My feeling is that this manager thinks that the employee is so close to being good, but, you know, she’s disadvantaged. So she wants to help her because after 6 years being a good employee, the manager still can’t see past her background and assumes she needs the manager’s sage advice. It’s super condescending.

Last year, my dad requested the day off for my niece’s first birthday, which was the weekend after my daughter’s first birthday. Just two weeks before, he had to take 2 days off because my mom was having surgery. So, 4 days over a month-long period, in a job where he works mostly 6 days a week (more than was agreed…

My husband had a manager tell him that he could immediately go back to swing shifts or lose his job right after he had surgery.

Yeah, bringing up the foster care/homeless thing seemed to be more a way of pointing out this person was basically street scum the manager had “rescued” by giving a job. Definitely some classism, possibly some implied racism/sexism happening there, too.

Really? I was told that I couldn’t have the day off for my wedding. I couldn’t have MY WEDDING DAY off work, because I “should have thought about the weekend rotation” before I set the date.

some people think that being a foster child would count against her character. A lot of people, consciously or sub-consciously, think that bad things only happen to bad people, so she’s not to be celebrated for overcoming, but to always be judged.

It depends on a person’s level of empathy though... when I read that letter, it sounds to me like those dickensian qualities are being used by the original writer as negatives, not positives. If seen in that light (which, ugh) it all becomes more believable. Consider that the manager in question may have kept this…

You should see some of the OTHER letters Alison’s had this year. There’s a manager who keeps showing up to his employee’s chemotherapy treatments to talk about non-urgent work matters (and he lies to the clinic and claims to be family), and a boss who required all employees to be tested to be a liver donor for his…

Ha! My mother is finishing a medical degree, she is in her 60s. In her last term she came down with double pneumonia and highly contagious viral pink eye. Her shitty clinical manager made her come in to take a final and treat patients anyway, and threatened to kick her out of the program if she didn’t come in.

So my…

this still sounds fake to me.

This actually just sounds like run of the mill bad, not even especially awful.

Uh, I don’t think that the employee is impossibly sympathetic, neither do I think that the manager is unbelievably evil.

Manager account spotted.

You’ve been very lucky with your bosses if this doesn’t ring true to you.

Sorry, but no. Actually, not sorry. Just no.

Umm yeah, Retarded is a pretty big trigger for most mentally or physically disabled people. As a parent of two Autistic kids who are both rather intelligent, it makes me cringe to hear someone say the word retarded when they mean it to denote being stupid. But it even goes back farther for me. I used to volunteer with…

You know, it’s actually not cool to compare EVERYTHING to racism against Black people or every word to the n-word you so easily used. We are not the stand-in example for every ism, and don’t want to be.

You make your own choices, but as has been pointed out casual use of these terms is absolutely a problem.

but I’m not going to jump down someone’s throat for using words like that in casual conversation.

No problem! I’ll likely only be able to check it out this evening, but I hope I can help.