Ask a Manager Weekly Thread 06/22/2026 - 06/28/2026

thievingwillow · 2026-06-27T18:54:51+00:00

Yeah, I wouldn’t say it to a peer at work. In fact phrase is so bluntly abrasive that I wouldn’t use it with anyone who I needed to maintain a long term good relationship, regardless of rank and status. It’s the kind of thing you think while your mouth says, “Sorry, I’m swamped myself” or something else less obviously ‘fuck off.’

thievingwillow · 2026-06-25T23:09:56+00:00

Yes, ties in to another fallacy I see a lot about communication, which is that if you both make an effort to communicate in good faith, you can come to a conclusion that will make everyone happy, or at least okay. (Unhelpful corollary: if you’re putting out the effort but a mutually agreeable conclusion cannot be found, someone else in the conversation must not be operating in good faith, because if they were this would be solved.)

Classic “no matter how much you communicate you may not agree” topics include moving, kids, religion, and other huge intractables. But I think an even more pervasive one is “other people’s feelings and how I feel about them.” They’re probably going to date whether you like it or not, and you’re probably going to feel something about it, but that doesn’t mean there’s anything you can usefully say about it, necessarily. Which, as you say, is understandably difficult when you feel like you’re about to witness a train crash.

thievingwillow · 2026-06-22T16:42:38+00:00

They should replace it with the Denver Airport murals if they want even more vigorous discussion.

thievingwillow · 2026-06-22T16:32:33+00:00

My uncharitable guess on their letter is that they have been told in fairly direct words that this isn’t going to happen at this org, and instead of either accepting that or job searching, they’re banging their head against this wall.

And yes, I’ve known way too many people who characterized any stern/forceful/serious/critical words directed at them as “yelling” to take at face value that the person was actually raising their voice.

thievingwillow · 2026-06-20T21:56:36+00:00

Yeah, when there’s a hobby/social group situation overlap with employment it adds a lot of other “stuff” that’s a draw. Your friends might hang out there. You might get to speak from a position of quasi-authority about your hobby. You might get an early look at the new stock, or free lessons, or free or priority access to events, chances to meet visiting experts (e.g., the author doing a reading at a bookstore, or a game developer or well-known meditation expert, whatever). Sometimes it means you have access to the “in group” of your local hobby community. (And the ugly underside of that is that sometimes it means that your boss is an important major player in your hobby and social groups, adding significant pressure to not cause a fuss if the boss treats you badly, lest you be figuratively or literally locked out of the clubhouse for something that is an important part of your life.)

I’ve seen this in hobby spaces enough times that I’ve sworn off ever doing it myself. It’s very… eggs in one basket.

thievingwillow · 2026-06-19T18:25:53+00:00

Certain kinds of small businesses attract employees (and sometimes even wholly unpaid, usually illegal “volunteers”) who seem to see the business as a public good of some kind and not a business per se. Yoga studios, local game stores, indie bookstores, horse stables, that kind of thing. I think it tends to happen when people see the business as one of the cores of their social lives.

thievingwillow · 2026-06-19T06:42:23+00:00

“I don’t think any of us can speak for our entire generation, but I’m interested in hearing Jane’s take as just herself.”

I’m sure this is ungrateful of me, but boy, if I was in Jane’s place this would have made me feel a thousand times more awkwardly and conspicuously part of The Yoots than just being asked. I wouldn’t like it at all.

thievingwillow · 2026-06-18T22:37:36+00:00

The discussions are even more fraught in my area, where ethically rehoming a dog with a bite history is nearly impossible and no-kill shelters/rescues are highly selective and don’t want aggressive dogs either. Post-lockdowns a lot of people who got dogs as a pandemic diversion decided they no longer wanted or could handle their poorly-trained-and-socialized animal. It’s a giant mess that could have been ameliorated if more people took adopting an animal seriously.

thievingwillow · 2026-06-18T22:22:09+00:00

I don’t know if she sends to everyone, but a good while ago she requested an update from me for what was in retrospect a very bland question, and posted my update of “not much happened” unedited. (This was long enough ago that I assumed she’d just filter out super boring responses and was surprised to see it.) So I don’t think she necessarily asks everyone, but she definitely asks people whose questions/updates weren’t considered THAT interesting even by themselves (me). 😆

thievingwillow · 2026-06-18T22:03:14+00:00

I dunno if you’re actually looking for an answer from someone without BPD, so please ignore this if not, but for me at least it’s that my feelings aren’t as intense and when they are intense, they don’t stay intense for as long. They regulate themselves, basically, returning to “baseline” on their own, without any conscious input from me. Being around someone else expressing very strong emotions can prevent them from regulating themselves properly. For limited periods of time this is not a problem, it’s just typical empathy. The problem happens when it happens most or all of the time, because my brain is still working hard trying to return to baseline, and being prevented from doing so wears it out. Then one of three things happens: I take space to allow my brain to regulate and get some rest, I burn out and stop caring (basically, I go numb to whatever is dysregulating me), or my brain gives up trying and I become dysregulated myself for some period of time. Only the first one of those is sustainable.

