we’re supposed to send compliments for Women’s History Month, Glassdoor can un-anonymize you, and more

by Alison Green on March 18, 2024

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

1. We’re supposed to send compliments for Women’s History Month

I wanted your take on this because for reasons I can’t entirely explain, it feels “icky” to me.

We received an email today through our D&I committee about a new Praise function in Teams that the committee is encouraging employees to use to send appreciation and thanks to female colleagues in celebration of Women’s History Month. On its surface, it’s got good intentions, but it also feels vaguely like one of those Administrative Professionals Day celebrations.

It feels icky because equity for women isn’t about sending female coworkers praise; it’s about equal pay, more parental leave and other support for working parents, having more women in leadership, and other actions that would require your company to do something of actual substance.

What your employer is doing is patronizing. We don’t need compliments from our coworkers; we need real equity.

2. I’m aggravated by the reminders my boss sends our team

I am a GenX/Boomer working at a very large university system. I am staff in a student support department, not faculty. I’ve been in my job for 14 years, in the same role but with increasing autonomy due to frequent restructuring. I’m a remote worker now. (I only go into the office one day a month and no longer have a desk/workstation, I just park my laptop wherever to get through the day.) Anyway, I’m on my eighth manager since taking this job. I’m the person who has been in the department the longest, and have seen the entire structure and staff overturned multiple times. My new boss is 27, has moved up the ranks quickly over three years, from entry-level to assistant director, and has been my supervisor now for four weeks.

Recently, we had a snow day, and our campus has a really good notification system wherein emergency operations blasts a text message to everyone related to campus as soon as they’ve made the decision to close or do a late start. If there is anything I need to know, it will come from emergency ops. An hour after getting the notification from emergency ops, I get a mass text from an unknown number, reiterating that campus will be closed and that we need to log in and put up an out-of-office message. More than half the people on that mass text either replied to it, or “liked” it, and my phone was going off every few minutes.

I found this to be really intrusive and unnecessary, since I’d already received the emergency ops message, and we’ve had at least one snow day a year since I’ve been there, and I’m a grey-haired two-years-from-retirement employee who knows how to read text messages and understand what they mean. We are also being similarly hounded when it is time to turn in timesheets (we are monthly and salaried). We get a calendar popup, an email, a Teams group message, and a text on my phone. I’ve never, in my 45+ years of working, ever forgot to turn in a timesheet. So I’m sitting here today, on my second snow day (which is following the same chain of events from yesterday’s snow day text message stream) wondering if I am justified in being angry about being treated like a child. Is this a generational thing? Our department is 15 people, I’m the oldest, there are three in their early 40s, and the rest are 33 and under, several in their mid-20s. My previous boss, a millennial just over 30, did not send me reminder texts after campus emergency ops texts, nor has she ever sent me a message reminding me to turn in my timesheet. These heavy-handed reminders have appeared recently. To be clear, if there were truly some emergency that I needed to be informed about regarding our department, I would be fine with getting those texts. But reiterating what I already know (and received)? It is over the top.

Should I bring this up with my boss, or just keep my mouth shut and be aggravated on the regular until I retire in a couple years? If I’m off-base, I’m happy to accept that.

Your reaction is a lot more over-the-top than the provocation is!

These are very minor things. Maybe there’s been an issue with people not putting on their out-of-office messages on snow days, who knows. But also, who cares? It’s a small blip in a day that it sounds like you’re getting paid for. As for timesheets, if you’ve never forgotten to turn one in, you’re in the minority; it is very, very common for people to need to be reminded about them. Instead of feeling like you’re being treated like a child, consider that you’re being treated like someone on a team with varied needs that might not all be identical to your needs. You can just ignore the things that don’t apply to you.

I don’t see anything generational here except that you’re connecting things to age that aren’t really about age, and you seem very age-focused in your letter.

3. How should Rachel have handled the restaurant interview on Friends?

I was wondering the other day about the infamous scene from friends when Rachel Green gets an opportunity to interview for a prestigious new position at Gucci and turns up to the interview to find her current boss sitting at the table next to her. She panics, tells him that she’s on a date, makes a complete fool of herself in front of the interviewer, and gets fired anyway.

Obviously this scenario is wildly unlikely, but it isn’t beyond the realms of possibility that you could run into a coworker or manager whilst in a public place for an interview. How do you think she should have handled it? I can’t see any situation where that doesn’t jeopardize her chances at the interview and risk her employment.

Agggh! Nightmare. (Although most people wouldn’t mess it up as much as Rachel did.)

One option would be to quickly introduce your boss with a pointed “this is my manager at X Company,” figuring that your interviewer would realize what was happening and help you finesse the situation. But enough people are oblivious to those dynamics that I’d worry your interviewer might out you with some horribly unsmooth comment like “your loss might be our gain, haha” or similar. Another option would be to quietly say, “I’m so sorry, but my current manager just sat down at the next table and doesn’t know I’m interviewing.” But then where do you go from there? Switch tables? That’s going to be obvious. Reschedule? It’s a clusterfudge of epic proportions and possibly the only action would be to fake a choking incident and leave immediately.

4. I did horribly at an internal interview

Ugh I’m still cringing about my terrible performance at an internal interview.

I work in info sec and I have been on the policy and compliance side for some time, but went back to school for a technical degree and have been studying to break into a more technical role. An opportunity at work opened up for a development program for a technical role that was likely over my head, but I went for it. It would be a seven-week program where you would then be placed with a mentor who would help you get situated in your new role.

They scheduled the interview, a panel interview, for 7 am the day I got back from vacation. I was a nervous wreck trying to be present visiting a family member and her new baby and trying to prepare for this interview by working on labs and going through my old school work which was most applicable to the role. My mistake was not looking over the program description again to look at some of the technical terms they’d be asking me and not refreshing on some of my basic learning.

On the morning of the interview, I was ready — I thought. I felt good and was excited to talk about this opportunity — and I totally blacked out and panicked. There were no behavioral questions. I had an opportunity to briefly introduce myself and give a description of my current role, but after that it was a rapid-fire technical panel and my mind completely went blank. I couldn’t answer nearly a single question, and by the time it came to talk about some of the labs I HAD done, I was so overwhelmed I couldn’t explain myself. It was utterly embarrassing.

So now I feel like I’m going to be seen as a fraud — like, why did we hire her again? The self-doubt and doom-talking are also telling me I won’t be considered for other roles. Even worse, I have an interview for a similar full-time role in the same department coming up (different teams, but they work closely together). I feel more prepared for this interview and am using this experience to learn, but now I am so frazzled and embarrassed that I don’t want to go. I’m actively fighting the urge to withdraw. I’m so worried that they have been talking to each other or others on their team who I happily work with in my office.

How can I forgive myself for this awful experience? How do I allow myself to move forward and gain some self confidence back so that I can put my best foot forward for the next interview? I haven’t lost the motivation to learn. My ego is just bruised!

This happens! Most people have a bad interview at one point. And it doesn’t sound like the circumstances really set you up for success with this one (although there’s also a lesson in there about how you prep for future interviews).

Are you up for talking to the person in charge of hiring for that role — not to ask to be reconsidered, but to try to reset their impressions? You could say something like, “I realize I didn’t perform well in my interview; my mind went blank in a way I was not expecting, and I’m hoping that if another role ever comes up, you’ll be able to see it wasn’t representative of how I normally perform.” That way, if it was as bad as you fear, you’ll be cluing them in that something else was going on, and they’re more likely to give you another chance in the future (and less likely to express any opinion that you’re not a strong candidate for that other role, or at least to temper it if they do).

5. Glassdoor can un-anonymize you

It appears that Glassdoor not only requires a name and other personal information with an account, they will actively add that information to accounts that don’t have it against the wishes of the people involved. You mention Glassdoor a fair amount and seem to understand needs of anonymity with this kind of feedback so I thought you’d want to be aware of it. The extremely cavalier attitude to user privacy here is alarming.

Source: https://cellio.dreamwidth.org/2024/03/12/glassdoor-violates-privacy.html

Well, this is alarming AF.

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{ 670 comments }

{ 670 comments… read them below }

  1. Age Ain't Nothing But A Number*

    LW2 – take it as some of your coworkers who may not be as savvy as you may appreciate the reminders. Just delete them. All this is like total 1 minute of your time.

    1. Language Lover*

      This. I approve time cards and even though HR sends out a reminder, I still have to send out a reminder on the due date because people ignore those first emails. If it’s just one or two people, I will take the time to only email a reminder to those two but if it’s multiple people, I’ll just send out the reminder to everyone.

      And when it comes to handling snow days? Same thing. For some people, the time card thing is low priority because it doesn’t feel like a job responsibility the way it does for me as a manager.

      1. The Prettiest Curse*

        I used to work in an office where people would need about 5 reminders to send in their time cards every pay period. Likewise with sumbmitting expenses.
        OP, you might be great at getting small stuff done, but many people are not.

        The comms part of my job has taught me that people are often overloaded with so many messages via so many different formats that often they will only remember or react to the most recent messages. (And that even if you send a message in multiple different way, some people will still manage to miss it.) So yes, you are being cranky. Ignore, delete and don’t yell at anyone to get off your lawn.

        1. Check cash*

          Not submitting expenses is WILD to me. Because….I want my money.

          I do not send out reminders as a manager – I expect people to put it on their calendars. That’s something they need to work out on their own – how they remember. There are classes or demonstrations of how to use outlook to help that I am happy to help them with, but at some point, these are adults paid to do a job, I’m not a first grade teacher.

          1. AKchic*

            I once had a role where half of my time was spent babysitting others who got paid at least double what I did.
            Expenses? Oh, that’s *my* job to take care of because HE couldn’t be bothered with taking care of it. And I had to follow up with his wife to get the receipts because he never brought them back to the office (she was a nurse and hated trying to track them down at home).
            Meetings? Oh, the initial calendar invite isn’t enough. I have to do a weekly reminder, a reminder two days out, the morning of, and then CALL every single attendee an hour before the event (even if there are 25 people attending!) to remind them because 3 of the attendees FORGET the weekly meeting that they are required to attend.
            Timesheets? Have to hand-hold just like the meetings. Calendar invite as a reminder. Email reminder. Phone call reminder. PAYROLL has to send out a reminder. And even then, the same three culprits don’t turn in their timesheets so guess who has to turn in a tentative timesheet on their behalf? Yup. With supervisor signature. They can turn in an amended timesheet after the fact, but we waited three days after payroll was due and gave multiple reminders from two departments and included supervisors in those reminders and couldn’t hold payroll up for the rest of the company.
            After eight years of hand-holding at that company, I got really tired of it. I left (granted, the hand-holding wasn’t the actual issue, it was just one small issue among many other issues). Now I won’t hand-hold for others, unless it’s an actual child (and yes, I do work with children on occasion).

            1. TGMC*

              Ugh – reminds me of the semester in college when I had to call the other students in one of my (admittedly very small) 8am classes, so that they’d actually wake up and attend. I wouldn’t have cared, except the poor grad student teaching the class needed at least so many people to take and pass the class, for it to count for her credit!

          2. JustaTech*

            I had a PI who managed to ignore expenses from a trip to Europe for very nearly a year, until the time limit was almost up, and then it was a Full Emergency for our lab manager to figure out how to read his receipts (in German!) and explain why an iPhone cable was actually a valid business expense (this was when iPhones were brand new) and get everything submitted in like 2 days.

            The other two people on that trip had submitted everything the minute they returned, but they needed the money way more than Dr Big Deal.

          3. Freya*

            Amongst my jobs is payroll. And yeah, you forget to turn in your timesheet or other documentation where that’s a requirement of getting paid? Then you’re not getting paid until the next regular payments run after you actually submit it. I don’t do payments every day, and I’m not sitting around waiting for people to give me what they know I need.

      2. vito*

        I am third shift, I get automated messages about approving my time card at 7am on the Monday it is due. Only problem is that I am still on the clock working at 7am on a Monday morning. I work until the 7am person arrives and takes over, usually about 7:30am.

      3. Antilles*

        Every single company I’ve ever worked at has occasionally struggled with people completing time sheets, no matter what HR/management tries. Email reminders, a recurring ‘appointment’, the timesheet system sending automated “hey it’s Wednesday and you haven’t put in a single hour” reminders, etc…and yet, there’s still people who occasionally forget completely or thought they clicked submit but didn’t or etc.

      4. ZugTheMegasaurus*

        Yeah, I don’t know what it is, but I’m one of those people who never remembers timecards. I am up to SEVEN reminders on my calendar, not including the 2 my boss sends to everybody. And last week I turned it in late. I have no idea why but it’s like there’s just a black hole in my brain where timecard awareness is supposed to be.

        1. Presently DeMo*

          I wonder if you’re maybe too familiar with the reminders so that’s why they bypass your brain? Maybe try naming the reminders as something completely unrelated (not even as a logical event reminder, just something like “dragons”) to reset your brain. Then you’ll wonder why you wrote “dragons” on your calendar and remember your timesheet.

      5. Always Tired*

        I am the HR that sends the general reminder Friday, another general reminder Monday morning, sends another 5 or so specific reminders around lunch time, and by 4pm makes one or two phone calls. It is exhausting because we are construction and pay weekly. I spend half of every Monday chasing down missing hours, correcting cost codes and hours (ie: you did not work 16 hours on Tuesday, you hit the incorrect date for Wednesday or entering PTO as billable on a project), confirming PTO that was never formally entered. We only have 42 employees!

        Grats OP2 on not needing those, but my worst offenders are also your age, so I don’t know what to say except that age doesn’t determine ability to do tasks without reminders. Perhaps your prior managers didn’t care that things weren’t done on time, or maybe they only messages specific people, or maybe newer hires are bad at it, or maybe after all the restructuring and turnover people are apathetic about these tasks. There are so many possibilities besides “those darn millennials” or whatever. Just shrug and move on.

        1. Freya*

          The most common thing I need to check on timesheets is people putting down that they worked on public holidays – their timesheet was a copy/paste of the previous one, and yes, sometimes they did get authorisation to work on that day or they worked interstate when it’s only a public holiday in one state, but it’s a thing I have to check every time.

          (my ‘favourite’ is the bunch of people who were working in Defence-adjacent roles whose timesheets said they worked on ANZAC Day… NO ONE in Defence is in the office that day!)

    2. Sue*

      Yes. All this focus on age makes me think you’re just adding to the stereotype of “old and cranky”.
      It seems like normal communication to me. If you don’t need reminders, great. Delete/ignore.

      1. Ellis Bell*

        I work in a high school; when we get a snow day there are many likes and little comments about how they got off without defrosting the car, before we start talking about what we can work on at home. Most of these are from people older than me (Gen X) who seem to have learned how to appreciate a rare snow day! I appreciate how annoying a lot of messages can be, but just mute notifications, or corral them and delete?

      2. Em*

        I’ve noticed that the media really play into this generational tribalism bs. I guess it’s appealing to certain folks, but to me, it’s a very unhelpful lens through which to view our fellow humans because it’s hardly ever positive.

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

          If I get one more email from SHRM about multi-generational work dynamics, I’m going to lose my mind. (Well, that and AI…especially now that they’ve taken to calling it AI vs HI and it took me a minute to figure out that meant Human Intelligence and now I want to go live in the woods somewhere.)

      3. ADH...Squirrel!*

        Definitely not an age thing. It’s a personality thing.
        My Gen X boss rants about her Gen X boss infantilizing her with reminders to do task that are pretty much the only damned thing we have to do that day.
        Followed up with “great job doing what you had to do today” type messages.

        1. Kathy*

          fwiw I would find that sort of thing motivating – if no one checks in or reminds me about my work, I start to feel like my work doesn’t matter and I could be chucking it all into a black hole for all anyone else cares.

      4. sparkle emoji*

        Additionally, for the text chain can OP mute it? If all the info is being communicated in other channels and they’re this irritated by the texts, most messaging apps allow you to mute a conversation so you receive the texts without notifications.

    3. Blomma*

      My manager (a Boomer, not that it matters because it doesn’t) sent us all an email on Friday saying that they also wanted to enjoy the sunny weather this weekend, so could we please be sure to submit our time cards + corrections so they didn’t have to spend the weekend tracking us all down. As someone (a Millennial, which again, doesn’t matter) who rarely forgets housekeeping stuff like this, it really is not a big deal to get a simple reminder that’s mostly meant for other people.

    4. JSPA*

      This seems like a phone settings problem.

      When the first message goes out, why not mute notifications from the team members, or put the phone on mute…sleep that extra 45 minutes that I’m imagining being at stake here… then turn the notifications back on/up?

      1. Maggie*

        Yeah I have work group chats muted and just check them regularly. We don’t have life or death emergencies at my work and people like to “like” messages.

        1. Miette*

          Also, I know a lot of people “like” messages as a form of acknowledgement back to the sender, so that’s probably what’s going on here. OP can just mute that particular message/type of message when it arrives and carry on.

      2. ED*

        I thought the exact same thing! If there is a generational issue here, it is likely that the letter writer doesn’t know how to silence alerts/chats. This would address 90% of the issue.

      3. A Simple Narwhal*

        I do that for the general texts from my daycare. They’ll send out a group text to everyone reminding us that they’re closed on X date/etc, and then there’s an onslaught of people thumbs-upping the message. If I didn’t mute that conversation I’d go absolutely batty. But I’m not mad that they send the message in the first place.

        1. A Simple Narwhal*

          And for anyone concerned, there’s a separate number for updates regarding my child, it’s only the general operations chat that gets muted!

    5. StarTrek Nutcase*

      Be grateful it’s via email/text. All 45 of us would have to attend a meeting (2x/month) where one topic was always timecards. It was so frustrating as 40 of us knew the 5 who never turned in their timecard on time – those 5 were oblivious it was them. So for 15 mins, we had to hear a lecture every time, usually followed by another 10+ mins on another frequent problem of 5-6 people (not necessarily same).

      This all was because our state agency facility didn’t want to “call out” anyone. I asked director why he didn’t have a private convo with each offender – but no…. that would make the offenders uncomfortable. So instead so much work time was wasted and it drove me nuts!

      1. Bast*

        I also worked in a place like this — we’d have all staff meetings to address the behavior of one or two individuals, as it “wasn’t fair” to simply meet with them individually because then we would be “treating them differently.” So really, we’d have a whole meeting that could last anywhere from 15 minutes to 1+ hour because Jane was late every day, or Tom kept forgetting to punch in and out. The funny thing is, whoever the meeting was about RARELY acknowledged it, seemed to somehow miss that it was about them, and frequently kept doing whatever it is that they were doing that prompted the meeting in the first place, leading to… you guessed it… ANOTHER meeting in which upper management refused to just sit the person down and explain to the individual what behavior was unacceptable and why, because it would be “unfair.”

      2. AnonInCanada*

        I’m sorry to hear that. It kind of reminds you of that teacher from elementary school who’d punish the whole class because one person didn’t do their homework but didn’t want to single them out “because it would demoralize them.” How about the rest of the class, teacher?

        I hate meetings as much as the rest of probably everyone who frequents AAM. To have one like that would make me rip my hair out and use it to strangle the offender(s)! It’s long enough, trust me. :-D

        1. Zap R.*

          Alberto and Philip wouldn’t shut up in Grade 6 French class and so we all had to miss recess. I still haven’t forgiven you, Mrs. D’Agostino.

          1. Bast*

            I still remember missing recess because 2/3 kids acted up when we had a sub in third grade, so naturally, we ALL had to miss recess the next day and not just those 2/3 kids. Hated this as a third grader, hate it still as an adult.

            1. Chas*

              Yes, I remember there were a couple of times teachers did this to us and said it was because the social stigma would stop the disruptive kids doing it again. But there wasn’t any social stigma directed at the disruptive kids because we all knew it was the teacher who’d made the decision, so all our annoyance about it was reserved for them instead.

              1. JustaTech*

                The *only* time the whole “social stigma” thing worked at all in elementary school was when there was a food fight in the cafeteria – and there it was that everyone at lunch at that time lost recess (so, 3 grades of kids) and we were told that if it *ever* happened again there would be no pizza party.

                Which meant that when that one kid started to throw a roll everyone else at their table jumped them.

        2. Kuleta*

          Or the teacher punishes everyone because there’s no way to know which students are actually guilty.

          Then again, it’s not just kids. In the Star Trek episode The Trouble With Tribbles, Captain Kirk confined all the bar brawlers to quarters after no one would tell him who started the fight.

      3. watermelon fruitcake*

        It was so frustrating as 40 of us knew the 5 who never turned in their timecard on time – those 5 were oblivious it was them. So for 15 mins, we had to hear a lecture every time, usually followed by another 10+ mins on another frequent problem of 5-6 people (not necessarily same).

        My employer does this as well and it is EXACTLY the reason you should not do group responses to individual problems. The people who get the message, already had it. The people who it applies to never pick up that it’s targeted at them. It may save the manager one uncomfortable moment of having to do their job, but it isn’t effective and they’ll end up repeating the same message over and over and over.

        Appropriately enough, our director is the exact same way. Managing people is his least favorite part of his job, so he does it minimally, and on such a rare occasion, his response is one of: an organization-wide email reiterating a policy; imposing a new (often punitive) policy; attaching a guideline or memo without specific reference to any sort of incident that warranted it. e.g. Half through the first year of the pandemic, “It has come to my attention that some people are not in attendance at our Zoom meetings, therefore we have a cameras-on policy going forward,” instead of directly addressing the one or two people suspected of logging in and walking off.

      4. Bootstrap Paradox*

        The best response to the repeat offenders is to include this ongoing problem in their performance review(s) and lower their review score accordingly. It sounds pretty harsh, but the amount of extra work + stress on their co-workers with all the surrounding time expenditure and drama merit it.

        In other words, the managers need to actually manage using the appropriate tools, not torture everyone else.

      5. i didn't know it was me*

        I was the oblivious person once. I had NO IDEA that I was driving a coworker nuts- I was frequently about 1-2 minutes “late” getting to a certain spot during the day. We had meetings where being on time was brought up frequently and I just had no idea I was part of the problem. If someone… if anyone! had told me I would have worked to adjust. Or at least apologized! I feel so bad in retrospect.

    6. Seeking Second Childhood*

      Yep. Myself as an example.

      I’m early GenX who just read that letter and said “oops.” Now logging on before breakfast to submit a time sheet…

      1. Distracted Procrastinator*

        same. I managed to get mine in this week, but it’s a bear of a task and I frequently turn in late. I’m working on it. Having to do 10-20 entries per day with an online system that is very slow makes it super tedious so I put it off.

      2. Red Wheel Barrow*

        I’m so grateful for automated reminders, including duplicate reminders, for meetings, appointments, timesheet submissions, and the like! I have problems with memory and executive function, and although I use my own multilayered system of notebook, calendar, and phone reminders, some still slip through the cracks.

      3. Radioactive Cyborg Llama*

        I’m sort of shocked that the prior manager didn’t remind them about timecards!

      4. Filosofickle*

        My company sends out time sheet reminders via email and multiple slack channels every week, plus there’s a drop-in time sheet “meeting” that is of course a calendar event that also sends reminders. Every week I am annoyed by the 4-5 Friday notifications and wonder why I haven’t just declined that calendar invite. Then, every week, the light bulb goes off and I realize I haven’t in fact done my time sheet and ould have forgotten it if not for these reminders.

        I have a memory hole for time sheets and this is the only job I’ve ever consistently done them, because of the reminders.

    7. Also-ADHD*

      It is kind of a lot though to be fair, and especially using people’s personal cell on the time sheets thing (an emergency I sort of get) in addition to calendar reminders, emails, and Teams.

      1. Not on board*

        I agree with LW2 that it’s a bit ridiculous – and perhaps email reminders are sufficient. Having people reply to the mass text and having all these messages can be super annoying, although there is the option to mute the conversation and then delete the whole thread later. Also, if it’s your personal phone then I’d be miffed about getting these reminders sent to my personal phone. And I actually agree that it is kind of infantilizing – there is a perfectly good snow day system and for things like timesheets people shouldn’t have to be reminded so to clutter up someone’s cell phone with that kind of reminder is silly. But I also wouldn’t be as outraged as LW either, more like shrug it off and move on.

      2. Not on board*

        Yeah, that’s what I was thinking. It’s the text messages to their cell phone that seem to bother them the most. And then people replying to the mass text – whereas a mass email reminder can be sent out as an anonymous group so you’d only be getting one email. And the snow day system has worked for many years so everyone working there should be familiar with it. I’d be annoyed too- but not as outraged as LW is.

      3. It Might Be Me*

        It is a lot. At some point we all have to be responsible adults. I set up a calendar reminder the day before it’s due. My supervisor has a recuring “meeting” on the Teams calendar to remind us. Other than that we’re expected to get it done.

      4. I Have RBF*

        IMO, it’s the barrage of notifications on the phone that is irritating, and the fact that so many people think nothing of blowing up my phone with trivia like “likes”. Using a personal cell phone for work stuff that is not literally an emergency seems pretty damned rude.

        My sympathies are with the LW, here, although the solution is probably just muting notifications from that number or app.

      5. sparkle emoji*

        But as others have mentioned upthread, phone settings allow OP to turn off/mute these notifications. If OP is bothered by this and the info is covered in emails, change the settings. Other coworkers are using the group chat, so it’s useful for some.

      6. Laura*

        Yeah, I agree. Getting a bunch of messages like this on my personal cell would be somewhat annoying.

      7. Distracted Librarian*

        Yeah, the group texts would drive me nuts. Don’t text me about work outside of work hours unless it’s an emergency. Don’t use group chat unless it’s an emergency. My phone is a lot harder to ignore than other forms of communication, and it interrupts my (already really limited) personal time.

    8. Sloanicota*

      Specifically, any time your manager texts you, turn off the notifications on that text thread immediately. You can just mute threads. Then you won’t be bugged by all those “thumbs up” responses. I actually agree that it’s annoying to text your employees but I’m sure a lot of people need it / appreciate it.

      1. JustAnotherCommenter*

        Yea, that’s just it, OP doesn’t need it so it feels like too much, but if even a handful of people appreciate it, it’s worth it because it really shouldn’t be seen as anything more than a minor annoyance at worst.

        And OP is grumpy about the snow-day one also baffles me – office closure due to weather is a pretty rare thing outside of academia (and even within academia there are lots of roles where an office closure wouldn’t significantly affect their work these days) – so if someone is newer to the role or the department the reminder to set an out-of-office e-mail was probably helpful.

        1. sparkle emoji*

          It seems like their annoyed by the snow day texts because they are fully remote, but their coworkers aren’t and might need them? The emergency alerts at my university were so frequent that I tuned them out, the alerts may not be sufficient for OP’s coworkers. I personally think extra reminders are rarely a problem, so OP’s reaction feels very strong to me.

    9. M2*

      You can also mute the texts so you don’t hear them come in and have to go into the chain to read them. I do this with my in laws, lol.

    10. House On The Rock*

      I’m a Gen X manager at a large public university with staff ranging from early 30s to close to retirement age, and I’m pretty sure every one of them has, at some point, forgotten to submit their time sheet. I also get questions from my staff most months about some detail of time reporting because lots of people just don’t retain that information.

      For snow days, some people get really anxious about that kind of thing and if you don’t acknowledge it they will spiral (sending multiple emails and texts to “confirm” that they really don’t have to go into the office, etc.). LW doesn’t seem to be considering that their boss is likely managing multiple personalities who require different kinds of communication and this is the easiest route! Also, the time they’ve spent stewing about it is a lot more than it would take to mute the group text channel!

      1. Jayne*

        For my university, they send out an automated phone call for snow days. At 5:30 a.m. So you get the “WAKE UP…go back to sleep”

        1. I Have RBF*

          I would turn off the sound for that. Then again, I have “Do Not Disturb” hours set on my phone, and only certain numbers are excepted from it. If it’s my 82 year old mother, yes, it’s urgent. Anyone else? Not so much.

