Ask a Manager

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

1. Boss said, “Well, someone’s parents didn’t love them” about me

In preparation for a team-building retreat, all employees in my department were asked to submit a baby photo for a “match the baby photo to the employee” icebreaker activity. The request for baby photos was framed as a requirement, not an opt-in request. I wasn’t able to get a baby photo because my mom is my only living family, and we are estranged. The request stirred up some *feelings* and left me feeling pretty crummy for a few days. I considered saying something to my boss about how this required activity might be a little rough for some people (for a variety of reasons!), but I decided to just be easy-going about it. Instead of a baby photo I submitted a cute baby animal picture instead.

The actual retreat activity involved going through each photo individually on an overhead monitor with the group guessing who the photo belonged to. My boss was “emcee-ing” the activity with a running commentary on all the photos. My baby animal photo came up and my boss commented, “Well, someone’s parents didn’t love them” (!!!). The thing is, my boss is actually normally a really wonderful boss that I think very highly of! I know it was just a dumb off-the-cuff remark. But of course it still really hurt and has stuck with me.

So my question is: should I say something to my boss? Mostly I just want to let it go. But it’s been eating away at me — I fear this is going to negatively impact the way I interact with my boss in the future. If I did say something, what would I even say? I’m sure my boss would be absolutely mortified and feel horrible if I revisit this with her.

She should be mortified. That is an appropriate consequence for what she said, and it’s a fair consequence even if she is a lovely person who just had a brain blip in the moment and didn’t think about the ways that remark could land — not only for people estranged from family, but foster kids who don’t have photos from their childhood, people who experienced other trauma at that age and so their early years are not happy memories, and more. Even aside from her remark, this particular game is a bad idea to play at work for those reasons.

You could say this to her: “I know you intended it to be a light-hearted comment, but it really bothered me. I don’t know if you realized how that game, and that remark, would be experienced by anyone who’s estranged from their family, or someone who grew up in foster care, or people from other rough situations. I know you’d never want to be hurtful, so I wanted to share how it landed with me.”

It’s okay if she feels bad about it. Sometimes that’s how we learn lessons.

2. How do I work with a former manager I can’t stand?

This is probably the pettiest question you’re getting from a federal worker right now, but: What is the absolute bare minimum of courtesy you can give to a coworker you’re now trapped in the office with since there’s no telework?

For context, said coworker is my former supervisor, with whom I had such an incredibly bad relationship I got to move to another team as part of an EEO settlement. This was after she filed disciplinary charges against me, which prompted me to charge her with workplace harassment. All those proceedings are still ongoing, but she hasn’t been my supervisor for about a year.

Anyway, it’s a small office and everyone knows everyone, and she and I are still in the same even smaller work unit, so I’m going to have to break my vow to never speak to her again. How can I prep so I can act professional with someone who made my life a misery for years?

You do need to be civil, because it would be unprofessional not to — and that would reflect on you, not her, no matter how justified your dislike. You don’t need to socialize with her or initiate small talk, but if she says “hello” or “good morning” or similar, you need to return the greeting, and if she asks how your weekend was or otherwise initiates chat, you need to be courteous in responding. You don’t need to be warm, and you don’t need to answer with anything other than something bland and neutral, but you can’t freeze her out. A good litmus test to have in your head is: if someone who didn’t know anything about either of you or the history observed the interaction, would you appear rude or not?

To mentally prepare for encountering her again, it might help to frame it for yourself as you being the bigger person: you will be civil to her because you are a professional person and she can’t change that about you, and also because you aren’t going to give her the power to make you look bad in front of others.

3. Lecturer said “fuck consent” about using AI for creative work

After a decade working full-time in an office, I went back to school last year to finish my bachelor’s in art and design. In a lecture series class last week, a professional graphic designer straight-up told 200 college students that if they don’t use generative AI in their creative work, they will be irrelevant and essentially fail. He then went on to showcase professional work he and his company made using AI, and spoke about how a project that they wanted to make using only AI was “unfortunately” scrapped (for not complying with fair use laws — apparently the art they stole used was too distinctive).

I am still in shock over the fact that a professional designer, with a successful company, admitted out loud with no shame that he uses AI to create the work he gets paid for. When I asked if he had any concerns about AI using artwork that has been illegally scraped from the internet, he said, and I quote, “Fuck consent.” And the professors backed him up! They said that AI is “just a tool, like a camera, or Adobe software,” and we have to “use our own moral compass” in deciding if we’ll use it or not. Astounding. For what it’s worth, I find the ethical and environmental effects of AI to be completely detrimental, and really have no respect for the lecturer or my professors in saying that these issues don’t actually matter.

