September 2020

weekend open thread – September 26-27, 2020

This comment section is open for any non-work-related discussion you’d like to have with other readers, by popular demand. Here are the rules for the weekend posts. Book recommendation of the week: With or Without You, by Caroline Leavitt. After awakening from a coma, a woman discovers that her life — and she herself — have changed. * I […]

Read the full article →

it’s your Friday good news

It’s your Friday good news, with more accounts of success even in this weird time. 1. I’m so excited to have good news to report! I started job hunting FOUR YEARS ago to escape a manager who pushed MLMs, complained about her pay, and took her relationship issues out on her employees. In that time, I […]

Read the full article →

open thread – September 25-26, 2020

It’s the Friday open thread! The comment section on this post is open for discussion with other readers on anything work-related that you want to talk about (that includes school). If you want an answer from me, emailing me is still your best bet*, but this is a chance to talk to other readers. * […]

Read the full article →

you’re exhausted and burned out because work is terrible

I’m a big fan of the writer Anne Helen Petersen, who wrote the excellent “Scandals of Classic Hollywood” series at the now-defunct Hairpin and a series of fascinating profiles and lately has been writing more and more about work. Her newest book, out this week, is Can’t Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation. It […]

Read the full article →

do you miss your office?

We often think of working from home as a perk (you can work in sweats! with a cat in your lap!), but with so many people switching to remote work because of Covid, lots of them have discovered they don’t much like it. Part of that is because of the circumstances, of course: we’re in […]

Read the full article →

manager buys me gifts, my rude email got forwarded, and more

It’s five answers to five questions. Here we go… 1. A manager who wants to hire me keeps buying me gifts A manager in a different department who I believe I have a great working relationship with can’t keep staff in her department. She wants me to leave my department and work in her department […]

Read the full article →

does it look unprofessional to draw in meetings?

A reader writes: I am a college student in my low 20s, two years in to my absolute dream job. I work for a medium-sized nonprofit that functions as an umbrella organization for six branches. I am the first assistant to one of these directors, and I’ve known her for years. The executive director (my […]

Read the full article →