I love animals. And I have no objection to working in an office with a canine or feline mascot. I’m not allergic to cat dander. I’m not afraid of big dogs. I don’t even mind snakes, having grown up in a house with two snakes, a tortoise, countless amphibians and a couple of birds. But, as with many situations, too much of a good thing can be a bad thing.

I used to work in an office with a sweet little dog named Phoebe, whose job was to greet all visitors with a squeaky toy in her mouth and a wag of her tail. If you didn’t feel like playing with Phoebe, that was cool. (more…)

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No one likes to use the “F-word.” Maybe if you’re a teenager announcing your independence from “the Man,” you’ll proudly admit to it, but more than likely, if you’ve been fired, you will claim to have quit, or been laid off, or (in that wonderful English phrase) been “made redundant.”

Surprisingly, employers are often just as reluctant to confront the situation. They’ll hem and haw and hide behind a bouquet of euphemisms that are a lot like breakup speeches that boil down to “It’s not you, it’s me.”

And because employers are often so unwilling say “You’re fired,” they can send mixed signals to the employee. Sometimes it’s like they want their employees to just quit before anyone has to have that awkward conversation. (more…)

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When you’re in a job interview, you always have a mental checklist you’re ticking off. Salary? Benefits? Vacation time? Sick time? The one thing that often gets overlooked is the company’s overtime policy. Which means some new hires are in for a nasty surprise the first time they work through the weekend without so much as a “thank you.”

Sixty has become the new forty, and not in a good way. “Forty hour weeks? You must be joking,” says Sela Murphy, an advertising assistant at a news magazine in New York. “Did you see The Devil Wears Prada? Take out the fashion and that’s my life.” Not only is Sela expected to use her lunch hour (that’s only a half-hour long) to run errands for her boss, but her “off hours” are also up for grabs. “He once called me from a Denver hotel to ask me to book a massage for him. Like he’d never heard of a concierge. Thank God for the Internet.” (more…)

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When Susan’s colleague Ruth’s mother died, Susan sent sympathy flowers to Ruth’s home, not realizing that the gesture was inappropriate because Ruth and her family are Orthodox Jews.

Similarly, when a group of men working in an advertising agency kept urging a new hire to join them for happy hour, they had no idea he was a devout Muslim who not only didn’t drink, but who found the idea of baby-back ribs, bacon-wrapped steaks and tiny cocktail wieners, abhorrent. (Mindful of cultural stereotypes, the man didn’t want to call attention to either his ethnicity or his faith, especially since he has what he calls “an All-American name” to go with his all-American citizenship.) (more…)

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I once worked for a magazine where the editorial department got an incredible number of job perks. Not only were they comped for every concert, play and movie premiere in town, there was also a constant stream of free CDs, books, gadgets, toys and gizmos coming in the door. Since there were only five people in the department, they couldn’t possibly use all these goodies so they … threw them away.

At any given time, you could walk through the editorial department and see trashcans overflowing with hard-cover books and shrink-wrapped CDs and all kinds of stuff. Sometimes people would ask if they could retrieve an item, and it would be graciously proffered. Sometimes people sneaked into the department after hours but before the cleaning crew arrived and just TOOK what they wanted. The rest got thrown away. (more…)

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