#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 2)

[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:

[vfdinthewild]

"the head of the nonprofit I volunteer for doesn’t know what a budget is"

-via the Ask a Manager column of the same name

[ranenutzadikim]

selfcare is not reading the comments on today's holocaust ask a manager post selfcare is not reading the comments on today's holocaust ask a manager post selfcare is not reading the comments on today's holocaust ask a manager post selfcare is not reading the comments on today's holocaust ask a manager post selfcare is not reading the comments on today's holocaust ask a manager post selfcare is not reading the comments on today's holocaust ask a manager post selfcare is not reading the comments on today's holocaust ask a manager post

[eisbecherovka]

ask a manager dot com is one of my occasional guilty pleasures, and i was scrolling to kill some time on the clock when i came across this paragraph that painted such a beautiful picture in my head

[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.

[abigailspinach]

Chickens

[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

[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 3)

[astrabear]

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

[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?"

[heckofabecca]

we live in a horror dimension