      2. alex*

        +1 about the different kinds of communication. Some people love and respond best to emails. Some tend to bypass them and do better with texts. Neither is right or wrong, it’s just a personality thing.

        My company’s HR director sends out emails every other Friday for people to turn in their timecards by EOD. I normally don’t need the reminder, but it’s nice to have it as a backup. I can just ignore or delete it if it doesn’t apply to me. LW can do the same instead of spending time and energy being cranky about it.

    11. Lenora Rose*

      I wonder if this part is the bigger issue: “More than half the people on that mass text either replied to it, or “liked” it, and my phone was going off every few minutes.”

      This could be what makes the messages so aggravating. One ping, a message that makes you think, “Yeah, I knew that, but thanks.”

      Then ping ping pingpingpingping…

      1. iglwif*

        Yes. And thus the #1 biggest thing LW could do to make this manager less annoying is to change their own phone settings.

      2. Office Lobster DJ*

        Death by a thousand pings. I think this has to be it, and I completely sympathize with OP. Unfortunately, all you can do is change your own notifications or hide your phone somewhere.

        1. Lenora Rose*

          I imagine it’s possible to tell people “for emergency alerts, please do not reply or like” and cut the number of pings in half, maybe. But *someone* will always absentmindedly reply, so the only way to prevent any extra pings is to shut off the notifications.

    12. Peon*

      I, for one, appreciate the time sheet reminders. The “due by” day is different every single month. You can’t even rely on “x number of days before months end” because it’s shifted to account for weekends, holidays, blue moons, and IT issues.

    13. watermelon fruitcake*

      For emails, you can set up rules to send all emails of a certain type (e.g. timesheet reminders) into a dedicated or general clutter folder. It’s easy enough to do with Outlook and there’s numerous ways to do it (by sender, by subject, by text, etc.) with the default filters, never mind creating script-based rules.

      For texts, iOS and Android OS, at least, have options to mute all notifications in a specific conversation; iOS lets you “leave” a conversation, too, though that may be only if all members are on iOS. Don’t delete the mass text you received but, instead, mute the notifications. You can also use the “do not disturb” or similar function to mute ALL notifications for a defined period.

      For Teams… Just turn it off. Sorry, no real tips there. I hate Teams and find it more of a distraction than a useful communication tool (and the video meeting feature is slow and bug-prone – Microsoft bought Skype, they had such a huge head start, and they still couldn’t figure out video calls!).

    14. I Have RBF*

      Sorry, but if my phone were going off with unnecessary texts, I would block that number.

      What people forget is that every damn time the phone bingles and beeps, it interrupts your focus. I will mute/block texts from numbers or sources that are not vital. I kill 95% of the notifications on my phone, because every damned app thinks it’s the most important thing in the world and needs to make noise at you day and night. If I didn’t strictly limit how much noise my phone can make I’d never get anything done.

      Maybe the “younger generations” like having noisy phones that notify you even when the temperature outside changes by a single degree (or things similar), but I don’t. I don’t want social media, website or game notifications. Every time my phone makes a noise, it better be actionable by me, because that’s what getting interrupted means – I have to do something right now.

      LW #2, solidarity. I don’t love how everyone seems to think it’s no big deal to have your phone squawking at you all the time. If you can go into the settings and silence various apps and/or mute the noise from certain numbers, it will give you some peace from unwanted texts.

      1. penny dreadful analyzer*

        I think it’s the opposite – the younger generations have their phones set to silent, period, end of story. Most young people I know simply have not had their phone make a noise in years.

        1. sparkle emoji*

          Yes, as a younger person most people my age treat silent and do not disturb settings as the default. If there is any generational component to this it might be the managers expectation that texts don’t need immediate attention or response, which is an attitude some people from older generations don’t share.

        2. MCMonkeyBean*

          I saw a very relatable tweet recently that said: “I cannot believe I am from a generation who paid for ringtones. If this little rectangle made a single sound these days I’d smash it up.”

      2. Distracted Librarian*

        All of this. I have my phone on vibrate to quash the noise but still notify me when someone texts, because my immediate family uses text to communicate. Yeah, I could silence everything, but why should I have to miss texts from my husband and kid because someone at work starts a group chat about something mundane? And yes, I can mute a group chat, but it still interrupts me on my personally-owned device. I don’t want work-related texts outside of work hours unless there’s an emergency. And I really don’t want group chats unless there’s an emergency.

    15. Not Jane*

      Sorry but I’m with LW2 on this. There’s the notification, then the likes notifications, it is totally unnecessary, inefficient, and telling people how to suck eggs. They are all adults. Also, trust -they can’t trust their staff to read the first notifications? I mean I wonder how they survive the world once they leave the office

    16. MCMonkeyBean*

      This definitely read to me like the kind of thing where maybe someone has a lot of frustrations with their job and they end up incorrectly funneling all their frustration into one highly visible but ultimately irrelevant issue.

      8 managers in 14 years is a lot! I’m sure there are a lot of very frustrating things to deal with.
      But yeah these messages should not be the focus of your frustration. This sounds like a very normal thing for a manager to do.

  2. Rd*

    LW2, I am also a boomer/ gen X and my office mate runs payroll. He spends SO much time begging people to turn in their time cards. Even if you’re salaried exempt, your payroll person needs to know if you took sick or vacation time. You’re overreacting, the fact that they’re sending the notice out means that not everyone is perfect like you.

    1. RedinSC*

      I was thinking, getting people to turn in their time cards SHOULDN”T be problematic, and yet, at my office every 2 weeks it’s like pulling teeth! So much time spent chasing down people, their managers, etc. It’s really a time suck for the folks who have to process payroll.

    2. Shakti*

      Yes!! I worked as an admin assistant for a company that was pretty casual about timesheets, but we’re up for a military contract and getting people to start filling them out on time was a literal nightmare. It was my job to send reminders first in mass emails then just to the group who wouldn’t submit them. It took over 5 rounds of emails every week. It involved some very angry emails directed towards me including the CEO who then had to apologize to me and ngl there was some crying from a variety of people!! One reminder sent out once a month is so little a thing!! Who knew timesheets could cause such intense drama, but most people do forget at some point and it’s extremely normal to remind adults about it. Also everyone involved was over 30 and most were over 40 except me so it really wasn’t an age thing

    3. Broken Lawn Chair*

      I’ve also done payroll and I get that some people won’t do it. I doubt, however, that a mass text on top of all the other mass communications does any good. If someone didn’t do it after a group email and a Teams message, they’re not going to do it because they also got a text. They’re going to be the one that you have to track down individually and get someone to stand over them until they complete it.

      In short, though I agree LW is overreacting and probably shouldn’t take any action, I also bet their new manager isn’t accomplishing anything with these texts, and if they were the one asking, I’d probably suggest they cut it out (at least based on the information we have).

      1. happybat*

        I’m the one it works on! I would see it a day late, then send a really lovely and apologetic email to payroll and, being lovely, they would always sort it out for me. Before we moved to online submissions, I had a really warm relationship with payroll – we used to share info about our holidays. Much nicer than an online submission.

        It probably saves quite a lot of admin time that I am now on salary.

      2. Seeking Second Childhood*

        Texts are completely completely different from the other forms–no connection to wifi or mobile data required, so it’s not as redundant as it seems at first glance.

        1. MCMonkeyBean*

          And that campus emergency alert system might be an opt-in situation–just because OP is getting the alerts twice doesn’t mean all of their coworkers are! Being told twice that campus is shut down is a billion times less annoying than *not* being told the campus is shut down and showing up only to have to turn right around and go home. I think it is extremely reasonable for a manager to take on the responsibility of trying to make sure their employees got the message.

          Now, the people replying are a different story. I would be annoyed with them too lol. I have had to mute a number of text groups with my in-laws lol.

      3. Falling Diphthong*

        Back when I ran the science fair I found that it really made a huge difference to personalize the emails asking for volunteers. If someone got a mass email it fell into the pit of mass emails. If they got a single addressee email that opened “Hi Bob, Last year you helped with the chemistry demos…” and then pasted the general information, response went up by an order of magnitude.

        1. Alan*

          LOL. I just got a personalized (apparently) e-mail about this year’s science fair that sounded almost exactly like your example and I did indeed sign up again :-).

      4. Radioactive Cyborg Llama*

        The LW is complaining about the content and/or frequency of the reminders though, not the form.

    4. Come On Eileen*

      This is a very tangential question, but can I ask why “boomer” is added to “Gen X” ? I think of these as very different age groups. I am firmly Gen X but I think of my parents as baby boomers.

      1. Tally miss*

        Not the OP, but I’d guess that the OP is right on the cusp. If I was a month younger, I’d be Gen X, but am technically a Boomer. But those of us in Generation Jones (born in the 60s), got none of the Boomer advantages and fill retirement age is still nearly 8 years away.

        1. Gray Lady*

          This. I was born in the first year of Gen X, and all my parents’ other kids were Boomers, so I was raised in a more Boomer way than a typical Gen X way. I like to pull the Gen X card when people make dumb remarks about Boomers, but really, I identify with them in a lot of ways.

      2. Leenie*

        My siblings are 6 to 11 years older than me. I am solidly Gen-X, and my siblings are all either technically Boomers, or technically Gen-X. To be honest, culturally, none of them really seem to fit in the Boomer or Gen-X group. They’re something different – like the elder Millennial cusp people, but at the beginning of my generation, and not at the end of it. I definitely feel like I fit into Gen-X culturally. But I could see being in that generational liminal space, and describing it the way the LW did (this is in contrast to another recent LW who was about my age and called themselves Gen-X/Millennial – I have no idea what was going on with that one. Mid 70’s birth year is not remotely Millennial).

    5. ecnaseener*

      Yep. I’m guessing if you take a step back, LW, you will remember that you actually know all too well that some of your coworkers aren’t reliably able to follow simple written instructions the first time. The extra reminder might feel *to you* like something only a child would need, but that’s not really the case.

    6. NotAnotherManager!*

      Same. Sending a reminder the day before timesheets are due has upped our compliance to 90%, and then the remaining 10% get a direct phone call, including a reminder that they are holding up payroll. Chronic offenders get a note on their annual evaluation that they don’t consistently comply with organizational policy.

      I’m beyond the *should* I have to remind people and moving on to what do I need to do to reclaim hours of my day every other week. I’m also very solidly GenX, though I think that matters much less than OP thinks.

      1. Bootstrap Paradox*

        100% re: including on their performance review! Those folks are creating extra work for (sometimes multiple) people, which costs the organization $$. I made the same comment above.

        Managers need to manage using the tools they have, rather than torturing the entire class.

    7. House On The Rock*

      Yes to all of this. Our time entry system and rules, even for salaried exempt staff, is a little arcane (we have to enter holidays ourselves, there’s a special code if you don’t take time off in a month, etc.) Every month someone on my staff misses the deadline or messes up something they’ve been doing for years. It’s so normal to send out reminders about these things!

    8. WhyAreThereSoManyBadManagers*

      Sorry, why are people lumping GenX in with Boomers as if they’re the same thing/generation? They’re not, they’re very different! And very distinct year delineations. Born 1965-1980, congrats you’re GenX. Before that, you’re a Boomer.

      1. Generation complexity*

        Because the letter did? And because surely you can imagine the potential ambiguity felt by someone born in, for example, 1965 itself?

    9. iglwif*

      I would be willing to bet that prior managers DID send out time card reminders, but sent them individually, after the deadline, to people who forgot theirs.

      This manager has saved herself a ton of time by automating an all-team reminder for every pay period — set it once and it goes out every week (or whatever).

    10. lilsheba*

      Frankly the people that keep “forgetting” to turn in their time cards, don’t pay them. Maybe in the future they will remember. Otherwise, snooze you lose. And constant reminders for the same damn thing annoy me too. I don’t need it 5 different times!!!

      1. Bread Crimes*

        Not paying people because they didn’t turn in their time cards would be illegal in a lot of places.

        1. kendall^2*

          Otoh, maybe getting paid but in the next pay cycle because they submitted their timesheet after the deadline would be ok?

      2. Whatwhatwhatwhat???*

        It is illegal not to pay people for time they work (hello, slavery), and while I’m not American so I will defer to actual Americans on this it seems that several states even have specific rules on when you need to pay people out.

      3. Kuleta*

        At least one firm I worked for, would turn off an offender’s direct deposit and issue a paper check on payday instead.

    11. Perfectly normal-size space bird*

      Yeah, I generally remember 99% of the time but there’s always that one week I’m overworked and keep thinking it’s Thursday, then wake up in the middle of the night and rush to my computer to submit it. Or it’s a week I’m on vacation or took Friday off and my brain is on everything but work. Those times I appreciate the reminder.

    12. T'Cael Zaanidor Kilyle*

      LW #1: Did anyone else take note of the reference to a “D&I committee” where the more common acronym is “DEI”? I know there are lots of different ways to phrase it, but in the context of this letter, it’s hard not to read it as “Diversity yes, inclusion yes, equity no.”

      1. lime*

        At least they’re being honest about it? Similarly, our organization used to have an Office of Equity that was recently renamed to Office of Civil Rights Compliance and like… that’s very telling.

      2. mitzijoy*

        LW1 OP,
        It’s called the Diversity and Inclusion Council and while equity is mentioned in the mission statement the focus seems to be on Diversity and Inclusion.

    13. SchuylerSeestra*

      I’m an elder millennial with severe ADHD and I’m on LW2 side. I absolutely hate doing expense resorts but it’s also my responsibility to get it done. The multiple notifications would annoy the hell out of me. It’s coddling grown adults who should be more diligent about basic responsibilities.

      Especially if it’s going to my personal cell phone. Send to email or internal messaging system.

      I think the supervisor sounds like a micromanager. If there are specific individuals who are consistently late to submit time sensitive docs, then they should be reached out to privately.

        1. Anon, maybe???*

          Can’t you just do it all anonymously? My account is based on an Apple’s hide-my-email feature. I didn’t use my real name, or any company names, or even location. I had to submit a review and luckily they have a “not listed” feature under company name so I could just make stuff up.

          1. anonymous person*

            Or just don’t sign up with your real name. If services are going to misuse our data, why give it to them in the first place??

            P.S. I also highly recommend picking a fake birthday that is easy for you to remember and using it for sites that don’t really need it.

            2. Timothy (TRiG)*

              If you read Monica Cellio’s blog, you’ll see that she didn’t give Glassdoor her real name: they found it and added it to her account.

              1. Meat Oatmeal*

                Right, but she didn’t give them any name. These commenters are suggesting using a fake name and other fake information so there are no empty fields for Glassdoor to fill with your real information.

                That said, I think this is a good reminder that all our real information is floating out there somewhere, and it’s easier than ever for companies to buy access to databases that enable them to figure out who we really are.

                So if I absolutely must use Glassdoor, I’ll provide fake information — but that still might not be enough to protect me in the long term.

        2. underhill*

          You don’t have to make an actual post – last time I checked, reporting your salary is enough. Not to defend Glassdoor, this is shady in the extreme, but FYI

          1. DJ Abbott*

            As I posted below, I entered two reviews of employers and they still wouldn’t show me anything. I don’t remember if I shared my salary, but there was no reason not to.
            I would have had to post a fake review every week for them to show me anything. This was from 2020-2022.

    2. MassMatt*

      It’s shocking that they seem to be fine with basically doxxing all their users, and duplicating their info for a sister site whether it’s wanted or not, essentially doubling individual vulnerability.

      This looks to be a huge privacy violation for everyone, but especially so in the EU which has much stronger privacy laws than the US.

        1. Sapientia*

          Adding personal information without consent would certainly be in vialotion of the GDPR.

          On the other hand there has been a recent ruling by the German Federal Court of Justice that a review on kununu (similar to Glassdoor) should be deleted because the lack of a first and last name attached meant they could not prove the review was based on real experiences.

          1. GlitsyGus*

            This is an interesting conundrum. I really do see both sides on that. I mean, just ask any small business that pissed of the wrong jerk and ended up getting 300 fake 1 star reviews on Yelp. Having some way to verify that a person is legit is a good idea.

            At the same time, with these kinds of topics anonymity is important. People won’t be honest, and by extention your service won’t be effective, if they are worried about retaliation.

            The easy answer is to have a strong enough privacy policy that covers both needs without unnecessary sharing, but that can be a tricky line to walk. At this point it’s pretty clear Glassdoor fell off the line and rolled down the hill.

        2. bamcheeks*

          Not just illegal, but really significant fines. Hope they’ve done a good job separating out their EU and UK users!

          1. bamcheeks*

            (though having read the post, they would almost certainly argue that you did in fact consent / link accounts / receive an email at some stage informing you of a change in their data policies / clicked on a pop-up etc. I don’t know whether the broad powers that software companies claim to share and link up data in their EULAs have ever been fully tested under GDPR, especially around “we’re changing this policy, click here if you want full details or just click Accept”: most companies seem to be taking the approach that it’s safest not to Piss People Off just in case. Would be interesting to see if this changes that…)

          2. Ariaflame*

            I read something that someone logged on and found that their profile had been autopopulated with their info, presumably from stuff associated with that email address.

          3. ecnaseener*

            Hopefully they haven’t, and they’ll get dinged hard enough to convince them to get rid of this feature worldwide!

          4. Timothy (TRiG)*

            The GDPR came in before the UK left the EU. The UK retained EU law after Brexit (which makes sense: they wrote a lot of it), so the GDPR (with minor modifications) remains law in the UK.

            1. bamcheeks*

              I meant, “separating out their UK and EU users, who are protected by GDPR and the UK domestic equivalent, from everyone else”, not “separated EU users from UK users”. :)

            2. Anti-GDPR*

              GDPR is awful and has made the entire experience of browsing the web in Europe awful. When I got there for work I set my VPN to use an IP address in the US.

              I understand some Brexiteers have targeted the UK’s GDPR law. I fully support them.

              1. bamcheeks*

                Some of the ways it’s been implemented on digital systems are deeply annoying, sure. But that stuff is really very superficial. When I look at some of the stuff that gets posted on here about personal information and medical data and it’s just, “this is ill-advised but not actually illegal” it’s like HOLY SHIT thank heavens for GDPR.

              2. Vio*

                Some aspects of GDPR are pretty bad but we’re still much better off with it than completely without it. Ideally it should be improved, but that doesn’t mean it should be scrapped.
                Also by leaving the EU we pretty much ensured that we no longer have any voice in changes to EU law but since we still need to deal with businesses in the EU we still have to abide by most of those laws so we get the worst of both worlds.

              3. Amy*

                No, it’s the companies who rely on the data they acquire unethically who implement it in the most annoying way possible and then blame the regulations for it. You fell for that old manipulation tactic

    3. fluffy*

      I deleted mine as well, and then immediately got inundated with dozens of emails from them all telling me that my contributions have been reviewed and do not meet their community standards.

      Obviously it’s just a boilerplate message that gets sent when something gets deleted from the site, but that doesn’t speak too well to the quality of their backend systems or any related privacy controls.

      1. Shannon*

        Same here. I logged in and found that my account had been populated with information I didn’t add (because it was the wrong information!) so I did cancel my account. Within the hour I had the “doesn’t meet standards” emails as well.

        1. Shannon*

          To be clearer – the added information was basically pulled from an interview review I had given. I did not get that job and didn’t claim that I had.

    4. How's It Going?*

      Ditto. I just logged in, lied about my name (which they demanded), and then told them to delete my personal data/delete my account.

    5. Seeking Second Childhood*

      Next worry is whether it was already crawled. Wayback Machine at least has a path to remove things from the Internet Archive – but all those slimy republishing sites may not.

      I’m suddenly glad I never used it. And they’ve just killed my trust so I won’t be starting now.

      1. WellRed*

        I finally bit the bullet and posted a review for the first time about four months ago! It was a bit scary but I reminded myself it’s anonymous. Ugh! Alison we’d live it if you could get a response from them on why they are doing this etc!

    6. Pierrot*

      I just went to the Glassdoor page for my former employer and I know that I wrote a very detailed review in 2019, but it’s gone, along with the other reviews that were there when I made my review. It looks like Glassdoor wiped everything from before 2018, but I know that there were other reviews that are now missing. It’s very bizarre.

      1. pally*

        I’m still finding reviews from 2015 and newer are still there. Especially the one I always look for: a small company where the CEO manages to make statements that are way out of line: “Does your husband approve of you working outside the home?” “My generation puts work first; your generation is not serious about work. So how can I trust that you will do the job?”
        “Who will take care of your children when you work?”
        (yeah, she’s a real winner.)

        I’m betting employers that ask are able to get Glassdoor to remove ‘distasteful’ reviews.

        1. Jill Swinburne*

          They are. There was a big thing with Zuru (a New Zealand-based toy company that floods the market with plastic landfill fodder, but who also own some other companies) who managed to get negative employee reviews taken down by filing a lawsuit in California with Glassdoor, which included Glassdoor handing over the identities of the people who reviewed them. I won’t buy Zuru products and the only way I will use Glassdoor is if I can find a working bugmenot account.

    7. Lacey*

      Yeah. Suddenly feeling VERY thankful I never posted a review for the truly awful company I worked at. I already felt like they could figure out who it was pretty easily with the info Glassdoor requires from you (how long you were there, what department, etc) but them just… revealing people like that is alarming

      1. Anon, maybe???*

        That was my concern, I was part of a layoff from a horrible company and 10% of the company was laid off (which was only 5 people (mainly from my dept.)

        Just the low numbers made me uneasy that I could easily be found out, but I figured my writing style and any horror stories from my time at the company totally would.

    8. Constance Lloyd*

      So did I, and then I immediately received a small flurry of emails saying, “Oops, there’s something wrong with your recent review. You have 24 hours to fix it.” The “something wrong” is probably a lack of identifying information. I only ever shared salary/wage info, so nothing especially sensitive, but yikes.

    9. Justme, The OG*

      I just logged in to do that and my profile had me most recent job title. I’m pretty sure I never changed it.

      1. Anon, maybe???*

        I’ve used a masked email and all fake info and everything stayed the same as what I left it.

    11. Galentine*

      This was a good heads-up! I haven’t looked at Glassdoor in years but I managed to guess my password, removed my sole review (from 2016), and deleted my account.

    12. Monstrummm*

      In reading through comments on cellio.dreamwidth.org’s page about Glassdoor’s policy, it’s bad in two ways. First, it makes it difficult/impossible to edit your profile or delete your account without providing additional information. Second, when you think you are *deleting* your account (and thus all the information), you are merely giving permission to Glassdoor to either permanently delete *OR* anonymize your data. So they can still do whatever they wish with your data, which makes it at risk of being hacked.

      1. Vio*

        Or sold. But of course such an honest site who clearly care about their userbase would never dream of doing such an underhanded and dishonest thing…

    13. FionasHuman*

      Am I the only one with a throwaway email account and who never provides factual identifying information for things like this? If a company isn’t postal mailing me something, they don’t need to know my actual name or where I live.

  4. seriousmoonlight*

    I’m also student support staff at a university. We’re a public institution and there was some confusion recently when state offices were closed for a snow day. This was something that hadn’t come up in a few years and we have some new staff, so some people didn’t realize that this meant we were totally closed and ended up working from home when they didn’t have to. An extra message from the unit manager (in addition to the institutional notification) to confirm would have been helpful. There are some situations where a little extra communication can be good, just to be sure everyone is on the same page. It’s not meant to be patronizing, but acknowledges that people work differently and have different communication styles and needs.

    1. WeirdChemist*

      Yes, plus university snow day messages tend to be more focused on the students/class closures than faculty (at least in my experience), so extra clarification is probably not hurting anyone. At my school, there were different tiers of closures for classes vs employees reporting to work, and the messaging was not always clear on who had the day off. Knew of plenty of professors who took advantage of the ambiguity to force their grad student workers into work when they were absolutely NOT supposed to be there. And also knew people who would see the “campus closure: classes canceled, employees still report for work” and stop reading after the headline and get in trouble for missing work.

      1. Gem-Like Flame*

        “Employees still report for work” on a day when the weather is considered to be too dangerous for students to make it to class? So the safety of the employees doesn’t matter – only the safety of the students?! Well, that says a mouthful about that university’s values!

        1. Just Staff*

          This is not uncommon, alas. I also work for a large, public university, and they’ve cancelled classes for weather but been clear that that doesn’t apply to staff. Staff also don’t get MLK Day off but students and faculty do, which says a lot about their supposed liberal values.

          1. Manic Pixie HR Girl*

            If I had to guess, it is because staff are subject to the statewide time and attendance rules in a way that faculty are not (I know that is the case in my state – though I know yours is a different state as we DO get MLK day!)

            I actually recall one year my state university (that I attended) had CLASSES on Labor Day but all admin offices were closed, for that same reason. It was the second week of the semester and it was a problem. They didn’t do that again.

        2. WeirdChemist*

          Yep!

          One tropical storm, it started flash flooding in the middle of the morning commute and all public transport stopped running by 9 am (which is how most of us got to campus). University never bothered to change their status to allow employees to stay home (students had the day off already). My boss got mad at how many of us called out that day.

          A different tropical storm, all the power got knocked out off campus in the early afternoon (including traffic lights), so public transport yet again got shut down. Students already had the day off, but again the university never bothered to change the status for employees. Luckily I had already left campus early that day, but my roommates had to walk home, in the dark (no streetlights!) in a tropical storm…

          It is much cheaper for universities to shut down classes than employee/faculty/research activities. Not saying it’s right, but it’s how it goes :/

        3. Jenny*

          Ehhh….a lot of time students are walking fairly long distances to get to glass, so that might be why students don’t have classes but office workers do.

          1. ErinW*

            But aren’t snow/extreme weather days usually called due to road safety? If staff is more likely to be driving, then it follows that they are also more likely to be in traffic accidents on the way in. If it’s not safe for students to get there, it is not safe for staff/faculty to get there, full stop.

            1. a clockwork lemon*

              It’s not really equivalent. When I was in college, I had multiple classes a day in different buildings so even if the ROADS were clear, campus would still be covered in snow and ice.

            2. sparkle emoji*

              Not necessarily. This wasn’t college but when I was in k-12 school most of our school closures were due to it being too cold(due to risk of frostbite for walkers and bus riders and issues with the bus engines in extreme cold) when there was no snow so no road safety issues. The risks from extreme cold would be an issue for students walking around campus but not faculty in heated cars.

        4. Orv*

          Often if staff don’t come in they have to use vacation time, so there’s an incentive to show up if at all possible.

        5. Jaunty Banana Hat I*

          Some of it is because many students live on campus, and if they’re on meal plans, they still have to eat, which means someone has to be there to make the food. There still have to be safety/emergency officers. Etc. Most departments that need to be physically present for reasons like that have plans for how to handle that on snow days, either via staff who are already there or who live nearby and come in and get comp time/overtime later.

          But definitely some universities do not handle these things well, and staff almost always get the short end of the stick compared to faculty/students.

    2. WeirdChemist*

      Also, the school weather alert messages aren’t going to contain any info on the level of out-of-office messages or whatever, so receiving the weather alert doesn’t really preclude the need to send a reminder about the more office-specific policies about weather closures.

    3. Jayne*

      That is interesting, since as my university, if you have an agreement to work from home, you have to work from home, even if the university is closed due to weather. Basically it was presented as the trade-off for the privilege of working from home, you never get another snow day.

      How much we are probably gonna get done under those circumstances will be left to the reader’s imagination.

      1. greenlily*

        Same here. We’ve been told that if there’s a “snow day”, we’re expected to work from home. On days when we’re working at the office and the weather report looks like there might be a snow day the next day, a million reminders go out from our boss and our grandboss and great-grandboss reminding all staff to take their laptops home with them so they can work from home in the case of inclement weather.

