It’s not like it’s going give you some credibility about anything, or let you pick up hotties at your local watering hole.

    Calling her a liar on this is completely idiotic.

    1. Rex Libris*

      This. It’s not like she’s claiming she was in special forces or something, and the records just got lost. People also don’t realize how ridiculously common it was for McDonalds to be one’s first job back then. Probably half of the random people over 50 you pass on the street worked at McDonalds for a couple of months in their teens.

      1. Panhandlerann*

        The whole thing actually just goes to show how ridiculously out of touch with such things her competitor is (not that we don’t know that already).

        1. PP*

          Add me as another teen who worked at McDonald’s, possibly my first official job. First un-official jobs were baby sitting, house sitting, dog sitting for neighbors.

    2. carrot cake*

      It’s political theater designed to paint her as a liar, and, worse, to race bait.

      That she and her campaign outright ignore it is further evidence of her readiness and capability of being the 47th President of the United States.

  60. Former Retail Lifer*

    #4: I worked retail for 20+ years starting in the early 90s. Just off the top of my head, I can think of several companies that either no longer exist or exist solely online in name only (and aren’t actually affiliated with the old brick-and-mortar stores): Capezio, Contempo, Delia’s, Baker’s, Lazarus. Lazrus became Macy’s, but when I applied again just over a decade later at Macy’s, they told me they did get Macy’s records but wouldn’t have anything from that long ago.

    1. Rex Libris*

      I remember Lazarus. I used to buy parachute pants there. I’ll just go yell at a cloud or something now.

    2. Insert Clever Name Here*

      Delia’s! The coolest catalog that I was never able to actually order anything out of because my mom thought it was all tacky <3

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

    -#4 I worked at a grocery store 2008-2012, some of it was only during summer and winter breaks as I was away at college. Late 2011 the owners retired and sold the store to a chain. The owners daughter had been working there as a manager when I left but has since moved on. I don’t have any records, I didn’t grow up in that town so I wasn’t friends with any one or kept in contact. I would not be able to prove that I worked there.

  62. Hawthorne*

    To LW3–as someone who is a vendor and who has had to have things escalated due to things getting lost or sometimes just freak things occurring, at worst, Jane won’t say anything about it at all and do what she needs to do. Likely though, Jane will be apologetic and bend over backwards. This stuff happens sometimes, even to the most conscientious people, and we deal with escalations often enough (sometimes for things like this, sometimes because our customers are jerks, or sometimes just because) that it doesn’t tend to faze us beyond being apologetic and very responsive the next time. You have nothing to worry about.

    1. OP 3*

      Thank you for clarification. It was very spooky to see how 3 one-on-one mail chains had turned into around 15 of them with bunch of people participating. I was under the impression I make their office explore.

  63. Miss Kat*

    The one place that always keeps records of all your past LEGITIMATE employment… Social Security!! Every single job anyone has ever had is listed if you ask for a detailed employment record.

  64. Nonanon*

    Joke’s on you, LW2’s management, some of us use LinkedIn so infrequently we have to reset our passwords every login, which would be a nightmare for both of us

  65. Anon Y. Mouse*

    LW3 – You know, it’s funny, I was just reading an article last night that included talk about how deference is kind of baked into librarianship (though they were talking more about librarian relationships to regular faculty)

    but it’s not surprising to see this deference in other parts of the work too

    1. OP 3*

      Thank you! I am very new in the librarianship area but feel it already, plus my PTSR from previous workplaces also don’t make this point easier. May you please share the name of the article?

  66. Former Retail Lifer*

    #4: Most of the retail stores I worked at in the 90s don’t exist anymore, or if they do, it’s online and in name only and they often aren’t affiliated with the original entity: Capezio, Contempo Casuals, Delia’s, Baker’s, Lazrus.

    Lazarus later became Macy’s. I reapplied over a decade later when it was Macy’s, and I was told that they had gotten all of the records from Lazarus but they wouldn’t have kept anything over ten years old.

    TL;DR: I have no way to prove I worked at any of my earliest jobs.

    1. Former Retail Lifer*

      (Posted basically the same thing 15 minutes ago because I didn’t realize the first one posted.)