I’ve been pondering if I have any ethical standing to name-and-shame this company and creator, or create Google/Glassdoor reviews (anonymously). I want to, but I also wonder if using AI this casually in professional creative settings is becoming the norm. I’ve been telling everyone I know about this company, because holy crap, the blatant disregard and disrespect shown to the students who spoke up about the problems with AI was the most unprofessional thing I think I’ve ever seen. And if I were thinking of working with this graphic designer, I’d want to know if they were using AI for the work I’m paying them to create. Is this an absolutely wild urge? Am I completely out of line? I guess I’m just wanting a reality check because I feel like I have to do something to counteract the absolute insanity of the lecture.

AI is becoming common in many settings, but that doesn’t mean that its use shouldn’t be disclosed to clients who presumably believe they’re paying for original and proprietary work, and it definitely doesn’t mean that artists who don’t use it will be irrelevant and fail (WTF?). Also, anyone who stands before a class of students and says “fuck consent” (on pretty much any issue I can think of, including this one) should be named and shamed, disavowed, and never invited to speak anywhere again.

Your professors aren’t wrong that people have to “use their own moral compass” in deciding if they’ll use AI or not, but there are still many, many situations where its use would be objectively wrong (or even just prohibited).

Maybe you can ask that your class bring in someone to speak to the counterpoint on this issue.

4. How to answer “can we contact your manager” when you have no contact information for them

So my most recent, non-current job was a temporary government contract, we only spoke to our supervisors on company phones, and the contract has since been terminated and presumably most of the contractors have scattered to the four winds (very common with this type of contract).

What should I put when future employers ask if they can contact a supervisor? Other than that, the most recent job I’m still at and the one before that I left about 10 years ago. So far I’ve been trying with old bosses who no longer work for my current company but there’s not many of them (and sadly, soon to be one less) so I feel like it seems a little sketch to have no recent contactable references.

When applications ask if they can contact a previous supervisor, they’re asking about your permission, not how easy it will be. Answering no risks being interpreted as “I left this company on bad terms” and/or “this manager will say bad things about me.” So you should answer yes, they have your permission. Whether or not they will succeed if they try is a different question. (However, if they’re asking your permission to contact a current manager, that’s a different question and it’s fine to say no to that; that’s common since people’s managers often don’t know that they’re looking.)

More here:
stop saying “no” when job applications ask “can we contact this manager?”

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

1. Interview felt like an exam

I had my first job interview in over 20 years yesterday, and it felt like an exam. Five people peppered me with a long list of questions, mostly hypotheticals. None of the questions were about my experience or my training. Only a couple were about what I had to offer the employer. The rest were, “What would you do if [thing that has never happened to me in all my many years working in this field] happened?”

The thing was, I found myself answering all the questions not with what I would do, but with what Ms. Perfect would do, if she had a textbook to refer to while the crisis was unfolding.

In the long ago past, I’ve had interviews that were more like “This is what we need someone to do. Have you done it before? Do you know how?”

It left a bad taste in my mouth and left me wondering if I wanted to work with these people, although they seemed nice on the whole. Am I off-base here? Have interviews become more like this since I was last in the hot seat? Should I be studying lists of hypothetical questions?

I’m not a fan of hypothetical questions in most interviews since they’re often easy for candidates to bluff their way through. Interviewers generally learn a lot more by probing into what people have actually done in situations they have actually experienced — which is why “tell me about a time when…” questions are used so much.

That said, I’m even less a fan of “have you done X before?” or “do you know how to do X?” because anyone can respond to that with “yes” and it tells you nothing about their real-life abilities. Maybe they’ve done X but badly! Maybe they saw someone else do X and are confident they can too, when it takes more practice to do well.

It sounds like these people just aren’t great at interviewing … but that’s pretty common. I’d pay more attention to what you’ve learned about the job, the manager, the culture, and the experiences of people working there. And if you don’t feel like you have a good sense of those things yet, ask plenty of your own questions before you accept an offer.

2. HR is sending everyone Valentine’s Day candy grams … from other coworkers

I work in a niche section of the healthcare industry at a medium-sized company. For a variety of reasons, I am currently looking for a different job. One of the things upsetting me is that our HR department (which is all of two people, one of whom is the daughter of the VP in charge of HR, which is a whole other issue) is trying and failing to improve company morale with more and more “events” instead of substantive changes like paper towels in the bathrooms or pay increases. Last week, there was a rock-paper-scissors tournament during the workday, and in a late afternoon email the day before we were told it was an “opt out” event — if you didn’t opt out, you were pulled away from your job up to three or four times in a couple hours to play rock-paper-scissors against someone else in the company, even if you were remote, in a bracketed tournament until someone finally won a previously-undisclosed prize of a basket of cleaning supplies. This week is the annual chili cook-off, which may or may not have a prize (it has one out of three times, and it has not been announced if there is one this year).