        Mind you, my school also waits until 8 am or later to announce that we’re going to be closed for the day. Student-facing offices open at 9, and most staff aren’t paid well enough to afford live less than an hour’s commute away from our campus (do not even get me started). By waiting until 8 am or later to announce it, they are betting that all staff have had to wake up, get ready for the day, make childcare arrangements for their kids whose school is cancelled, begin commuting, etc. so that when they tell us to turn around to go home and work from there, we’ll already be in “work mode” and will actually work. I’m sure they paid some management consultant a large amount of money to be told that there’s research indicating that this policy improves staff productivity by X percent on Y amount of snow days, or something like that.

    4. badger*

      I was staff at a university extension office about 15 years ago and we had the same thing, there was a question as to whether we were closed when the state was. At least some of the time the school shuts down for students but not faculty/staff because the city bus system shuts down for the day and students depend on that, while many faculty/staff have other transportation (but not all, which was always really frustrating for those who don’t).

      And then I went to law school and there was one very memorable snowstorm during my first semester finals when the *university as a whole* was closed for students…but not the law school. I remember getting the the email from the university and immediately emailing my professor and the director of student life in a panic and they were like, um, yeah, we’re still holding finals. The bus system was shut down and my car was buried under at least a foot and a half of snow, and I lived in an apartment and didn’t own a snow shovel. I dug out with a 5 gallon plastic bucket so I could go take the stupid test.

    5. Justme, The OG*

      I’m also student support at a university and there is confusion every snow day. But our snow day policies keep changing.

    6. ErinW*

      Additional problem at my school is that the automated emergency messages are opt-in and also reset every year. (Why????) So a lot of people think that they are set up to receive the School is Closed or Braun Building Closed Due to Broken Pipe or whatever messages, but they are not.

  5. Msd*

    I think the issue is the many people that “reply all” to the group text messages. It’s annoying when it’s email but at least email isn’t pinging your phone constantly. It’s an odd human behavior that so many replay to global type messages and clearly not age related

    1. Happy meal with extra happy*

      At least with iPhones, you can mute conversations so you don’t get pinged with constant alerts.

      2. Also-ADHD*

        You can do that on all phones but then if something was important later, you’d miss it.

          1. Also-ADHD*

            Yeah, maybe I’m past the age cutoff too (older Millennial) but that’s still annoying to have to deal with. I get why LW is annoyed (esp. with 4 reminders for a routine thing they need no reminding or duplicate texts when they were already alerted). I think their vibe made it a bit much, but I also think the boss is either used to managing real slackers or the department is far less reliable than LW overall, because that’s a lot. No one on my team would need that, and the one person who would need more reminders than others would get them separately.

    2. Anonsies*

      Yes, I work for one location of a nationwide group of clinics and one hospital somehow last month accidentally sent their daily huddle to every single corporation email instead of just their own. There were at least 250 reply all messages, 50/50 “I don’t think I was supposed to get this” / “we all know we weren’t supposed to get this, stop hitting reply all” and IT had to get involved to stop making people hit reply all. it was indane.

      1. Sasha*

        Something similar (rogue all-students test email) brought down our entire college email system a couple of years back. Thousands of students “hilariously” replying all with their witty comments, plus the other half getting irate and telling the others to stop…. via reply-all.

        IT just turned the whole system off for three days.

        1. bripops*

          I remembered an incident of something like this basically shutting down a major company for a few days so I googled it to try to remember where and it turns out the NHS, Air Force, Microsoft, Wells Fargo, and several other orgs have all had that problem at some point in the past few years lol

      2. Falling Diphthong*

        We all know we weren’t supposed to get this, stop hitting reply all.
        Truly I valuable message to send out using Reply All.

      3. bripops*

        I worked for a massive international company with thousands of locations in hundreds of countries and every year or two someone would manage to email the entire company instead of their local group (stuff along the lines of an associate in the Netherlands accidentally emailing thousands of people worldwide looking for a specific form in Dutch). Chaos ensued every time, I’m talking HUNDREDS of responses coming in for days replying-all saying things like “STOP replying! I’m getting too many emails!” or telling people to just mute the thread, with a few well-meaning people sending greetings from their country.

        HR had to get involved after people continued to ignore orders from corporate to just leave it alone and a new policy was made about conduct in email communications, but as far as I’m aware nobody has limited who can email the entire company which to me seems like the obvious way to prevent this from happening.

        I personally avoid reply-all whenever possible, which people tend to appreciate and means my emails get overlooked less because folks know that if I kept them copied it’s because the email is at least tangentially relevant to their work. I agree that LW2 is overreacting a little but with the text messages specifically I’d also be kind of annoyed. It’s one thing to have to mute a Teams chat or email chain, but if it carried over to my personal phone that seems like overkill.

      4. Msd*

        You would think that email systems would have a configuration parameter that could be set by the system administrator to address if a reply all is to more than x people. Something like a Pop up “you are about to reply all to x number of people. Please confirm that is what you intended”. Or something similar. It would also have to look at the number of members in a group list but should be doable. Wouldn’t work for text messages. Will probably never happen. I mean Microsoft excel still doesn’t allow a leading zero in a numeric field. You have to use a work around

    3. Posilutely*

      Our work thread that sends out messages like that is set so that only admins (managers) can send messages. It’s one-way information with no likes or pings and if someone did need to query something, they could phone in.

    4. LikesToSwear*

      Another issue – is this a work issued phone or a personal phone? If it’s work issued, then sure, just delete. If it’s personal, say something to the manager about it not being appropriate to include your personal number on a mass group text. Because that just gave your number to everyone on who received that text.

      1. Treena*

        Yea I’m really surprised that this wasn’t addressed in the letter. Yes OP sounds old and cranky, but isn’t everyone still well within their rights not to receive work contacts on a personal phone?

        1. Also-ADHD*

          I mean, my company sends emergency alerts on my cell, and my boss definitely has the number. I think the emergency system and even leadership follow up on cell seem okay mostly (in case WiFi is down etc) but the time sheet thing on cell seemed odd to me.

          1. Spooky Spiders*

            I mean my bosses absolutely have my phone number, but I am very strict about giving out my phone number. I laid down the law after a couple different incidents. Then there was a new manager who wanted to put up a phone sheet so people could call around for coverage–it was dropped after multiple people (all women, of course) pushed back with different incidents that had happened at that employer. (Dick pics, stalking.)

            So I don’t allow my number to be shared, and I am VERY selective about who I give it to. At previous previous employer I think I gave my number to about 3 people. I worked there for 4 years.

        2. I Have RBF*

          Seriously. I would not want to get timecard reminders on my personal cell phone. That would be an intrusion on my personal space, IMO, especially if everyone ended up “like”ing it and blowing up my personal device. I would literally block that number as being abusive, and I would probably be petty and “reply all” with a message like “Too many useless texts. Blocking.”

          Email, work chat? Fine, go for it. I don’t allow it to make sound on my personal device. But text to my personal phone? It had better be an emergency, or extremely time critical, and personally to me, not a mass text.

          I do on-call, and I whitelist the NOC type number only. If someone wants to reach me after hours, they need to go through the right channels.

        3. Dainerra*

          most situations like this are using a text message program. so it goes to everyone on the list but doesn’t include phone numbers that are accessible to anyone but the admin. because it goes through a third party program.

          1. sparkle emoji*

            Yeah a third party messaging tool seems likely. If LW’s phone number is being shared and they are concerned they can address it but it wasn’t mentioned in the letter so Alison didn’t address it.

    5. Jared Carthalian, True Heir*

      I worked at a place where the owner expected everyone to reply ‘read and understood’ to every all-staff message. Every single one. Their reasoning was that if people didn’t respond then obviously they’d have to make people sign real pieces of prayer constantly. We had a weather closure and no one responded because most people were off anyway when the notification was sent and it’s a silly thing to have to respond to. The day after the closure we gotta another all-staff message with some ALL CAPS phrases about how no one replied to the weather closure notification.

        1. Potoooooooo*

          If you were raised Catholic, you’d sign it “In nomine Patrii, et Filii, et Spiritus Sancti.”

          I can’t speak to other traditions though.

      2. rebelwithmouseyhair*

        This sounds particularly daft, since presumably they didn’t also get messages from people who’d managed to get in somehow only to find the office closed? It was kinda obvious that people had seen it. And anyone who doesn’t see it and braves the weather to get to the office, well they’ll only make that mistake once, and it’s no skin off the boss’s nose either (unless they have a serious accident slipping on ice and ending up in hospital).

    6. Sparkle Motion*

      The “reply all” is definitely a problem, but so are the multiple methods of communicating one piece of information. I wouldn’t welcome an email, slack message and a text.

      1. Falling Diphthong*

        We went through this with the school notices for closings for a while–this was as weather prediction got better, so we knew a storm was starting, our kids had spent hours before bed studying different “odds of school closed tomorrow” sites, and we all knew to check first thing in the morning. Getting an automatic phone call to every single number associated with each child, from every school, all through the predawn hours, was not extra information that any of the parents actually wanted.

        1. Ginger Cat Lady*

          Oh my gosh yes. 3 kids in 3 schools meant 3 texts, 3 emails, and 3 robocalls for every district wide closure. And it took TWO YEARS to stop getting notifications after they graduated and were no longer in school!
          Aside from being annoying, I cant help but think that it means they’re sending a lot more emails, texts and robocalls, which has to have *some* cost associated with it, so it’s not a good use of education funds, either!

          1. Lenora Rose*

            I am amused that I get the automated email when the preschool programs are cancelled when I have no preschoolers, and the robocall when the bus is cancelled, since my kids don’t take the school bus, but at least I get ONE email or ONE call.

    7. Maggie*

      They’re replying to confirm their receipt of the message to their boss, mute notifications and the issue is solved. I don’t think it’s odd human behavior to acknowledge a message with a directive in it from your boss

      1. Seeking Second Childhood*

        reply to boss = no problem
        reply to all = frustrating

        mute conversation = possible problem if boss uses the same conversation to start the next notice.

        1. Jaydee*

          The problem with a group text versus a mass email is the difference in ease of replying to just the sender. In email, you hit “reply” instead of “reply all” and send your message. In text, you need to send a separate message to just the sender and then likely say a lot more than if you replayed in the group message (e.g. “Saw the reminder about OOO messages for the snow day. Just set mine.” instead of a thumbs up response or an “okay” or a “will do” or whatever else).

          1. Dainerra*

            and to piggyback on this, a lot of places now use the third party programs to send out text notifications. so you may not even have your managers number to reply back to them personally and your only option is to reply to the thread.

        2. Maggie*

          That’s just not how modern day text messages threads work and are used (in my experience). People like the text vs going out and starting a separate conversation to say they got the text. That would be even more cumbersome and nonsensical.

    8. Yellow sports car*

      I’m rather younger than a boomer – but I was not aware you could “reply all” to a text.

      I do think LW is overreacting, but I think it fair to ask manager if there’s a way to send the text alert without a reply all option. A BCC version of text.

      LW could also consider using profiles to mute work texts outside of work hours (unless on call).

      Personally I’d appreciate a text telling me not to come to work. As someone who works from work – I usually won’t see emails until I’m at my desk.

      1. Maggie*

        When you reply to a group text it goes to everyone. At least on iPhone there is not a way to BCC text messages, but it’s not a bad idea for an IOS update!

        1. Orv*

          The solution here is to use a proper mass texting platform, not hack something together with the group text feature.

    9. Bast*

      I am a huge believer in not saying anything unless I have something to say. For this reason, I really hate most “Reply All” email threads and long text chains where no one is really saying anything and/or it doesn’t really pertain to everyone in the chain. If there is a mass email sent out wishing John a happy retirement, there is no need for everyone to “Reply All” with “Happy Retirement John” — just send it to John. If there is cake in the breakroom announced, I don’t need every single email about “Woohoo cake” “Thanks for the cake” etc, etc, 50 times. It gets irritating and distracting to get 10, 20, 30 of those types of emails that need to be parsed out from real requests and relevant work emails.

    10. AngryOctopus*

      Text wise, I’m sure what’s happening is that people see it, and send a quick “thumbs up” to say “yes, I have read this message” so that the sender knows. They’re unlikely to think too much about the distribution list, especially if they have the conversation on mute.

    11. Lacey*

      Yeah, that would bug me too. I know there are ways to mute it, but I’ve had trouble with those in the past, so it doesn’t seem like an entirely great solution.

      My work just sends out an email. No one replied to it and it’s nice to have a reminder in case I forget. But I’d be annoyed if it were constant notifications about the thing.

    12. Daisy-dog*

      Agreed. It would be one thing if the message either set expectations on the type of reply expected or if the supervisor stated elsewhere that the message could be muted. This is kinda in a in-between state where OP doesn’t know if that text chain will be used for anything else or if the messages provide any information that isn’t included in the standard email.

  6. Artemesia*

    We have shifted to a constant reminder society with the changes in technology. Doctors didn’t remind people of appointments when I was a kid or young or even middle aged adult. If you invited people to a dinner party you didn’t feel you had to call and remind them. etc etc. Now even an opera ticket comes with an alert a day before. The ease of text and email messages coupled with some shifts in social behavior, now has made people expect and rely on reminders for important events.

    1. Gretta Swathmore*

      It’s so annoying. I have some meetings this week, and I’m going to have to spend about an hour reminding people to come and be prepared.

      1. Empress Ki*

        Do you really have to do that ? Presuming they are adults, not children, they are responsible to remind themselves they have a meeting ! Unless their presence is absolutely essential to you/your service, I wouldn’t send any reminder.

        1. English Rose*

          Yes, we’ve recently stopped sending reminders for most internal meetings. When it’s a formal enough meeting to merit written minutes or notes, people are listed as either “Attended”, “Apologies sent”, or “No Show”. The public nature of being a “No Show” often stops it happening next time.

          Also, if a meeting has been organised via Teams or Outlook or whatever, reminders pop up, so there’s no excuse.

        2. Ms. Murchison*

          Often yes, we really have to do that. People are overloaded with information, opportunities, and distractions. They should be responsible enough to remember, but if you know that your meeting or whatever if not their most urgent concern, you need to remind them or risk wasting your time/dealing with delays.

    2. Language Lover*

      I pre-date this technology and I remember doctors/dentists doing appointment reminders. The difference is that the reminder was done by someone in the office instead of having it be automated.

        1. Snow Globe*

          I think they may be talking of a time before email. Some of us are old enough to remember that.

                1. Falling Diphthong*

                  I like those! They are good for asynchronous communication. i.e. I put the card with the bills to be paid and then take care of it when I’m doing a bunch of such tasks.

        2. ADHD mom*

          As a woman, I remember filling out my address on a postcard so in 6 months the doctor could mail me a reminder to call and make an annual appointment.

          I am 44. This was in the late 90s and early 00s. I generally have chosen larger more technology-oriented practices since then. I get to robocalls now.

          1. 1-800-BrownCow*

            Our vet’s office, eye doctor and dentist office all send out postcard reminders for scheduling appointments. Although, in their defense, I live in an area with a lot of people who use these services, but do not have electricity in their homes and so they don’t have phones or computers for phone, text, or email reminders.

        3. badger*

          Just last week the health system in which I have a specialist sent me a letter reminding me to make a follow up appointment.

          My primary care clinic calls with reminders a few days before, if it’s something scheduled out more than a day or two. I also get the reminders on MyChart, but not everyone uses it.

      2. Falling Diphthong*

        Yes, until quite recently a human would call to remind me.

        It’s a question of hitting the right level to be helpful, rather than falling into the blurred mass. For example I got a reminder a week before the dermatology appointment (set about 6 months earlier), which was useful as I had written down Thursday and they had Friday, and I was leaving town on Friday. But if the system is set to “send daily reminders every day for a week” it enters chaff.

        It’s an interesting aspect of the information age, that putting people on the receiving end of a fire hose of information just leads them to ignore it all. Even though there’s more information, and isn’t having more information always better?

        1. Red Reader the Adulting Fairy*

          I love my vet to bits, but every time I have a vet appointment, I get reminder emails (2), texts (3), and phone calls (1). At least three of them require me to reply to confirm the appointment.

          And heaven forbid it’s for both cats at the same time — I get all of those reminders for each cat. (THEY AREN’T EVEN MY CATS. I’m just the one whose name is on the vet account. :P )

          1. Kay*

            I just decided to stop replying to the confirmations. I had one business tell me they didn’t actually care about the confirmations, it was just part of the system and they couldn’t change it. Then there is the business that says my confirmation is mandatory (I still don’t confirm, somehow my appointments are still there when I show up!) even though I only booked 2 days before. Sigh.

      3. AngryOctopus*

        Yep. Now I get text messages (my preference) from the dentist and doctor to remind me of upcoming appointments. It’s actually useful to me, because then I might readjust my work schedule around the appointment time, depending on what I have coming up. But it used to be phone calls from an actual staff member, so this is just shifting time consuming office work to an automated system.

        1. allathian*

          My dentist’s office used to call me, the most recent call was last fall. Last week I got a text to offer an appointment with my dental hygienist, I sent a code to confirm that I accepted the appointment, the dentist’s office confirmed it by text and also sent a calendar invite to my work email address, which I accepted and flagged private. If I hadn’t been able to accept the appointment, I would’ve just called the dentist’s office to reschedule. I found this very practical and easy to do, no sweat. Text messages are also a lot more private than calls, especially in an open office environment.

      4. Higher Ed Cube Farmer*

        @Language Lover, same here.

        I used to get postcards in the mail, AND phone calls at my work and home numbers, to remind me of appointments.

        Now the best of my service providers give me the option of choosing my notification preferences: none, phone, text, email, or paper mail.

    3. Adam*

      Yep, and doctors used to have a double-digit percentage of missed appointments, but reminders significantly reduce that. Reminders are great for getting people to actually do things they mean to do but forget about, and they help everyone by making it so that doctors see more patients and everyone gets better access to medical care.

      1. Emmy Noether*

        Yeah, there have always been flaky and forgetful people, and even responsible people forget stuff from time to time. Especially things that were scheduled months in advance. It’s human nature, and has always been thus. I bet it’s gotten much better for doctor’s offices since automated reminders became possible.

        I’m normally very organized and on top of things, but I did once forget a dentist appointment (marked it wrong in my calendar, and of course didn’t remember what I set 6 months ago), so I for one appreciate the reminders, even though I mostly don’t need them because I have my own system. I’m a belt and suspenders kind of person.

        1. Lady Lessa*

          But it can get ridiculous. I kept getting a reminder about a doctor’s appointment 4 months in the future but because the message was not clear, it took a person to leave a message to ask me to reschedule.

        2. Radioactive Cyborg Llama*

          I forget stuff because I have ADHD, not because I’m “flaky” or irresponsible.

          1. b*

            Yeah, fellow ADHDer, and I’m actually LOLing (respectfully) at Emmy’s comment above about ONCE forgetting a dentist appointment. I truly cannot comprehend what it would be like for forgetting an appointment to be a notable one-time experience…Sigh.

            Fortunately I bring enough value to my workplace and am afraid enough of getting fired that my ADHD has not kept me from being a valued employee, but my time sheets are frequently late.

            1. Orv*

              I’ve known people with ADHD who missed so many appointments the doctor that was TREATING THEM FOR ADHD declined to keep seeing them.

              1. Gyne*

                My take on this would be, clearly the treatment isn’t working and they should probably find a new doc with a different approach.

                1. Orv*

                  Agreed. But for some people it can be hard to find someone. My area has very few mental health professionals and some of them explicitly say they do not write prescriptions for ADHD meds.

          2. cabbagepants*

            Would you consider yourself forgetful? I think you might have misread the comment that you are taking offense with.

            1. b*

              IDK if you are responding to me or the comment above, but I’m not really very offended TBH! More marveling at how differently people’s brains work. I don’t really think about myself as forgetful in the way many people understand that… I actually always have a list in my mind of all the things I need to do, but sometimes struggle with the executive functioning required to place those things in time, that’s probably why me and the commenter above are bristling a little at the phrasing that “even responsible people” can forget things. I do consider myself fairly responsible.

              I didn’t really mean to derail with a whole ADHD discussion…oops. I think even a lot of ADHDers would have different reactions to the number of reminders in the original letter. You reach a point of diminishing returns with that stuff and people will get overwhelmed and start to tune it out. I personally would not love to get a lot of texts on my personal phone from my work.

          3. Emmy Noether*

            Oh no! I didn’t mean to imply that people with ADHD are flaky, I’m sorry that it came off that way. I forgot (heh!) to include neurospicy reasons.

            I should have limited myself to saying that people have always forgotten things, and we can better deal with that now. The existence of ADHD actually supports that point, since there have also always been people who had that.

          4. Empress Ki*

            Emmy Noether didn’t say that people who have ADHD are flaky. If you forgot stuff because you have ADHD, you aren’t flaky. But some people are flaky !

        3. Panne*

          Please don’t equate being forgetful with being irresponsible. Everyone is forgetful to a degree, and I can assure you that people who are more forgetful than average suffer from it a lot.

          To take myself as an example: no one ever seems to understand that I actually do take my appointments seriously, even if I can’t even remember that I’ve made it in the first place. It comes with a high social cost, but also a material one: I also frequently forget to pick up my medication that helps reduce the very same forgetfulness (among other things it does). Or forget to cancel subscriptions, or pay my bills if they’re not automated. Very costly, a bad memory.

          I blame myself enough about it, I really can do without everyone else’s judgement.

    4. Zap R.*

      Which is absolutely fantastic for people with executive function issues and other neurological disabilities. I can now expect and rely on reminders and now other people can finally expect and rely on me!

    5. Lily Rowan*

      When I was at the hairdresser recently, my stylist got a call from a client wondering if she still had an appointment, because she hadn’t gotten a reminder call. My stylist said she had just made the appointment a few days earlier! And they don’t have an automated system, the stylists just call people if they have a chance to (or if the person definitely needs it).

      1. greenlily*

        oh hey, now I’m wondering if we have the same hair salon. Named after a Hanna Barbera cartoon character? My salon doesn’t have any way for people to make appointments through the website or e-mail, so their staff has to call people in person to remind them of their appointments.

        (Yes, you have to make appointments by calling them or going there in person. Their reasoning for this boils down to “when we allow our clients the anonymity of electronic/automated communication, they inevitably abuse our staff and stylists, so we no longer offer this feature”. Which seems fair enough.)

    6. 1-800-BrownCow*

      I don’t mind needing the constant reminders. First, when I grew up with all this technology to remind us, my mom was a stay-at-home mom. She scheduled everything and wrote it on the calendar. While my brother and I were involved in a few activities outside of school, it wasn’t as busy as it is these days. There also weren’t as many other things going on in my parents lives that they had juggle either. Our lives were not as busy then at all like peoples’ lives are now. Compared to my parents, my family’s life is much, much busier. While we limit our kids to only 2 after school activities each, their activities are much busier and more involved. I also work during the day, so everything has to be scheduled in the evenings after work and school. I have a lot that I manage and have to keep track of. I’m grateful for my phone calendar and text reminders to help me keep track of my life. If it weren’t for that, I can guarantee I’d miss more appointments than I make.

    7. Spitfire Teapot*

      So agree! With medical and dental appointments I think it’s ok because before email/text technology, the office staff used postcards or called patients to remind. It’s important to have few no-shows to help the practice run smoothly. But for social things like concerts, etc., I think the auto reminders are silly. Also, the more reminders we get (sports events, kids’ activities, utility bill payments, and so on) the less we will take note of them and the less we will be managing our own calendars.

    8. Anonynon*

      Unintended consequence of reminder culture is that now I panic a little inside if I don’t have 100 reminders, because maybe I wrote down the appointment/time wrong, and I’m not supposed to be there.

      1. catlady*

        This happened to me last week! I had on my calendar this important follow up doctor’s appointment, I had already planned how my day would go to accommodate it, I let my coworkers know I’d be out for a few hours, and was walking to my car when it occurred to me that I hadn’t gotten any reminders or the usual check-in form. I checked my patient portal, and sure enough, it’s for the same day next month. Womp womp.

        1. Galentine*

          I’ve done this, too! About to leave for a doctor appointment, realized they hadn’t sent me a barrage of text and email reminders. Called the office…they had no record of the appointment. I think it was their error, not mine, but the second thoughts still saved me a wasted trip.

    9. theletter*

      I gotta say, as someone who really struggles with preparing for upcoming events, the automated reminders are a godsend.

    10. Babydoc3000*

      Yep. Our (medical) office used to call people the day before for appointment reminders. Stopped because people didn’t like answering the phone/don’t check voicemail.

      Now we have email reminders x2 and text reminders x3 for every appointment. No-show rate has decreased slightly but not by much. Now the excuse is they don’t always check their texts, that is their throwaway email and they never check it, they got a new phone and we don’t have that number, etc.

      To be fair, we also get people who complain about getting too many reminders. So I guess it evens out?

    11. Grith*

      It depends what you’re used to recently. My doctors usually sends a reminder for any in-person appointments – but when they didn’t for an appointment last week, the first I knew of it was when I got the follow-up text chastising me for wasting their time. I don’t really care if it’s something I have to manage myself or can rely on a reminder – I just need it to reliably be one or the other!

  7. Jason L*

    Re: Team reminders

    Gen X here. My contemporary sounds like an uber-together person I would be thrilled to work with! Unfortunately, not everyone is as together as they are, and different tools fit the workflow of different people we work with. Some of my colleagues are lost when Teams falls over dead. E-mail, at least, can be sorted and filtered. (Even Outlook/Exchange get nearly all the cruft and noise out of my main inbox!) I get that we may announce things on multiple platforms at once, and largely, I can deal with it.

    But they’re dead on when it comes to text messages. That can’t be filtered. The best I can do is play whack-a-mole with every permutation of a mass text list I get sent. No. When my butt wiggles, I stop what I’m doing and look, because I expect it’s something personally important. That’s how pagers and texts have work for me. Since it’s my phone, it runs on my terms. It sounds like my contemporary feels the same way–they’re entitled to.

    There’s mobile messaging, even mass-texting systems, that corporate can buy into, things we can opt in to or out of. Or they can hand out old-school Motorola pagers that we can shut off, or throw in a drawer when off the clock. (Medicine still uses them!) Otherwise, they must face trial in The Hague.

    [Side note: Alison, this column is a blessing. It’s one of my most valuable sources of perspective and sanity. Thank you!]

    1. Rebecca*

      Also Gen X. I find it much harder to draw a hard line around texting. I don’t have work email on my phone for a reason, and I don’t want my phone blowing up with work texts. I don’t really mind during work hours, but otherwise kindly leave me alone unless it’s truly an emergency or a once a year quick request for your emergency.

      The solution was actually quite simple. I ignored them. And left them until the next morning. Then I replied in the morning explaining that I limit my kids’ devices by placing them in a drawer and turning them off, and my husband and I were setting an example by doing it too. (We don’t actually do that. But that’s really neither here nor there.) This works. Do recommend.

    2. Jay (no, the other one)*

      I’m a doc and I wish I could get my old pager back. I have a work phone, so I can still put it away when I’m not working, so that’s something, at least. I still feel like I have to answer it when it rings as opposed to checking the number on a pager, finishing my task, and then calling back.

      1. Orv*

        I usually figure if it’s important people will leave a voice mail, but I understand for various reasons most doctors have a policy of not responding to voice mail. I don’t think I’ve ever gotten a callback for one.

      2. Nightengale*

        AMEN

        I miss my text pager so so much. It was not a phone. I could use the information on it to then go use a phone. After I had pulled up the patient info on the EHR and thought for 10 seconds.

        And the phone replacement for pager is an even bigger deal for me because I have neurological problems using touch screens. I can dial a smartphone but I can’t answer one. Or at least I can’t swipe to answer one from a lock screen. I have had long conversations with Apple Accessibility and our IT people and basically every option that would allow me to answer the phone is not permitted due to IT security. Just 5 minutes ago I called a parent and then couldn’t answer the phone when she called me back.