  67. Pension Guru*

    Part of my job involves verifying where people worked decades ago, and the Social Security earnings record is a great source. They have records going back to the 1960s at least (perhaps earlier, but I haven’t needed them), but they are not all digitized. There is a form that any person can fill out (Form SSA-7050-F4) to request their Social Security earnings history (so getting the records from the SSA would not be any sort of “favor”), and it would definitely show employment at McDonalds in the 1980s. I have no doubt that Kamala Harris did work for McDonalds (as did I while in college in the 1990s, and it has never once been included on my resume), so either no one on her campaign knows about this resource, or they consider the claim that she didn’t work there so ridiculous that they feel it is better not to respond.

    3. Orv*

      Given Obama’s experience with his birth certificate they probably believe that people making the claim wouldn’t believe any proof they came up with. They’d probably claim Biden doctored her Social Security records or something.

  68. JennyEm56*

    LW3: I manage vendor negotiations for a major library consortia. I swear sometimes vendors don’t want our business. Or, more probable is that they don’t want us to negotiate; we should accept their terms and move on. A lot of sales reps are overworked too; there’s tons of turnover.

    I always try to have the sales manager’s contact information to fall back on if the sales rep isn’t answering. I’m pretty sure that has gotten some reps jobs reassigned or even fired, but they’re not doing their jobs.

    I can be apologetic too, but sometimes these vendors are so eye-rolly, I’ve learned to channel my inner mom voice and be blunt and tactful. We have several right now that are taking FOREVER, and I’m getting blunter and blunter as I get more annoyed.

    1. OP 3*

      Thank you for your response! I absolutely second this. Vendors, especially ones with unique materials, are handful in the best days, but this case was over the top for me: I can’t buy their materials any other way and my library patrons really need it. I now have some extra contacts for this vendor, not just C-level people.

      Wish you the best luck! Consortia is a great deal for our profession.

  69. nonprofit director*

    #4 Maybe this has been mentioned; you can request a listing from Social Security that includes employer names and dates.

    1. dulcinea47*

      the thing is, you really don’t need to prove yourself to people who are accusing you of lying just to be a d**k. working at mcdonalds in high school is not a proven requirement for presidential candidates.

      1. Goldfeesh*

        The Deep State is so deep, and she is so super powerful, that the SSA fabricated records proving she worked at McDonalds when she clearly didn’t. (Or something else equally ridiculous)

  70. Blue Pen*

    #1 — IDK if the LW is just giving not-great examples, but I don’t really see why this co-worker is so irritating to you based on what you’re sharing here. I think I might be a little confused if someone responded to bring them back a bagel next time in sincerity, but that’s kind of the extent of it.

    Of course, there’s *all kinds of people* we don’t get along with (sometimes for inexplicable reasons) so I can understand on that front, but I think you need to relax and take down the temperature a bit for your own sake and sanity—or as Alison says, bring lightness.

    1. Jaunty Banana Hat I*

      I mean, if it feels like someone is constantly asking you to do things for them, I can see how that would be frustrating. I would find it weird if, nearly every time I got coffee my coworker responded to the smell of my coffee with “oh, get me a coffee next time”. It IS rude to constantly ask people for things. I do think LW will be better off accepting this is just how their coworker is and not read so much into it, and try to come up with some lighter responses.

      (I will say, anyone who knits/crochets/sews/etc. has definitely encountered many, many people who ask them to make things without any recognition of the time/effort it takes. The costume request would absolutely get my hackles up. That’s a huge ask, and there are absolutely people that make those kinds of asks seriously; I bet that’s where a lot of the response of frustration is coming from.)

      If the co-worker is neurodivergent, it might be a kindness to let them know that making requests of people as conversation–even when you don’t actually expect for the person to fulfill the request–can be off-putting.

      1. Clisby*

        Exactly. Like, why are they making these comments? Maybe it’s a regional thing? I’ve lived all but 9 of my 71 years in the US South, and this sounds completely foreign.

  71. Just Another Cog*

    Was thinking about this when I last revamped my resume. I’ve been at the same organization for 20 years now, but in a series of different roles on different projects, and I need to reformat to make it clear that I’ve progressed through them with new and advancing titles.

    But if they want my employment prior to that? Damn. My previous boss is dead; that job was with a public university so they might have records? Before that I worked for a large retail chain that was bought by a larger company, put out of business, and the larger company has since declared bankruptcy and closed. Before that, a job at a university in a function that no longer exists, and before that, a public library that was closed and consolidated into a larger regional public library. I literally cannot readily produce proof that I worked in any of those places.
    Actually, I think I have my W2s, so I could produce proof I worked there, but not any kind of meaningful reference from anyone.

