Lady Business

What I know is definitely uncool is for you, a young, straight man in the workplace — not a minority unless it is Opposite Day — to take umbrage with a female colleague’s apparel choices. Because, frankly, what Perla in accounting wears to work so she can cover her bits and feed her family is really none of your business — even if your erection disagrees. If she’s violating a dress code rule that she’d been briefed on at the time of her hire, somebody in H.R. will talk to her, and she’ll probably be embarrassed and start wearing a scarf. Wow, what a victory: treat yourself to an extra Michelob Ultra if and when that goes down.

As for your not being able to “focus” on your work? It’s, no offense, so down on the list of problems I’m worried about that the oil-coated ducks in the Gulf are taking their last gasps of breath just to call you a chode.

Babies, babies, babies! They’re everywhere, aren’t they? In our eyes, in our thoughts, in our arms, in our dreams. Sometimes, in our dreams, they are riding alpacas or juggling tacos — but that doesn’t mean those dreams are necessarily about babies. Look, I’m not Freud.

Here’s the thing: if you want to be at home with your baby, and you feel like your kiddo is all you can think about, you don’t have to hear it from me that a career transition is probably on deck, at least for the time being. If your current gig is a full-time one, and your schedule is preventing you from doing what you need in order to feel like you have a life, and not just a job, it sounds like you need a more flexible gig, or to work toward taking a break until your partner finds work.

But here’s what I have to say that you do need to hear: There is nothing wrong with what you are asking for! If I may temporarily don my bio-deterministic hat, I think an inherent part of being female has to do with the desire for a kind of fluidity in our lives. Which is a fancy/fruity way of saying that there are all kinds of phases of a woman’s career, and it’s okay to want to work full time in a breadwinner role at one point, and stay home with your baby at another time.

You don’t have to apologize to anyone for supporting or not supporting non-traditional gender roles. What you do have to do is make sure your family is fed and provided for, and, at the same time, make sure you’re not putting yourself in the position where you’ll look back and regret not spending more time with your apple-cheeked little baby girl, who (I’m guessing?) has chubby little fingers and toes and the world’s most squeezeable tuchus. BABIES, BABIES, BABIES!

I advise you to transition out of your predicament in a way that splits the difference between pulling a full Steve Slater, and acting out, from your cubicle, a reverse-gender version of “The cat’s in the cradle and the silver spoon.” Frankly, in a perfect world, you should have more maternity leave or be able to work from home. And if you haven’t already, discuss those possibilities with your supervisor before going any further.

But if those options are not available, I’d advise you to start sniffing around for some consultant gigs that may utilize your skills more efficiently than your current job. Visit a career counselor on your lunch break and get notes on your resume. Do whatever networking you can with your daughter in tow, and online. And have a talk with your husband about the possibility of shifting the responsibilities around so that you can spend your time doing what you want to do. Like taking your daughter’s cheeks in your hands and being like “There you are! There are your cheeks! Look at you! I’ve got your cheeks!” and so on. Good luck, and keep me posted on that little one.

On a personal note, this will be the last installation of Lady Business, which was meant to be a summer series. I want to thank my readers and Salon for giving me the chance to run Broadsheet’s first ever advice column! It’s been a pleasure and a privilege hanging out this summer with all of you. For those who’ve responded in the comments section with constructive feedback and kind words: thank you so much. If you want more of me, you can follow me on Twitter, read my blog or my book, or, if you hate reading, stay tuned for its television version on HBO. Oh, and if you don’t want more of me? Well. May God have mercy on your souls.

And as for your extremely generous multiple choice attempt at understanding why your boss would ever, EVER, think it would be OK to rummage around his business in a place of business, that’s just a case of inappropriate empathy. There are worse diagnoses! But of the choices you’ve laid out, I’d give a resounding yes to your hunch that his public pubis-tousling is most definitely a “Bad Manners” thing, and whether he’s in need of a dermatologist or he’s just “hard at work,” so to speak, his reasons for relieving himself in front of you are so irrelevant, I actually just got angry typing that right now.

This problem — which is, by the way, his problem way more than yours, though it doesn’t seem that way because you’re the one who’s uncomfortable and he’s the one who’s merrily rough-housing his groin — has “HR” written all over it. I would strongly recommend that you visit someone in the Human Resources department and voice your discomfort. They should be the ones to talk to him about it and protect you by keeping you anonymous — which is absolutely reasonable, because he could very well be raking his junk in front of any number of employees — not to deny you of any, um, flattery.

Any company sexual harassment policy should include his behavior as an example of something that is absolutely in no way cool. Whether or not he considers his behavior a subconscious tic, a medical condition or a sexual come-on, however bizarre (remember Clarence Thomas’ winning lines?), touching your crotch in front of your female underling is not something that you can do. So consult those boring packets you were given on your first day, and go have a closed-door convo with the dude or lady who handed them out.

And in the meantime, try to keep any interactions with your boss either on the phone or over IM. At least in the latter case, his hands will be occupied with the keyboard. That poor, gross keyboard.

Greetings, Future Would-Be Competitor!

