August 2021

my coworker won’t volunteer for any of our work

A reader writes: I work on a team of three – Fergus, me, and our manager, Lucinda. Fergus and I both have the same role. I have been with the company for about six years, and Fergus joined just before Covid hit and we all switched to working from home. We both mostly work on […]

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update: my employee gave me an “it’s her or me” ultimatum

Remember the manager last week whose employee given her an “it’s her or me” ultimatum? I wrote that it seemed like that employee had it in for her coworker and wasn’t trustworthy and that the manager was pretty badly mishandling the situation. She got a lot of criticism from both me and the commenters, but […]

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inside the weird world of out-of-office messages

With many people squeezing in vacation time before the summer ends, this is the season of out-of-office messages – most of them comprised of similarly bland boilerplate (“I am off work until the 7th and will answer your message upon my return”) but some of them decidedly more interesting. In a sea of generic out-of-office […]

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weekend open thread – August 28-29, 2021

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: You Should Have Known, by Jean Hanff Korelitz. Grace Sachs is the author of a book telling women the signs of problems in their partners were […]

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it’s your Friday good news

It’s your Friday good news! 1. I’ve been waiting to share this good news for over 6 months! The very small company I was working for is one I could have submitted a novel about, full of red flags that I didn’t fully see at the time: the owner says we’re all a family, that we’re […]

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