        At least I have managed to change the settings so the phone only vibrates when I get an e-mail from the answering service rather than every e-mail throughout the day including the computer training modules that the system assigns to me at 4 AM.

    3. AnonInCanada*

      This exactly! This is what WhatsApp or Signal is for. The group can be alerted on a work-related matter, which I can mute when I’m not working. If I hear a lot of thumbs-up responses to a message I don’t need any part of, I can mute that conversation.

      When a text comes to my personal phone number, I can’t mute that. It may be from a friend or family member that I need to be alert to. Mass group texts to my personal phone? No, no, a million billion times NO!

      1. Claire*

        That’s strange. On my phone I can definitely select specific text threads to mute. Are you sure you can’t do that on your phone?

        1. meggus*

          Group texts aren’t suitable for important notifications because of this. Muting it will lead to missed notifications. that’s why notification systems exist.

        2. AnonInCanada*

          I could, but I may end up missing an important text from someone in that group. This is why notifications like this should be relegated to an app like Teams or WhatsApp. At least I can filter out a conversation and mute it if it become nothing but a bunch of thumbs-ups and thank-you replies. In other words, what meggus said in this thread.

    4. meggus*

      LW even notes that their org already has those systems set up. i wonder what their IT department would have to say about it. tbqh.

    5. JustaTech*

      About a decade ago my husband’s tech startup had to buy physical pagers for their on-call rotation because too many people slept right through the alerts on their phones, so the alerts would get escalated all the way up to my husband, and wake both of us up.

      The physical pagers had a ring-tone I called “End Of The World” that woke up even the heaviest sleeper.

  8. Observer*

    #2 – You need to take it down a notch or 10.

    There is a very strong whiff of “this young whippersnpper is trying to teach ME how to do things?! I *know* how to do stuff, probably better than he does!” The fact that he’s 27 (clutching my pearls at how young he is!) has absolutely nothing to do with how he is handling the situation and the fact that you bring that up, and repeatedly allude to your own age and experience is not a good look. Worse, it’s not a good or healthy attitude and it’s likely to make your life difficult.

    I would point out that by your own description, the text was actually needed / appreciate by people, to the point that over half either responded or *liked* it.

    We are also being similarly hounded when it is time to turn in timesheets

    That’s almost certainly due to pressure from either payroll or someone higher up. *You* may be perfect about time sheets, but as others have pointed out, people not handing in time sheets on time is a really common, and seriously problematic issue. Because they need to pay you on time, but they still need the records. And experience is generally that once the payroll period passes it gets ever harder to get the time sheet. And its exponentially worse with people like you who seem to think that no sort of timekeeping records are really necessary anyway because you are monthly an salaried. And that’s just not the case. (For anyone who wants to know why so many places make even their exempt staff clock in, this is one of the reasons. It’s easier to use time clock records than chasing people for this stuff.)

    As for the rest. Maybe you know what all the procedures are for every situation, and remember everything you need to do without ever forgetting, and are always 100% aware of what may have changed. But guess what, your colleagues are mostly human beings who are hopefully good at their jobs but do sometimes forget.

    If your manager were requiring you to respond to all of his messages, that would be one thing. Then “intrusive” and “over the top” would probably be appropriate. But this? Using multiple communications lines is absolutely standard practice. Maybe annoying when your phone beeps and disturbs you when you’re in a flow state. But beyond that, I’m trying to figure out just why you are so up in arms (and I’m not that much younger than you.)

    1. mlem*

      I find many people use “like” simply to confirm “yes, I saw this”. I’ve done that myself. Its use doesn’t inherently mean everyone *needed* that notification.

      (I’m GenX and I’d probably be irked by four separate timesheet reminders myself, but I recognize I’m a cranky one.)

      1. Allonge*

        I think that four mass reminders will not help in any way, and that is what would annoy me.

        People who do the thing on time have their own system of doing it (recurring tasks in Outlook?).

        People who need/welcome an external reminder still likely don’t need four (what is it that makes the fourth one the one that gets through? Why not five?). Sending four means that there is pretty constant messaging about timesheets (and I guess not a lot of improvement on handing them in).

        Anyhow, OP, you sound stressed in general. Frankly, some of the stuff you describe would annoy me too, but you sound very very stressed. Is there anything else going on?

      2. Also-ADHD*

        Yeah, I actually don’t even like most messages I like (thumbs up means I see it, heart or something means I like it etc).

      3. AngryOctopus*

        Yep. Just silence that chat, and the acknowledgment “likes” won’t bother you!
        I get the timesheet reminders–OldJob was small but needed accurate timesheets because a lot of collaborators were paying for FTEs and they wanted the documentation to pay out. I now work at a larger company, but they need to make sure that vacation days and other things are tracked accurately. Some people work on more than one job code, and have to track that. And of course companies of all sizes can be outside audited to make sure that sick/vacation/etc. are all being tracked accurately and everyone is getting their entitlements. How do you do that? Timesheets!!

    2. mango chiffon*

      OP reminded me of a colleague who saw a different colleague had posted the same notification post in two different (well attended) slack channels and then replied to criticize the second colleague for redundant cross-posting while also saying his “intent was not to criticize”. Everyone started adding emoji TY and heart reactions to the original post that the colleague being criticized had posted, and then the critical colleague eventually quietly deleted his response. Some people just get really bent out of shape about minor things like this and can cause friction in a work place if they don’t figure out how to self regulate

    3. Smithy*

      Reading this letter, I’m reminded both of myself (millennial, no where near retirement) and my mother (months away and eager).

      I know that personally, I’m still in a place in my work life where if I’m getting that irritated by certain processes it may be time to consider if my current job responsibilities or lack there of leadership/seniority that I have is irking me. Essentially, I know I can do more, and I should seek a job where I am responsible for more. Being managed by a quickly promoted 27 year old would irk me too! But also make me question if I should be looking at roles with more advancement, leadership, etc. Essentially, how do I make the next few years as well as the next decades feel better.

      My mom was a high achiever for many years, looking for as much leadership and responsibility that she could get in her field, with her qualifications. Now that she’s retiring, and truly months away from being out the door – everything that used to be a mild irritation, bothers her BIG TIME. She is done, but coming to terms with not fixing things and also not letting those things bother her is a whole other challenge.

      If the OP truly is just a 2 or so years away from retirement, then finding other ways to detach from these irritants is likely a really good way to make those next two years being managed by someone much younger be less troublesome. Whether she ends up being an amazing supervisor, an average one or something else – finding ways to be unbothered can only enrich your life by thinking about how to fix and make better systems like payroll and snow days you will be leaving behind sooner rather than later.

      1. bamcheeks*

        I think this is a really good comment, and I think this kind of stuff is often the driver for a lot of people to gear-shift to part-time work or go more overtly to a “I just do the day-to-day, that stuff is Not My Problem” role.

        I suspect LW can’t just stop caring, but trying to see it as a deliberate choice whether to care enough to put energy into fixing it can be really helpful.

      1. AngryOctopus*

        I did immediately get a whiff of “How DARE this 27 year old try to tell ME what’s happening when I very well know it!”. Yes, it’s really hard to go through what is basically constant management turnover. But different people will do different things, and just rolling with it and adapting to yourself (ignoring it, silencing it, do not disturbing the chat for an hour) will serve you better than getting angry over it.

    5. Trippedamean*

      Agree totally with your take on the LW’s attitude. It probably comes across to their coworkers too, and doesn’t do them any favors. I say this from experience because I learned the hard way that being (maybe) older and wiser doesn’t mean that I get to treat people condescendingly. It alienated people rather than convincing them of my rightness and I wasn’t acknowledging that they have their own experiences and expertise that is different than mine.

    6. meggus*

      I’m GenX and work(ed) in IT. Notification systems and those reminders are set up so they’re not ignored. Group texts that everyone can reply to create constant chatter and get muted, so information gets missed. it’s also sharing personal, private employee information without consent on non-company systems. There’s valid, important reasons organizations set up notification and alert systems that shouldn’t be discarded or ignored.

      1. Observer*

        Notification systems and those reminders are set up so they’re not ignored. Group texts that everyone can reply to create constant chatter and get muted, so information gets missed.

        Which is why it’s weird to me that apparently the only notification going out from Emergency OPs is a text. Sure, we would use text, but we would do it in ADDITION to the other methods. And we *would* use texts, because sometimes people do not pay attention to the other methods. And a lot of people don’t have all of the other items on their personal phones / are not looking at their work phones after work. So, certainly for emergency closings it makes sense to use multiple platforms and the *one* of those platforms is personal text.

        I *would* suggest that they change the setup to not be a group text, but rather a text that goes to a list that is essentially bcc.

    7. Hush42*

      Some of OPs complaints feel like they come from being the person on the team who has been there the longest. I am a director at a company where I started in an entry level role 10 years ago. I am reminded fairly often that things that feel normal and obvious to me are not actually that obvious to people who haven’t been here for most of their adult life. For OP they know what the process for Snow Days is because they’ve been there for many years. Newer employees, who may be used to entirely different snow day processes, may not know what the process is for the snow day. Not only are newer employees learning the process for their new company they are also unlearning old processes. Snow days are mostly rare enough that someone who has been there even 1 year or 2 might not be 100% certain what they are supposed to do.

    8. Karma is My Boyfriend and so is Travis Kelce*

      This is a good distinction–while OP maybe be perfect about everything, there are probably others that aren’t. And what if–gasp!–there are new people on the team??? How DARE they be reminded about snow day protocol!

  9. Msd*

    I find the need to send out timesheet reminders to salaried folks really annoying because I know that if they only got paid for time entered then they would never forget. I spend a lot of time tracking down people. (and it’s usually the same people over and over)

    1. MassMatt*

      I know some jobs need to bill hours to specific clients or projects, but for the most part… why not stop wasting time on these time sheets? Are they really necessary, or is it like the TPS reports in Office Space?

      When I went to full salary saying goodbye to time sheets was one of the many perks.

      1. Leenie*

        Maybe it’s a public sector thing? I’m in the private sector with no billable hours, and I only need to submit a time sheet if I’m taking PTO or other leave.

        1. Lenora Rose*

          I know people who work government contracts – and especially if they’re a private sector business that only work on government contract for SOME projects – need to very clearly mark which project they were working on for how many hours in a given week.

          In some cases, too, the contracts stipulate both overall minimums and overall maximums to keep an eye on – so while the individual contributor is only expected to track their own time, the payroll and compliance folks need to know if the department as a whole is doing too much or too little on that contract before it becomes a violation. So they need to see everyone’s hours in a timely fashion.

          I only did that kind of work of a few months but I was advised to put in an alert for about 1o minutes before end of day to fill in what I did that day, because it was easier than trying to remember at the end of the week.

          1. Fanny Price*

            The government contracts require that time be entered on the same day it is worked. Doing it late occasionally isn’t usually a big deal, but doing it all at the end of the week can get you into trouble.

      2. Observer*

        Are they really necessary, or is it like the TPS reports in Office Space?

        It depends. For instance, where I work, I don’t need to allocate every hours, but there is a general allocation that is affected by how many hours I work. Also, in many cases it’s highly useful to keep track of how much PTO a person has left – and if you have separate buckets, which bucket. And it creates a documentation trail of work time in general, which can be useful in all sorts of situations.

        Is it possible that some places a requiring time sheets when they are not necessary? Sure. But even then, if that’s what the organization is requiring, it becomes important to do it – not because of its intrinsic value, but because failure to comply then become an *additional* time a resource sink.

        1. AngryOctopus*

          This! I’m salaried at my job, but we fill out monthly timesheets. For people at my level, it’s mainly to keep track of vacation time/personal time (we get 5 personal days that don’t roll over, but vacation time does roll over), and some people do work for different job codes so have to book that. Many jobs do it because it helps if there is an outside audit. OldJob used to do an internal audit once a year to make sure all time off was tracked and banked right, and that outside collaborators were being billed right.

      3. Language Lover*

        I’m not 100% sure they why they do it with salaried employees where I work but I always assumed it was to verify that no vacation was taken.

        1. Hastily Blessed Fritos*

          So assume “no vacation or sick time” unless they’ve requested it in the system?

          1. Sneaky Squirrel*

            I can guarantee if didn’t require our employees to complete a timesheet, some of our employees would never alert us that they took PTO.

            1. Allonge*

              This. People who forget time sheets will also forget to add their days off in any system – not because they mean to, or because they are bad people, but because they forget these things.

        2. doreen*

          That’s definitely one reason. My job at one time used paper timesheets that consisted of listing any time I took ff and which pot it should be deducted from.

        3. lilsheba*

          At my work, I’m salaried and I don’t ever have to fill out a timesheet. We track PTO in a PTO calendar and that’s it. Luckily it’s a very simple system.

      4. Msd*

        We are an outsource vendor and have to charge hours to specific customer projects/services/cost centers for billing purposes.

    2. allathian*

      I get it that it’s illegal to withhold salary from employees as a punishment, but some potential solutions do exist, but for them to be applied, your employer has to care about time sheets as much as the employees who process payroll do.

      If your performance evaluation had a section like “Employee has turned in their timesheet accurately filled and on time without fail,” and getting a no meant that the employee would be ineligible for bonuses, promotions, or raises for the next evaluation period, they’d definitely prioritize filling in the time sheets accurately and submitting them on time. One can dream, I guess…

      1. doreen*

        You’d be surprised. My job cut off direct deposit when someone was a certain amount of timesheets behind (2-3 months worth) – and it would still get to the point where supervisors essentially had to say ” I have your printed paycheck and will hand it over as soon as you hand over the timesheets.” Not sure what would have happened if the person still didn’t turn the timesheet in.

        1. ferrina*

          I know someone whose workplace does that! Your choice is to either stay on top of time sheets or *shudder* get a physical check.

          The people get paid, but it’s their choice on how convenient their money is.

      2. Tau*

        Or they don’t, and you harshly penalise an otherwise good employee who struggles with a relatively small part of their overall job.

        I get that this is frustrating for people processing payroll, but there are reasons for employees struggling with this that really aren’t “they don’t care because it’s not affecting them” and which punitive measures will not help with.

        1. Anecdata*

          When you’re in charge of timesheets, it feels like the most important thing. But in reality, any big company has 75000 bits of administrivia they need people to do, and it just isn’t reasonable for /all/ of them to be prioritized by leadership, or part of PAs. I try to get my timesheet in on time (and I’m salaried & non billable; so they’re tracking for general planning and for tax reasons) because it makes our admin’s life easier… but in the end, it’s just not what makes me a good engineer or not

      3. Governmint Condition*

        We don’t withhold paychecks here for unsubmitted timesheets, as per the law. However, you have to submit it on time if you worked any overtime, or you won’t get your overtime pay on time. Some people here tried to push back pointing to labor law, but the pushback to the pushback was “how can we pay you your overtime if we don’t know that you worked overtime?”

    3. Broken Lawn Chair*

      “if they only got paid for time entered then they would never forget.”

      Oh, if only that were true.

      1. JustaTech*

        As someone who *regularly* forgot to clock in at my first retail job, yeah, no.

        The only reason I was better at my next retail job was that the clock was pretty much impossible to miss.
        After that I set myself several calendar reminders, and even then had to run back into the office on a Friday afternoon to actually *send* my timesheet.

        I very much wanted to get paid so I could buy books (and eat and pay rent and make my student loan payments) but my brain had (and has) a hard time with timesheets.

    4. Your Mate in Oz*

      During the covid lockdowns our salaried staff stopped having to submit timesheets and have not restarted.

      Previously they had been one sheet of A4 paper every week, on which the salaried staff would dutifully write their name, “8” in each box of the “hours worked” column and some magic code in the “on what” column. Most engineers only did that when the admin person was standing at their desk demanding it, leading to 2-3 months of timesheets being completed at a time. Weirdly I was the only one who automated it, by making a copy of the Word document that automatically filled in the date, and having my name and 8 hours etc as fixed entries. I just printed one every week as expected and dropped it in the box. Now I WFH and I’m glad not to have to visit the office just for that :)

    5. AMH*

      I once had to collect timesheets from our field (construction) crews. While their pay legally didn’t depend on the timesheet being turned in, my boss claimed it did to them and would probably have followed through (one of many reasons I no longer work there). I can tell you that it did not in fact make people turn in their timesheets and I spent at least half a day a week tracking them down.

    6. metadata minion*

      “I find the need to send out timesheet reminders to salaried folks really annoying because I know that if they only got paid for time entered then they would never forget.”

      This is not how memory and executive functioning works! Ask anyone with ADHD how often they’ve had to pay late fees or otherwise lose money that they can’t afford because they have trouble remembering.

      Now, I also agree that it’s my own responsibility to remember these things, and I am grateful that technology now gives me a way to set my own obnoxious reminders to myself, but people aren’t forgetting their timesheets *at* you.

    7. learnedthehardway*

      I definitely need reminders. In fact, I set reminders for myself to do my invoicing. Why? Because I hate doing it, and literally will forget about it in order to avoid it.

    8. Russ M*

      I’m in consulting and the system is very simple.
      If you forget your timesheet twice in a calendar year, you are fired.

    10. Lenora Rose*

      The person who surprised me the most for forgetting to fill in time sheets was one of the most senior Ob/Gyn doctors in a birthing hospital. We’re talking weeks to months late, according to the nurses. And apparently, he was also the worst for working into the next shift and still being on the floor, so he was shooting himself in the foot for overtime.

      OTOH, I know this because he stuck around at shift end to talk a younger doctor through my first birth, which was a natural breech, and the younger doctor (himself probably about 6-8 years in the role) hadn’t actually done one.

      (All his breech births had been caesarians; I was being prepped for caesarian just in case, but the older doctor was pretty much “nope, the baby’s right here, there’s no time.”) So, let’s just say, much appreciated, Doc.

    11. Dainerra*

      I can guarantee you that’s not true. myself and all of my coworkers are paid hourly, not salary. and almost every week management is going around from person to person because the timesheet doesn’t have someone’s name on it. or I don’t have a timesheet for this person or that person. or this time she has your name on it but it’s completely blank. or you didn’t fill out what time you left on Tuesday.

    1. Ask a Manager* Post author

      Oooh, that one contains the detail that the interviewer shows up after Rachel and after the current boss, which would make it easier to handle (because you could go speak to them at the front of the restaurant before they’re seated).

    2. pennyforum*

      Since thats the case could she have discreetly asked the staff if she could move to another table before her interviewer arrived?

      1. JC*

        She did, and the restaurant refused because “it’s his usual table, he always sits there”. She’d also already pissed off the maitre’d by being weird and pretentious about it being with Gucci (and acting like the maitre’d wouldn’t know how to pronounce/spell it), so that didn’t help. She also didn’t know what the interviewer would look like (keep in mind this pre-dated social media and LinkedIn), so she couldn’t plan to grab him as he came in.

        I’ve always felt she should have tipped the maitre’d $20 and asked him to please convey her regrets to the interviewer from Gucci (who was played by the lovely Brent Spiner but I can’t recall the character’s name). Then, she should have left and used whatever method of communication got her the interview to ask for it to be rescheduled due to unforeseen circumstances…and ask that it be at Gucci’s office instead of a lunch interview. Whenever that reschedule happens, she could explain the funny situation in person. After all, she was being headhunted, not out shopping for a job, so they likely would have accommodated her.

    3. Angel*

      This just triggered an awful memory from my early 20s trying to leave a toxic job (that I ended up staying at for another three years). Met recruiters for lunch at a restaurant next door to my office (both were youngish women like me) and my boss walked in. I proceeded to freak out and hide behind a menu and even ducked under the table at one point pretending to fuss over my shoes. The recruiters played along and we ended up leaving as it was clear we wouldn’t be able to speak freely. I cringe so hard when I think back to how naive I was and how I acted. I didn’t hear back from them after that and resigned myself to staying at the job as it was “too hard” to find something else. My boss made pointed comments for months as he clearly saw what was going on.

      1. RT*

        After that roller coaster, reading that your boss knew what was going on anyway just broke me. Hugs!! At least it’s in the past.

    4. GammaGirl1908*

      I think the best course of action would have been to meet the interviewer at the host stand, explain the situation, and ask to go to another restaurant, reiterating how excited you are for the interview. If the interviewer had already been seated when she arrived, it would have been more awkward, but maybe ask the interviewer to step over to the host stand with you for a moment (making a silent but slightly frantic expression that makes it clear you have an emergency).

      Of course, TV being TV, she chose the absolute weirdest option. Woof.

      Also and not for nothing, I have passed by a number of conversations about noting the moment in an old TV or movie plot where a mobile device would have aborted the plot of the episode. This is especially true in many early 2000s shows, including Friends, where the writers artificially kept the characters without mobile phones for a weirdly long time because a lot of plot devices depended on miscommunication or lack of information (the Friends characters only used mobile phones a couple of times, to my memory). In 2004, it was a little early for BlackBerrys, but executives at Ralph Lauren and Gucci likely would have had phones. Maybe Rachel wouldn’t have had her interviewer’s direct contact number, but she could have made a couple of quick calls to try to get the interviewer’s number. Or even typed a message to show the interviewer that explained the situation without having to say it aloud (although she could have written a note to do that!).

    5. I edit everything*

      If you have never seen your interviewer before, though, which is the norm, you wouldn’t know who they were until they came toward your table. You’d have to talk to the hostess before the interviewer arrived.

      1. GammaGirl1908*

        True, but even that would have been better than what she did. She could’ve waited by host stand to listen to the names of people arriving, and when she recognized the name of her interviewer, she could’ve intercepted him. Or she could’ve alerted the host that she needed to intercept the interviewer before he came to her table and enlisted the host’s help.

  11. Pippa*

    I recently deleted my Glassdoor account when I noted that MANY reviews of a previous employer had been edited to be more positive. Three reviews referencing preditory behavior towards young attractive women were removed entirely as were two which called out negative minority experiences. The firm has a lot of obvious positive management or new hire reviews. Seeing that they somehow got Glassdoor to remove truthful bad reviews made me lose trust in the whole platform.

    1. JSPA*

      wishlist: Alison uses patreon and go-fund-me, and contracts some recently- retired IT and design people to start a nonprofit “employer reviews” site, that puts anonymity front-and-center.

    2. Carole from Accounts*

      This makes me so sad because there’s really no other site out there where you can get such a review-based look into a company.

    3. Llellayena*

      I find this more disturbing than the collection of personal info. Our info is out there so much, in many cases willingly posted, that having it attached to an account doesn’t bother me (thought the collection tactics do). As long as no one outside Glassdoor can connect that info to my “anonymous” review and they don’t share with anyone, I’m fine. But it’s NOT ok to change my written comments without my permission. If you want a comment changed Glassdoor can offer a ONE TIME per post service to transmit a request for edit, which can be ignored with no penalty. No direct contact between company and poster. But no one except the OP should be able to alter comments, not even Glassdoor itself.

      1. Kevin Sours*

        “As long as no one outside Glassdoor can connect that info to my “anonymous” review and they don’t share with anyone, I’m fine.”

        How do you know? How could you know? And even if they don’t today, what’s stopping them from doing it tomorrow? Do you really trust a company with the attitudes displayed to safeguard the information they insist you provide?

    4. Pierrot*

      Yup, I made this comment above, but I just checked the Glassdoor page for a former employer and the review I made in 2019 is gone, along with a number of others (fortunately they’ve received many negative reviews that say the same thing since then).

    5. Falling Diphthong*

      It sounds like Glassdoor has joined the enshittification lists.

      From Cory Doctorow, in Wired: Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves.

    6. Miette*

      Alarmingly, when I just logged into it to delete my profile, I had to answer a series of questions about my employment status, including whether I was employed or not. I am self-employed so I entered “employed” and my company as “self-employed”. Welp, when I went to my profile, it had changed me to “not employed” and when I wanted to change it, it asked me for my current employer email! WTAF.

      Looks like they’d rather be more like LinkedIn and less like Indeed, but these tactics aren’t the way to get there. Deleting immediately.

    7. Caroline*

      My company still has negative reviews up (including one scathing one from a couple of years ago where someone accused a C-level executive of blatantly lying to the CEO about project statuses and accepting kickbacks from vendors.)

  12. Leenie*

    I’m confused about the numbers involved in the second letter. So their department is 15 people and they got a “mass” text from an unknown number, to which about half the people replied. So are they considering a 15 person group text to be “mass”? Because 7 or 8 responses wouldn’t even flicker my irritation meter. Or was it a much bigger list? If it’s a much bigger list, are they sure it’s even their boss sending it from the unknown number? Why would the boss send the reminders to a bunch of people who aren’t in her department? Anyway, even if they’re sure it’s their boss, and it’s going to an objectively large number of people, the LW is overreacting. But as the letter reads, I’m not even sure what they’re upset about (My phone dinged 7 times, and for some reason I didn’t silence the offending conversation!), or that the target of their irritation is the correct person. And to clarify, this isn’t me not taking the LW at their word. This is me reading and believing what the LW is saying, but just not understanding everything that they’re trying to convey.

    1. Banana Pyjamas*

      Same. Same. The op seems really bitter over really small normal things. Things that are easy to ignore or silence. Even the timesheet reminder emails could automatically be filtered to their own folder.

      1. Captain dddd-cccc-ddWdd*

        Especially as OP says they are only 2 years from retiring… this seems the sort of thing to just internally roll your eyes over and let it go, knowing you’ll only have to put up with it for 2 years (or maybe less if they continue to have turnover/change of management!).

    2. Myrin*

      I think OP uses “mass text” in the sense that it wasn’t an individual text tailored to her specifically but addressed to a bigger group of people.

      But I had the same thoughts as you – I initially read it as those texts and reminders coming from way up and going to every employee, but OP ends her letter with mentioning her department’s numbers and her previous direct boss who never sent stuff like this, so I have to assume that she knows now that the unknown number was her new boss and that the text really only went to people in her department. And if that’s the case, much like you say, the numbers seem rather minimal. I can understand being annoyed but OP sounds legitimately furious.

      OP, if you’re reading, to me personally, it sounds like you’re either in BEC mode with your boss or you’re stressed/overwhelmed/overworked/aggravated in a more general sense and this is just the straw that keeps breaking the camel’s back.
      I don’t think you would be out of line to talk to your supervisor about this, but it would have to be with curiosity and an open mind – possibly she’s found out that there’s been a huge problem with people not receiving the emergeny operations texts or lagging behind with their timesheets and she’s just trying to see if this new method will help.
      Above all, though, I feel like it would be really beneficial to try and get some intentional mental distance between yourself and all these annoyances – try practicing just letting it rolling off your back.

    3. Cat*

      If this is LW’s personal number, a mass text has the same issue as emailing a bunch of people to their personal email and not putting them all in the bcc

      1. Orv*

        Agree that’d be a problem for me, but since OP didn’t mention it I suspect this is one of those workplaces where it’s normalized for everyone to have everyone else’s cell number. Maybe it was a condition of working remote.

        Personally, I work in IT and I deliberately safeguard my personal number because I’m not supposed to be on call, but if people could reach me at any time I effectively would be.

    4. Janet Pinkerton*

      Oh I would be annoyed to be on a 15-person text chain for “we’re closed today”! Like, I’m not trying to have everyone have my cell number. I don’t care if my coworkers saw the text. I’m trying to enjoy my bonus day off and I keep being interrupted by work thoughts, and I wouldn’t feel like I could mute the thread in case someone sent a work text. Just because it wouldn’t phase you doesn’t mean it’s not reasonable for someone else to find irritating.

      I’m 35, so I’m not even an elder millennial, for the record.

      1. Leenie*

        I’m solidly Gen-X. So, if nothing else, we’re helping to prove that the LW’s hypothesis that this is generational/age related is probably off base.

    5. Allonge*

      I think you put your finger on where the cultural divide is on this: it’s not generations, it’s how many texts / notifications are too much in a day.

