sometimes an old job isn’t done with you … even when you’re done with it

This post was written by Alison Green and published on Ask a Manager.

When you quit a job, you typically assume you’re finished with that work — once you’re gone, your former colleagues will find a way to move on without you. But sometimes an old job isn’t done with you … even when you’re done with it.

Bizarrely, I hear all the time from people who still regularly receive work questions from jobs they’re no longer employed by. A minor question or two in the first few weeks after you leave might not be odd — where’s the key to file room? which vendor did you use for X? But some offices send a steady stream of questions to previous employees, sometimes even asking them to perform substantive work long after their final paycheck hits the mail.

At Slate today, I wrote about this weird phenomenon. You can read it here.