  72. girlie_pop*

    As someone who works in B2B marketing, LinkedIn prospecting is definitely a thing, but not at all like that lmao. In my experience, it’s also most effective when used less like cold calling and more like connecting with someone who is already aware of/engaged with your company and is interested in continuing that conversation – which makes me think that external group had no clue what they were doing!

    They could have just been a bad, scammy agency but I would guess they were one of the “lead generation” businesses that just buy huge lists of peoples’ information and turn around and sell them to businesses as “hot leads”.

  73. Sunny*

    OP2 – It’s bizarre to me that your employer went along with this ridiculous request. It’s not just asking for passwords to your personal account, it’s also that they proposed impersonating you. How did that sound remotely acceptable to anyone in the room?! Of course you said no to it.

  74. dulcinea47*

    I’ve only had three jobs since 2000 and those are all documented. Anything before that, I might be able to find a stray paystub but I might not. For many of them the company doesn’t exist anymore, or at least not in the same form as it did 25 years ago.

    tfg never actually had a real job so what would he know.

    1. WillowSunstar*

      Right, him “serving” fries for a few minutes was probably the most real job he has ever worked in his entire life.

  75. I treated you like a son*

    Years ago I worked in a sales job where the CEO gave us all access to his LinkedIn so we could connect with prospects from his account (the idea being that a CEO cx request is more likely to be accepted). That seemed a little odd at the time but it was his idea and we were careful so it was fine.

    The idea of some random third party company doing it though? No way

  76. Facilities Squirrel*

    #4: I mean, if you need to see my Employee of the Month plaque from February 1984, I’ll bring it in…

  77. Sylvia*

    #3 – I have similar job duties and have had to get pushy with vendors. I think the sales reps are under a lot of pressure to bring in new business and sometimes neglect their current customers because they can–most of these companies don’t have any competition. Some of the sales reps are great, but they can’t get their billing department to provide an accurate invoice and it becomes a month-long group effort. It’s my impression that the bigger vendors don’t fire people often for that, if that makes you feel better about Jane.

  78. WillowSunstar*

    Before my current career, where I’ve been at this company for over a decade, I had a very long string of temp jobs due to being very shy and socially awkward, but also young and inexperienced. I do not remember half of those temp jobs, and the ones I do remember had either the very abusive or very good bosses. Could I prove I worked at Microsoft for about a year or so as an admin? Probably not, but it was through a temp agency and I had access to Bill Gate’s email address during that time. (Was so tempted to send him an email but figured it was probably a fireable offense.)

  79. GS*

    #4 – I was working as a recruiting coordinator and this woman went to a high school in another country that no longer existed. It was a role that did not require a BA/BS but did require high school. We literally ended up having a family member of hers who still lived in the country go to the local government and try and turn up anything they could. We eventually got SOMETHING but it was insane. I absolutely believe very few people who worked most jobs decades ago would have an awfully hard time turning something up. My mom worked as a waitress at IHOP in college. 0% chance we could find proof of that.

  80. Jiminy Cricket*

    I’m trying to think how I might prove my 1990s experience at Kinney’s Shoes and … that yogurt shop, what was it called? … and that pizza shop that has been out of business for 30+ years. I think I could contact my college and request a copy of my admissions application, on which I probably listed them. Maybe maybe maybe I put a paystub in a box in my parents’ basement for nostalgia?

    What’s hilarious is that this is universally known. No one who held a service industry job in the 1990s actually believes that there is a way to prove it.

    1. ThursdaysGeek*

      I found out (to my dismay at a previous job offer a few years back) that my college won’t admit I went there, as I went there before they digitized their records. A formal request for transcripts will (probably) work, and bringing in my diploma was adequate for that job offer.

      I don’t know the name of that German restaurant I worked a summer in 1980 or 81, and I doubt that anyone else from that area remembers it either. I do still know how to chop onions!

    2. Ellis Bell*

      You’ve just made me realise there were a couple of companies I worked for, where I don’t even remember the company name. I remember an ice cream factory and a furniture chain but not their actual names.

  81. May*

    Actually, I’m wondering if the very old jobs might show up in one’s Social Security account. There is a place where you can view your annual income (that had SS tax deducted) and mine went back to the beginning of my employment, late 1990s. It includes the names of the organizations. I am not sure how far back that database would go, though. Someone else with a longer work history want to check?

    2. Orv*

      I think that might prove she earned income that year but not where she earned it. Also I’m not sure how that works with teenagers who don’t make enough per year to need to file taxes.