      For me, especially if it’s about something I did not need a reminder about, 7-8 texts are too much and would bother me (not to mention that this is a recurrent thing, so frustration builds up). Like: I just got 6 Whatsapp messages from 3 different people (work-friends) within 30 minutes and I muted my entire phone because it was too much.

      At the same time there are people who text consistently through the day. Obviously for them an extra 7 messages may be nothing!

      1. Too Many Tabs Open*

        I have an ancient pay-as-you-go phone plan that charges me per text, so if I’d given them my actual text number, I’d be extremely annoyed that all these replies were blowing through my funds.

        In actuality, that’s why I use my Google Voice number at most places that ask for texts.

    6. Anon For This #554*

      Well…I’m confused why you don’t find 7 phone pings that turn out to be essentially non-information (a thumbs up) for most recipients to be annoying – the only person who might need such an acknowledgement is the manager. Which means we likely hold different tolerance levels for alerts, as does OP. It’s okay to have different preferences here, though OP does seem to be overly annoyed by all this; this is an adaptation to a new boss that’s not going well.

      I really don’t think a work text thread during work hours is something that should be muted, though, even for an off day.

      1. Leenie*

        Fair enough. It might just be that I keep my notifications silenced virtually all of the time. If I’m waiting for something urgent, I’ll turn the sound on. Or, I’ll allow sound for specific, important contacts. Otherwise, I’ll either see things pop up, or check when I have a chance. I’m not an ER surgeon, so nothing is quite that time sensitive. If notifications are flashing on my screen enough to become annoying, which, given that they aren’t audible, is a much higher threshold, I’ll mute the thread itself.

    7. Alton Brown's Evil Twin*

      I dunno. 15 certainly counts as “mass” to me. Not to mention that this is not a cocktail-party conversation, but rather a directed 1-to-many communication.

    8. Pescadero*

      My phone pinging more than once a day for something I don’t need to know would be irritating… 7-8 notifications and having to mute a conversation because folks are sending thumbs up – I’m going to be real irritated.

      1. I Have RBF*

        Me too.

        I don’t know how anyone can stand their phone constantly pinging with notifications. It would drive me to toss the phone in a drawer if I couldn’t shut it off.

    9. Ess Ess*

      That was my gut reaction too. At first they said mass text and reply-alls so I thought this would be hundreds of people. But then OP say it’s a group of 15. That would be a small set of responses and also a small enough group to just have a quick email discussion to see if others are bothered by all the notifications to come up with an agreement not to do the ‘thumbs up’ or reply-all to reduce notifications.

    10. Another Use of the Identify Spell*

      It’s an unknown number because LW doesn’t have it saved. I would frankly be surprised if they had not had the opportunity (or several) to save Boss’s number in case of emergency. Everywhere I’ve worked since mobile phones became widespread has suggested or even required it. (e.g. If you’re stuck in a ditch, at least you can let them know you’re not *dead* in a ditch and you have been able to call for help.) I would actually put money on the offending “unknown” number showing as Manager Name on everyone else’s phone.
      – Technically GenX, mostly Elder Millennial

  13. Twix*

    For number 2, I do think there’s a generational element at play. In my experience, older people tend to find push notifications and similar a lot more intrusive than younger people who grew up them being a normal thing. I work with computers and outside of work I regularly get asked to look at peoples’ IT problems, and “How come everything sends you so many damn notifications these days!?” is an incredibly common refrain from Boomers about things like software update popups. I don’t mean that to sound patronizing – younger people are just native speakers of systems older people had to learn as a second language, and are generally better at filtering out the irrelevant stuff automatically.

    2. Awkwardness*

      younger people (…) are generally better at filtering out the irrelevant stuff automatically.

      I know that this a common narrative, but I do not agree. Younger people may be used to it, but it is not necessarily a good thing and they might just not realise the impact. There is quite some study on decrease of attention span or focus.

      1. Twix*

        I actually don’t disagree with that at all, but I was talking about the emotional impact, not the functional impact. By “automatically” I meant that younger people find them less annoying because dealing with them is more reflexive and requires less conscious thought. What the consequences of that are and whether it’s a good thing or a bad thing is a separate issue.

        1. Campaign to Stop Ageism*

          I’m 68, work full-time, and you had better believe I’m the best at deleting and ignoring irrelevant information, however received. I would never get anything done otherwise, and I must stay focused. We just living an age of information and communication overload and must develop coping strategies, no matter the age.

          I don’t know why the concept of individuality apart from age is so hard to grasp. Things bother/don’t bother people of all ages.

          OP, I mute group texts all the time, do that and stop expending energy on this. Think about your retirement when all this will be behind you.

        2. kiki*

          I agree with what you’re saying, Twix. Younger folks are not mad about the alerts because they’re so used to it. It’s probably impacting them more than they may realize, but it’s very normal to them.

          1. Bast*

            What are we classifying as “younger folk” here? I am in my early 30s and would consider constant notifications to a mass email/text annoying. My kids are involved in sports, and the mass “Game is tonight at 6, remember your glove” text and the subsequent 4 “Okays” 3 “Thanks” and what feels like 100 thumbs up reacts gets on my nerves, especially when I am at work or trying to focus on something. It’s gotten so bad that I will take my phone and lock it in the desk drawer to avoid seeing the constant light up, but then I also risk missing something actually important.

            1. Twix*

              In my experience the dividing line is roughly people who remember the pre-internet world, which falls in the middle of Millenials. But as with any trend, being true in general doesn’t mean it’s true for every individual.

            2. doreen*

              I get annoyed at “reply all ” emails and I wish there was an easy way to respond to only one person in a group text. Because I think a lot of time , those notifications are useful to the person who sent the original although they are annoying to everyone else. But it’s a lot easier for someone to acknowledge the text by replying “K” than it is to sent a “K” just to the original texter.

            3. kiki*

              To me, there’s not a solid dividing line but a gradient. As age decreases, the annoyance to frequent notifications tends to decrease.

              FWIW, I’m also in my early 30s and I didn’t mentally include myself in younger folks. I’m not terribly upset by them, but I’m also annoyed and get on edge when I’m receiving an unusual number of notifications in high density. It’s a lot to sort through.

              1. Bast*

                I am confused at where I fit in when it comes to “younger folk” now, and think it depends a lot on the speaker (which can be hard to parse out online). I realize when someone 50+ says “younger folk” I’m probably included, but then to quite a bit of people “younger folk” is referring to people under 30. To my grandparents, it is anyone under the age of 80.

                1. kiki*

                  Right, I also think that’s part of why I think a gradient is more illustrative than any sort of clear cut-off of who a young person is. Because I am younger than folks in their 50s. I think I am less annoyed by email reminders and calendar reminders than some of them might be. But folks in their 20s are younger than me and likely more used to being in a million group texts they need to mute due to all the reactions/responses.

            4. Pescadero*

              I’d put the dividing line right around “graduated from high school before cell phones with texting were common” – so folks who graduated from high school before ~2000.

    3. The Prettiest Curse*

      Communication methods and styles have changed so fast since the internet was widely adopted for consumer use that I think it’s really hard to generalise how people have reacted to those changes. And in 30 years’ time, the Gen Z’ers reading this will probably be writing in to Ask An Android Manager to ask whether their manager needs to keep reminding people that there’s a time lag when notifications are sent from a space station, or something.

    4. Sapientia*

      Younger people also tend to have their phones on mute or vibrate all the time – probably because of the influx of notifications. Personally, I have configurated notifications for every app so I tend to get only the ones I want to get: some are mute, some don’t show up at all, very few are loud or pop-ups. That can even be done to different contacts, just like the specialised ringtones.

    5. bamcheeks*

      I would see the generational difference (with all the usual caveats abo generations being broad generations, people are individuals etc) as being the extent you’re expected to manage your own boundaries and access in a world of near limitless conmunications. Don’t like emails out of hours? Take Outlook off your phone. Don’t like push notifications? Switch them off. Don’t care about your colleague’s puppy? Mute the group chat.

      Obviously this doesn’t work if your work doesn’t let you have boundaries, but it doesn’t sound like that’s the LW’s problem so much as the feeling that this many notifications shouldn’t be sent in the first place.

      1. UKDancer*

        Yes. when I was newer in the workplace we used to get a newsletter from a member of staff which was supposed to boost morale and update us. I didn’t like this person (Fred) much and the newsletter was teethgrindingly annoying, folksy and just everything I hated.

        I asked my boss (Tywin) if he could get Fred to stop sending this. He suggested I set up an automatic email rule so Fred’s emails on this subject went to a folder where I didn’t see them.

        Tywin also explained that trying to stop Fred doing his Fred thing was a bad use of personal capital, would make me look unreasonable and would cause bad feeling and I’d do better to learn to ignore it and minimise the Fred impact.

        I learnt a lot about power from Tywin and how to get stuff done. He was unscrupulous but quite often right.

      2. metadata minion*

        Yeah, my first step on getting a new device of any kind is to turn off almost all features that make it flash, buzz, beep, or otherwise try to get my attention. It rings if someone is actually calling me, and it gives an unobtrusive visual alert for texts and apps like rideshares where I actually want know what’s happening in a timely manner. I have Slack on my phone because sometimes it’s easier to use my phone when I’m away from my computer (I’m a librarian and have to periodically go do stuff in the stacks) or I need to quickly text my boss that I’m out sick, but it doesn’t do phone alerts the way I get desktop alerts on my work computer.

    6. Hastily Blessed Fritos*

      Who do you think wrote those damn systems? People over 40, or over 60, or over 80, are not necessarily technically illiterate.

      2. Twix*

        I didn’t say they were. Recognizing general trends is not the same thing as saying that it applies to every single person in a given group.

      3. kiki*

        I don’t think Twix was saying that at all! It’s not about technical literacy, it’s about being adjusted to the barrage of notifications and information. I think we can all agree that incessant notifications are probably not good for anyone, but a lot of younger people don’t remember any other way. People of all age groups have adapted, of course, but I think a greater percentage of young people wouldn’t even bat an eye to see 37 missed notifications on their phone after an hour. Whereas I (early-30s) would be a bit stressed.

    7. Falling Diphthong*

      When I reinstalled Uber, I hesitated over the “allow notifications” option because I do want it to tell me that the car is 5 minutes out, is that what it means?

      That is not what it means. And I can’t turn it off. So throughout the week my phone will make a noise, and it’s uber letting me know that I could call an uber right now!

      It stands out because I’ve managed to kill notifications on most things.

      2. AnonInCanada*

        I had the same problem with Uber (and Eats). Every time I want to order some lunch and open the Uber Eats app, the first thing that pops up is “Enable push notifications?” To which I immediately say “NO!!!” Because the one time I turned it on, my phone would (insert Samsung five-note sound here) about 15 times a day, all coming from the Uber Eats app suggesting a discount on Burger Joint or “BOGO on Slurpees at 7-Eleven.” Go. Away!

        I think I may have three apps that will make notification sounds on my phone: Messages, Outlook, and Phone. Every other app can buzz off with the notifications! I don’t need to hear about so-and-so replying to my Reddit post or XYZ upvoting my Quora answer. I get enough distractions in my day, thank you!

      3. Ess Ess*

        if you have an android phone, when you go into ‘settings’ there is a section for ‘apps and notifications’. If you go to the ‘Uber’ app inside the ‘apps and notifications’ there is a switch to turn off the notifications for that app.

    8. Peanut Hamper*

      You don’t mean to sound patronizing, but you do sound ageist. Computers have been around a long time. I’ve worked with them for 44 of my 55 years.

      This has nothing to do with age. LW #2’s situation has everything to do with a string of changes in management and frustration at having to deal with those changes on a regular basis. Annoying yes, but it sometimes happens. Developing strategies for dealing with those changes is what is needed here.

      1. Allonge*

        Computers have been around, but multi-level notifications systems on smartphones have not and nor was the opportunity to get used to them. The level of ‘normal amount of beeping’ increased a bit, is what Twix is getting at, not that people above 40 cannot possibly comprehend smartphones.

        My Commodore 64 did not need me to tell it on three different levels when and about what I wanted to be notified by a beep, ding-dong or flashing lights, not did it assume that my default was to be able to tolerate it going off once every five minutes about ‘you should check if you have new messages’ and that I would turn on ‘sleep mode’ if I wanted a break from instant availability. This is a cultural shift.

        1. Peanut Hamper*

          So Twix is saying that the ability to adapt to these changes depends on age? If so, that’s still ageist.

          1. Allonge*

            Ok, obviously I am not Twix, but my point was: if someone grew up in the ‘notifications everywhere’ age, they have nothing to adapt to. Beeping is the default.

            It’s not a capability thing, it’s an energy level thing: my English is pretty good and I do great work in an English language environment, but it still costs me more energy than it costs my colleague who has English as a first language.

          2. bamcheeks*

            Whether or not you need to “adapt” or whether this is the only way you’ve done things is always based on age, surely, cross-referenced with the level of seniority you have when a new way of doing things comes in.

            I’m “started on Windows 3.1” years old, and moving to cloud-based services and losing a lot of the functionality of Microsoft Office in exchange for ease of access regardless of location was definitely an adaptation for me. My twenty-something assistant never used pre-Microsoft 360 systems, so he’s not adapting.

      2. Twix*

        I’m not sure how making a general observation about generational differences with no value judgment attached is discriminatory. I’m not saying it applies to every single older person, nor that LW2 is wrong to be annoyed by their situation, nor that this is the only reason they’re frustrated. I disagree with Alison’s statement that there’s no generational factor here, but everything else she said is absolutely true. And yes, computers have been around for a long time, but push notifications and popups across multiple communication platforms directly to your desktop and a device you carry on you at all times have not.

    9. Spencer Hastings*

      I’m a mid-to-late Millennial and I turn off as many push notifications as I can. If my phone buzzes, I want it to be for something important.

    10. I'm a Pepper*

      I wonder if LW2 is someone who keeps their phone volume on rather than silenced. I know that for myself, if I kept my phone volume turned on and got a barrage of texts that I didn’t need/want, I’d be pretty miffed too! But since my phone is always on vibrate/silent, it’s a lot easier to ignore notifications until I have the time or desire to look at them.

      When I’m around other people who keep their cell phone volume on, I get distracted by *their* notifications. LW2’s intense reaction makes a tad more sense to me if they’re hearing a loud text tone go off over and over again.

  14. Posilutely*

    I think I’d still rather be in Rachel’s Gucci situation than be Monica when she has the chef interview with the creepy salad dude:
    – I thought that I would cut up the tomatoes.
    – Are they firm?
    – They’re… all right.
    – You’re sure they haven’t gone bad? You’re sure they’re not very, very bad?
    – No, really, they’re okay.
    – You gonna slice them up real nice?
    – Actually, I was going to do them julienne.
    – Uuhhhhhhh.
    – I’m outta here!

  15. Lizzie (with the deaf cat)*

    LW1 – yes your organisation is just doing performative behaviour. Looks good, means nothing, sometimes means less than nothing – sometimes means things are going backwards fast.
    Look at the Ruth Bader Ginsberg Annual Leadership Awards – originally meant for “women who exemplify human qualities of empathy and humility.” This year the recipients were: Sylvester Stallone. Elon Musk. Rupert Murdoch. Michael Milken. Martha Stewart. So – two people who have served jail time for dishonesty, the man who destroyed twitter, the man who arguably has done more to destroy democracy than anyone ever, and an aged actor. If you want to be even more disbelieving that this could be true – guess who was on the board to select last year’s recipients – Sylvester Stallone’s wife Jennifer Flavin. Martha Stewart.
    These people have no shame.
    So, LW1, your D&I committee is just for show, in my opinion. Ask them for their input on this year’s RBG award recipients. Bet they tell you it is a good inclusive change that men can get the awards as well.

    2. HairApparent*

      I had no idea until I was on the other side of these types of awards that recipients are often selected in large part based on who will generate money/publicity rather than actual merit. They’re pretty much all about ticket sales, sponsorships & ad sales.

    3. Pastor Petty Labelle*

      Yes very performative. Oh give the little ladies a compliment and they will be happy.

      Last month was Black History Month. Did they suggest everyone give their black colleagues a compliment?

      1. bamcheeks*

        I mean, a lot of places will have done that or less. I wouldn’t necessarily point at corporate Black History Month activities as an example of Getting It Right.

        1. Observer*

          I mean, a lot of places will have done that or less.

          Honestly, I would prefer not marking the month to this. This is not just merely performative, but it’s offensive and actively damaging by minimizing the real problems, especially in the workplace and acting as though people in the respective groups are children who can be appeased with a verbal candy.

    4. Galentine*

      Wow, that is…something. It’s like the episode of Parks & Rec where Ron wins Indiana Woman of the Year.

    5. Simon (he/him)*

      Wow, that’s basically the real-life version of the bit on Parks and Rec where Ron wins Woman of the Year award. That’s awful

    6. mitzijoy*

      LW1, yes. I’ve always believed it’s mostly performative. I see very little in terms of actionable behavior.

  16. nnn*

    I’m thinking #2 would be well served by looking into how they can adjust their notification settings so things aren’t beeping at them as much.

    I know you can mute Teams group chats so it doesn’t beep or pop up, while still being able to see in the left-hand column that the chat contains a new message. Can you mute other things similarly? Set up an email rule so the timesheet reminders are redirected into their own folder (or perhaps even auto-deleted)? Set up your phone so it doesn’t beep for reactions, or so the mass text number doesn’t beep at all? Mute your phone entirely once you get the snow day notification, set up your Out of Office message, and go back to bed with the covers over your head?

    A lot of this depends on the specific apps being used, but often you can have nuanced control if you dig into the settings.

  18. nnn*

    #3: I haven’t seen the episode in ages so I’m not sure of the exact choreography, but I think in general terms the least worst approach would be to not explain to Rachel’s boss why they’re having lunch at all. If introductions happen, Rachel would introduce her boss to her interviewer by saying he’s her boss, and then introduce her interviewer to her boss just by name, with no mention of role. All proceeding as though “We’re in a restaurant, we’re having lunch, there’s nothing worth mentioning going on here.”

    If absolutely pressed, she could tell her boss she’s networking.

    1. Varthema*

      If their tables are next to each other, it’d be pretty hard to mask the fact that it’s an interview.

      1. Varthema*

        and tbh, you can probably strongly suspect that it’s an interview by body language alone. Ideally the boss would pretend to not notice, but it’d be nerve-wracking to pin your current job security on that assumption. Nerve-wracking enough that it’s likely to scupper the interview for you if you’re on edge. Never agree to a restaurant interview, long story short!

        1. 1-800-BrownCow*

          You’re last sentence isn’t always an option though. I work in a field where interviews are often with numerous people and can be schedule for 5-6 hour days. It’s quite common that throughout the interview process, 1 or 2 of the interviewers takes the interviewee out to lunch. I would be annoyed if I had to spend that many hours interviewing and not get fed a meal. A couple places I interviewed, they brought lunch in so we didn’t leave the facility, but more often than not, I was taken to lunch, or as the interviewer, I’ve taken several interviewees out to lunch.

          1. Antilles*

            Not only is it “not always an option”, it also feels very unnecessary. Unless your town is so small that you can count the number of “business caliber” restaurants on one hand, the Friends scenario simply isn’t realistic. Especially in larger cities where the new job’s office is likely to be in a slightly different area of town than your current one.

            What are the odds your boss happens to be visiting that exact restaurant in that exact same area of town (which isn’t near the office), on the exact date of your interview, at the exact same time of your interview?

            It’s a sitcom scenario which is interesting to discuss and consider, but it’s so unlikely to *actually* occur that “never agree to a restaurant interview” just seems way too extreme of a conclusion here.

    2. General von Klinkerhoffen*

      I have a vague idea the tables are next to each other and (Rachel believes) her boss hears every single word.

      1. Myrin*

        Yeah, I’ve never seen Friends but OP mentions “the table next to her” and I assumed the tables are pretty close together or at least not far enough apart to make it impossible for your neighbour to hear (if only just parts of) what you say.

        1. siliril*

          I just watched the clip online, and it’s essentially the worst possible option, cause TV. The tables are close enough together that the chairs are practically touching. And of course she ends up sitting almost directly back to back with her current boss.

          Based on the sequence of events in the clip there’s little Rachel could have done once she was shown to the table. The host refuses to move her to another table, her current boss recognizes her seconds afterwards, and the interviewer arrives moments after that! I honestly think I would have made an excuse to leave. Email an apology afterwards and consider the interview a dud.

          Also, lesson learned to treat staff kindly. Rachel makes a big deal of her interview with Gucci and talks down to the host. Her best shot at getting out of the situation was blown because the host had 0 sympathy.

  19. Maroon*

    OP 2: I agree that these reminders aren’t in any way about you as a person or an employee, but could there be a chance that you’re annoyed at the reminders because they’re stand-ins for a general pattern of micromanagement or lack of trust? It sounds as though you may be aggravated at how your supervisor perceives you more generally, and the reminder messages now represent this underlying pattern. However, it’s also easy to become annoyed for no obvious reason (I know from experience!)

    Since you’ve only worked for this boss for a few weeks, maybe the supervisor will become more trusting in your team as time goes on. However, this could also end up on the long list of mundane aggravations we endure for our jobs.

    1. AmberFox*

      Yeah, this is not too far from what I was coming to say. I’m an elder Millennial and we’re going through a lot of work stress right now (whoo, reorgs…). I have had days where I would literally rather claw my face off than have to deal with YET ANOTHER reminder or group message or chipper email about something I already know or drawing my attention to something I already saw four hours ago omg shut uppppppppp.

      The thing is, though… those 8 million reminders? If I’ve already seen the thing or done the thing, they’re not about ME. They’re not a personal affront to ME. They’re all about the 80 other people that may or may not need the reminder. And that makes it much easier to just… snarl at my computer, clear the notification, and move on.

      The texting in this situation makes sense – not everyone is remote or will have started up their PC at the point he sent that, I’m sure. But after about the third pointless thumbs-up on a text string, I would have just rolled my eyes and mute the whole thread for a few hours.

      There probably is room to go back to your boss and say, “This high level of notifications is a LOT, I’m feeling overwhelmed by it, and there might be other people feeling overwhelmed too. Would it be possible to limit these reminders to one channel, maybe, so the message still gets out there but it’s not a constant barrage of alerts everywhere?” Might not do any good, but I had some good luck pushing back that way on excessive notifications (Ask Me About the Teams group where I got pinged within 5 minutes by the external channel, the internal channel, and three different individuals who wanted to make sure I’d seen the one original external channel message that needed an answer…).

  20. tokyo salaryman*

    LW1: We have recently had a similar thing. Our HR gets really behind themed months for DEI, such as celebrating Pride Month or people with disabilities in December – but interestingly, for those, we’re never encouraged to publicly thank or praise our LGBT+ or disabled colleagues.

    1. Captain dddd-cccc-ddWdd*

      These things are a pain in the ….. – I want to be praised (if at all) for the thing I did, not for doing the thing whilst being female! It almost comes off as “normally we don’t praise women for their work so today let’s make sure we do because it’s International Women’s Day”.

    2. Brain the Brian*

      Our HR gets really excited about some of these months, but not others. And it’s really, really noticeable.

    3. ChurchOfDietCoke*

      My old company had a HUGE thing about Awareness Months. Rainbow flags everywhere for Pride, massive events for Black History Month, etc. Changing our e-mail signatures on a weekly basis to reflect the current Awareness thing. Yet almost all of our employees were straight, white, middle class women and there were no real moves towards increasing the diversity through better recruitment practices.

      On International Women’s Day one year, four of the five speakers at a Keynote Event were white, middle class, university-educated men, one was a transwoman, and she was barely able to get a word in edgeways for the entire hour.

      Later the same year, our HR department had to explain to a interview candidate with a physical disability that someone would ‘meet her in the loading bay and take her up to the offices in the Goods Lift’ because there was no easy access route into the building for a wheelchair user or person using mobility aids due to steps. Once inside the building, there was ONE accessible toilet, tucked away behind the IT offices, and two of the three training rooms used by me and my team were not wheelchair accessible due to steps. Our staff canteen was not wheelchair accessible. My Deaf colleague spent years trying to get IT to install an induction loop at our reception desk to no avail.

      All mouth and no trousers.

        1. Swiss Army Desk*

          Mostly men, but not entirely. ChurchOfDietCoke said that one of the five panelists was a woman (who spent the entire time getting talked over by the four male panelists).

          1. Avery*

            To be fair, it’s also telling when the panel on women is MOSTLY men who then proceed to talk over the one woman there, replicating one issue that’s known to happen to women all too often in the workplace…

    4. ThatGirl*

      My company is annoying when it comes to Women’s History Month. Last year we were all encouraged to praise each other- which is nice but not at all the point of the month. This year they held a leadership panel with three women … moderated by a man.

    5. JustaTech*

      My office is so weird about which months they celebrate and which ones they don’t:
      Like, they do a pretty good job with Black History month and Women’s history month, but then we skip straight to Juneteenth (at least we celebrate it!) and ignore Pride completely.

      And Asian American History month and Hispanic Heritage month? Nothing. Even though we have plenty of staff in those demographics as well.

      It’s all so painfully lip service I can’t decide if it’s better to skip than to do a lousy job.
      (When we celebrated International Women in Science day a few years ago the CEO managed to miss-spell my name in the company-wide email.)

  21. LinesInTheSand*

    LW2 I’m with you. I don’t think it’s age based. I hate getting endless reminders for things I’ve already done, like confirming docotors appointments or restaurant reservations. For me 9 texts at once would be a major irritation. And like you, I suspect, I can’t silence everything because some of my calendar notifs are important, as are some texts from my boss.

    The best strategy I’ve come up with is to put my phone on Do Not Disturb for 30 minutes at a time so at least the notifications are batched. But that doesn’t change the absolute rage that comes from getting requests to do something I’ve already done. And the best explanation I’ve got is that is feels like the preson notifying me 6 times doeesn’t actually care if I’ve accomplished the task because if they did they’d notice it was done and stop pinging me. I understnd this is a me problem and not a them problem, but there’s not much I can do.

    Don’t get my started on sitting on hold for 30 minutes listening to a prerecorded exhortation to check the website when I’ve already scoured the website an d determined it can’t solve my problem.

    1. londonedit*

      I agree that reminder texts are annoying, because I’m the kind of person who puts an appointment on the calendar and doesn’t forget about it, but the fact is there are a lot of people who do forget, or who don’t have the means or the wherewithal to keep track of things like doctor’s appointments, and that’s who the reminders are for. The surgery or the hospital or the restaurant have no way of knowing who’s going to remember and who isn’t, so the only solution is to remind everyone. Here we get loads of text reminders for hospital appointments, because people missing appointments is a real problem for the NHS in terms of wasted appointments that could have been used by someone else, and in terms of costing the health service money – one of the text reminders actually says ‘Missed appointments cost the NHS [amount – I think it’s £120 or £160 or something]. If you can no longer make this appointment please call [number] to reschedule’. And it’s the same with restaurants – since Covid restaurants have had a terrible time with people not showing up, or with this trend of people booking several restaurants and then deciding which one to go to on the night, leaving the others with empty tables. So sending those reminders is a way for them to try to get people to either confirm or cancel so they’re not left with cancellations at the last minute.

      Yes, it’s annoying for those of us who are able/willing to keep track of everything, but there are many people who aren’t, and that’s why the reminders exist.

      1. Emmy Noether*

        And even those of us who generally keep track of our stuff occasionally make a mistake. I missed a dentist appointment once because I entered it wrong in my calendar (must have accidentally clicked on the wrong date). And of course I didn’t remember the right date from memory, since I’d made the appointment 6 months previously.

        I like reminders even though they’re unnecessary for me 99% of the time. Because I’m not infallible, and I’m a belt-and-suspenders kind of person. If there’s no outside second system, I’ll often set my calendar AND my alarm for important stuff.

      2. LinesInTheSand*

        I understand the reminders are a godsend for a lot of people. My issue is they break the social contract, which goes like this:

        You ask me to do something.
        I do it.
        You stop asking me about it.

