coworker is giving a colleague underwear in our Secret Santa, cooking a roast at work, 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 coworker is giving a colleague underwear in our Secret Santa

My office organizes a Secret Santa. The guy who has the desk next to mine told me today that he got the name of a colleague of ours with whom we eat often, and that as he heard her say once during lunch that it is a tradition in Spain (she is Spanish) to wear red underwear for the new year, he bought her red lingerie. He is quite friendly with her, but I still think it is a terrible idea. He is in his late 40 and married, and she is in her early 30 and single. They are at the same level and they don’t work together, so he really sees her as a peer and doesn’t agree with me when I tell him that this kind of present is entirely inappropriate. She will have to open it in front of the whole office. Even from a close friend I would not like it, so in a work context I believe it has the potential to become a huge problem. It could damage both of their reputations. I told him what I think and he disagrees with me. What else should I do ? I don’t really want to let my colleague get this kind of present at work.

Yeeesh. That’s really inappropriate. Even if they have the kind of friendship where she wouldn’t be bothered by the gift, she’s going to be opening in front of all her coworkers — and I doubt she wants that, or that they want that.

Since he’s not interested in hearing from you, tell the person organizing the Secret Santa and suggest they intervene. They’d probably be interested in clarifying the guidelines of a work gift exchange with him. (And warn your coworker, as well. She should know too.)

– 2019

Read an update to this letter here.

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 the 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.)

– 2019

3. Will I be tarred with the same brush as my unprofessional counterpart?

I just recently started my first post-grad job and I’m loving it. I have been working since I was 14, so while this is my first full-time job, I consider myself fairly well versed in professional behavior. I’m aware that I am very young, but I’m willing to learn and take cues from my colleagues, and I think I’m balancing the fact that I’m inexperienced and need advice, with my ability to read the room and abide by office norms.

I started alongside another brand-new employee doing my same role, also fresh out of college. She does not seem professionally aware and she’s very chatty, often talking over people to share her personal stories and not letting others talk, quick to loudly chat about personal stuff when we should be getting our heads down, and generally she seems young and focused on things that seriously don’t matter. I see older employees roll their eyes when she interrupts them to talk at length about sorority dramas and college deadline disasters. She’s incredibly nice, and competent too, but I’m worried we’ll both be seen as the same. I really don’t want to be tagged alongside her as “annoyingly young and unprofessional” by the rest of the office, which might mean I don’t get invited to sit in on and observe higher stakes meetings/decisions, etc. which would be really useful to learn from.

I wondered if you had any advice, other than just being as professional as possible, to make sure I’m not seen in this same light? I can’t really give her advice because we’re the same age. (And also, I’m not 100% sure what’s acceptable, so what would I even say!) We work closely together so we are always in the same conversations, and her behavior is never truly separate from me – conversations about her sorority pals always happen with me right there and I’m worried I’ll inadvertently get labelled as having the same attitude. Any advice?

You’re underestimating your coworkers! I promise you that they can separate the two of you and can tell that you’re not the one talking over people, interrupting them, talking about sorority drama, etc. The fact that you’re the same age isn’t going to make them think you must be like that too, since they can see that you aren’t. In fact, it’s likely to do the opposite and make you look better by comparison.

One thing I would watch out for, though, is to make sure that you don’t exclusively pair up with her for the social parts of work — like having lunch with her all the time, always grabbing coffee with her, or so forth. It’s fine to do that occasionally if you want to, but if you do, make sure that you’re forming relationships with other people too. If people see you socializing primarily or only with her, there’s a danger that they’ll associate you with her a bit more — not that they’ll think you’re overly chatty, etc. if you’re not, but just that they may see you as having less mature judgment just by association. That’s not really fair, but it’s also not always a conscious process — people just often assume when they see two people hanging out together that they have the same values and worldview. That’s not to say you can’t socialize with her — you definitely can! — just make sure that you’re spreading your time around to others as well.

– 2018

4. Cooking a roast at work

Last year, our common lunch area and kitchen (for about 120 people) was refurbished, with an oven put in. Nobody has really used the oven until this week when a group of staff from different teams, who are friends, decided to use it to cook a roast for lunch. (Walking into work at 7:30 am to find a staff member oiling up a raw piece of meat was NOT an expected start to the day.)

Well, the oven’s first ever workout was a bit gross. For the whole cooking time of a few hours, the common space smelled of raw meat and some other weird odor. Apparently a few people commented on the smell — nothing overly malicious, things like “eww” and “ooh, that doesn’t smell good!” Some people seemed not to notice, but a number of us found it a really awful smell, to the point that we had to avoid the space. The two or three chefs got defensive (“it smells nice to me!”), complained to our HR department about the way they were treated, and have been cold shouldering a few staff all week as a result.

What do you say? Given that this group probably couldn’t have foreseen the roast/oven smelling weird, is this an appropriate use of the common kitchen? Is this just fun for a group of work friends to do, or am I justified in thinking that cooking a roast at work for eight people is a little obnoxiously cliquey? For what it’s worth, a number of the group involved in the roast are middle managers.

I don’t think it’s a big deal that they decided to cook something together — there’s an oven and there are people who need lunch, so why not make something in it? But it’s true that making something that needs to cook for hours and will fill up the space with a noticeable smell (even a good one) isn’t a great move if they’re not offering it to others too. Not outrageous, but not ideal.

The weirder part is that they took such offense to people’s comments about the smell, to the point of complaining to HR. That’s a bizarre response, and I wonder if there’s some other context that would make that make more sense.

– 2019