We just received an email stating that the company is sending candy grams to everyone for Valentine’s Day, and to “support” that, everyone has been randomly assigned a coworker to write a Valentine’s message for and it will be signed from us, not the company. I don’t even exchange valentines with my partner of a decade, much less with a coworker I have never met in person! I know this is trying to be nice, and I feel like pushing back is being a party pooper, but I feel really weird about it. I remember in school when some kids would get candy grams and get a bunch of nice personal messages, and others would get none or only one from the teacher, and that was always sad and awkward. I don’t want to make my coworker feel sad or awkward with a generic message, but I don’t know them outside of auditing their work!

I don’t know how to approach this at all, either to participate or to try and argue against doing it. In the past, my boss has been very resistant to passing on feedback to other departments, especially HR, and she strongly encourages our department to participate in all company events, up to and including guilting us about missing them or opting out. I don’t care if the company wants to give everyone candy — just sign it from the company, not me!

Yes, this is weird. But there’s no reason your message with the card can’t just be “Happy Valentine’s Day!” This is different from the school dynamic where it’s seen as a popularity contest, and I don’t think anyone will be sad not to get a more personal message from a random colleague … and I suspect a lot of people, maybe all, will be writing something similarly bland.

That said, if it’s possible to opt out (it’s not clear if it is) and you want to do that, you should feel free to! You can do that with feedback attached (“I’m uncomfortable sending Valentine’s greetings to coworkers so please don’t include me in sending or receiving”) or without it. If you think your boss will care, you could simply say to her, “I try to participate in company events, but I prefer to opt out of this one.”

3. Assistant always prioritizes my peer’s projects over mine

I work in a small office where support staff are in teams, and I have a dedicated secretary and a dedicated assistant (“Abby”). The issue I’m dealing with is Abby supports me and two others. Abby openly favors “Lucas,” who is my equivalent but much less experienced (think 25 years versus three years in the field). Abby will focus on and complete tasks and projects for Lucas first, and my projects will go on the back burner. When I press for updates or ask our supervisor for assistance, I’m told that Abby is very busy and to see if the other assistants can help. Because I’m not always privy to exact details, and I don’t want to create an adversarial office environment, I’ve started to just give Abby hard deadlines, whereas before I was more flexible to give her autonomy to avoid micromanaging her workflow. (I just started doing that, so I don’t know yet if it will work. But she has not responded to my new emails with the hard deadlines which might be a sign of resistance.)

Our supervisor favors Abby and has openly defended her and made excuses for her, so he is not going to step in. What should I be doing? I’m frustrated and demoralized.

I wish it was a couple of weeks from now so that we’d know if giving the deadlines was going to solve this, because it’s possible that it will. But meanwhile, one tweak I’d make to that plan: can you talk to Abby in person when giving her work so that you can say, “I need this back by (deadline). Is that doable?” so that you’re getting an answer from her on the spot?

If that doesn’t work, can you ask to be assigned a different assistant? If it’s true that Abby is very busy, as your manager says, and can’t compete your work on time, it’s entirely reasonable to ask for an assistant who can. And if you can’t get a different assistant, then it’s reasonable to meet with Abby and Lucas together and ask to figure out some protocols for prioritizing work so that you’re not the one who always gets short shrift.

4. Nose-picking boss

Over the years, I’ve had two different managers who openly pick their noses. It’s disgusting and I’m wondering if there’s an appropriate way to let them know how noticeable and off-putting the behavior is? I’m not talking about a discreet “scratch.” This is full-on digging, examining, flicking, and repeating going on. Years ago I experienced it in person and at one point offered my boss a box of Kleenex from my desk, which he declined and continued picking. Currently it’s happening on Zoom meetings (different company and manager). Both managers have very public-facing roles and general awareness of social decorum … they just both seem to be unaware of this behavior.

WTF?

When you’re in person, offering someone a tissue is a polite way of handling it and should alert them to the issue. If that doesn’t work, you could just hand them a tissue while saying, “Here, let me give you this.”

But over Zoom and when it’s your boss, there’s not much you can do. Video conferencing software really needs to start offering non-hosts a “remove this person from view” option for other participants on the call.

5. Can an employer make you use FMLA for weekly medical appointments?

Our HR team at work is typically stellar, but I’m confused about a recent announcement they made. They said if someone has a weekly medical appointment (i.e., physical or mental health therapy), they will deduct an hour from the person’s sick leave balance and an hour from the person’s FMLA balance. Is it correct that you can have time deducted from two places for one appointment?

Yes. FMLA isn’t a form of paid leave; it’s job protection. It allows you to have up to 12 weeks off per year (for qualifying reasons) without putting your job at risk, but it’s not a separate bank of leave and employers can require it to be used concurrently with your PTO.

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

1. Is “hey” rude?

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

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

2. Did our coworker fake-retire?

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

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

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

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

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

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

3. Frustrations with business voicemail and a claims process

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

4. Coworker keeps coming into my office and distracting me

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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