friend won’t pay my cancellation fee, car alarm disrupts our office, and more — Ask a Manager

I’m on vacation. Here are some past letters that I’m making new again, rather than leaving them to wilt in the archives.

1. My friend/client won’t pay my cancellation fee

I have a friend who I met because we both enjoy certain sports. I’ll call him Frank. I only see Frank when I am involved in this sport, but it’s a small community, so everyone knows each other. Because my business caters to this sport and others like it, Frank decided he would like to use my service. And because he is a friend, I gave him a discounted price. My business is appointment based and I can only see one client at a time, so we have a strict 24-hour rescheduling policy. He has cancelled his appointment many times without proper notice, leaving me in a lurch. I explained to him that I am unable to see other clients as I cannot double book my time and not always able to fill the hole in my schedule on short notice. When I confront him about this, he gets very angry and says he is not a “client” (he is “more than that”) and do not treat him as such. He refuses to pay the cancellation fee.

Meanwhile, an ex-employee who was fired for insubordination and stealing clients, is siding up to Frank — disparaging my name and my company, all the while trying to steal him as a client. Because of Frank’s flaky nature, I’m not to sure this wouldn’t be a bad thing.

The problem is that Frank is very good at certain athletics and is a featured client on our advertising campaign. In addition to that, he knows many people in the sporting community and word gets around. Should I suck it up? Or set a boundary, change my campaign, and let the chips fall as they may?

Wow, Frank is being a real a-hole here. Since he’s a friend, he should get to mess up your schedule and cause you to repeatedly lose income? That’s precisely the opposite of how it should be.

Any chance you can say to him, “You’re right, you’re a friend. I don’t want this to interfere with our friendship, so I’m going to refer you to another business for this work from now on.” Or if it would go over better if it wasn’t personalized to him, you could say, “I’ve realized it’s too messy to take business from friends, so I have a new policy of referring friends to other providers.”

Alternately, you could tell him you’re willing to keep seeing him but need to get payment in advance and can’t book the appointment without that.

But yeah, it sounds like losing him as a client would be a good thing. It also might be a good idea to change the advertising campaign that features him, if that’s not a huge pain — or at least to be prepared to do it if he gets more difficult.

– 2019

Read an update to this letter here.

2. A car alarm is disrupting our office many times per hour

My office is small, one story, and located on a relatively busy street. There is a car that parks along the street directly in front our our building, and this car has a VERY sensitive car alarm. This has always been an issue since I started here, almost three years ago. The owner of said car previously used to have a car where the alarm system blared every single time a car would zip by. It didn’t matter if it was a smart car or a 4×4 lifted diesel truck, that alarm would go off. Every. Single. Time. Now, she has a different car, with an even more obnoxious car alarm. Sometimes it takes her 2-5 minutes to walk outside the building and turn it off, and it often happens nearly every 5-10 minutes. This is maddening. We are unable to hear clients on phone calls and unable to focus on work because her car alarm is blaring for what seems like hours, every 10 minutes. It is so bad, we have two clients that refuse to meet in our office, which is an issue because of the nature of our work.

The reason that we don’t know what to do is that this car does not belong to one of our employees. It belongs to someone in the next door office. I have suggested calling next door and requesting the employee park across the street in the communal lot, rather than right outside our front door, thinking that if it is located in the lot, it won’t be triggered by street noises. This was shut down because they don’t want to cause any hostile tensions between us and that company. They also believe this will come off as controlling. I have also suggested writing a friendly note and leaving it on her car, letting her know her car alarm is very disruptive to our business and the others on the street. This was also called too aggressive (which, who cares at this point). Aside from it being disruptive and giving me regular headaches, I am positive that this has to be annoying for the owner too. Having to get up from your desk to turn off your car alarm every 5-10 minutes has got to be disruptive and aggravating to her too, so I am really at a loss as to why she even wants to park there knowing she is gonna be pulled away from her desk to turn off the alarm. Do you or your readers have any suggestions?