Advance congrats on making the big schlep to New York, where professional writers suffer and strive in unparalleled numbers! You’re doing the right thing by coming here, though I can’t necessarily condone your decision to go the grad school route with the same amount of conditionless confidence (though I’m certainly aware that you didn’t, ahem, ask). From my experience, I think that when it comes to writing things that aren’t novels, the best way to learn how to do it is to farm yourself out for freelance gigs like a meth addict juggling plates. Do it a lot is what I mean. Take non-paying assignments for the experience, meet people in the process, and use those relationships to get yourself more work, becoming better and better at writing while you do.

However! Being a newcomer to the Big City is no short task, and the structure of grad school, however expensive (and, combined with the life expenses of a typical New Yorker, prohibitively so, unless you have some kind of sheik benefactor), is often helpful to aspirants looking to learn the ins and outs of stringing a sentence together, while making contacts in the process. So, good luck with your MFA, and I won’t snark on it any further. I’ve been burned myself in the “I”m going to get a master’s degree!” department, only to wish later that I had the cash equivalent of those years, but I think regret is useless in the absence of time travel, so let’s all tuck our tales and execute our learned lessons going forward, which is what time does anyway.

As far as staying sane and achieving balance in a competitive field, I think that’s a matter for you and the more sympathetic of your friends, your yoga instructor, your chaplain or rabbi, or the person you complain to weekly who gives you your Pristiq prescription. In other words, whatever balance it is you seek will come, by definition, from the parts of your life that are not embedded in the work areas of it, and whatever perspective you have on it will come from your philosophical worldview. As for achieving some kind of sanity within the profession, I will happily advise you from the experience I’ve accrued in my last (mumble-mutter-I am old) years as a writer.

If you are making money writing, you are doing great. If you can support yourself writing, you are a success. I don’t care if you’re writing textbooks or Pulitzer Prize-winning articles for weighty publications of world renown: If you’re writing and it’s paying the bills, consider yourself a successful writer. Beyond that — when it comes to Twitter followers, book sales, and pretty much anything else you mentioned besides emotional weight gain — which I’d discuss with any of the above advisors, especially the doler out of antidepressants, because there are some meds that will puff you out like the cotton candy cloud Katy Perry’s resting on and others that will tighten you up like a knotted shoelace — you are really talking about fame, which is different from success, and by a wide margin.

Try as hard as you can not to worry about whether you are destined to become the next author of that book about Food and Oprah and Women and God, in that order. Look to your short-term goals as they present themselves, and try as best you can to do so with blinders on, because jealousy of your colleague’s latest achievement will only bring you further away from your own discretion as to what it is you actually want to do. It’s just distracting to get hung up on Suzie’s feature on Chelsea Clinton’s wedding on UsMagazine.com or Margie’s listicle on the Daily Beast of the Nation’s 15 Wealthiest Dogs, when all it is you came here to do was, say, financial reporting.

For the time being, focus on the formidable task of moving to New York City and surviving your first semester. Ace your assignments. Be nice to people. Listen like it’s your job (it kind of is). Whether or not you find an apartment big enough to stash all of your “word baggage,” the mere fact that you’re taking the steps that you are to get here deserves acclaim. So, hooray! Here is some acclaim for you! Now get to work on your writing skills so you can start paying your rent on the merit of your work at some point, and never mind the fame talk, the clatter of irrelevant accomplishments that are not your own, or the self-doubt that clouds the inner voice of any writer, like so many Katy Perry-hosting cotton candy doom harbingers. Clear them away and do your work. The rest will come soon after.

Julie

My Dear Intern,

In the parlance of the newspaper world, it looks from your question that you have a veritable backlog of issues that need addressing; I’ll do the best I can to answer the ones you’ve left on my stoop.

It seems, first and foremost, that you’re having a hard time grappling with your first experience as one of the lone females in a predominantly male working environment. This is a big rite of passage, and not something to be taken lightly! In fact, the most important motivation behind any internship, besides the personal fulfillment found in schlepping salads and photocopying documents, is that you have the opportunity to figure out whether you’d want to make a career out of the industry you’re spying on. Keep that in mind when the stress of the gig is driving you bats: You’re there to learn about that particular office; you’re not married to a workplace kind enough to let you do their grunt work for free.

Moving on to a bigger concern I have from your letter: A bustling, bromantic, fratlike work environment is one thing, but your “distinct impression” that your supervisor wants you to sleep with him is another. I would need to know more about the details of your hunch before counseling you on the matter of whether you should act more like “one of the guys,” at a bar or otherwise. Because while unwanted sexual advances on interns have certainly been known to sell plenty of papers, they shouldn’t be part of anyone’s experience on the side of putting them into print. (Or anybody’s! I’m going to go out on a limb here and say I’m strongly against sexual harassment.)

If your boss is making you feel uncomfortable, or putting you in a quid pro quo situation, meet at once with whoever hired you, or talk to your internship advisor at your school. This is more important than anything else.

Let us now discuss the politics of the bar, and the newspapermen who frequent it.

