We recently asked women in our BuzzFeed Community to share their work horror stories. Here are a bunch that are infuriating, and unfortunately relatable AF.
23 Horrifying Things That Have Actually Happened To Women At Work
Category: work
How to view coworkers with empathy — Quartz at Work
Quietly judging people is something of a pastime for me, wherever I am. But there’s something different about the way I judge, and see, my therapy waiting-room cohort. I have nothing to forgive them for, but I forgive them—for tapping their feet; for turning their earphones up too loud; for being genuinely happy; for being unapologetically sad. I do not know their lives, but I have true empathy for them—for their broken relationships; for their loneliness; for the harm they’ve endured; for their fears, anxieties, and attempts to feel better, all communicated through that glance we share as they exit the room, and I enter.
Lately I’ve been trying to bring a similar approach to how I see people at work.
The Utter Uselessness of Job Interviews – The New York Times
A friend of mine once had a curious experience with a job interview. Excited about the possible position, she arrived five minutes early and was immediately ushered into the interview by the receptionist. Following an amicable discussion with a panel of interviewers, she was offered the job.
Afterward, one of the interviewers remarked how impressed she was that my friend could be so composed after showing up 25 minutes late to the interview. As it turned out, my friend had been told the wrong start time by half an hour; she had remained composed because she did not know she was late.
My friend is not the type of person who would have remained cool had she known she was late, but the interviewers reached the opposite conclusion. Of course, they also could have concluded that her calm reflected a flippant attitude, which is also not a trait of hers. Either way, they would have been wrong to assume that her behavior in the interview was indicative of her future performance at the job.
This is a widespread problem. Employers like to use free-form, unstructured interviews in an attempt to “get to know” a job candidate. Such interviews are also increasingly popular with admissions officers at universities looking to move away from test scores and other standardized measures of student quality. But as in my friend’s case, interviewers typically form strong but unwarranted impressions about interviewees, often revealing more about themselves than the candidates.
The Utter Uselessness of Job Interviews – The New York Times
George Saunders: what writers really do when they write
Many years ago, during a visit to Washington DC, my wife’s cousin pointed out to us a crypt on a hill and mentioned that, in 1862, while Abraham Lincoln was president, his beloved son, Willie, died, and was temporarily interred in that crypt, and that the grief-stricken Lincoln had, according to the newspapers of the day, entered the crypt “on several occasions” to hold the boy’s body. An image spontaneously leapt into my mind – a melding of the Lincoln Memorial and the Pietà. I carried that image around for the next 20-odd years, too scared to try something that seemed so profound, and then finally, in 2012, noticing that I wasn’t getting any younger, not wanting to be the guy whose own gravestone would read “Afraid to Embark on Scary Artistic Project He Desperately Longed to Attempt”, decided to take a run at it, in exploratory fashion, no commitments. My novel, Lincoln in the Bardo, is the result of that attempt, and now I find myself in the familiar writerly fix of trying to talk about that process as if I were in control of it.
We often discuss art this way: the artist had something he “wanted to express”, and then he just, you know … expressed it. We buy into some version of the intentional fallacy: the notion that art is about having a clear-cut intention and then confidently executing same.
The actual process, in my experience, is much more mysterious and more of a pain in the ass to discuss truthfully.
How to Beat Procrastination
Procrastination comes in many disguises. We might resolve to tackle a task, but find endless reasons to defer it. We might prioritize things we can readily tick off our to-do list—answering emails, say—while leaving the big, complex stuff untouched for another day. We can look and feel busy, while artfully avoiding the tasks that really matter. And when we look at those rolling, long-untouched items at the bottom of our to-do list, we can’t help but feel a little disappointed in ourselves.
The problem is our brains are programmed to procrastinate. In general, we all tend to struggle with tasks that promise future upside in return for efforts we take now.That’s because it’s easier for our brains to process concrete rather than abstract things, and the immediate hassle is very tangible compared with those unknowable, uncertain future benefits. So the short-term effort easily dominates the long-term upside in our minds—an example of something that behavioral scientists call present bias.
How can you become less myopic about your elusive tasks? It’s all about rebalancing the cost-benefit analysis: make the benefits of action feel bigger, and the costs of action feel smaller. The reward for doing a pestering task needs to feel larger than the immediate pain of tackling it.
Sick at Work: Staggering Number of Americans Go to Work With Bad Colds or Flu
If there is one type of co-worker Americans dread coming into contact with above all others, it is the sick co-worker—the one who should be home in bed but showed up at work despite incessant coughing and sneezing, a runny nose and a painful sore throat. Unfortunately, going to work sick is all too common in the United States: a survey released by Wakefield Research earlier this year found that 69% of working Americans don’t take sick days, even when they’re genuinely ill, because they feel they can’t afford to miss even a day of work. That is if they even have paid sick days; many American workers don’t. According to the National Partnership for Women and Families, 40 percent of private-sector workers and 80% of low-wage workers do not receive any paid sick leave.
Between job insecurity, rising housing and healthcare costs, wage stagnation, outsourcing to developing countries and the lack of federal legislation mandating sick leave, too many Americans feel compelled to show up at work sick when they should be home recovering, and their co-workers—and sometimes the public—pay the price when they get sick as well.
Mindfulness: Capitalism’s New Favorite Tool for Maintaining the Status Quo
The meditative practice is being used in a way that betrays its anti-materialist roots.