my manager set up a secret email address using my name, asking a coworker to swap pants, and more

I’m on vacation. Here are some past letters that I’m making new again, rather than leaving them to wilt in the archives.

1. My manager set up a secret email address using my name

I work at a community college. All regular employees at the college are assigned email addresses that begin with our last name. My email, for example, is LastName_FirstName_MiddleInitial@collegename.edu.

In Outlook, if someone sends an email to a non-existent address, they will receive an “undeliverable” auto-reply. Several people have tried to email me using an incorrect email format (FirstNameLastName@collegename.edu). The incorrect email format doesn’t conform with the college email, so I assumed it had to be nonexistent. I emailed IT to ask them to set up that undeliverable message. They looked into my request and then discovered that the email address did exist and that the owner was my supervisor!

IT revealed that my supervisor had set up a private Teams group with her as the sole member, and the group email was my FirstNameLastName@collegename.edu. Any emails going to that email were being forwarded to her work email address.

It alarms me that she set up this email using my name — an email that I was not aware of and that only she had access to. I don’t know how to find out what she has been using that email for. She’s extremely passive-aggressive and acts like Kevin Spacey’s character in “The Usual Suspects” as she always plays dumb. She is also constantly gaslighting us. I can’t outright ask her why she created that email, because she’ll either lie to me or play the innocent and act confused, which are her two go-to moves. Is this something I can approach HR with? How should I proceed?

I’m trying to think of an innocent explanation for this and I’m pretty sure there isn’t one. It just sounds extremely nefarious.

And also extremely weird. She wants to be the one who receives any misdirected emails intended for you and doesn’t want you to know about it? Why? There can’t be that many, and they can’t be that interesting. It’s not even like she’s monitoring all your email — just the occasional misaddressed message. What could the motivation possibly be?

It sounds like we’ll never know, unfortunately, because it doesn’t sound like she’ll tell you. You could talk to HR about it, but I don’t know that they’ll do anything about it; it’s troubling but doesn’t fall in any obvious category of things they typically take on, like harassment or discrimination. You could try! But I wouldn’t count on much coming from it.

It sounds like this is just one of many problems with your boss. I’d add it to the list but I’m not sure you’ll get much benefit from putting a ton of energy into trying to unravel it.

– 2021

Read an update to this letter here.

2. Is it OK to ask a coworker to swap pants with me?

During college I enrolled in a program that we call Junior Enterprise, where the students have to, on their own, maintain a company. It is an awesome experience because we have the daily problems of a small company. We need to look for projects in the area that we are graduating in to pay for the expenses of the company.

When I was a senior member of our Junior Enterprise, I had an appointment with a teacher who we wanted to sponsor one of our projects. Around 30 minutes before the meeting, my pants ripped in the knee, very visibly. I asked an “intern” of the company who was my size to change pants with me, and she did it willingly. (We were both students in the same course, although not close friends.)

Would it be okay to ask a colleague at work if I were in the same situation with an important client coming in? I have never made up my mind if it was the correct choice or not.

I think you could mayyyybe ask a peer-level colleague if you had a pretty good friendship — but I would not ask an intern, because interns will feel obligated to say yes … and no one should feel compelled to literally give you the clothes off their back (well, legs).

The key with a request like this is you should only ask if you know the person would be comfortable saying no. By definition, that rules out interns for a lot of personal favors because of the power dynamic. There’s too much chance they wouldn’t really want to do it but would feel obligated to say yes anyway.

(That said, this might not have applied to your “intern” in the school program if you basically felt like peers.)

Thank you for giving me the opportunity to write one of my favorite headlines ever.

– 2020

3. My coworker told her manager that I called her a rude name

I had a conversation with a peer, Ann, who works for another manager, during which time I called Ann’s manager an inappropriate name and showed her why that name was justified. At the end of the conversation, I recanted and told Ann that this conversation stays just between us and she agreed.

However, I was called into a conference room by Ann’s manager the next day and she asked me about the conversation (quite politely). I refused to answer, as I assumed it was a mutually agreed private conversation between Ann and me. Now I have a meeting with HR on Wednesday. What is my best course of action here?

Probably to apologize and say you realize that calling her a name was unprofessional and that you won’t do it again.

Don’t lean too hard on the “it was a private conversation” angle, because you’re unlikely to win that one. Conversations with coworkers — especially conversation with coworkers about work/other coworkers — don’t have any special right of privacy attached to them. They may get repeated, and they may get repeated in ways that cause problems for you (as happened here). And your employer is less likely to care that your coworker broke a confidence with you than that you’re calling a colleague a (presumably rude?) name.

The fastest way to make this go away is to say that you understand that it was poor judgment and that you’ll be more thoughtful about what you say at work in the future.

– 2015

4. Employee says she got “yelled at” when she gets feedback

I have an employee who uses words like “big trouble,” “I got smacked,” and “yelled at” when describing incidences when she is informed she is not following directions. When I hear her say those things, I cringe. I have never touched her, let alone smacked her! Please help!

“Jane, I understand you’re using hyperbole, but when you tell people you got ’smacked’ or ‘yelled’ at or ‘in trouble,’ you’re conveying something very different than what actually happened — and you’re putting me at risk if anyone takes you literally. I need to be able to give you feedback about your work without having it characterized so hyperbolically.” You could add, “Adults don’t get in trouble. They get feedback on their work, and that’s how we should refer to it.”

– 2019

5. My clients can’t make up their minds

I work as a freelance designer and recently have had clients who cannot make up their minds. I end up going in circles with designs. It feels like an endless game of whack-a-mole, they ask for X, I give them X, but now they really want Y, so I give them Y, but actually let’s go back to X, no never mind, let’s do Z, so I give them Z. At what point do I say: I’ve given you multiple options and you’re still not satisfied … really don’t know how to even finish that sentence. I read your pieces about breaking up with clients, but I really want these gigs. How do I tell them enough is enough with the redesigns? I feel like they’re violating boundaries. How can I nicely be stern about this? I find when I work with clients, I have been more compliant because I want the job and when I speak up it’s not always received well — perhaps I’m usually frustrated at that point. How can I be nice and assertive?

The easiest way to handle this going forward is to clearly lay out in your contract how many rounds of revisions are included in the scope of the work (for example, three). Then, when you send the first design, you remind them by saying, “Our contract gives us up to three rounds of revisions at this stage.” And then if they get to three rounds and they’re still revising, you let them know how much additional revisions will cost (even better if you laid that out in the contract too). Or if you want to be especially nice, you can say, “I can give you an extra round of revisions for free, but beyond that I’d need to charge you for the additional work.”

It sounds like you don’t have that kind of contract in place now, but you can still set limits — “I can do one more round of revisions after this, but then we’d be outside the scope of the project and I’d need to charge an additional ($X) for further rounds.”

– 2018

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