P.S. I decided to track the alarm and how long it blasts each time it goes off. In the last 49 minutes, her car alarm has gone off seven times. Since it takes her so long to turn off the alarm, the alarm has been blasting for a combined 28 minutes. I am losing it.

Good lord, how is this woman okay with going outside leaving seven times in an hour to turn a car alarm? How is her employer okay with it? I do not understand this situation.

In any case, leave the note. You don’t need your employer’s permission to leave the note, as long as you don’t identify your company in it. Leave a note saying you work nearby, the alarm is giving you headaches and driving away clients, and beg her to disable the alarm (which clearly isn’t serving any function at this point) or try parking in the lot. That said, this is not someone who is governed by logic, so the note may make no difference.

Your other, and perhaps better, option is to report it to your local police. Many cities will cite car owners whose alarms go off too frequently.

– 2019

Read updates to this letter here and here.

3. Coworker’s son comes to work and has bad bathroom etiquette

I have a question that I hope will be funny for you and your readers despite the abject horror it has caused me and my colleagues. A C-suite person in our (small, 15-person) office occasionally brings her 12-year-old son to work with her due to childcare issues. My coworkers and I have no problem with this and are all very sympathetic to the plight of working parents. However, there is a major issue: the son regularly pees with the bathroom door wide open (not just one or two inches ajar). We have a single occupancy bathroom on this floor, which is shared by eight colleagues. The other workers are on another floor. Not only does he pee loudly and with the door open, but he frequently misses the toilet, leaves pee on the seat/floor, and doesn’t wash his hands. I know this because, sadly, my desk is right near the bathroom. We put a sign in the bathroom imploring all to wipe the seat if needed, but that doesn’t stop the son. The mother is known to be petty and vindictive, and HR is very hands-off. What to do?

The next time you see him going in the bathroom, say, “Cyril, please shut the door when you use the bathroom here.” Handle it just like you’d handle “Cyril, don’t run in the halls here” or “don’t throw those papers all over the place.” You might need to say it repeatedly until it sticks. Until then, if he’s in there with the door wide open, someone should walk over and close the door.

You can do the same with the mess: “Hey, you left a mess in here. Please come back and clean it up.” Every time. This will require you and your coworkers paying attention when he’s just left the bathroom but it sounds like it’s warranted.

In normal circumstances, you’d ask his mother to handle all of this, but since you describe her as petty and vindictive, you’re probably better off just dealing with it directly. Alternately, it’s reasonable to tell HR they need to intervene (the fact that they’re hands-off doesn’t necessarily mean they won’t, especially if you push hard enough) — but the fastest path here is just to tell Cyril directly what he needs to change. (And if you have any worries the mom will complain, let your manager and/or HR know ahead of time you’re planning to handle it yourselves so they’ve got that context before they hear from her.)

– 2019

Read an update to this letter here.

4. IT guy remotely accessed my laptop when I asked him not to

Today at work I was experiencing some technical issues, and raised a ticket with our IT support team who are based in another location. Later in the day, I was having a VERY busy hour when a member of the team instant messaged me in response to the ticket. I told him that it was a really bad time and asked if we could look at the issue a bit later, but he remotely accessed my computer anyway! (As in, he could see my screen and had taken over control of its function.)

Am I in the wrong for feeling like this out of order? Not only was it a bad time, but I actually had my online banking open in my browser which I would have preferred to have kept private. And what if I had been halfway through a presentation with an important client?!

On the other hand, I guess his job is to fix things — not to wait on a time that’s convenient for me, and I suppose I have no right to any real privacy on a company computer. I don’t know — I’m torn! What do you think?

I’m with you. If he absolutely had to do it right then because of his own schedule, he should have said something like, “This is the only time I’ll be able to look at it this week — okay for me to go ahead or would you rather wait until next week?”

As you pointed out, not only does this raise privacy issues (and sure, you don’t have real privacy on a work computer, but you’re still entitled to at least say, “Hold on, let me close my banking info”), but it could have been far more disruptive to your work than waiting would have been to his (like if you were presenting to a client, or dealing with a work crisis, or so forth).

– 2018