#ask a manager

[scyllas-revenge]

LOTR + Ask A Manager: Part 2

Part 1, Part 3 and Part 4 here!

[sable-pigeon]

Nirvana in Fire and Ask a Manager (Part 3)

[writing-relatedactivities]

A Very Ask A Manager Thanksgiving

So I love advice blogs (I maintain that comment sections on advice blogs are the best free tool for writers to explore different viewpoints, which really enriches your characterization), and for a few years now, I have had this idea that I want to do a do an Ask A Manager themed dinner, purely to delight myself. Meant to do it as a cookout this summer, but timing never worked out, so I broached the idea of doing it for Thanksgiving. My partner, who is also a nerd and therefore very supportive of my advice blog love even though it is not one of their interests, was down, with their only condition being that I should still make my cider bread with maple butter.

The menu:

Appetizers

Chips with:

Guacamole in honor of Guacamole Bob, of "ordering extra guacamole is wasteful of member dues” fame. (This being on the menu may also have been a factor in Partner being willing to have our holiday take on an Ask A Manager theme, as I once took a community education course on grilling that taught me nothing about its ostensible subject matter but did teach me to make a bomb-ass guacamole. The secret is that your first step should be to pulverize an entire head of garlic into a paste in your mocajete.)

Three store bought salsas, where the trick is to "fold" the salsa to get the best flavor

A bottle of hot sauce so we can get fired after a coworker steals our spicy food

Main Course

"Duck club" sandwiches in honor of the secret office sex club where you get points for sex in different locations, and quacking is involved. (These were very decadent and if anyone's interested in a great duck recipe, I used the Duck with Lemon recipe from A Feast of Ice and Fire.)

Sides

Cheap-ass rolls that I definitely deliberately brought to upstage you, yes you, the person who signed up to bring Hawaiian rolls! It's definitely not an overreaction on your part to declare that "they can all take Santa and stick it up their ass!" You're definitely not getting fired for being wildly hostile! (These are actually homemade rolls, but I weighed "buy actually cheap rolls and be done" or "spend a couple hours adapting a corgi butt roll recipe to a human butt roll," and chose in favor of the pun.)

Dessert

Bribery cupcakes, from that time a letter writer brought some cupcakes over to chat with her neighbor, the son of the Chief of Police, about a disruptive noise issue in her workplace and some commenters decided this constituted bribing a public servant. (The recipe is in the comments on that link; I made the carrot cake version. However, I realized halfway through that I was somehow low on vanilla despite obsessively buying fancy vanilla extract every time I am in a spice shop, along with a bunch of other things I don't need because buying cool spices makes me feel like a wizard. Anyway, half of these had vanilla in the filling/icing, and the other half had cardamom extract.)

A birthday cake that somehow crosses boundaries by...being too fancy? Being paid for a staff person? Not involving the wife in the planning? Anyway, the real answer to the letter writer's question is, "Eh, I don't think it's a big deal" because different offices have different norms around birthdays and it's whatever, but sometimes a low-stakes office norms question hits just right and you get 630 comments of people debating The One True Way to Do Office Birthdays, and whether or not buying a cake means you're angling for an affair. (Okay, not all the comments are about that particular letter. Anyway, I picked up this fancy-ass cake at Marc Heu Patisserie, and appropriately enough, the guy ahead of me in line was picking up a cake for his boss.)

And of course, what Ask A Manager column would be complete without chocolate teapots?

Beverages

Mudslides, because "girls love chocolate." And magic tricks. And being played "You're So Vain" on the piano with a mournful stare. Partner and I are both notorious lightweights but I had been snacking all day as I cooked so I was mostly immune. Partner took one sip of this drink and immediately began loudly telling me how their one colleague doesn't sing enough to his Pre-K students, and "this classroom will do anything if you sing to them!" After dinner, they lay down on the floor and sang the Slippery Fish song.

The full spread:

[moontyger]

Other resources:

A journalist who is one of many reporters asking government employees who are willing to talk to contact her. You can ask to remain anonymous and stay off the record.

How to securely send anonymous tips to ProPublica

Info on how OPM handles severance pay

A guide to the first-day executive actions on the federal workforce (this has excellent, concrete advice for what federal employees should be doing right now)

What civil servants need to know in week two (this too)

A DOJ attorney’s guide to upholding ethical obligations and the rule of law

A civil servant’s checklist of current rights

Resources for civil servants (tons of useful stuff here)

How *you* can protect democracy (for everyone, not just federal workers)

Contact your elected officials

And I’ll just leave this here — a CIA guidebook that was distributed in Nazi-occupied countries with advice for office workers and bureaucrats on how to safely resist the Nazis without putting yourself or your family in danger (and here’s a link to it at the Wayback Machine instead if you’re concerned about viewing it on a government website).

[some-anonymity-preferred]

Four’s a Crowd Chapter 1: The Odds are Good But the Goods are Odd

Stede Bonnet returns to the office from a dreadful lunch date, and his assistant, Lucius Spriggs, coaches him through the finer points of online dating apps. They scroll, swipe, and snipe together, and they each set a date for that evening. What could possibly go wrong?

[shakespearenews]

This time, his question was essentially, “If you had to choose between the death of one person you’ve never met or the destruction of all the works of Shakespeare (or another author you prefer), what would your choice be?”

Everyone was being flippant for the most part (i.e., “If I save the person, no kid will be forced to read Shakespeare ever again!”) until Carrie chimed in and said, “Shakespeare teaches us more about humanity that saving one life would, so I would save the plays.” This created a very awkward silence and made several people visibly uncomfortable. Personally, I thought it was a theoretical discussion (and was scrolling on my phone anyway) so didn’t take it too seriously. Steve seemed to feel the same at the time and debated with her a bit, but no one else said anything related to it for the rest of lunch and most everyone excused themselves quickly. I thought it was awkward but just one of those things that would blow over.