      1. Clisby*

        If they’re working legally, they still should have paid SS/Medicare taxes. When my son was in college, he had several jobs where he didn’t have to file a tax return, but he always had to pay the FICA taxes. I don’t see any obvious reason the SSA would care about income taxes – just payroll taxes.

    3. Indolent Libertine*

      Mine goes back to my college years, let’s just say it’s before 1980, and I’ve never looked at these records before and there is definitely stuff missing! Including a tiny job I had with a major public university. SSA have info for that job for year X, and for year X+2, but not for year X+1 when I was definitely also doing that same job. Not worth my time to try to fix it since that job paid into the state employee retirement system rather than SS anyhow so it wouldn’t change my eventual benefit.

      1. RVMan*

        A handful of universities have opt-outs for student workers. I know I have a couple of jobs missing from when I was a student at a major Texas state-affiliated university, but not all of the time when I was there is missing. The rules on that are Byzantine and have changed through the years – if your student status changed (full time/part time, summer session while enrolled part time or not at all, etc.) while you had the job, that might explain the reporting difference.

  82. jane's nemesis*

    I worked at a Baskin Robbins while I was in college from summer 1997ish-spring 1998ish and I would have absolutely no way of verifying that. It was a franchise location, I don’t remember my manager’s name and even if I did and the location still existed (it doesn’t) AND she still worked there, why would she remember me? I never met the location’s owners. Why would they still have records of my employment, 27 (gulp) years later?

  83. Samwise*

    My first job where I had a W-2 was when I was 15. In 1975. Holiday job at an arts and crafts store that has been closed since 1978. No way to prove it. It was almost 50 years ago!

  84. Pumpkin215*

    LW#3, I feel your pain and also worked with a Jane.

    She needed to provide me with one piece of data that was part of a package filed to the state. There would be fines if we missed the deadline, and it was a significant number that could not be left out.

    I tried email, IM, and voice messages. I started cc’ing her boss. After no response, I cc’ed the next level up. Radio silence. A “hey I’m working on this and will have it shortly” would have sufficed. I got nothing for 3 weeks and the deadline was approaching.

    I went straight to the CFO. This was like jumping 5 heads over “Jane”, but I was out of time. The CFO agreed that I needed the information in order to preform my job and sent out an “what’s going on here?” type of email. I had the data I needed in 15 minutes on the day it was due.

    Going forward, “Jane” hated me after that but I did not care. She also produced the data within 24 hours whenever I asked for it. I don’t work there any more and I don’t regret the route I took.

  85. Kyrielle*

    Re #4, heck, forget proving it, I have one where I can’t even remember the name of the company! It’s only going to come up in a “funny stories about my past jobs” or “exhaustive list of everywhere you’ve worked” context because it was a call center and I quit after my first day. And another, I know I worked at one branch of a very large tutoring org, grading papers, for a summer. I don’t remember which branch *or* which summer. It’s been multiple decades and I was young and not keeping track!

    1. NobodyHasTimeForThis*

      Same. I worked for a temp agency in college. I was paid directly by the temp agency. I don’t remember their name at all. I remember some of the placings that lasted longer, I covered offices for 3 different maternity leaves. I remember some of the placings that did not last very long – night shifts at a potato chip factory picking burned chips out of the assembly line. I do not remember the many many shifts in random buildings doing random monotonous low skill office work. So many many mailrooms.

  86. ARW*

    Re; #4, one of the largest computer record systems belongs to Social Security and they actually do have records of every job not under the table that you’ve ever held (post 1935). The Privacy Act protects those records but I imagine if Kamela herself went and asked for a redacted printout, they’d give it to her, showing how much OASDI she paid from that job with that employer in that year.

    1. Indolent Libertine*

      I’ve just looked up my own record and there’s definitely stuff missing! Like a job I held in year X, year X+1, and year X+2, where they have numbers for the outer two years but not the middle one.

  87. WestSideStory*

    LW#3 – having worked on the sales end of supplying science library product, I think, as a buyer – you were way too nice. I like Alison’s take for the next time – contact Jane (email and then phone number) and if you don’t get an answer in a week, email the most responsive of the C-suite who helped you last time.
    Whatever Jane’s problems were, it was probably multiplied by the fact that the past year has roiled academic publishing on many levels. Forgive her, but be ready to go to the top if you can’t get an answer to purchasing their products.

