1. Should I have told anyone I thought my incompetent coworker made up her work history?
My organization hired “Jane,” a coordinator for my department, about six months ago. I didn’t interview her or knew anything about her before she was hired. I am one level below her manager, who is in my department but on a separate team. I interacted with her mostly by helping her with a few tricky process things that are hard to understand if you’re just starting.
While working with Jane, I noticed that she seemed pretty unprofessional for a person with her work experience, and she seemed to have kind of weird email etiquette. For example, she basically just declined to do a training because she didn’t want to, and instead kept asking me to do her requests even after I said, “I’m sorry, I don’t have the capacity to help you with this, you need to do the training so you can do it yourself.” She told a very long, overly personal story about her boyfriend’s ex-girlfriend at a company happy hour. We have a pretty informal email culture at my workplace, but her emails were super casual, along the lines of “heyyyy girl” to higher-ups. When she was in charge of organizing a team retreat, she forgot to order lunch (so other team members ran out to pick up food for everyone) and was 30 minutes late to the first session (about 90 minutes after she was supposed to be there to set up breakfast) because she didn’t plan for traffic.
All of this added up to some red flags for a person about 40 years old who claimed on her resume that she had worked as an executive assistant at several large, well-known companies and had managed large admin projects. Because I am nosy and probably unwise, I did a Google deep dive and couldn’t find any evidence that Jane had worked at the companies she claimed. She does not have a LinkedIn profile. I couldn’t find anything at all to support her professional history, although I did find tons of other internet trails (social media profiles, etc.). But, of course, I had no real evidence that she had lied on her resume, I don’t want to be a person who goes around assuming someone is lying, and in any case, I wasn’t her manager or even directly on her team so it was probably weird for me to be spending time on this in the first place! I also think that, while making up a work history on your resume is obviously a big deal, it’s a more immediate problem that she was not doing the basic duties of her job. And that part was visible to her manager (including the training stuff, which I had filled in her manager about) so I figured there was no reason for me to get involved.
Cut to this week. I got an email saying, “Jane is no longer with us as of today.” My organizational culture is really forgiving, so I assume she must have done something pretty serious to be let go with no notice and so quickly that her email was still active (in my six years at this large organization, the only other instance I know of someone being fired without notice involved embezzlement). I don’t know what happened. Should I have brought my concerns about her resume to her manager or my manager before things got to this point? Since Jane’s manager definitely knew about her performance concerns, was there any reason for me to bring up my nosy internet sleuthing?
Nah, I don’t think so. The performance issues were your business since you were training her, and hopefully you didn’t sugarcoat those when you brought them to her manager. But it’s up to them to do their due diligence before hiring someone — and, as you point out, the immediate problem was that she wasn’t able to do her job.
It would have been different if you had clear, incontrovertible evidence that she had made up her work history, but you didn’t have that. And really, lots of people don’t have LinkedIn or don’t talk about their jobs online. So maybe she did lie about her experience or maybe she didn’t — but either way she couldn’t do the job, and that was the thing to focus on.
2. My coworker uses everyone else’s trash cans
I have a coworker who tends to throw away their garbage in other people’s bins. Everyone has their own trash bin at their desks, including this person. But they still make the rounds to “chat” while also taking the opportunity to throw away anything in their pockets or in their hands. Yes, including stinky lunch leftovers. I don’t want to sit next to someone else’s smelly food for the rest of my day. How can I tell this person to stop without sounding like excessively controlling?
For food: “Would you mind not putting that in my bin? Whenever there’s food in it, I smell it all day.”
For other stuff: I don’t think you can reasonably stop him from throwing, like, scrap paper in your bin since it’s a trash can and that’s what it’s there for. If he’s filling it up, that’s a different story — in that case you could say, “Could you take that to your bin so I don’t have to empty this” — but otherwise let that part of it go.
3. My office told me to pump in the bathroom
I recently had a baby and am currently work from home until the new year. My child is exclusively breastfed, and I pump and store milk regularly.
I went into the office today to pick up some items, and I quickly came the realization that my breasts become full and painful rather quickly if I’m not pumping or around my child. This prompted me to ask HR what accommodations would be made when I come back in January. I jokingly typed “(not in the bathroom please)” when asking where I could pump.
To my surprise, he said I would actually have to pump in the bathroom until other accommodations are made. I am not doing that (for a multitude of reasons), and I’m not sure how to respond.
Nope, that’s illegal. The PUMP for Nursing Mothers Act, signed into law in late 2022, requires employers to provide nursing employees with a private place to pump, and the law explicitly says it cannot be a bathroom.
Send HR a message saying something like this: “I wanted to make sure you know that federal law does require us to provide nursing employees with a private place to pump, which cannot be a bathroom. (Details here — the law just passed last year so the company might not have been aware of it.) Can we arrange for me to reserve times in a private office space or locking conference room once I’m back in January?”
4. Using a pet photo as my Slack profile photo
Most people in our internal Slack have icons of themselves or no icons. My boss and I both have pictures of our pets. We work not directly with animals, but in an animal-focused area of a much larger business. The great majority of our communication is internal within this animal-focused subsection. Is this a bad idea? It really is a job focused on animals and everyone’s pets are an incredibly common point of friendly conversation in the office and online. Mostly I think its funny, but I’m newer to this kind of job and my boss is known to be a character (he’s great!).
I think you’re fine. You work in an animal-focused area and your boss has a pet photo as his image. Even if those things weren’t true, it still wouldn’t necessarily be a problem — but because those things are both true, you definitely don’t need to worry.
5. Explaining why I’m quitting with nothing else lined up
I have been using your tips to land a different role but have come to the conclusion that I am just too burned out at this point to put in the hours needed to successfully pivot to a new-to-me, competitive role. Thus, I am gathering my wits to resign from my current role without another lined up. What is a fast, truthful, information-lite way of conveying this to my current job (they will ask due to concerns about competitors) and to interviewers? “Taking time to explore my options” seems trite.
To your current employer: “I want to take some time off for some personal projects and to think about what I want to do next.”
To interviewers: “I was in a position to be able to take some time off in between jobs so I can be really thoughtful about what to do next.”
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