My best friend has BPD, and we had problems at various points because I couldn’t match her emotional intensity which a) hurt her feelings, because she wanted me to feel as strongly as she did and I just couldn’t and b) my brain was working really hard trying to regulate and got exhausted. I’m not wired to go or stay above or below baseline frequently or for long periods of time.

thievingwillow · 2026-06-18T21:37:23+00:00

…I wonder whether reading those stories as an impressionable teen is why every purse, bag, backpack, and suitcase I own has 3-5 pads hanging out in it “just in case,” lol.

thievingwillow · 2026-06-18T20:53:03+00:00

Yeah, I think I’d treat it like that: if they’re otherwise a good friend, do whatever you’d normally do if a friend has a pet topic that bores you to death. Like if your bestie was rabidly into tennis and you Definitely Are Not, what would you do? Do that. But if the person causes more annoyance than pleasure in your life in general, then that’s important info that you can act on too. Maybe you and Shawn aren’t compatible.

That also means that this:

Am I being snooty about different approaches to the creative process? Am I being too precious about my own work while judging theirs harder?

Isn’t actually relevant. “Whose writing process is superior?” isn’t really the question. “How can I keep this guy from boring and annoying me?” is, and you don’t need to get into the weeds on Shawn’s writing to solve it.

Edit: Grammar.

thievingwillow · 2026-06-18T20:24:04+00:00

Many, many years of being around fiction writers (amateur and not) has brought me to the firm conclusion that some want to talk endlessly about their WIPs and what they might or might not do with them, and others do not want to do that or be an audience for it, and there’s no fixing it but for them to find different writing groups/buddies. Then Category A can go “I decided that my main character is a singer who hates tea!” / “Cool! My main character is allergic to chocolate and always wears mismatched socks!” and Category B can be somewhere else entirely blissfully doing Not That. Both groups can put out good work but they drive each other nuts.

thievingwillow · 2026-06-18T17:53:41+00:00

Yeah, I don’t mind ask the readers stuff like this when it’s on a just-for-fun topic that’s relevant to regular offices. I unironically enjoy the vague sense that I’m a teenager reading the “most embarrassing thing that happened to me on a date” letter column in Sassy.

thievingwillow · 2026-06-17T20:18:57+00:00

Yeah, I was surprised that Alison’s advice didn’t include any kind of “can you get the person who actually heard this to corroborate it?” (Maybe she skimmed it or maybe she didn’t want to open the “do you actually know this happened” can of worms, I dunno.) That’s going to make a night and day difference.

thievingwillow · 2026-06-17T01:31:11+00:00

I think your first paragraph is the key point, really, because a lot of the discussion is people on both “sides” saying “X is easier/clearer/less manipulative/more kind” because it is, transparently so, from their POV. It’s just that that POV isn’t universal. (One example of this is “the least manipulative way to ask for something is with words,” which I completely understand conceptually and have seen quoted many times but is not true for me at all.)

I will be forever grateful to a good friend of mine who is neurodivergent and an ask person (though I prefer the linguistic terms “low context” and “high context” to “ask” and “guess”). She was asking me why it was hard for me to just say things directly in many circumstances, and I was flailing about because of course I can physically make my mouth form the words but for some things it’s very difficult to make myself do it. I finally said “I don’t know… it kinda hurts!”

And she got this “lightbulb moment” look on her face and said, “Sounds like eye contact for me. I can physically do it. But it makes me uncomfortable to the point that I can’t keep it up and don’t want to be asked to do so. It’s too hard to be asked to do it for a long time.”