        The current system of mass notifications is very valuable for some people who need the reminders, very convenient for other people who have to send them out, and also a little bit rude. I get that there are plenty of reasons to do things this way, a lot of them are very good reasons in aggregate, but one of the tradeoffs is that it’s a little bit impolite and a little bit impersonal and some of us feel that more keenly than others.

        I’m not going to convince anyone in this thread to do anything differently, which is fine because I’m not here to do that, but I do sympathize with people for whom “just get over it” is harder advice to take than it may seem.

        1. tinyhipsterboy*

          I’d want to challenge you to change your thinking about this – it’s not about a social contract of no longer asking about something once it’s done. It’d be one thing if they were going specifically to you (and repeatedly so; occasionally missing that someone’s done something is normal), but because that’s not the case, the social contract differs. It becomes asking you to do something and to disregard later communication regarding it if it doesn’t apply.

          It’s simply not rude to send out a mass notification to the whole team about something; it’s just a routine reminder that a deadline of some form is coming up. If you’ve already done it, then the message simply isn’t for you, and you can feel free to mute the thread for a while to prevent notifications from interrupting you.

          Think of it like going to a meeting; sometimes group meetings will include agenda items that don’t apply to every single person on the team, but that doesn’t make them rude. If there’s a meeting of a teapot-making department to see how the teapots are coming along, it’s normal to check in on the clay-shaping team and then proceed to the glazing team once that’s done. The clay-shaping team doesn’t necessarily need to pay attention to the glazing team’s portion, and the glazing team doesn’t necessarily need to pay attention while the clay-shaping team is giving updates. It’s just a normal part of working.

    2. bamcheeks*

      whereas I love it! I forgot to drop my car off for its MOT last week. I’m keeping track of my work appointments, enough of my partner’s that we don’t have a sudden childcare failure, at least half of my kids’ social lives, general personal and household maintenance, and getting that thing saying, “remember that six months ago you booked a dentist appointment for yourself and the kids? That’s next Tuesday” is a BLESSING!

    3. rebelwithmouseyhair*

      But just imagine if the boss were to say, no need to send reminders to Lines or OP2, and then one of you were to forget because of some out-of-the-ordinary event…

      1. Ellis Bell*

        This is what baffles me about some people with great executive function; what can it hurt to use the aids as well? My pet theory is they doing the ‘use it or lose it’ approach with their memory. My partner has a perfectly wonderful memory and takes pride in not writing things down, and he hates reminders, but then on the very very rare occasion he forgets something he blames his own memory and not the failure to use a strategy.

        1. Irish Teacher.*

          As somebody who…well, your partner sounds a bit like me…it’s probably partly that “use it or lose it” but also it’s just that it doesn’t occur to me that it might be necessary. Like you probably don’t use aids to remind yourself to eat dinner. Or to go to bed. Or for most of the things you do each day. To me, stuff done on a regular basis would go into that category rather than the category of things I set reminders for, which would be once-offs, like a job interview or something onto that line.

          It’s not that it would hurt to use the aids for something like filling in timesheets, but it wouldn’t hurt to fill them in for eating dinner or teaching my classes or doing my lesson planning or doing my shopping either but it just…wouldn’t occur to me to set a reminder for any of those things. Is it possible I might forget some of them sometimes? Sure, but I don’t think anybody sets reminders for everything they do every day and honestly, I’m not even sure where the average person would draw the line. If timesheets are something one does every week, then it probably wouldn’t even occur to me that that would be within the line of things people usually set reminders for.

          1. Orv*

            Stuff I do every day I don’t usually need reminders for because they’re habit. Stuff I do once a month is just infrequent enough for that not to work, especially since the ends of pay periods can land at odd times during the week.

            That said, I don’t need to set a reminder for my timesheet because if I don’t submit it the day of, I get an automated reminder to do it. Which is probably the ideal situation, since it only bugs me when I forget.

          2. Ellis Bell*

            Yeah you’re wrong about my not needing reminders to eat dinner and go to bed stuff! I need reminders or at least I need to practice doing things after reminders for other things. I’m totally time blind so left to my own devices I’d be eating dinner at 2am and going to bed at 6.

        2. Allonge*

          I don’t know about executive function, but my memory is great (still? age is a thing here). I use reminders and calendars all the time – why on earth not?

          Do I know that we have a standup at work every day? Yes. But it’s a calendar item and goes into my calendar like all other calendar items, because that lets me use my calendar consistently (not to mention share it work others) instead of having to remember some things.

          I have fill in timesheets as a recurring task for Fridays. It costs precisely nothing, it gives me a nice ‘ticked off task’ feeling and it gets me to do the thing. Would I remember most weeks? Probably, but this way I don’t have to.

      2. LinesInTheSand*

        To play devil’s advocate here, if someone built a calendaring system that sent notifications to every team member for every reminder on every team member’s calendar, the team would bin it in less than a day. And that’s effectively what’s going on with the mass texts.

        1. Another Use of the Identify Spell*

          To play “the devil doesn’t actually need advocates,” it’s not constant every day. The snow day was once and the timesheets are once a month. Given the stated ~1 snow day/year, LW has to survive this approximately 1.083 times per month until retirement. I survive multiple annoying things more frequently than that with minimal griping, because being around other humans involves… being around other humans.

  22. Yours sincerely, Raymond Holt*

    One of the many, many reasons why doing a formal interview in a restaurant seems a terrible idea.

    It also throws up issues like having to navigate food issues and general table manners, eating etc while trying to interview, the costs of food and who pays, setting a general tone, and much more.

    You also don’t get to see the place you’d be working which is part of the interview for me.

    I’m in the UK so maybe it’s a more common thing in the US? It does occasionally happen here but it’s unusual.

    1. Chocolate Teapot*

      I once had an interview in a hotel bar, since it was next door to the airport and the interviewer’s flight was in a couple of hours.

      On the choking, that did happen to another diner in a restaurant I was eating at over the weekend. Thankfully the Heimlich Manoeuvre worked, but it was definitely scary!

    3. melissa*

      “It does occasionally happen here but it’s unusual” sums up the situation in the US as well. I’ve never had an interview in a restaurant.

      1. ScruffyInternHerder*

        If we’re going to count a post-interview-lunch in a nice restaurant, then I’ve had one. I typically DO count this one as I suspected it was as much a test of my manners and personality match than just a “lets grab a bite”.

        I have a parent in the same general industry that I’m in; apparently this type of thing was a lot more common (again, same industry) 40-50 years ago, as a part of the “formal day long interview process”.

        1. Anonynon*

          I got taken out to lunch once for a very junior role after the panel interview, by someone who worked with the department (this was at a university). Their manager had been on the interview panel. It was awkward because we just went to a food stand on campus. I still don’t know what the point of it was, because they hired me against the wishes of my lunch companion’s manager (who hates me and refuses to work with me to this day, 12 years later).

    4. Brain the Brian*

      Very much not the norm in the U.S. For some very senior roles, you might get taken out to lunch as part of a full-day set of interviews, but it would be understood that the lunch is not a “formal” interview — and anyone who’s interviewing for roles that senior probably has regular business lunches anyway and could pass it off as such if required.

    5. flefs*

      Once had an interview where the company made me to sign an NDA for the interview (not unusual in my industry), informed me how important it is to keep quiet … then we had the interview in a crowded restaurant with the loudest hiring manager I have ever encountered. There were probably 30-40 people who could have listened to every word, in an area where there were offices of several competitors …

      1. flefs*

        Just checked. My current employer explicitly banns interviews outside of the office (probably mostly for security reasons, but I have a feeling they also did not like reimbursement requests for the meal).

    6. Good Enough For Government Work*

      I’m in the UK and the only time I’ve had an interview that wasn’t in an office was in a cafe… when the job was to be a member of staff in that cafe. So that seemed reasonable enough!

      I’d find it extremely odd for any other role.

    7. WantonSeedStitch*

      It’s not common here either, though not unheard-of. Generally, since my workplace does a bunch of interviews in one day for more senior roles (director and up), lunch is usually involved, but it generally is brought in for the candidate so they can eat on their own in a conference room, giving them time to rest and recharge before the next interview. I only did a lunch interview one time, and that was with a director candidate. I interviewed them in a very informal way over lunch with other people would report to the position.

    8. KaciHall*

      I had an interview in a Panera Bread once, for an insurance agency, but only because it was a brand new agency and the office was still under construction. (She then fired me when I got pregnant, so maybe I should’ve taken the ‘no office’ thing as a red flag.)

    9. JustaTech*

      In the past we used to take interviewees to lunch (but not always, I didn’t get one) – partly because it was a half-day interview and it made sense that they’d be hungry, and partly to get to talk to the whole team more informally.
      The last time we did it the bosses were actively not invited (“Boss, you can’t come to lunch.”) so that we the peers could be really honest about the team and the company and make sure the candidate knew what they were getting into.

      All of that ended before COVID, so I don’t expect it will be back.

  23. Yours sincerely, Raymond Holt*

    The IWD praise alerts seem awful!

    Patronising for the reason Alison gives, and also surely any praise you receive would feel a little shallow, given that you know everyone has been asked to do it?

    If you’re a manager or employer and you know there’s a problem of under appreciating the female coworkers, then fix that.

    Encouraging a general culture of people sharing praise when it is genuine is one thing. Targeting at women, one day a year, is gross.

  24. Snoozing not schmoozing*

    I know more about the ages of #2’s colleagues than I did about the people I worked with for a quarter of a century.

    #3 reminded me of a coworker who’d been interviewed not long before I was. Her interview was in a restaurant, with the organization’s director. At the next table was a woman whose ankle was entwined with the director’s throughout that very awkward interview. It got more cringey when the candidate returned to the office with the director and was introduced to various staff people – including the footsie woman. The director “retired” shortly after I started, moving to another state with his wife, who was NOT Footsie Woman. The board was on to his many inappropriate behaviors by then, as I’d been interviewed in a conference room with the board president asking most of the questions. I missed all the fun!

  25. Kella*

    OP2: I notice a few patterns in your letter and I invite you to consider these questions both in this context and potentially applied to other situations as well:

    1. When someone does something that has a wide impact (meaning it impacts a lot of different people), and it happens to impact you negatively, does it impact everyone the exact same way? Is it possible that it has benefit for people who are not you?

    2. If you are looking for solutions for said negative impact, do the solutions that come to mind take into account the varying impact the issue had on other people? Do they require a lot of other people to change their actions significantly? Is there a solution that allows for *just* you to make a change that doesn’t take much energy on your part?

    3. When this type of wide impact action that negatively impacted you happens, are there explanations for the situation that are not reflections of you and your character, or them and their character? Could there be logistical or circumstantial reasons for it that have nothing to do with you?

    1. Myrin*

      Yes, I’m seeing an interesting contrast of “messages/reminders/alarms sent to everyone” regarding “things I’m personally always on top of”.

      I’m not denying there might be a real issue here regarding useful, resourceful, and efficient messaging but as it stands, it reads a bit like the people leaving irate comments on a recipe for tomato soup stating they can’t have that because they’re allergic to all nightshades. There, like here, the takeaway should be “well, this isn’t meant for me”.
      (And again, I unerstand that the other main problem seems to be the annoyance but surely there are technological ways to combat that.)

      1. AngryOctopus*

        Haha yesterday I read comments on a recipe I was making and one was “I don’t use boxed mixes or pudding mix. How do I substitute them?”. The author, to her credit, said “I don’t know, I wrote this recipe to use boxed mixes.”.
        Point being, OP, is that not everything is for everyone. You can ignore the reminders, and recall to yourself that it’s possible that someone is getting it and saying “Oh, thank goodness I just got this, I forgot/I didn’t know that was how it worked”. You can adjust settings for reminders and silence things. You can choose to not be annoyed that others are not the same as you. I think you’ll feel better about things if you say “I don’t need this, but someone else does” when you feel that annoyance.

        1. Cetacean*

          I understand the annoyance. These messages break the rule of “don’t scold everyone if only a few are getting it wrong.” I realize a text isn’t a scolding, but it is … annoying.

          1. fhqwhgads*

            Yeah. My beef with the texts would be “tell the people who are effing it up, not everyone”. However, what OP can’t know is if the origin of these group messages is because without them the vast majority of the group did eff it up. In which case, well it makes sense it turned into a group message, and congrats OP on being the one person on top of things.
            It only makes sense to be annoyed by messages reminding you of things you’ve never shown a sign of forgetting if it were specifically directed at you. But since these are all group comms, the takeaway is “other people need reminders”.

            1. Spencer Hastings*

              I’d be pretty annoyed to get all the replies from everyone else on the text thread. (If I were the manager, I’d send an email and bcc everyone, so that they couldn’t reply all.)

          2. Kella*

            But that doesn’t apply if OP is in the minority of people getting it right, or if different people are getting it right and wrong at different times, and OP is the only one being consistent. OP’s manager also doesn’t necessarily know that OP would get it right even without the reminders. It’s significantly more work to figure out who does and doesn’t need a reminder every month (which would need to regularly be re-evaluated) then it is for OP to just ignore the reminders.

  26. Agent Diane*

    OP2 – you’re taking something that is aimed a whole team really personally. How dare this whippersnapper treat you like this?

    But they are not. They’re treating the whole team like this. Is it a good way to manage? Possibly not. Certainly for the timesheets they should switch to having one-on-one conversations with the team members who are failing to turn them in to solve why those individuals are not doing it. That more targeted work always get better results.

    Your manager has a great resource in you, an old hand, but if you’re bringing even 1/10th of the anger your letter shows into your work interactions then they are going to start dismissing your knowledge. Not because they are young but because you are being needlessly combative. Over reminder emails and texts.

    Take a step back and work out what you really want? To be Oscar the Grouch for the remaining time you’re working, or to make sure your institutional knowledge is used by the people who will still be there when you’re gone?

    And can the generational stereotypes: people are individuals, not marketing demographics.

    1. Maybe she’s born with it, maybe it’s ADHD*

      Why am I not turning my timesheet in? Because I forgot. Even though I have a calendar reminder, the day ours are due is usually one of my busiest days of the week with meetings starting first thing in the morning, and by the end of the day I’ve forgotten to do it as I rush out the door to get my kid to or from activities. I usually remember in the evening and either log back on for 10 minutes to submit it or log on early the next morning to do it. A well-timed reminder email/text would be far more helpful to me than a personal conversation about “why cant you just remember such a simple thing?”

      1. HonorBox*

        This. And in a situation with the snow day, perhaps there are members of the team who for some reason aren’t in the system and boss just wants to make sure everyone knows. Or boss is trying to prevent a bunch of questions for “how do we handle” the day from people who are newer to the team and don’t have the experience. One mass message – email or text – shows that the boss is managing expectations.

    2. Ellis Bell*

      There’s really nothing remarkable, and there’s no implication of bad management to send out reminders. It’s great if everyone has perfect executive function; the rest of us view the reminders as a godsend. It’s beyond easy to mute anything you don’t personally need.

      1. Allonge*

        It’s beyond easy to mute anything you don’t personally need.

        Except it’s not? We have a text group for work. It’s 10% useful information (I will start later today, my kid is sick so I will work from home, we cancel meeting so you can attend training) and the rest is reactions to the above (sorry to hear that, that’s great, thumbs-up). How would you separate out notifications for useful and not?

        1. tinyhipsterboy*

          You could mute the entire thread and check it periodically throughout the day, for one. Or leave it on, and if you get a message and see that it’s one you don’t need info about, mute it for a little while to account for the reactions to it, then unmute the group so you don’t miss things later.

          1. Allonge*

            I know there are solutions to this. I don’t like to have to manually mess with notification settings on every texting app on my phone multiple times a day.

            There are also tech solutions to reminding myself of recurring tasks, without having to rely on someone else sending mass messages bothering people who don’t need the reminder.

            Neither is ‘beyond easy’, is my point.

            1. Ellis Bell*

              Comparatively easy should have been the phrase. It’s comparatively easy to have such good executive function that you feel need to mute the reminders

    3. Pretty as a Princess*

      I also am a manager of the GenX variety in a place with monthly timesheets. And you know what? They are not due on the same day every month, because every month does not have the same number of business days. They are due on a cutoff date based on deadlines for our financial systems. And we still have 1-2 people who regularly blow the deadline but aren’t the same people every month. It happens for reasons like travel or PTO or getting distracted or … because they send it in after their manager has logged out for the day and don’t notify the manager another way. Because our system for approving those timesheets does not send an automatic real time ping to the managers that the timesheet is in. If you haven’t submitted it by the time I leave the office, I can’t spending my evenings constantly refreshing my email or a status page on our intranet to wait for it.

      And being late causes problems because the first thing those timesheets is used for is a quick look at actual billing vs forecasts, since our financial close happens later. So not getting your timesheet in makes someone else’s job a lot harder.

      And I do not have the time to make personal calls or emails at 3 PM on the due date to everyone who has not already submitted them. So yes, I or one of my team leads is likely to send a reminder in advance to everyone on the team to remind them, especially if the deadline occurs on a day adjacent to a weekend or holiday. And if they have already done it… they can just delete the message and go on with their day because they know it does not apply to them. I’ve never once gotten a “wow Princess you’re such a jerk for sending this reminder, I’m old enough to be your Dad and I know better” or any other complaint routed my way, but I have gotten plenty of “thanks for the reminder – I’m on travel this week and it would have slipped my mind.”

      These reminders do not seem to be a Gen Z thing, but the LW really is hyperfocused on the age of the manager and sounds really bitter about having had younger managers and is making it an age thing in their head.

      And would also probably be doing themselves a favor by adding their manager as a contact in their cellphone. The reminders are not coming from an unknown number; this struck me as particularly petty in the letter. They are coming from the manager, and the LW knows it, or they wouldn’t be complaining about the manager… If the LW is bugged by not having the messages show up from a contact, that’s on them.

    4. Observer*

      if you’re bringing even 1/10th of the anger your letter shows into your work interactions then they are going to start dismissing your knowledge. Not because they are young but because you are being needlessly combative.

      Exactly this.

      OP, I’m going to assume that you are good at what you do, that you have a significant amount of institutional knowledge that you put to good use, and that you are meticulous in your paperwork and record-keeping. But that’s not going to matter much if you get this enraged over inconsequential stuff, because “not flipping out” is a core requirement of any job, especially one that requires in person presence. And the added layer of ageism (not in a legal sense, but in the normal sense of the word) is just going to make things worse. When you try to bring up an issue, you are likely to get dismissed because you clearly see the “youngsters” as not being having valid standing the change things that “worked JUST FINE in my day.”

  27. Higgs Bison*

    Looks like if I ever make a glassdoor account I’m using the spam/mailing list email account not attached to my real name. I knew I wasn’t being paranoid when I made that.

    1. Sloanicota*

      Unfortunately, it seems like things are increasingly more connected these days, and they can connect things without your permission. Advertisers want a lot of information and most services like google or glassdoor want to give it to them. Security-minded types also insist on verification for emails – I know my servicer hounds me constantly to provide more info “as a backup, in case you’re locked out of your account” – if you had more info, like phone numbers, they will use it to connect you to other things. There are data brokers who put together different pools of info. I know at least on things like apps, they will look at the wifi you’re logging in from and use that to put together other information about you, which I assume is the way of the future if not already being done.

  28. bamcheeks*

    LW4, I totally understand your cringe, but having been on the other side of it, interviewers do tend to give you the benefit of the doubt and “wow, she interviewed horribly” is actually a far more logical conclusion than, “she is a giant fraud who was clearly lying about having taken a training course / didn’t learn anything on that expensive training course we sent her on”. Generally speaking, interviewers *want* you to do well– we want to hear about the skills and knowledge you have and be able to judge you against other candidates based on a true assessment of your abilities, so we can pick the right person. But we all get that interviews are a weird and artificial environment, and generally if someone freezes and blanks it’s more kind of, oh no, we know you’ve got it in you! Can we help in any way? Maybe some more prompts will help? Oh no!

    So if you go in and do a good (or even GREAT!) interview, the attitude will be, “oh phew, this is the real you, thank goodness you got over those nerves!” Go forth and shine!

    1. Emmy Noether*

      I agree. From the other side, one can generally tell if a candidate blanks. When it’s happened to people I’ve interviewed, I’ve generally tried to get them back on track by, for example, talking myself for a few minutes (let me tell you about our team…), some light humor, or some easy, non-technical questions. Not all interviewers will do this, however, some just cringe internally and forge on.

      However, if the candidate can’t get back on track, I have to sort of treat it like they canceled the interview. It’s not a black mark, but they can’t advance in the process either.

    2. Anne of Green Gables*

      Yes, I have found that when the candidate is internal, we’re actually much more likely to suspect that something was off that day than to wonder about the overall performance of the candidate in their current job. I do like Alison’s suggestion to say something to alert them that you realize it was not a good effort.

    3. PhD survivor*

      Also I’m shocked that this interview was held at 7am, is that normal for your industry? There’s no way I’d be able to think clearly for a 7am interview the day after vacation.

      1. L.*

        Came here to say the same thing. You’re setting me up for a fail if you make me do anything that requires effort and thought at 7am.

    4. Orca*

      Also agree – I recently was asked to interview for an internal move that is pretty lateral to my current role but more money, and when they asked why I was interested in the position my mind went fully blank and I stammered SOMETHING that made the interviewer immediately basically just rephrase and ask again (which I still kind of whiffed because…I like my current role, someone just wanted me to interview! and I like money!).

      I used my thank you email to be like “[actual information], hope that is a more helpful answer!” I got the position so it might have helped to do that, haha.

  29. r.*

    LW5,

    Oh hey, look at that. A possible privacy policy violation case with the potential for actual, quantifiable damages.

    A quite rare animal — at least outside of GDPR-landia, which had the explicit design goal to make that type of violation actionable in case of serious violations but with no or only de-minimis quantifiable damages.

    1. amoeba*

      Yeah, that’s definitely… something else. I mean, there might be reasons, people in other time zones, whatever, but then I’d at least expect an explanation (and apology) for the unusual time, plus hopefully some choice as to the day (and would obviously then not chose the one after I come back from holiday)! Those circumstances would be harsh on anybody…

    2. Seashell*

      I had an interview once at 7:30 am and I was grateful for not having to give yet another fake excuse to my existing job for missing part of the day. The interviewer had flexible work hours and typically came in and left early, so when I asked for something either early or late in the day, 7:30 worked for both of us.

    4. WellRed*

      Yes I would argue that the first mistake was agreeing to 7am, AND the first day after vacation. Push back on unreasonable times. And OP, they won’t assume you are a fraud who should never have been hired.

      1. morethantired*

        I agree. I would also think it’s worth putting that in the email “I realize now that agreeing to an interview time at 7am on the first day back from vacation was an error on my part.”

      2. WomEngineer*

        Yeah, when they ask your availability, it’s good to balance giving them options while considering when you would realistically want to interview.

        Idk if that happened with LW. But I had a couple times that were technically “available” but a bit inconvenient… and of course the interviewer chose it.

    5. M2*

      You can also ask to switch the date/ time. I recently had a test for an interview and they just gave me a day and time and I couldn’t do it that day at all I was booked, so I gave them other times and they gave me a completely different date and time so I had to keep it.

      Then for my actual interview with a panel of people they booked me for 6:00 am. Then they emailed back apologized and switched it to 7 AM. The people were overseas so it varied for them from afternoon to evening. I felt I couldn’t ask to change the time as I had already done so earlier.

      I always offer a few dates/ times and give people as much notice as possible (the above they emailed me 24 hours before my test). I also let people know if those times don’t work to feel free to give 2-3 dates and times that work on their end.

      I only have an issue when someone wants an evening interview because they have to work. I work nights and some weekends especially during certain parts of the year and I’m not interviewing someone after 5 PM my time. I did it before but now I have boundaries and won’t give up that time since I work late many days of the year.

      I will however do an interview in the morning if need be. We usually have some candidates come and meet with several departments and people so it can be a day or half day thing but if it’s just a call I don’t mind doing an 8:15 AM since I can do school drop off at 8 am. I have put up way more boundaries at work recently because it’s not worth it not too!

      1. LW4*

        Yes! This was another lesson learned from this experience – it’s okay to ask to reschedule if you’re proactive. I should have reached out to the program manager ASAP and let them know I’d be returning from vacation and may need a moment to recoup, asked for even the day after as an option. I think it would have allowed me to settle down, have one more day to prepare at home in my regular routine, and maybe I would have felt more comfortable. But because I did not ask – they did not know!

        Also – we are a global team and 7am calls aren’t unusual. The ones scheduled for the mornings when you’re returning into work can sometimes be hectic, but on any other day this would have never been an issue.

    7. Pickle Shoes*

      I would if that’s what worked for the candidate, but I also start my day at 5:30. You wouldn’t catch me signing up for an interview my first day back from a vacation, though.

  31. rebelwithmouseyhair*

    OP2
    You may not need reminders but a lot of people do. I’m much the same age as you and I would need them, so you see it’s nothing to do with age.

    So just delete the notifications, and smile as you remind yourself that you don’t need it even while the others do.

    You could always ask to be left off the list of people needing notification, but then you might get left out of notifications for fun stuff,.

    1. I Have RBF*

      IMO, the problem isn’t the initial text notification, it’s the subsequent replies that just blow up the phone with noise/vibration. I would block that number, personally. They don’t get to spam my personal phone, period.

  32. Dinosaur rawr*

    LW1: For International Women’s Day, my company sent out a rah-rah, “grrl power!” email encouraging everyone to read two articles. One was about diet and fitness, and the other was about how to be more positive and upbeat in the workplace.

    1. honeygrim*

      That’s amazing. “Happy Women’s Day! Here is how you can improve your ‘woman-ness’ so as not to discomfit any of your male coworkers.”

    5. 1-800-BrownCow*

      Apparently my company “celebrates” International Women’s Day every year. I learn this from their LinkedIn post the put out each year. Yet in the 6 years working at this company, I’ve yet had anything said to me directly about it. Oh and outside the LinkedIn post about how important and valuable the women employees are to the business, I’ve seen no changes or improvements to women’s equality in the workplace. I’m 1 of 3 women managers at my location (compared to the more than 2 dozen male managers), our parental leave policy is the bare minimum to meet federal FMLA laws, I suspect I’m paid less than others in my position, and when I applied and was promoted to my current position, I was not treated the same as the male manager who left the position to move his family back to where he and his wife grew up. He was an external hire 3 years earlier and as part of the position, he was given his own office, a manager parking spot (for safety reasons even though he was a 6’3″ 275+ pound male who worked as a bouncer in his 20s), as well as a few other perks. When I was promoted, I did not receive my own office (a male coworker moved into the former managers vacated office because he felt he needed more privacy, so there was no offices available), no manager parking spot because it wasn’t necessary for me as a 5’8″ 150ish pound female, nor any of the other perks. But hey, our company posts on LinkedIn that they celebrate International Women’s Day, so obviously they care deeply about their women employees, right?

    6. Guest*

      Wow. That would certainly make me more positive to use death stares and Fatal Bitch Face on whoever sent that out.

    9. I Have RBF*

      One was about diet and fitness, and the other was about how to be more positive and upbeat in the workplace.

      Arrrrrrrggggghhh!

      Diets and toxic positivity are two of the things that are aimed at women at work that I hate.

      Woman does not equal dieting!

      Women do not need to be told to “smile more” or “be more positive”.

      I would be very tempted to ream whoever sent this shit out a new one in oh so icily polite “professional” terms.

      Yeeesh

  33. Yikes*

    Re: Glassdoor.
    So, when I first signed up to Glassdoor, I used my Gmail.
    Today, trying to sign in for the first time in years, I got the following notification:

    “By continuing, Google will share your name, email address, language preference and profile picture with Glassdoor. See Glassdoor’s privacy policy and Terms of Service.”

