Category: In Which We Mock Our Employers

I have some rules for work. One rule, Don’t be Friends Above Your Pay Grade, has recently been amended to Don’t Flirt Above Your Pay Grade, because I can’t go about cutting off any more friends. Another rule is Don’t Alk-Tay About the Og-Blay at Ork-Way. (Which, translated from the PigLatin Don’t Talk About the…

At some point in the last 20 years, HR departments codified their sexual harassment rules and banned “unsolicited compliments” from the opposite sex. Thus, if I I look nice, the women on my teams can all agree that I look nice, and the men stay silent, as if they cannot see past the impenetrable HR…

Meetings at TeddyJ often start with icebreakers. I was born with my built-in icebreaker: my extra thumb. I was in a meeting the other day, and the instructor presented us with the oddest icebreaker. “What’s something you did before you were eighteen that you’re proud of?” Completely blank. I truly did not do a thing…

Earlier this week I was in a small six-person meeting. I looked exactly like this. Someone on the call was making chit-chat and remarked, “We can tell what Ellen did yesterday: she got some sun.” “No … Why do you think I got sun?” I was genuinely perplexed. “Because of your face. You got a…

Our work project meeting took a break for lunch, and while I did turn off my video, I did not mute. For the past three years this would have been fine, because lunch is when you do the laundry, and make dinner. Who stays at their desk listening to the phone at lunch? Who? People…

I was asked to give a status on my current work projects. These are my thoughts, in order: Well I had a meeting yesterday. What was it? It was for that project with that woman with the tall hair. The Doomed Project. What’s the actual name of the project? What’s the status of that project?…

We are all reorganized now at work. I have two bosses now, one for my skill development (both work skills and god help me, social skills) and then another for my task assignments. All the people under these two bosses are then broken up into “high functioning teams” that are then assigned to projects. There…

I was fired once, actually fired. I don’t mean semi-fired, like when I disappeared from the schedule at the IHOP, or when my teaching contract was not renewed after I refused to change a kid’s failing grade. I mean actually actively fired, pack up, turn in your badge. I was a cashier at the university…

I was put on a team at work, we were given new software, and tasked with making a little practice project. We put about four hours of work into it. Toward the end, I was just playing with the software. I added our new project to my list of preferred projects in my new workspace,…

Someone at work introduced a new term, “seducible moment,” the moment when you might gets users to commit to what you want. Everyone giggled, but by the end of the day even modest young ladies were using the term. It enraged me. What I want to do now is to use the term in our…