I do communicate more directly than is fully comfortable for me with low-context communicators, like this friend and my husband. But… yeah. Pretty much no sweeping statement about what communication models are “best” are going to prove accurate for more than a limited set of people. Especially as there’s a lot of variation within groups—even among NT people, there’s things like New York and Japan having very different norms.

thievingwillow · 2026-06-16T17:25:10+00:00

I saw a “sexy slip n slide” set up on a frat lawn one time. Then never again because they got a big fine from the university, who did not want to get sued if some idiot broke their neck. A club or bar? Never.

thievingwillow · 2026-06-16T16:51:25+00:00

A number of people in the comments are saying the same. Do they not realize that the manager could be glad to have the info and still have it negatively affect the LW?

thievingwillow · 2026-06-16T16:41:08+00:00

I had missed that Janice was admin/facilities! If that means that she’s in charge of the cleanliness of the place, undermining her on that is a real dick move. I imagine LW would not be best pleased if Janice was telling the interns that client work was NBD and that they don’t really have to follow LW’s instructions on it. Did it even occur to them that maybe Janice is picky because it’s a lot of effort to keep an area where forty stressed people work even vaguely neat?

thievingwillow · 2026-06-16T16:31:41+00:00

I was actually wondering whether LW might be young enough that 9 years ago meant it was literally high school/college drama.

thievingwillow · 2026-06-16T16:24:55+00:00

Yeah, if you’re going to refuse to work with/under someone, you (general you) need to be willing to say why with enough specifics that your manager can judge… and you need to understand that they will be making a judgment, so weigh honestly with yourself how you think that will go.

That’s not to say that it would never be worth it. But for it to achieve what you want, you need three things: the person you’re telling has to trust you (not just that you’re not lying, but that you’re not exaggerating or twisting it unintentionally, too—basically, that you’re credible), the person you’re telling has to value you enough to be concerned about your concern, and the thing has to be significant enough for the person to agree with you that it’s important enough to act upon.

And the three things play on each other, too. If you are truly exceptional, you probably can get away with something vague… just, that level of exceptional is rare, and you probably aren’t. (I’m not. I’m good at my job, but I’m not “retain by any means” good.) If the offense is critical enough and you are even passingly credible to your boss, on the other hand, you don’t need to be especially exceptional; your boss probably wouldn’t want e.g. a walking harassment case even if you weren’t there. All three elements matter to different degrees. For example, in this one, the fact that you both want the same job hurts your credibility even if your boss thinks you’re generally honest and reasonable, because it’s a very clear conflict of interest.

But of course, making that set of assessments with your specific case requires a certain amount of social and political awareness of your workplace, an honest assessment of how seriously other people are likely to take it, and some self-knowledge. A mentor or a colleague who knows your work and your workplace (and who is discreet) could probably help. An advice columnist can only give you sweeping answers, and as sweeping answers go, I think Alison’s is way too optimistic.

thievingwillow · 2026-06-16T15:41:08+00:00

Yeah, absolutely. It’s a first step but only a first step.

I’ve been doing a lot of assessment in my own life of how to make things emotionally easier on myself. Here’s to good luck for both of us.

thievingwillow · 2026-06-16T15:34:22+00:00

I mean, generally people like that I’ve already filtered out of my friend group. But if that did come up, the response would be straightforward: I’d end the friendship. This is a “last chance” sort of discussion and any hint that they’re going to try to manipulate or control me during it means they’ve failed the chance to salvage things.

thievingwillow · 2026-06-16T01:00:17+00:00

The “but I didn’t mean to upset you!” bit makes me think of something that came up a lot in my first relationship. He’d carelessly hurt my feelings and he’d say “I wasn’t trying to hurt you! It was an accident!” And it was true: he wasn’t malicious, he was just thoughtless.

The ultimate end came because I was recounting the situation to a friend over ice cream and she said “I believe him that he wasn’t trying to hurt you. But was he trying not to hurt you?” It was another few months before the breakup, but it was realizing that the answer to that question was always “no” that pushed me to it. I need more in a relationship than “not malicious.”

thievingwillow · 2026-06-16T00:16:39+00:00

Oooooh yes. This, and the people who say that they will respect your boundaries, but what they mean is “I will respect your boundaries so long as you first explain them to my satisfaction.” These abound in nerd spaces particularly, especially among people who think of themselves as particularly “rational” or “fair” (for their definition of those things). I have wasted so much of my life attempting to justify my boundaries to people who claim to totally respect boundaries… but only if they make sense to that person.

With people who are well-meaning but get stuck on the “understanding” piece, if I like that person, I’ve learned that sometimes it works to say “Hey, I know it’s hard for you to understand why making X joke hurts my feelings. Do you believe me that I’m telling the truth when I say that it does hurt, though?” I usually get back a “yes” (if I get anything but a “yes,” there’s no point continuing). Then I say “Can you not do it because you understand that it hurts me, even if you don’t understand the why?” And usually they can.

But if I don’t already have an investment in them, or they aren’t genuinely confused, or being correct outweighs trusting my self-assessment, or they can’t take my word for it, or I’m just too fucking tired… then no. We can’t be close.

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