  88. FloralWraith*

    Re: OP2: Your company was cheap, they didn’t want to pay for a few star players to have Linkedin premium accounts that would be able to do this work much more efficiently, so they tried to get you all to do the work for them by basically allowing them to work via clone accounts.

  89. B Wayne*

    Alison had me at “white chocolate macadamia nut cookies”. My fav! And I have to ration them to only a handful a year.

  90. Bruce*

    I have one job from before 1982 where I still know how to contact one of my supervisors (the other one passed away, sadly). Before that I’d have no clue.

  91. NobodyHasTimeForThis*

    #4 – I could provide witnesses to my HS fast food job from 1985 because it was me and some of my best friends and we are all still in loose contact. But no actual proof. And no way for my temp job in 88 where I remember where I was placed, but nothing about the actual agency I worked for. I’m not even sure I earned enough to get a W2.

    I assume that if I really tried I could get proof of my full-time job with a large corporation in the 90’s because maybe their HR has some documentation.

  92. falc*

    oh you want me to PROVE i worked at a restaurant 20 years ago that later burned down from suspected arson???

  93. nekosan*

    For #1, I had the opposite problem – I took the comments as joking and replied lightly, and they took it all as completely serious! I guess it was more of a “them problem” than a “me problem”, but when it escalated to “I tried to secretly follow you home to see where you live,” I took it to HR, who told me it was “my fault” for smiling and nodding at everyone I passed in the hallway. I’ve tried to be super duper careful about not doing anything that could “lead anyone on” since then. (I was late 20s female, and the problem person was a male.)

    1. Silver Robin*

      That is deeply horrifying and I hope you have fully internalized that it was *absolutely* a them problem. I am so sorry you have (understandably) curbed your friendliness because some man decided to be an absolute creep.

      Just for the sake of absolute clarity/validation: if somebody had taken you seriously when you meant it lightly, that would not at all lead to them having to follow you secretly, because they would have (what they theoretically thought was) explicit consent to go with you somewhere, or would have standing to just ask you directly about it. There would be no need for secrecy. That some guy decided to follow you home is not your fault and HR acted abominably.

      1. nekosan*

        I had a very similar thing happen in college too. That person went on to become violent when his next object of obsession reported him. As a female-presenting person in heavily male-predominant fields, with a heavier than average percentage of neurodivergent males, I’ve learned that anything that can be interpreted (or misinterpreted) as friendliness can backfire. Being overly cautious is the name of the game, in order to be safe. =(

        (In college, the person thought that my flat statement of “No, I am not interested in you, please go away and leave me alone” and closing the door in his face was flirting.)

  94. Mango Freak*

    LW1: when they ask you if you remembered past details, I’d honestly just say “uhuh” and look at them expectantly. Like, “go on.” I would treat it as thought they’re not literally asking whether I remember–that this is the act of them reminding me.

    If you don’t remember, and you care, you can ask clarifying questions. But you probably don’t care THAT much, right? You’re just them tell a story and following the broad strokes.

    Then if you want you can do the Los Espookys trick: when they pause say “That’s actually so funny because” and change the subject to yourself.

  95. Late40s*

    If you go to The Work Number website and create an account you can find a bunch of old employment data, I found my information from when I worked at Kmart in the mid 90s.

  96. Sammy Claws*

    LW1: You are NOT alone here. I am very literal and when someone asks something like “that looks good, why didn’t you bring me one?” it absolutely drives me nuts b/c I’m usually caught a bit off-guard, I don’t know what to say (thanks for the tips, Alison!) and really, it’s rude. Putting someone on the spot, even if it’s in jest, is simply not cool behavior. I can’t tell you the number of invitations I’ve issued because I felt completely obligated to do so when a random person invited themselves to something they heard I was hosting/doing. I’m admittedly a bit of a pushover which I’m working on, but these comments are maddening to me!

  97. Dr. Wes Abernathy*

    You can find your employment history at SSA.gov/my account. Out of curiosity, I just checked mine and it has every job I’ve ever had starting in 1987 – 21 total plus two short temp jobs I’d forgotten about, spanning big corporations (including McDonald’s), independent shops and restaurants, school districts, state government jobs and small and medium sized non-profits.

    It’s pretty cool, actually, and wow, did I have some lean years back on the day.