    2. Whatwhatwhatwhat???*

      Please excuse me, my jaw dropped somewhere into the ninth circle of Hell and Satan is complaining about the mess.

      1. Orv*

        This could happen with any service that allows you to use OAUTH single-sign-on to log in. Google is the big one but Facebook is also really common. Twitter used to do that too, before they became X. My workplace also offers it for some services we use.

        For non-privacy-sensitive services it’s often a good thing, because you have one less password to remember. The place you’re logging into never sees your password, only a secure token, so they can’t accidentally leak your password, either. But you do have to be conscious that you’re linking those accounts together.

    4. Timothy (TRiG)*

      Is that signing into Glassdoor using an email/password combination, and the email just happens to be a Gmail one? Or is it using your Google account to sign into Glassdoor, which is a completely different operation and means that Google, not Glassdoor, is handling the login process.

      1. Ray Gillette*

        I’m assuming the second one, the exact same message started showing up recently for me in a work context. We use Gsuite and use our Google accounts to sign into various online services.

    5. DJ Abbott*

      I ran into that same message recently, not on glassdoor. I don’t remember what site it was. I noped the hell out of there.
      At least Google warns us. It could be worse.

  34. Jamie*

    Y’all were using real email addresses and names for Glassdoor accounts? I’m more shocked at that than Glassdoor being a snitch.

    1. Anonna*

      That’s not the concern. People used email addresses, yes, but with an expectation of privacy. Glassdoor is going out and linking your real name to it without your permission or giving them the name at all!! One post i read said that they think Glassdoor is trawling LinkedIn for real names to populate their fields.

    2. Maggie*

      It requires email verification but the only review I’ve ever left I stand by so they can publish my face with it if they want for all I care . Also the HR lady met with Glassdoor and got it removed anyway. Glassdoor isn’t some benevolent company

  35. Irish Teacher.*

    LW1, in addition to what Alison said, Women’s History Month is not just “be nice to women month” or “appreciate women month”. It’s not even exactly directly about equality for women. It’s about recognising how women have been written out of history or their achievements minimised. (One example from Irish history is Anne Devlin, who at least when I learnt about her was spoken of as the housekeeper so devoted to her employer, Robert Emmet, that she endured prison rather than give him away after his rebellion. My teacher even implied that maybe she fancied him. It was only as an adult that I found out that she had been basically posing as his housekeeper as a cover. They were worried that it would look suspicious if the plotters were in and out of his house, so they went looking for a woman to pose as his housekeeper and pretend to be entertaining. She knew from the start what the risks were and that it would involve protecting them, but the history books changed her from being part of the part to the loyal woman, devoted to her employer.)

    Sending around appreciation and thanks to women comes across as patting women on the head because other women’s achievements weren’t recognised and really doesn’t give me much hope that they have any committment to changing this.

    In fact, that kind of patting on the head was probably what a lot of the women did get. Anne Devlin, in fact, is recognised in song and history books, but all in a kind of “even though she was only a women, she loved her employer so much she managed to be brave for him,” sort of way.

  36. France*

    Y’all are using your real names and email addresses for your Glassdoor account?? Come on guys that’s a rookie mistake. Any website can get your info from you at any time.

    1. Sloanicota*

      I used to be great about always using fake info, but everywhere has clamped down on that so much now. You have to give places an email you can actually check to log in, because they won’t let you proceed unless you click some link to “verify.” You used to be able to get cheap easy throwaway emails, but now that’s a security problem, email servicers claim to need your phone number for everything, or need a backup email, or whatever. It’s still possible, but it’s definitely gotten harder. And so much of everything is being done on phones anyway now.

      2. Lime green Pacer*

        Duck dot com has a long-term throwaway addresses that reroute messages to your main address.

      3. tech hater*

        simple login (browser extension) has an email generator that will direct any emails sent there to whatever email address you specify. so you can have an active “alias” that results in emails sent to you that you can verify, but not have to give up any of your actually important email addresses.

        also, protonmail doesn’t require a first and last name so those couldn’t be scraped if you have an email address from them

    2. bamcheeks*

      I think thinking a fake name and email address is going to protect you is probably the rookie mistake these days! Most of the big data systems are designed to connect usernames and accounts across multiple systems using unique identifiers. Even if you haven’t given them your “real” email address, name or phone number, then any fake address you’ve created to verify an account is going to be connected to any other address that you regularly access on the same device(s).

      So it might protect you from planned or accidental publishing of your “name”, but it’s unlikely to stop any of the big data aggregators from knowing that FakeFrance is the same person as RealFrance. Even under GDPR, most of us have given permission for this kind of data processing when we’ve signed up to use the service.

    3. Sweet Polly Purebread*

      When my company’s plant was having issues hiring workers, the company asked us all to submit good reviews for the company on Glassdoor

  37. DJ Abbott*

    I’m not terribly surprised at GlassDoor turning on its users. It never worked as intended for me. It was never really about helping job hunters.
    I was using it in my search from 2020 to 2022. I had been at the same job for almost 10 years when my position was eliminated in December 2019. I posted a review of that job with three stars, and then later a review of my grocery store job.
    Maybe once or twice GlassDoor let me look at actual reviews. The rest of the time it said I had to post more reviews myself to look at them. How many jobs did they think I have? Did they think I’m changing jobs every few months? How many interviews, did they think I was getting interview every week? Especially during the shut down…
    The system was set up in a way that made it impossible to see the reviews unless I fabricated some, which I did NOT.
    For the last several months of my search I didn’t even bother logging in, just looked at the ratings.
    I don’t think I’ll delete my account because my reviews are useful to others, and I don’t think it would be harmful to have my name attached. I’m going to keep a note in my job search materials not to login to GlassDoor, and I’ll re-post this article. One day they will get what’s coming to them.
    At some point another service will be offered that actually does what GlassDoor said it did.

    1. Alianora*

      Yeah, that always bugged me about the review requirements! I understand asking for one from each user. More is just unfair. I’m sure they have skewed data because of it.

  38. Enough reminder*

    about the reminders. the manager should be. made aware of the redundancy. it is very distracting to have all the methods of communication dinging repeatedly with the same information. when my child’s high school started having remote work days, we had multiple training sessions, multiple emails, multiple pre recorded telephone calls (to the point the phone company flagged it as spam), school wide text messages the night before and the morning of. then each teacher emailed six times throughout the day with the only message, don’t forget to login and do the assignment. I received hundreds of that message per day. after we had been doing monthly remote work days for some time, the messages increased. I spoke with the assistant principal and counted how many messages I received and if it takes that many times for high schoolers to know what to do, then remote days don’t work. suddenly thousands of those messages disappeared and left to one text the night before.

    1. Ellis Bell*

      It really does take that many reminders with large numbers of high school kids (If you’re lucky).

  39. Michelle Smith*

    LW2: I would be annoyed by it too, but it’s not rational to complain about it to your manager. You have to file this one away as mildly irritating and move on with your life. Some things you can do to decrease your annoyance include filtering reminder messages into a separate email folder so you only look at it on your own time, rather than being pinged, and either muting the group chat or leaving it (with the caveat that you should mute rather than leaving if it will cause tension with your manager because, on iPhone at least, leaving the group chat means everyone will see a notification that you left).

  40. Mavis Mae*

    LW1: Fleabag season 2, ep 3 captured this with searing hilarity – watch in awe as Kristen Scott-Thomas’ character demolishes all such initiatives as “infantilising bollocks”. Maybe a clip of that speech could find its way anonymously to your HR department? I’d also suggest Andrew Denton’s “The Year of the Patronising Bastard” from his series The Money or the Gun, but that’s a whole episode rather than a speech.

  41. Llama Llama*

    I work for a ginormous company where payroll is processed centrally but has to be submitted by each location. Some locations have to be reminded to submit that payroll.

    That manager is just getting ahead of the people forgetting and having to deal with late payroll.

  42. Becky S*

    #2 – it’s exhausting to go through so many changes on a job and have so many different managers, and I sympathize with you.
    Taking things personally that aren’t aimed at you is also exhausting and a difficult way to go through life.

    1. Peanut Hamper*

      Taking things personally that aren’t aimed at you is also exhausting and a difficult way to go through life.

      +1000%. My life got a lot easier after I added a mental filter for this:

      `If $_item is aimed at $_me, then _do_it(), else _let_it_go().`

    2. Cat Tree*

      8 managers in 14 years is an average of a little under 2 years each. That’s a little short, but not unreasonably so, especially if one or two were very short term and the rest were there a bit longer. 3 or 4 years in one position is standard, at least in my industry. (It’s still Ok to feel annoyed by it though.)

  43. Choggy*

    LW1 – in my company, they put up a poster and put a picture of each woman in the department on the poster and encouraged us to add pictures of women we admire (this was open to all department employees). This really irked and icked me out. none of the women was asked if it would be okay to put their picture on this poster.

    3. pally*

      If I saw my face on that poster…they’d be coming down forthwith.
      Who’s gonna stop me?

      This seems so insincere to begin with. A low-cost show of supportiveness.

  44. Bookstrategy*

    Re #5: I’m not an attorney, but a 2022 legal ruling against Glassdoor raised this possibility in my mind—it held that Glassdoor had to reveal the poster names for some reviews the employer said were false and defamatory. It didn’t say that GD had to reveal the names publicly, but it occurred to me that they would probably begin to collect it as their own safeguard in the event of similar legal actions. I believe the plaintiff was Zuru but I’m not certain…I’ll put a link in a separate post.

    1. Bookstrategy*

      If my linked post doesn’t it through moderation, just search GD and Zuru—it was covered in HR and business publications. I don’t see any AAM coverage but I may be missing it. The employer was Chinese and the reviewers from NZ, but the case was adjudicated in California.

  45. Peanut Hamper*

    #2: I have a calendar reminder on Friday reminding me to submit my timesheet.

    I have another calendar reminder on Monday morning reminding to check to make sure I submitted my timesheet.

    I am also GenX, and I also need these things. Our new system auto-approves all timesheets (why?) on Tuesday evening, so my boss doesn’t have to check beforehand to see if I’ve submitted something to approve.

    1. 1-800-BrownCow*

      GenX’er here. I have a calendar reminder to review my direct reports’ timesheets every Monday. I must have it done my Tuesday noon and even though I’ve done this every week for the past 6 years, I inevitably forget without the reminder. Email and calendar reminders are my lifeline. I’m so thankful for today’s technology to help with this stuff.

    2. Observer*

      Our new system auto-approves all timesheets (why?)

      To make sure that your time sheet gets processed.

    3. bishbah*

      I’m salaried and thankfully our system only requires me to enter my PTO, but I supervise an employee with a timesheet and have to sign off on her hours biweekly. If you are missing any entries three days before sheets are due, both you and your supervisor are sent a notification email. So every two weeks I get an email reminding my employee that she hasn’t yet entered her hours. I also get an automated email two days before the end of the pay period reminding me to approve her hours—sent before her hours are actually complete. So at that point I set a task reminder on that email for a time when I can actually do something about it. Plus I have my own calendar reminder. Ugh.

  46. Jessica Clubber Lang*

    Didn’t you always need to provide an email address when signing up for a Glassdoor account? What is new or different about this?

    1. Pinkie Parkour*

      I recommend reading the link in the post so you know what the post is actually about. Hint: it’s not about email addresses.

    2. Lost academic*

      People who use social media accounts to login/authenticate instead of email/*password are allowing the account service (,,e.g. Google or Facebook) to provide certain information to Glassdoor (you agree to the specific information shared the first time you do it)

      I use an email and password and I don’t have anything else associated with my account but I can’t remember the last time I left a review if ever

    3. fhqwhgads*

      The post is about requiring your real name (including GD finding out your name and applying it to your account for you without your knowing it) and has nothing to do with emails.

      1. Jessica Clubber Lang*

        Ok but I just signed up for a Glassdoor account this morning and was able to leave a review with a new email I just created and a fake name, location, etc..

        How is GD going to identify me without my consent?

        1. Melissa*

          They can’t. Especially if you aren’t using their app. There is no way for them to connect it despite what some people are saying on this website.

  47. Anne of Green Gables*

    I am a supervisor and have 11 direct reports and 16 people for whom I am the grand-boss. When we have something like a snow day, I can send one message to clarify to all 27 people what is going on, or I can field questions from a high percentage of those 27 people. Guess which one is easiest for me. Do all 27 people need the info? No. But a lot of them will, and if I’m pro-active, I can save myself a LOT of time.

    1. Dinwar*

      One of the perks of being the boss is that you get to set up certain things to make your own life easier, especially if the cost to others is “Ignore the info I already have.”

      I’ve seen this attitude in other areas, and I feel that the attitude in the letter is an example of the current anti-management bias in our culture. People assume that management is evil by default, and that anything that we do to facilitate our jobs is inherently wrong.

    2. kiki*

      Yes, I think LW here is really fixated on whether they personally need the information or not when their boss is simply doing their due diligence, especially for employees who may not have experienced a snow day before or who have forgotten the protocol since the last one.

      Most phones allow you to mute certain text conversations– LW might look into doing that in the future after the initial message so they’re not bombarded with all the follow-up pings.

      It might be worth asking around with LW’s fellow coworkers to see if they feel like the messaging is over-the-top. If other employees also find it to be a bit much, it might be worth asking if some of these reminders could be opt-in. Or at very least let recipients know that they don’t need to respond to the messages. But it might also turn out that a lot of folks really like the reminders and felt like events were being under-communicated previously.

      I want to say that as a manager, you can’t win with stuff like this. There will always be somebody caught off guard if you don’t send the reminder and there will always be somebody who feels the reminders are unnecessary. As a manager of multiple people, it’s generally better to lean into too much than too little.

    3. LCH*

      yup, this is the most reasonable. it’s like any message that doesn’t apply to you; you can just delete it! or for texts, i think all phones have the mute option? whatever! (43)

    4. Pescadero*

      Can’t you just post it on an “outage”/”closure” page on your website – and tell everyone to just check the website if there are questions about whether you’re open or closed?

      2. Glowworm*

        Because they need to make sure that people stay off the roads, and to do that they need to proactively text people before they get on the road and unsafely commute

  48. Eagle*

    LW 2 can you just ask your manager to not text you about snow days and timesheets? I’m GenX too and it read infantilizing to me as well.

    1. Dinwar*

      How many people would you be willing to individually tailor messages for, though? If it’s 3-5, sure, that’s manageable. If it’s 30-40, no. Even if it takes one minute to send each message, that’s a half-hour to an hour of email sending (once you factor in the time it takes to go “Oh, wait, Jake doesn’t want a remainder, and Jane only wants texts, and Phil prefers carrier pigeon, and….”).

      Things like this sound reasonable, but they don’t scale.

      1. Option b*

        The manager can take certain phone numbers off the chain and not send it to them. That’s no less time consuming.

        1. AngryOctopus*

          And then the manager doesn’t remember taking them off the chain and so the next time they send a reminder for something else, that person off the chain misses it and is upset they didn’t get reminded.
          It’s so easy to just glance at something and say ‘oh, that’s not for me’ and move on, rather than trying to make someone tailor a distribution lists for various categories of reminders.

        2. NotAnotherManager!*

          Taking them off is not time-consuming. Remembering who wants to be taken off of which specific messages and then if it’s okay to take them off because of compliance/issues and then, if I need to prove who I told what in the future, trying to recall that – too much mental load to accommodate a single employee pet peeve v. spending time actually getting critical things done.

          I send the reminders because, if I don’t, compliance rates drop precipitously. At one point pre-reminders, I was spending hours chasing people down and being yelled at by payroll at least every other month and then by the people whose OT pay was delayed because they didn’t submit it timely. With reminders, I spend maybe a half-hour per month and wave hello to payroll in the coffee room. Managers don’t do this to piss people off, we do it because it’s effective.

        3. Dinwar*

          How many such lists will the manager need to make, though? You have one for snow days, one for timesheets, one for mandatory trainings, one for company-wide IT problems, a dozen for different types of meeting notifications, a few for issues like parking and road maintenance near the buildings…. And remember, for each of those you have to how each employee likes to be notified.

          And why is the manager putting in this effort reasonable, but the employee going “Already knew that” and moving on unreasonable? It takes significantly less effort on the employee’s part to simply ignore something than for the manager to tailor-build every communications style and for every possible communication. In contrast, ignoring something takes less time than it takes to type out “Ignoring something”.

          And all of that assumes that the manager has the time and tools necessary to tailor this sort of thing to everyone’s individual tastes. Since “management” is no longer a thing–most managers are “working managers”, meaning that we’re expected to be full-time individual contributors as well as full-time managers–this simply isn’t true. You’re going to get the information in a way that’s most efficient on my side because I’ve got 30 other things demanding my attention as well and simply do not have time to spend an hour letting everyone know that the roads are closed so you need to work from home.

          Sorry, but as an employee, you’re just going to have to deal with occasionally getting stuff that’s generic and which you can ignore.

    2. No username*

      There seems to be something else going on for the OP to have such an over the top reaction to normal office communication. And they’re going to stand out for all the wrong reasons if they tell their manager to take them off a distribution list. As a contractor I get monthly reminders about timesheet deadlines. I just delete them – I don’t take it as a personal insult and that management thinks I need to be micromanaged.

    3. Observer*

      LW 2 can you just ask your manager to not text you about snow days and timesheets?

      Almost certainly not. Because the manager is not sending individual tests and reminders.

      And with the timesheets, I’d be willing to bet that the manager wasn’t acting completely on his own.

    4. Ginger Cat Lady*

      You need to understand that the “it’s infantilizing” is only happening in your head. And you can change the way you think about it. The messages go out to all employees and have nothing to do with how they think about YOU.

    5. Zona the Great*

      No, you don’t ask the boss to maintain an Unsubscribe List and expect her to remember it during emergencies. You simply learn to set certain notifications to silent.

  49. Jenny*

    LW2–once your new manager figures out what is and isn’t a problem (and therefore needs email reminders) she might stop sending all of them. It’s also possible that one of your coworkers felt that there was not enough communication and the new manager is trying to address that.

  50. Blue Pen*

    LW#2: While I agree with Alison’s response completely, I, too, also work in a large university system and being treated like a child is an experience echoed by many. My current department, thankfully, is eons better at this than my last, but I do understand this sentiment and can see how your response might be cumulative to those conditions.

  51. Lost academic*

    I read the link and am pretty unhappy with the responses the author got, but when I went to my account, all they had was my email. I use a Gmail but I do not log in via Google so Google does not provide any account information.

    Unless that changes I think I’m ok.

  52. Falling Diphthong*

    Re #1, Breaking Cat News tells me that for the 5 big newspaper groups, less than 2% of comics are written by women. This means dead men are outnumbering live women.

    1. Abogado Avocado*

      OMC, so happy someone else here follows Breaking Cat News! (Purrrrrrrrr……) Who’s y0ur favorite character, Falling Diphthong?

      1. Falling Diphthong*

        Quite possibly Beatrix the intern, who learned that they secretly give Lupin decaf.

  53. HonorBox*

    OP2 – This seems annoying, but it is more of a minor annoyance. I’m in a couple of group chats that get to be a lot when people are liking messages so I just choose to ignore my phone while that’s happening. The annoyance is probably more about the fact that there are people responding to the message than it is about the message itself. If you frame it differently, your boss is simply ensuring everyone is aware of important information. Better that than information not being shared well…

  54. Ex-prof*

    LW #1: Also because women are insulted and harassed by “compliments” from the moment they hit puberty. Or before.

    The compliments that come in are likely to be thinly-veiled contempt– “I’m surprised Jane knows so much about market volatility in the pipe organ business!” or sexual harassment under the guise of plausible deniability. “What? I thought we were supposed to compliment Jane so I just said…”

  55. Hawk*

    LW 2: Depending on the phone, there is a way to mute text conversations. On my Samsung (Android) phone, in the Samsung messages app, if you open the text and then go to the menu in the upper right corner, you can then touch the image of a bell (I believe at the bottom of that menu) and it will mute the messages from that conversation going forward. As others have said, you can mute Teams notifications as well, and you can mute Teams messages (if your system admin allows it). There is a one-size-fits-all approach to how everything is being approached, but really, this is low level aggrivation. On the other hand, the part that sticks out to me is that you’ve had 8 managers in 13 years. That’s a lot! I’ve had a similar number over a similar timeframe (closer to a manager per year), and I’ve noticed that it just puts me in a very on edge place because it feels like something will change as soon as I get used to it. Maybe this is what is actually at the core of what’s bothering you — that there are a lot of changes in a short period of time — and it’s not related to the age of the managers.

    Letter 5: YIKES. I honestly found recent Glassdoor changes confusing and not very helpful, and honestly the questions they were asking felt fairly invasive after a point for a supposedly anonymous review site (although I was also on their job searching side, which was also not great).

  56. duinath*

    1 sounds like the kind of idea you have if you are the kind of person who consistently expects the woman in the room to make the coffee.

  57. Lone Agree with LW2*

    LW 2-I am a millennial and I agree with you! I can’t stand the constant reminders through emails and texts and other communication apps. I know some people struggle with time and calendar management…but seems like something that you should be able to opt into if you struggle with keeping tasks on time. I would ask your office to remove you from the chain texts. I think that is appropriate, considering it’s harder to not be notified and constantly interrupted with texts.

    My dog had a vet appointment recently and I received two emails a week for a month prior to the appointment and then one email and one text EVERY DAY a week prior to his appointment. And two texts the day before. It was RIDICULOUS.

    1. AngryOctopus*

      Ridiculous to you. I bet anything if you asked the vet why they do that, they’d tell you that it cuts down on no-shows or last minute cancellations by a substantial amount. They’d rather annoy you with reminders than lose the money from cancelled/no show appointments.

      1. Lone Agree with LW2*

        But it would be helpful if I could opt out of their excessive notification system. I never opted in to all these texts. That’s unprofessional.

        I know, and understand completely, that many people need the reminders. We seem to have accepted more as a society that it’s okay and acceptable to have so many reminders for many legit reasons. We haven’t quite caught up with the fact that for some, the excessive reminders can be an impediment to their daily life. I have all notifications silenced on my phone and no alert badges at all. Because I know what causes me to get distracted from my work. I would like the same consideration to opt out of constant reminders as someone who finds them helpful. That’s all.

      2. Blue Pen*

        But they could also charge for late cancellations/no-shows/late arrivals instead of bombarding their customers with “reminders.” I’m not against reminders at all, and many times, they keep me on track if something does slip my mind or from my calendar.

        But two emails/week for a month, one email and and a text every day for a week, and an additional two texts the day before is not reminding. It’s borderline (if not actual) harrassment at that point.

    2. Jay (no, the other one)*

      About 70% of people show up for non-urgent pre-scheduled doctor’s appointment. I suspect the rate for vet appointments is lower, and vets work on a much narrower margin and are more likely to be running their own business. They lose money when people don’t show up. The Email reminders may or may not be effective, but there is a reason for them.

      When I make an appointment at the nail salon I get a text immediately, a text the day before, and a text the day of plus the Email and text reminders that my calendar sends me. This is why my phone is always on vibrate and in my purse.

    3. Maggie*

      It’s totally annoying but I’d rather not pay 40% more for vet services because they have to make up for all the missed appointments

  58. Kristin*

    LW2, you know how every single public bathroom in the world has a sign begging people not to put foreign objects in the toilet? If you saw one of those signs in a cafe washroom, you wouldn’t say, “Well *I* never put paper towels in the toilet, how dare they assume I need this reminder!”, would you? You’d think “who does that???”, shrug your shoulders, and go about your business. Same thing here, you see these messages but they’re not about you, so delete them/mute the thread and get on with your day.

  59. plantseniortreenewspaper*

    Yeesh, I just deactivated and then submitted a separate request to delete my personal data from Glassdoor. What the heck?

  60. kiki*

    I’m the person who has been in the department the longest, and have seen the entire structure and staff overturned multiple times.

    I think it’s important for LW2 to remember that most people have not been through the snow day process over a dozen times before, so getting some reminders of how to handle them is appreciated. And even for staff who have experienced snow days a couple times before, dealing with something once a year is just enough time for a lot of people to forget that they need to so some specific actions, like set an OOO. I get that it can seem odd for folks who do have a really good memory, but most people really do need reminders.

  61. Marketing Ninja Unicorn*

    LW 2, I’m a Xennial, and I work with people both older (Boomers) and younger (true Millenials, Gen Z, etc.)

    At every.freaking.monthly.meeting, we are reminded to (a) submit our time cards (if we’re hourly OR if our time is billed to certain programs so we can track it; (b) approve time cards (if we’re a supervisor, which I am) that have been submitted and to track down ones that haven’t been.

    Similarly, we have the same process for approving purchasing cards, and a whole slew of support staff just lost access to their cards because their (Boomer) supervisor couldn’t be arsed to approve them timely and now all of his staff are SOL.

    I think you’re reading into this ill-intent where there is none.

  62. Glass Door*

    Glassdoor helped my horrible former company that was going under for fraud sue employees and threaten them with legal action for leaving honest reviews they said were a “NDA” breach. They weren’t.

  63. Cafe au Lait*

    I’m in a new manager, and twice in the last seven months I’ve had instances where an employee didn’t get paid because they didn’t turn in their timesheet.

    It was super helpful each time to have an email I could point to and say “Hey, I emailed you on Date, and the email clearly said the submission time was by 5pm. Then I emailed you a reminder on the Monday after Date. I’m sorry you didn’t get paid but I couldn’t submit a timesheet for hours I didn’t know you worked.”

    OP #2, you might want to start creating filters for yourself for routine emails that you dislike getting. I set filters for automatic meeting responses, the times where a “reply all” storm occurs, or anything else that tends to bring in a high volume of email responses quickly.

    It’s your manager’s job to communicate with you. It’s your time to manage the communications.

    1. WellRed*

      In the US, I’m pretty sure employees are required to be paid regardless of whether they turned in their timesheet or not. Though I’m guessing there may be some exceptions.

    2. Lisa Babs*

      I don’t know if you are in the US. But as an avid reader of AAM I learned that the law (at least in the US) require employers to pay employees for all hours worked on-time. Failure to turn in a timesheet does not provide an exception to these laws. Which makes no sense logically since how can you pay someone when you don’t know their hours. But legally you have to.

      1. Observer*

        Which makes no sense logically since how can you pay someone when you don’t know their hours.

        The pay doesn’t need to be accurate, but it does need to reasonable. Like if someone normally works 36 hours per week, and you have no reason to think that this week was different, you pay them 36 hours. Then, if it turns out that this week was different, you straighten it out.

        That’s the logic.

      3. fhqwhgads*

        Basically you pay them their expected hours/scheduled hours/usual schedule and let the (usually minor) variances get adjusted/dealt with later. But the point of the law is: whether someone turned in their timesheet or not, their schedule is almost certainly known before the work happens. Therefore employers don’t have a good reason to pay someone nothing for failure to turn in a timesheet.

  64. Juicebox Hero*

    I was born in 1976, which apparently makes me Gen X.

    LW 2 has been there a long time and experienced All The Things, but seems to be forgetting that newer staff haven’t, especially for things that might only happen once a year. Also, they might have missed the earlier notification, not known if it applied to then, just plain forgot, etc. The age of the staff doesn’t matter.

    The boss sounds like an overcommunicator or possibly butt coverer, which annoys LW but again has nothing to do with their age.

    When I was in college in the 90s, I was a commuter student. The school rarely closed completely, and the only way to know if a class was cancelled was to actually get there and see if was posted on the bulletin board. If you were lucky, you had a friend who was a resident who could check and call you in enough time not to risk your neck on the road. I’d much rather have the zillion notifications and thumbs ups of the modern era :P

    1. HonorBox*

      One of the things I’ve told people over the years is that we need to find ways not to make more work for others. The boss sending reminders is setting expectations and boundaries so that everyone in their department isn’t causing more work for them. There may be people who haven’t experience (many, or any) snow days, so sending out a reminder setting expectations is helpful so they’re not getting question after question. Sending out reminders about payroll saves the boss time because they’re not having to go back and fix things.

