my friend is bombarding me with urgent messages while I’m at work, I fell for an email scam, and more
It’s four answers to four questions. Here we go…
1. I told a friend I’d help him, and now he’s bombarding me with urgent messages while I’m working
A coworker of mine recently left my company to head up a nonprofit organization founded by his late father. The organization has very limited resources and is just getting off the ground. I told him I’d be happy to help him out with any marketing-related tasks, so long as it did not interfere with my actual work. Since he left two weeks ago, however, he has been up my proverbial ass with requests and things he “needs” urgently. DURING WORK HOURS. This week, he had the audacity to email my work email address with the word “urgent” in the subject line. Other colleagues have been included on these emails as well, but nobody seems to be perturbed.
Mind you, I told him i would help, but we never had the discussion as to what his marketing needs are and what the time commitment looks like. He just assumed he could start sending me requests.
How should I field this? Should I just not respond to future requests, or should i set the precedence that I am happy to help, but he needs to be respectful of my time and work schedule? I also haven’t received a single please or thank you for anything I have done, and that bothers me too. Do you think it is worth it to say something? He is an adult and I don’t want to scold him, but come on, dude.
It sounds like he may have had a different understanding of what “as long as it doesn’t interfere with my work” meant. He may have thought it meant you’d do stuff for him when you had downtime at work, and not realized you didn’t want to hear from him at work at all. So if you’re still interested in helping him, be really, really explicit with him about what that means. For example: “I can help you with things like X and Y, but I’m not going to be able to do anything during work hours, including fielding questions. You definitely can’t email me at work, and generally I’ll need a few days to get back to you. If things are going to urgent or need to be moved forward during the work day, that’s not something I can help with. Given that, does it still make sense for me to help out?”
Also, ask directly what kind of time commitment he’s envisioning from you in an average week/month because you might have wildly different expectations there too.
Of course, all that assumes you still want to help him. If you don’t — and it’s absolutely okay if you don’t, particularly given his apparent lack of appreciation of your work and your time — you can say, “I’ve realized this is more of a time commitment than I can take on right now so I should bow out.”
2. I fell for an email scam and cost my company money
I was recently the victim of a scam over company email and I wanted to write you for both advice and to warn your readers!
Recently a member of the executive team (but not my direct supervisor) emailed me in the morning to ask if I had any meetings or if I was available to do her a favor. There were very few people in the office and we’ve worked together for many years, so this wasn’t odd. My coworkers do these kinds of things for each other fairly often. I let her know that I was available and asked what I could do to help. She said that she was in a meeting and couldn’t talk, but needed me to run and grab a few Google Play gift cards for her for some clients. None of this raised any red flags for me, but you see where it’s going…
…It wasn’t her emailing me at all. Someone had spoofed her email address and I ended up sending over $1,000 worth of gift card information purchased with my company credit card over email to a stranger and criminal. It wasn’t until I had done everything that she asked and she requested more gift cards that it occurred to me that I was being scammed. By then the damage was done. The cards are worthless now.
The second that I realized what happened, I ran to fill in my supervisor and contacted IT and our accounting department to let them all know. Everyone was understanding to a fault, but I can’t get over it. It’s humiliating to have fallen for this. I have no experience with Google Play gift cards, but apparently they’re one of the few cards that you only need the code to redeem, not the gift card number itself.
To add insult to injury, I’m generally one of the most tech and digital-savvy people in our organization and I’ve never been so mad at myself. I’ve been trying to pay my company back the money I lost, but they won’t allow it. If you have any advice over how to move past such an idiotic, pointless, and pricey mistake, I would love to hear about it.
Your company is right not to let you pay back that money. Mistakes are a cost of doing business, and it’s in their best interests not to have employees worrying that they’ll have to personally foot the bill if they mess something up. So stop offering that! (And for what it’s worth, while I’m sure your company wasn’t thrilled to have lost $1,000, in the scheme of things that amount is not huge for most companies that way it would be to most individuals.)
This scam works because people fall for it. Chalk it up to experience, decide you now have a good story when the subject of email scammers comes up, and don’t stay mired in embarrassment about it. (Plus, you’ve done a good deed now by spreading word about it here.)
3. I don’t like my new firm’s business casual dress code
I am a lawyer, and I recently moved from the law firm I have worked at my whole career to a smaller firm in the suburbs closer to where I live. The job is great, I’m well remunerated, I like the partners, and the cases I’m working on are interesting. The firm’s culture is also very good and I’m often leaving the office by 5.30 pm.