    1. Elusis*

      I used to get a paper update of my SSA record in the mail once a year, and it was never accurate, leaving out many jobs I worked in HS and college or having inaccurate dates. Long ago I had an intention to try to get it updated properly but I made so little money most of the time that I couldn’t imagine it would make any measurable difference in my eventual benefits, which I assumed probably wouldn’t exist by then anyhow. So we’re back to the Harris/McDonald’s issue again – she has a file, but it may well not even reflect that job.

  98. Elusis*

    I am 51.

    There is no conceivable way that I could prove
    – the seasonal job I worked in HS making wreaths out of tree scraps at a local nursery (business is long closed, there’s a private school there now, owner died well over a decade ago, I don’t even remember the name of the place)
    – the 3 months I worked at Target before it interfered with my speech team and theater schedules (location still exists, there is zero chance that anyone I worked under hasn’t retired, I couldn’t name a manager or coworker if my life depended on it, I’m certain they’ve changed personnel systems at least once if not multiple times)
    – the two years I worked for a New Age music promoter and her husband the New Age label manager (they both died in, I am not kidding, a murder/suicide pact some 20 years ago now and left their estate to their parrot – Greenie, I hope you’re still going strong and that you still love k.d. lang!)
    – the summer I worked for a professional theatre company in a production of Rocky Horror Show (the producers literally stole the money and fled the state, I kid you not it was like a caper movie except they capered off with our income and any records they bothered to keep)

    I could go on and on. For that matter, I struggled to obtain employment certification for Public Service Loan forgiveness from a teaching job I worked from 2007 – 2010 because the school was bought by another school, renamed, the department was merged with another department, and then the entire school was incorporated as part of the purchasing entity. I had to find someone to document my work when I started filing PSLF documents in maybe… 2014? 2017? whenever they finally made a form available… and it was a nightmare that involved a great deal of time on the phone, certified letters, and finally someone probably just taking pity on me and agreeing to sign whatever I sent them because the personnel records were lost under so many layers of changes. And that was less than 10 years ago, for a job I worked 15 years ago!

  100. Christine*

    Regarding job history, I had a handful of short-term jobs in my 20s that I couldn’t substantiate. Seven weeks canvassing for a non profit. Two months for a long-defunct pizza restaurant. Two weeks for an optician whose name I couldn’t tell you under threat of torture.
    I then settled into math tutoring, including being an independent contractor for a couple of tutoring businesses (names long forgotten) before I figured out how to obtain students on my own.
    Harris is only a few years younger than I am. I have no reason to doubt her recall of her life.

  101. Fluffy*

    My first attempt at earning money was growing cucumbers for a pickle factory as an independent contractor in the late 1960s. My brother plowed the little unused plot my dad let me use. He probably planted the seeds too. I picked cucumbers as soon as they were big enough and hauled them to a collection point where I was paid by the pound. I was spectacularly bad at this. I probably coerced my little brother to help pick but we couldn’t keep up. I usually delivered mature cukes that resembled yellow submarine and practically worthless. I think I remember the name of the factory but that’s it. I have never put this on a resume.

  102. Old Lady at Large*

    I worked for three years at a coffee shop in my youth that burned to the ground right after I left the job due to a construction accident in the dairy that was attached to the coffee shop. If I had to prove I worked there I’d be up a tree, because I’m sure the people I worked for are no longer with us. I mostly have information on my government jobs, as the jobs from before that era were things like cashiering at a gas station, working in a school cafeteria, and, yes, the wait staff job where the place burned down. I’m now retired and not looking for jobs, but I think that those of us with some years on us shouldn’t have to dig up all the part-time jobs we did in our youth.

  103. Too Old to Work, Too Broke to Retire*

    That political candidate’s mention of the McDonald’s Job was a throw-away line in a political speech; all politicians do that sort of thing to try to identify as the “common man.” I am around her age and I would be unable to produce any records to substantiate that 40-some years ago I delivered newspapers, worked as a dishwasher in a Chinese restaurant and was a busboy in a now-defunct steakhouse chain. However, I could recall some factoids about everywhere I worked, like the manager was a short Greek guy, and us busboys wore this sort of vinyl smock, and the location was in a particular mall etc. Unless I missed new information, she hasn’t really done a brain dump of everything she remembers which might help to substantiate the claim, aside from documentary evidence, to the extent that it is necessary to do so for what is standard politician puffery at worst.

    Maybe the bigger picture is that *ALL* political candidates must remember they have this thing called “the internet”, and absolutely Every. Thing. You. Say. can be fact-checked. So the old days are gone when you can stick something perhaps arguably dubious or exaggerated in a stump speech and get away with it.

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