…which it didn’t. People started avoiding Carrie or being very curt with her almost immediately (like, that very afternoon). It’s not really the vibe in our office to email each other since we’re so small, but most everyone started emailing her when normally they would just approach her or speak to her over her cubicle wall. I honestly can’t tell if Carrie even minds the different treatment, but it’s so pointed I have to think she’s noticed.

[wheelie-butch]

job interview tip

(idk if anyone cares but basically i'm a hugeeeee fan of the Ask A Manager blog i read it for fun every day for like 2+ years now even though I'm a usually jobless student but ANYWAY)

on AAM there's this job interview tip they call 'the magic question' and I've started doing it in all my interviews for summer jobs etc. and it always goes super well, I really think it helped me get the job yesterday :)

basically at the end when they're like 'have you got any questions for us about the role?' once you've asked the other important things you need to know, you ask them something like "Looking back at other people who've been in the role, what's the difference between someone who was alright at it, and someone where you say 'wow, they were amazing!' ?"

It's useful to get info on the sort of things they're hoping for that might not be in the job description, for example one job they told me they would feel like that if the intern left them with a lot of stuff they could continue using after the internship, and the one yesterday for them the focus was really on people who bring a ton of positive energy to the role. I think it also signals to them that you're looking to be really good at the job yourself? I always get told that was a really great thing to ask and i think it helps things end on a positive note.

Anyway it's been so useful to me I just wanted to share in case it helps anyone else :)

[vfdinthewild]

"Honestly she probably has a verbal fluency distort herself and this is one of the methods to help smooth speech."

-from a comment on the Ask A Manager post "how do I deal with a painfully slow talker?"

[rekhaa]

P.S. Whoops, one more thing — about that feeling that you’re “not good enough to work in a bakery” because they didn’t call you back. That’s not the right way to look at this. Most jobs have multiple applicants for one slot. When one person gets hired to fill that one slot, that doesn’t mean that everyone else who applied “wasn’t good enough.” It means that the employer had one slot, and they’re only hiring one person for it, so as a result, many qualified people will be rejected; that’s the case for every job opening. You can’t take it personally or as a reflection on you. It has nothing to do with you — it’s just math.

ask a manager

[astrabear]

Outsider POV for all your enemies-to-lovers office worker AUs

[thatbadadvice]

Help! The Ungrateful Youths of Today Don't Appreciate the Value of Anything, and by 'Anything' I Mean the Worthless Shit I Am Trying to Sell Them

Ask A Manager, 12 May 2023:

Several years ago I was frustrated with the way people went about looking for jobs. I’m a small business owner and even before running my own company, I always networked. Through networking I’ve managed to do so much. Today I run six networking groups. Again, several years ago I created a t-shirt designed to network for you. It lists various fields, each with a checkbox by it, and comes with a small sharpie so you can check off the type of job or career you desire. By wearing the t-shirt everywhere you go, it starts the job seeking conversation. I marketed them inexpensively to college grads. I went to colleges, job fairs, and even graduations. Not one t-shirt sold. I was so angry. I was on popular talk shows and in the paper and still nothing. Today I sit with every size t-shirt in my garage. Many ask why I don’t still pursue this idea. They are the ones who got the idea and believe in it. Perhaps I was ahead of my time. I marketed towards college grads who texted as a main form of communication. However, today communication is even worse. Young adults can barely look someone in the eye. Please tell me what your opinion is of my t-shirts. I hoped people would wear them daily and maybe while filling their gas tank this would start a conversation that would change their lives forever. Networking will always be the way to get what you need. Referrals, physicians, mechanics, plumbers, electricians, landscapers, housekeepers, financial advisors, accountants, babysitters, trainers, real estate agents, tutors, and whatever I have missed. Am I wrong? Would my product help those unable to network?

There is one reason and one reason only that your revolutionary clothing business has failed to see the success it so clearly deserves: young people today are appallingly poor communicators who, for reasons that likely include video games and participation trophies, are actively unwilling to appreciate the awesome one-on-one human connections that can only be made by going about life wearing a t-shirt and hoping someone reads it and decides to enter into a business relationship as a result. Yes indeed, it is specifically and only the modern youths who have refused to purchase your t-shirts who are very, very poor at understanding how to build valuable and meaningful relationships with other humans. There is definitely not anybody else here who is bad at communicating.

Every single person on planet earth who is under the age of, say, 25, lacks the foresight and vision to appreciate the radically lucrative possibilities of wearing the same t-shirt every day every single place they go. Every single person who didn't buy one of your shirts did so because they are young and stupid and don't know a life-changing idea when they see one. But you do! Because you are old and smart, which are the same thing.

After all, you are great at networking and have managed to do incredible things as a result of your great networking skills, such as running six networking groups. If that's not proof positive that networking works, what is?

The only way to know for sure whether your shirts will help poor communicators understand exactly how bad they are at connecting with others may be to try your product out for yourself.

[scyllas-revenge]

LOTR + Ask a Manager

I've seen this somewhere on tumblr before, but I couldn't rest until I made my own

Part 2 , Part 3 and Part 4 here!

[sable-pigeon]

Nirvana in Fire and Ask a Manager (Part 1)

[heckofabecca]

we live in a horror dimension

[elskanellis]

from Ask a Manager's mortification week: I was trying to email my resume to a manager for a job I REALLY wanted, but accidentally attached a different file containing a poorly photoshopped image of my cat driving a Mario Kart race car. Didn't realize it until she replied saying she hadn't received my resume, and I checked my sent mail. Shockingly, I did not get an interview.

[riverofmolecules]

If only they posted this a day earlier for Lottery Day