1. Job applicant smelled like poop
I recently posted an ad for a job opening at my law firm. Initially it is mostly going to be admin with the opportunity to progress to more responsibility. A few interesting resumes arrived via email, but someone actually dropped off her resume in person. I looked at her skills and experience, but based on the resume, I suspect she was just resume bombing local businesses.
The major issue, though, was her body odor. She unfortunately smelled like she had soiled herself. When she left, we had to open windows and spray air freshener. About a week later, I noticed she was in a cafe handing in her resume with people covering their nose with napkins due to the smell. Obviously she couldn’t work in an environment handling food because the feces odor might make some people suspicious about her personal hygiene.
The next day, I was commuting home from work on the local bus. Again, the smell crossed my nose. I saw she had embarked the same bus and was having a phone call, which I couldn’t help but hear. She was mentioning how she was struggling to find work.
For context, there do not seem to be any mental health issues and she was wearing different clothes every time.
Should I reach out to her as someone she had hoped to be a potential employer, and mention the body odor? Or is this a case simply a case of “Not my circus, not my monkeys”?
This is sad, but you’re not well positioned to address it*. You’re a stranger who’s only had maybe a minute of contact with her, if that. “You smell like poop and it’s why no one wants to hire you” is not a message you need to deliver.
* I suppose someone could argue that actually you’re extremely well positioned to address it because you don’t need to worry about awkwardness in your relationship with her — but you don’t know enough context to do it. Maybe she has a medical issue and is well aware of the problem, maybe she lashes out horribly at people who deliver unwelcome news, maybe this is all a social experiment — we don’t know. But you don’t need to figure it out.
2. My company took away our GIFs
What’s your take on leadership removing the GIFs function from Teams because a company considers them “unprofessional,” with the added justification that they could become a problem if the company is ever subpoenaed?
Is this a legitimate workplace professionalism issue, or are we really supposed to believe a lawyer is going to crack open our chat threads someday and say, “Oh my God, Kevin sent a GIF of a dancing cat”?
I wish I were making this up. At this point, I’m not even sure emojis are safe.
That sounds like a very overblown concern on the surface, but I could imagine it happening in an office where the GIF use was getting out of hand and cluttering up Teams conversations.
3. I’m pregnant and my boss is being weird
I just received a new boss recently as part of a six-month period of many changes and shakeups in my area. During this time, I did the work of my previous boss, an entire other process manager, and all of my work, plus extra duties as assigned. This involved many extra hours of work and, about three months in, I also found out I was pregnant.
I submitted for an accommodation through our HR process, as there was no way I could be in office, manage my symptoms properly, and still keep up with the workload.
Once my new boss, Sirius, was made official recently, he posted my previous boss’ job (Sirus is a couple of levels higher than my previous manager, so he wants the position in between filled) and it notably left out my city as a location to be considered. I talked to him about it and he said he wants to have someone in seat to lead while I’m out on maternity leave in a few months and then beyond. He asked if I really want the job, and said we could figure out something else to potentially work towards moving me up when I return from my leave.
Concurrently, my accommodation was pending with HR. Sirius followed up with me multiple times about it and told me to keep pinging our HR department to ask about its status. HR had said when I asked previously that they had a major backlog due to the RTO and that I could get manager approval in the interim. Sirius though said this wasn’t good enough for what was being asked of him and that I was a “red flag” on our departmental RTO reporting and our top executive was personally asking his boss about this, so I needed to do everything I could to get it moved along.
The accommodation was finally approved, and then suddenly yesterday I received a message from a colleague asking about the accommodation process, as Sirius had told them I “just got an approved accommodation through HR, so you can ask her how to do that.”
I’m not sure what to do with all of this. I guess I want to understand whether this is illegal or just ignorant behavior or am I overreacting, and then if I should take any action if it is more than me overreacting. I’m trying to not make any big changes or do anything that could stress me out while I’m pregnant, but this is all very strange behavior and it’s making me extremely uncomfortable and I feel wrong staying quiet because this does not feel okay.
I don’t think it’s a problem that he kept nudging you to nudge HR to get the accommodation made official; that was arguably in your interests, particularly if he was getting pressure from above to to have you on-site.
But saying he wouldn’t consider you for the promotion because you’re going to be on maternity leave is discriminatory (and illegal) — your pregnancy cannot be used as a factor in promotion decisions.
He also shouldn’t have told your coworker that you have a medical accommodation; that’s supposed to be on a need-to-know basis. But the promotion is a much bigger deal, and worth talking to HR about since it opens the company to pretty serious legal liability.
4. Should I tell my boss about a potential medical issue?
You’ve written about how to tell your boss when a medical issue is affecting your work. How do you handle this when it’s a situation where the medical issue might affect your work, or everything might be completely fine?
As I get older and have been dealing with more health issues, I’m getting prescribed additional medications to treat those issues. More medications means more potential side and more potential adjustments to keep everything working as well as possible. But when I first start a new medication I don’t actually know if it will negatively affect my work. Should I proactively tell my boss about this (since I know it’s a real possibility), or should I wait and see if I actually have any problems?
No, you definitely do not need to — and should not — tell your boss every time you start a new medication. That would be excessive and pretty odd! You should only raise if you have real reason to believe that it is affecting the way you’re functioning at work.
The exception would be if you were starting a new medication that was highly likely to cause work issues from the side effects, and then there could be an argument for mentioning it at the outset — but even then I’d generally wait to see if it actually does. Medications affect different people differently; it makes sense to see how you respond.
5. Job application wants my Social Security number
I’m in the process of job hunting, and my skillset/professional experiences are applicable across a lot of sectors (I’m in the communications field).
I’m applying for a role with a smaller town’s government communications department. I know that the website and listing are legitimate, but I’m balking at some of the information the agency is asking for during the application process. I’m being required to provide my Social Security number, driver’s license number, and street address to even apply. There is no way to opt out or fudge the numbers in order to provide specifics at a later date. While I’m assuming this is for efficiency in the event that a candidate moves forward (the role requires two forms of background check, including a check of a candidate’s driving history), this feels invasive.
To be fair, I don’t apply for a lot of government jobs, so maybe this is standard, and were I to move along in the hiring process, of course I would be happy to provide this information. But am I off-base in feeling annoyed/hesitant at being asked to provide this information at the outset of the process?
You’re not off-base. It’s excessive to require that at the application stage; if they need it later, they can get it at the stage when it’s actually needed, rather than gathering and storing a bunch of Social Security numbers. However, some government jobs (and some private employers) do require it to apply.
A small number of states actually prohibit it for private jobs, although most don’t.