My problem: the firm is only business dress on Mondays or on days we’re in court. The rest of the week is “business casual,” which in effect seems to mean polo shirts and chinos. The firm I came from was strictly business five days a week, and had a dress code which mandated navy/charcoal suits, solid dark ties, white or light blue shirts, cufflinks, and oxfords without brogues.
When clients come in, I have to make presentations while wearing casual clothing. I find that this means I’m being taken less seriously by clients. I’m quite young for a senior associate and I look even younger than I am. I also feel much less confident. Even when I’m sitting at my desk doing work, I feel like I’m less productive because I’m wearing casual clothing and I don’t feel like I’m at work. Whenever I wear a suit, I feel in the zone and I’m more productive.
What can I do about this? I will look very odd if I turn up to work every day wearing a suit. I also don’t think I can shift the dress code, because the partners love being able to go straight to the golf club after work and are convinced it increases worker morale. Is it unreasonable that I’m actually considering quitting my job and finding somewhere new because of the casual dress code? I’ve invested a lot of time and money in my professional wardrobe, and I feel like I’m a worse lawyer when I don’t look like one.
Dress code can be a big part of culture, and it’s possible that this just isn’t the culture for you. But before you decide that, I’d give it some time. You don’t say how long you’ve been at the new firm, but I’d give it at least a few months to see if you start adjusting. Lots of people do feel just as productive in business casual as in suits, but there might be an adjustment period before that happens.
Meanwhile, though, is there a middle ground — something dressier than a polo shirt but not as formal as a suit? Chinos and a dress shirt, for example? That probably wouldn’t stand out as too out of sync with everyone else, but would be more formal than a polo (ugh).
The issue with clients taking you less seriously is tougher, because clothes really do help convey professional maturity when you look young. Could you keep a blazer at work and put it on before you meet with clients?
Ultimately, I’d give this some time to see if you can make it work since you seem to like everything else about the job. If six months in, you’re still feeling like this piece of the company just doesn’t fit you, it might make sense to look around — but give it time first and see if you do adjust.
4. How do you ask a question you should already know the answer to?
This happens to me a lot: I start a new job, and the person who’s training me mentions something in passing (“You’ll also use these for the RF reports when I pass that task over to you”). I don’t ask for clarification because things are moving fast and our focus is on something else and honestly my head is spinning with the amount of new information I’m absorbing. Often I don’t even remember the reference.
Then it’s two years later. There was a period when I was too new for anyone to explain to me about the RF reports, and then there was a period when I’d been here so long that naturally I must know all about the RF reports — I never seem to catch the moment when it would be the right time to ask!
I know the solution to the problem at hand: I have to ask someone, no matter how awkward it feels or how much I feel that I’m losing face professionally because I don’t already have that information.
What I want to know is, is there a way to prevent this from happening? Since it’s happened to me in nearly every job I’ve ever had, surely the common factor must be something I’m doing wrong. How do I avoid having these gaps in my knowledge?
It can be hard to catch it when it’s first mentioned in the type of moment you described — when training is moving quickly and you’re already overwhelmed. The key, I think, is to believe that that’s normal and that’s there’s absolutely nothing wrong with realizing a week or two later (or even longer), “Oh crap, I have no idea what these RF reports are” and asking someone. It sounds like the crux of the problem here isn’t that you’re missing things initially — because that’s really normal in a new job — but that you’re not asking once you spot it because you feel like your window of opportunity has closed. It hasn’t!
If it’s just been a week or two, all you have to say is, “I realized that I’m not clear on what RF reports are. Can you go over that with me?”
if it’s been longer and you feel like it might not look great that it’s taken you this long, then you just own that! Say something like, “I’m realizing I should have gotten this clarified by now, but with everything else I was learning, I somehow didn’t! Can you show me how to use RF reports?” If it’s been a really long time, own it even more: “I can’t believe I don’t know this, but somehow I never learned what RF reports are when I was being trained.”
This is normal! It happens to everyone. It’s not going to make you look foolish unless you start covering up that you don’t know what they are — which can cause real problems and will reflect badly on you in a way that none of the above will!
my friend is bombarding me with urgent messages while I’m at work, I fell for an email scam, and more was originally published by Alison Green on Ask a Manager.
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