      I don’t think this is about age at all. Longevity plays into this more. But looking at things from the boss’s standpoint, they’re communicating with everyone so everyone hears the same instruction. It’ll save the boss a significant amount of time. And if OP is annoyed at the information, imagine how annoyed the boss is if they’re having to answer the same question 5 times.

      1. Peanut Hamper*

        This is so spot-on. And it builds transparency, because everybody is getting exactly the same instruction at the same time. No chance for someone to claim the boss is playing favorites.

    2. doreen*

      Yep- when I was a commuter student at an entirely commuter college, if the entire campus closed it would be on the news or I could call a phone number for a recording if it was weather– related. If one professor canceled a class, I wouldn’t find out until I saw the note on the classroom door. (which was a real pain if I traveled one hour each way and that was my only class that day). Same thing with work – pre-cell phone and email they closed some offices a couple of times for non-weather reasons. They tried to call people – but mostly everyone was on their way in. I’d way rather get a bunch of notification than miss getting that sort of info.

  65. Czhorat*

    I TOTALLY agree with Alison that LW1’s situation is everything I hate about performative nonsense involving diversity.

    It doesn’t address the systemic issues which make these days important

    It doesn’t address anything the company does to contribute to sexist culture.

    It doesn’t even offer sincere compliments – any praise delivered *because it’s women’s history month* will feel like a patronizing pat on the head.

    It’s lip service, and not even USEFUL lip service; it isn’t as if the women being complimented are given anything more than a few kind words. Are they getting a raise? Promotions? More high-profile project work? Training opportunities? No? Then shut up.

  66. Shirley Keeldar*

    Dear Jane, thank you for being so hardworking and dedicated even though you get paid 22% less than John for doing the same job. Appreciate you!

    Dear Jessica, thank you for bearing the burden of being the sole woman in upper management. Love your nail polish today!

    Dear Jennifer, thank you for hopping on that Zoom meeting while on maternity leave and breastfeeding your newborn. Sorry for the text about your boobies from Jerry. You’ll be glad to know HR had a meeting with him. He’s a nice guy, really, just a bit clueless.

    3. Maggie*

      I’m glad I work somewhere where if we did do this admittedly misguided activity people would not use it as a way to insult or demean me.

  67. Shelly*

    Can someone explain the Glassdoor situation Does this mean any review I have written can be traced back to me?

    2. Tinkerbell*

      Essentially, Glassdoor has stepped up their efforts at data collection AND once they find out information about you, they retroactively link it to everything you’ve posted. This means if you made a critical review of a previous employer intending to be anonymous, and Glassdoor later is able to link your anonymous account name to your real name, they’ll replace it with your real name and they won’t necessarily tell you. They also doubled down on “you can’t make us stop.” Given how data keeps getting consolidated, it’s likely that even a throwaway email address could be linked to your real info without your knowledge or consent.

      1. Czhorat*

        That’s not only horrible, it defeats the entire purpose of what GlassDoor is. If you can’t post about your current or prior workplaces anonymously then you can’t post about them critically. This makes the platform a useless on in which there will never be anything other than positive reviews.

        Ironically, this will eventually kill their platform and drive the revenue from whatever data they collect/sell down to zero.

  68. Addison DeWitt*

    I just go around patting the office women on the head and telling them something encouraging, like ‘You’re doing a great job for a woman” or “Way to go, little lady!”

    Gross.

  69. June*

    LW2 – if you’re in iOS you should be able to mute group chats! I find the notifications from message reactions distracting, too – if they’re pulling you out of focus and you don’t need the reminders, definitely go ahead and mute the group. Since your boss is also using other methods I’m assuming you won’t miss any important messages if you do that.

  70. OP*

    I’m also Gen X and I totally get LW #2’s annoyance at the pings from the texts being acknowledged.

    In my current role, when a manager sends out an email or Teams message with info we need, we’re all expected to reply all with something like ‘Understood, thanks!” or “Noted!” or some such. It’s irritating af to be distracted from what I’m working on to manage the constant pings from either software of constant responses.

    1. OP*

      Oops! I was an OP on a previous letter and forgot to change my name :) I am not any of the OPs from today’s letters.

    2. Teapot Wrangler*

      That’s so ridiculous as a requirement. The most that seems sensible is a thumbs up emoji and even that as optional!

  71. On my way out*

    LW #2, I was grumbling a lot about my job (not without reason) and my wife just turned to me one day and said “Retire. We’ll figure it out.” I think your issues *might* be an age thing. My tolerance for petty little stuff has dwindled over the years until I have no more f-s to give. I feel like the younger people I work with have a lot more energy. Maybe, if you can, advance that retirement. I’ve got 3 weeks left and I can’t wait. Don’t be miserable any longer than you need to.

  72. CzechMate*

    LW 2 – Millennial here, also in higher ed working in an office ranging from Boomer to Gen Z. I personally think that generational things are pretty overblown….but one thing that came out recently in one of our staff meetings is that the Boomer/Gen X coworkers and managers may become overwhelmed when the start getting lots of G-Chats/Slack messages/texts and assume that it means everyone expects an immediate response. It doesn’t necessarily. I and a lot of other people use it just to park a message somewhere when we want someone to see it at some point, but that may not necessarily be now if you’re busy.

    If your phone starts going off when something like this happens, you can just glance at it, get the message, and then put your phone aside or mute the notifications. Your team is probably intends this as a, “Just a heads up reminder” rather than a “You are a child and must drop everything to acknowledge this” kind of message.

  73. I Would Prefer Not To*

    It’s funny how some of the more banal questions sometimes get so much traction on this wonderful site :)

    LW2 maybe you can suggest some changes? For instance, ask in a department meeting whether you can agree that people don’t respond to the mass text with likes or replies unless it’s for clarification – the you only get the reminder and not the other notifications. Secondly, in my organisation we get reminders the day after the timesheet deadline and only if we haven’t submitted it. It’s not clear from your post if the reminder is coming from a system or directly from your manager – if it’s from a system, I’m sure it can be set up to only reach ones who haven’t submitted theirs. If it’s from your manager he might be convinced that only reminding the offenders is a much more effective way of getting the message across.

  74. Helen_of_the_Midwest*

    LW1 reminds me of the Jax song “Cinderella Snapped”: “Don’t call me ‘baby’–equal pay me!”

  75. lalalindz*

    Re: the episode of Friends. I would have waited at the hostess stand so I could tell the interviewer privately, and ask if we could go to a different coffee shop/restaurant (which, it’s New York City, there’s probably one of those right next door).

  76. JelloStapler*

    LW1: Compliment to a female employee: “I am so impressed by your ability to manage both work and home without having an OBVIOUS mental breakdown- or at least being able to pretend you’re fine”

  77. TheBunny*

    I haven’t used Glassdoor as anything but an employer to post jobs for quite a while.

    They require you to add feedback about a job once per year to keep access.

    Well. The job before my current position (I’ve been there almost 6 months) was 6 years. The one before that was 5.

    I don’t change jobs often enough for their algorithm.

  78. I should really pick a name*

    #2
    Is it possible to mute likes on whatever messaging platform that you’re using? That would reduce the interruptions somewhat without risking missing important messages.

  80. The Rafters*

    OP2, I read your letter and realized I didn’t submit my TC last week, so thank you for that. Re: snow days or emergency school closings: they are almost all automated but they are sent to office phones, emails and cell phones. Since I often have office phones forwarded to my cell phone, guess how many of those I receive? A nuisance yes, but nothing to lose sleep over.

  81. SpicySpice*

    LW1, it is 100% icky. Right now there are TV ads for Yolplait yogurt where they are “empowering girls” by printing complimentary phrases on the yogurt lids. It is so terrible that I get actively mad when I see the ad. This is part and parcel of the same thinking – we don’t have to actually DO anything about womens’ causes, we just have to compliment a woman and problem solved! It’s the thoughts and prayers solution.

    1. Irish Teacher.*

      And it also in a way puts the blame for inequality on women. It implies the issue is that women just don’t know their worth and once we tell them they are awesome, that’s problem solved. When the problem is really structural inequality.

      1. Observer*

        It implies the issue is that women just don’t know their worth and once we tell them they are awesome, that’s problem solved. When the problem is really structural inequality.

        Well, ONE of the problems is structural. But another problem is that women who *do* actually know their worth often get punished for that….

    2. JustaTech*

      I keep seeing an ad from Indeed that’s two women standing by a poster that says “Celebrate Women!” and they rip off the top half of the poster so now it says “Promote Women”.

      And while I’m not huge fan of Indeed, they’re right that it’s not about celebrating, it’s about promoting. Companies say they support women, show it by promoting women.

  82. Dasein9 (he/him)*

    LW2: Solidarity!

    Constant notifications are an absolute pain. Email, chat, and getting it on your phone too means not being able to maintain a train of thought for very long. It’s so counterproductive. Knowing I don’t have to reply right away makes it more annoying, not less, since I’ve now got to do the work of re-focusing and it wasn’t even because something important happened.

    I’ve just started letting my team know I’m on Do Not Disturb and will check email regularly throughout the day. Maybe you can get your boss to take you off the group chat for such things?

  83. Pescadero*

    I feel like there is a bit of burying the lede going on with #2.

    The biggest problem? They shouldn’t be texting your personal phone. Ever.

    1. bamcheeks*

      Genuine question, how else would you expect emergency closures to be communicated? I can totally see the logic of not using personal phones for any work-related communication or routine stuff, but how else would they communicate “we’re closed, do not come to work, do not log in”?

      1. Pescadero*

        The way they are communicated at my giant (40,000 student, 40,000 staff, 20,000 hospital staff) university is… the local news.

        No text messages. No notifications.

    2. Kel*

      If they don’t have a work phone, how would they get messages re: snow days or other emergency closures??

      1. SchuylerSeestra*

        The OP mentioned there is a company wide system already in place. The manager is sending text alerts in addition to the company specific alerts.

    3. Dinwar*

      Maybe ten years ago this would be true. Now? Everyone assumes that everyone has a smart phone that’s available 24/7. I cannot tell you how many conversations I’ve had–at work–that include “Just download this app to your phone.”

      One of many reasons I do not have a smart phone: I’m fine with people calling or texting my personal phone (after all, personal phones have always been used that way), but I don’t like the idea of the company digging its fingers into my devices.

      Back to the original point, though: How else is the business supposed to contact you?

      1. Gatomon*

        Yeah, my company provides a cell phone for most positions, but with required MFA, if you don’t want the app on your personal cell and don’t qualify for a provided one, you get a separate dongle. I think adding the corporate email requires enrolling in some kind of management thing for your device, so I keep a separate phone for that reason. I remember we were forbidden from using Pokémon Go when that came out because of fear we’d photograph Pokémon in sensitive locations.

        I also think it’s a security risk – I have some level of access to do damage. I keep my work phone and laptop very clean from anything non-work. If someone compromised my personal phone or laptop, they’d have to make a leap to separate devices with totally different logins and such.

    4. NP*

      Thank you! That’s immediately what I honed in on there. That level of texts on my personal device for work – I’d be livid. The emergency alert no big deal. Everything else should be sent through work email or a work based communication system on a work device of some kind.
      My managers want a cell phone number for emergencies but I’ve learned it often becomes a slippery slope for all kinds of other messages

  84. New Mom (of 1 7/9)*

    I mean, Glassdoor isn’t going to un-anonymize *reviews*, from what I can tell? Except by lawsuit e.g. Zuru, Inc. v. Glassdoor, Inc.?

    Totally agree that it’s horrible practice to add. names where users don’t want one. But if I already had my name attached to my Glassdoor account and have left reviews, there’s no issue, right? (Totally happy to be corrected here, just trying to understand!)

    1. Kevin Sours*

      For now? Probably not. But data breaches aren’t exactly a hypothetical problem. Or they could be sold to a private equity fund that will just package the data up for sale. Hell, given the attitude they’re taking they might decide to just do that themselves.

      They clearly do not care about anonymity and that is a problem given what they’re doing.

  85. Justin D*

    Getting reminders that you don’t need is annoying but the grizzled coworker who gets ticked off at little stuff like this is worse.

  86. JLC*

    LW2 I totally understand both your position and your boss’. I’m a millennial and have been doing my job for long enough that the procedures are second nature. I am often surprised at how this differs in both my older and younger colleagues. I can wish folks to be better all I want, but to get by in this world, I have to accept that the outcome I want costs more effort. In your boss’ shoes, this is a simple way to cover the bases. I bet in their heart of hearts they’d love to get to a place where it’s not necessary. In your shoes, I’d ignore it. Think of it as someone shouting in the office, “someone’s car lights are on” and you biked to work. Yeah you overhear it but it has nothing to do with you.

  87. Kevin Sours*

    My first job out of school was timesheet software. Trust me when I say that Alison is 100% correct here.

  88. Glazed Donut*

    LW1 – For me, the ick is around the implied “this is the one time a year we honor women!” similar to how some companies use February as the one time a year to shine a light on contributions from the Black population. People who do good work shouldn’t be limited to one time a year for their recognition.

    LW2 – When I had a job with timesheets, I had to submit my own and approve 10 others’ sheets. The annoying part was that the system took about 24 hours to reflect others’ changes. So, if Mary didn’t submit on time I might not realize it until a day or two later and we’d get dangerously close to the deadline for her pay.

    I’ll also add this about the snow day texts: For jobs when some people are remote and others aren’t, snow days can be so confusing. In my WFH job, we didn’t get snow days, even if the main company location was closed. Also, lots of people have mentioned muting the text thread (which I wholeheartedly endorse). My iPhone also lets me filter texts by known and unknown senders- all unknown texts go to a separate folder of sorts, and I don’t get notifications for them. This works especially well with political solicitations (they come from so many different numbers, it would be nearly impossible to opt out or mute all of them) or the “I want to buy your house” texts.

    Finally, I wonder if part of your anger at the communication and focus on age may come back to your time in your role and the number of different bosses you’ve had – is there a chance you’re a bit resentful at not having the role yourself, or maybe not having a say in the hiring of the person? I think that’s also worth some self-reflection if you’re going to be happy at work for the next few years.

  89. EquityChampion*

    RE: LW1
    “We don’t need compliments from our coworkers; we need real equity.”
    Alison Preach!

  90. Gatomon*

    #3 actually happened to me!

    Our office usually opened at 7:30, but on this day of the week we didn’t open to the public until 9 for meetings and trainings. Well it was a short week or something due to a holiday, so the staff meeting was canceled, therefore I didn’t have to show until 9. A second-round interview was scheduled for 7:30 at a local restaurant, which was perfect because I didn’t need to fake a doctor’s appointment!

    Or so I thought.

    As I’m walking in to the restaurant, I run into one of our office supervisors. Of course I have to say hi and greet her. Turns out she’s meeting another supervisor there for breakfast, he too spots me too from the bar area.

    Y’all, I’m dead. Busted. I’m dressed way too nicely with a portfolio in my hand, I don’t even know what I stammered out, but these people I’m meeting are clearly not my friends or dates. They know. And if they know, the manager knows. And he’d just done some crazy things to try to torpedo a previous employee’s departure, so I’m terrified now.

    I spot the folks I’m meeting in the booth area and stagger over there, picking at a fruit cup because I’m like, internally melting down. I leave with just enough time to squeak into work and change my top in the staff restroom as planned.

    In the end it turned out all right because I got the job, but waiting for the call back was so, so hard. Literally spent the entire day in a panic, as I didn’t get the call until I was leaving work. Almost did a donut in the parking lot because I was so relieved.

  91. Yup*

    #2: I’m a freelancer, and one of my clients emails all freelancers once at the end of every month to turn in timesheets. That’s it. It’s timely, helpful, quick, and effective.

    If I had to deal with people reminding me of everything, I would be really annoyed too, I’ve had clients email me before a deadline to see if I’ll still meet the deadline. After I’ve never once missed a deadline. It feels both unproductive and insulting, and it’s about them being unable to manage their own stress about the project as opposed to me not being able to manage my work. I can see reminders for big issues, unusual cases, or past forgetfulness, but not for weekly tasks like timesheets.

    As for age, I think it *can* play a factor, because younger generations use different methods and means of communication, which can strike us as odd whereas it’s perfectly normal and familiar to them.

    So while I don’t think there’s much you can do, I think your frustrations are valid. Being seen and understood as a good, thoughtful, thorough employee is important.

  92. Yup*

    Oh and #1: What or what did in the world do we have to do to get people to actually LISTEN to what women want??

    People: What do women want?
    Women: Pay equity, parental leave, equal opportunities, credit for our work, promotions, Flex Time…
    People: I guess we’ll never know!

  93. Kuleta*

    OP3: No advice, just sharing a story.

    Firm A was hiring away an entire group at Firm B. The group leader, Reed, traveled to Firm A’s head office to discuss the deal. Reed’s colleague Susan happened to also be at Firm A’s office on her own business trip, saw Reed there and reported it back to Firm B.

  94. Office Manager slash Miracle Worker*

    LW2 – I am 75% aggravated with you. The 75% stem from me thinking why aren’t we calling out the people who it concerns? We know the ones that are always late and/or don’t know what’s going on. Because let’s face it – those are the ones that need the reminders.
    The other 25% is me understanding that it’s not always politically correct to call people out individually and that it’s easier for the manager to email everybody and their grandmother via pre-set distribution list.
    Maybe consider how much of your capital you are willing to spend to bring it up and how receptive your manager might be.
    I also realized in my work, that people tick differently – he might not be aware that it’s unnecessary and think he’s doing everybody a favor. Just a thought.

  95. NotBatman*

    LW3 made me laugh, because a similar thing happened to me just last week!

    I left my small (600-student) college, drove 250 miles to interview at another small college — and bumped into my former student in the cafeteria! Turns out he transferred from my current school to the prospective school. He was really happy to see me, told the interviewer I have cool classes, and said he hopes I come to work there. So I actually think it helped my chances!

  96. UnintendedConsequences*

    Holy cow, that’s the same Cellio I know from the old Livejournal days. We’d lost touch!
    So sorry this happened to her, but thank you OP for posting that link so we can reconnect.

  97. Lizzianna*

    #2 – on one hand, I too get annoyed when I’m constantly reminded of things that I have a handle on.

    On the other hand, since becoming a supervisor, I can’t tell you how much time I have to spend reminding people to do things. Unfortunately, I don’t always have time to sort out the people who need reminders from the people who don’t. And it’s always the one time you figure “she’s got it!” and don’t send a reminder, is the time that they don’t actually have it handled. So it’s easier to take 5 min to send out an email than risk having to spend several hours tracking something down after it’s due.

    It’s also shocking to me how many people don’t read their emails (and I know it’s worse because we’re cluttering inboxes with reminders). But I can’t tell you how many times I decided, “you know what, this meeting really could just be an email!” and canceled the meeting, only to have people complain that I didn’t “tell them” and they missed the email.

    I’d love to take a firm stand that doesn’t handhold, but it’s not a hill I’ve been able to tackle yet. As a supervisor, part of my evaluation is based on my team meeting admin standards (getting paid on time, being up to speed on mandatory training, etc.), so I haven’t been willing to tank my own performance to take a stand on this.

  98. TheFlipSide*

    At most places I’ve worked that require timesheets they’ve only sent out reminders if something unusual was going on (for example, an earlier deadline because of a holiday). The rest of the time it was the employee’s responsibility. If they didn’t submit they didn’t get paid until the next time period.

    1. Observer*

      If they didn’t submit they didn’t get paid until the next time period.

      In the US it’s generally not legal to do this. And it also often causes a fair amount of trouble to not have timesheets for processing in all the ways in can touch other systems in a timely fashion.

  99. Have you had enough water today?*

    Just checked Glassdoor & discovered that my name, location AND EMPLOYER were listed publicly, so I deleted my account & got an “oops, we were unable to do this at this time” so that’s great.

  100. Raida*

    2. I’m aggravated by the reminders my boss sends our team

    You can talk to your manager about the texts – Tell them “I get all the required information from the Emergency Ops about the snow day, right? Then I get a text from an unknown number reiterating the same information, plus “out of office” instructions. THEN I get, and this is not hyperbole because I counted to check if it was just me being irritated or not, one hundred and forty-seven further notifications.”
    “I understand not everyone has the experience I have with snow days, I understand some people would need an out of office reminder, I understand it’s safer on your end to include everyone and not have a set of different distribution lists in your phone for possible combinations of staff. That’s absolutely fine. ~warm smile in your voice~ But the responses and the likes were half an hour of interruptions and notifications that I had to check in case they were pertinent. It really put me in a bad mood, it really threw off my day.
    Is there a way you could do one-way communications for these events?”

    and then “While we’re talking about notifications, I’m curious about the timesheet ones – you’re sending them out in four separate channels. Is that because your staff have this varied preference for receiving these reminders?”
    “Could you do a little poll in Teams to check if all four are warranted maybe? It’s just… I don’t need to be reminded, and I’m getting told four times, plus people once again responding. If that could be cut and not negatively impact anyone I’d appreciate it.”

    1. Churu*

      So I’m a manager, of sorts, who recently had Payroll freaking out because some student workers (under one of my reports) hadn’t turned in their timesheets on time (despite my report’s frequent badgering), my report was away for a family matter, supervisor approval of timesheets was due in about 3 hours, etc. I had to get HR to make me the approver of those timesheets. And one of the student workers never did turn in his timesheet for that week (and apparently this is a known problem for him).
      I have another student worker who reports to me, on paper (timesheet-wise) who sometimes forgets to fill theirs out correctly, or waits until the last minute to submit it to me. That’s so much fun (not).

      The majority of my reports (traditional employees) are on the ball about submitting timesheets on time and correctly. They know how snow days and other org-wide communications are handled (mass texts, mass app notifications). But when it comes to timesheets, I send an email reminder the Thursday or Friday before they’re due because I do not want Payroll on my back. And after that–well sometimes people need to learn the hard way (i.e. a missed or late paycheck) to get their timesheets in on time, correctly).

      When there is inclement weather and we might be looking at a snow day or (more likely) a “virtual learning/working” day, or some other out-of-the-norm event? I’m emailing my reports even though they may be getting the app notifications and the text messages, and checking the org’s special webpage (which doesn’t always update very quickly). Just because classes are canceled or moved to virtual doesn’t mean my reports might not have questions about whether or not they’re still expected to be on site, as staff. Now we don’t do group texts just because but like, I don’t think this is a hill that the LW should really try to die on. And I definitely don’t think they should bring all the age/generation stuff into it. It’s super irrelevant and it’s just honestly asking for age discrimination against themselves (unless maybe they want that so they can retire early on the lawsuit proceeds?? But those lawsuits take forever to resolve so…IDK, there have to be easier ways to make money).
      Mute the text threads, accept that some of your team members are still dumb about turning timesheets in on time (and your manager won’t/can’t just let them learn a harsh lesson about it), and live your life. This is very much a nothing-burger of a problem.
      Or you can do what Raida suggested and get fired, like, please, come back and let us all know how that turned out.

    2. Bog Witch*

      Every time I read one of these off-the-wall, novella-length scripts, I wonder: do y’all actually read what you’re writing? Or try saying what you’re writing out loud? Because I cannot imagine suggesting to someone with a straight face that they tell their boss that something they did “really put me in a bad mood, it really threw off my day”. If I were someone’s boss and they said this to me about *checks notes* getting some extraneous notification alerts, I don’t think I’d be able to stop myself from laughing in their face.

      And I can tell you…the boss would probably love nothing more than to stop sending out all these reminders! They aren’t doing it for fun! The reason the LW is getting the same notification about timesheets in four different channels is because enough people are screwing up their timesheets on a regular basis that they need to be reminded and they can’t use the excuse of not seeing the reminder because it’s been posted in every conceivable channel. Is this a great use of anyone’s time or a good permanent solution? No. Is it within the LW’s standing to address? Also no, and definitely not like this.

      Here’s what the LW can do: pat themselves on the back for always being on top of their timesheets and snow day procedures, make themselves a cup of tea and curl up with Google to find out “how to control notification settings iphone (or android)”, and get a stress ball.

  101. Pam Poovey*

    I get automated reminders every pay period when my timesheet is due. Half the time I’d probably forget without it.

    Methinks someone is a little resentful that their boss is younger than them. Why else bring up everyone’s age and generation?

  102. Neko*

    LW 2: I understand how you feel on this. I’ve worked with my supervisor for many years now, and I still get annoyed at the constant time card reminders and such.

    I used to feel very annoyed by this, like she was treating me like a child. She knows me by now and should be able to trust me without the reminders. I have to remind myself that others do need these reminders (younger and older than me). It’s very annoying when it pulls me out of what I was focusing on, but I’ve learned to ignore it.

    Only advice I can offer it to mute the notifications on the group text. I did this and I can look at it on my time, not when they text. Made it much easier to bear. Work email is unavoidable, but controlling my personal phone notifications has helped. If the calendar reminders are reoccurring ones you may be able to mute those as well.

    And remember it’s not aimed at you. It sucks to be treated the same as the most forgetful person on the team. On the other hand, if the supervisor left you out of the group reminders others could be resentful of you getting special treatment.

  103. Calamity Janine*

    i feel like the true moral of the second letter is simple:

    it is an excellent demonstration of why timed mutes for notifications are the sign of a civilized app. and until then, an ode to the joys of Do Not Disturb mode.

  105. Bear in teh Woods*

    For LW#2, one thing I though of was the possibility that the 27 year old went from entry level to assistant director in a quick span of time. They may also be dealing with the insecurity of being so young (and potentially inexperienced) against a team that is distinctly not.
    It could be a hyper vigilance that you often see with people experiencing imposter syndrome and who are desperate to not be seen as falling short. This could certainly be me reading too much into the situation, but it just seems to me that it’s almost like this guy is trying too hard.

  106. Teapot Wrangler*

    I have to say, I would be nearly as wound up by this as LW2. I’m a millennial so not sure it is a generational thing but I do feel that my concentration being interrupted that many times would get annoying fast. I’d also find the calendar reminders a bit infantilising – I can add stuff to my own diary if I need a reminder once you’ve emailed me details
    If some people aren’t meeting deadlines, you should raise it directly with them and talk to them about how to make sure they meet deadlines not keep contacting everyone over and over!!
    I know this is possibly a bit of an over-reaction but it would build up as an irritant

  107. Amy*

    Regarding the Glassdoor and other services on the Internet. Unless it’s not absolutely necessary (and I mean it in the literal sense, like them needing that data for legitimate purpose, such as government online services, getting a passport, employment, etc.) NEVER provide your real name for ANYTHING online. Not even deliveries from Amazon (unless it’s something for which you’ll need to present ID upon collection – you can do as a one-off though) or other online shopping. Never. They say they care about your data? They don’t. They say their service is encrypted? Well, there’s always that one employee who’d make a mistake for convenience. They say they anonymise the data upon request? Sure, they’ll make you Anna Smit instead of Anne Smith. They’ll keep all the other data intact. This is important, especially if you live in a data-protection unfriendly country such as the US.

  108. Trixie the Great and Pedantic*

    LW2, consider: some people use reactions or replies as a confirmation of receipt. It’s annoying that a mass text basically serves as a “reply all”, but if I were in your supervisor’s shoes, I’d be relieved that people knew about the snow day, so that they aren’t putting themselves in danger to come to an office that was closed.

  109. TD*

    Re Rachel on “Friends”: That’s still not as bad as when she kissed her job interviewer goodbye. Or when she tried to get her personal-shopping client to go out with her. Or when she got her friend Chandler to date her boss. Or when she claimed to be sleeping with Ralph Lauren. Or when she hired a guy to be her assistant just because he was good looking, and started sleeping with him.

    And yet she kept getting promoted. It’s enough to make you think that all someone needs to succeed in the fashion business is to dress well and look like Jennifer Aniston.

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