You’re right in that many of the decisions concerning who rises in a company, and why, are made off-site in social settings like bars, restaurants, baseball games and dinner parties. But just as nobody should ever force you to participate in, say, a workwide health spa retreat, complete with mandatory Bikram yoga and wheat grass enemas, so, too, you needn’t go beyond the frontiers of your comfort level, whether it concerns your physical flexibility, your tolerance for G.I. symptoms, or your propensity for hard liquor. In other words, you don’t need to “get sloppy” at a drinking session with colleagues if you don’t want to. In fact, it’s to your advantage that you do not, and that’s exclusive of your potentially lecherous supervisor.

When it comes to your either-or mental diptych of “get really drunk” or “avoid all social interaction with my co-workers,” I think what makes the most sense for you to do is to create your own gray area (a concept I’m looking into developing as a self-help book, or a hair regrowth kit for the elderly). What if you went out for a drink with the guys from the office and limited yourself to one or two rounds, then spent an extra half-hour sipping Diet Coke and getting to know the people you work with? Keeping your wits about you while, at the same time, remaining social and friendly, is a good skill to learn from a summer spent setting type or fact-checking Op-Eds, or providing lozenges to the people whose job it is to scream “Stop the presses!” — or whatever it is people still do at newspapers these days, besides hire unpaid interns.

But, of course, the above advice is exclusive of a scenario in which you’re being sexually harassed. If you are indeed in an outright unfriendly environment perpetuated by your supervisor, please talk to somebody — even if you’re unsure. Before you raise a glass of whatever spirits or cola, I want to protect you, and all girls everywhere, from ever being dubbed a “portly pepperpot,” however brilliantly, by tabloids who made a mockery out of Bill Clinton’s indiscretions with a girl in his office not much older than his daughter. I look forward to the day when being called “another Monica Lewinsky” refers to the hard work behind a master’s degree in social psychology from the London School of Economics, after spending the first act of one’s life deflecting the shame of a scandal that should have rested on the shoulders of a man old enough to have known better. But until then, keep your head screwed on, and remember: If this isn’t the gig for you, you can bet the Sunday coupon section you’ll find a better fit somewhere else soon.

Julie

I’m in my mid-40s and am not ready to throw in the towel, quietly riding out my career at this level. I still have things to learn and a great deal to impart. Is it me? Is it the economy? Is it the sheer dearth of such opportunities because I’m in a niche market (healthcare editorial)?

Sincerely,

Maria 

Maria! Thank you for writing me. Your concerns will give me a chance to prove myself capable of writing a service-y, well-informed, maybe not-as-funny answer to your very serious, valid question. Perhaps in the process I can show off not only that I know what I’m talking about to Salon’s commenters — all of whom I’m certain are individuals who are hugely fulfilled in their day jobs and personal lives and could easily use their real names instead of anonymous handles in their signatures if they chose to do so, but opt instead to criticize my “bright red bouffant” and “idiot gossip cutsie voice” under brave, informed, artisinally crafted pseudonyms — and mayhaps even win them over, because, really, impressing strangers is the only ambition I’ve ever had, since I was a tot. I also have some unresolved issues around trying to make bullies like me in third grade, and at one point seriously pursued a career in the performing arts. Do you think those issues are related?

This will no longer be about me, I promise. This is about you — and you, Maria, are a very impressive professional with a great track record at your company. So, before I continue, I want to give you a hearty, Teddy-Roosevelt-worthy “huzzah” for getting yourself to the “bully” level of senior editor at your place of business — a position that, considering the potentially John Hughes-ian, popular-kid politics of your workplace, is nothing to sneeze at. I mention John Hughes not just because it’s been a year since he passed away (R.I.P.), but because it sounds to me like there might be some popularity politics at work at your office, especially since I get the feeling from the tone of your letter that you’re a confident enough career woman type to have already asked your supervisor for the promotion you feel rightly entitled to, having put in your sweat and time at your place of business.

The best thing I can advise you to do is to start sniffing around elsewhere in your field, however niche it may be. Send some queries to colleagues at competitive firms along the lines of what you told me, just now, about vertical versus lateral moves, and all the experience you’ve accumulated in your impressive tenure at your current gig. If your boss finds out about your hunting, she won’t know anything you haven’t already told her. Or, wait — that was an assumption on my part, wasn’t it.

Meet with your boss, if you haven’t already. Tell her that you’re frustrated with the lack of growth opportunities at your work. Keep in mind that if she resists promoting you or giving you clear feedback as to why you haven’t been promoted or what you can do in terms of steps to take toward those ends, you might be working against a bit of a high school popularity situation, meaning there’s no accounting for people’s taste when it comes to who’s in and who’s out. In other words, whether or not your work speaks for itself, you might be competing against the inevitable, which is the fact that not everybody plain old likes everyone else, and whether it’s your boss, or your boss’s boss, I have a feeling that something besides your experience is working against you that may have to do with the politics of personalities.

So, write to contacts at other firms to inquire about work elsewhere, keeping in mind that you have nothing to hide from your supervisor in doing so, because you’ve already spoken to her, remember? Finally, if you haven’t already considered it before, allow me to be the concierge of your imagination for a moment or two and suggest you seek out other fields to which you could lend your superior editing skills as well as your panache around rather-universal corporate matters of budgets, personnel and strategy. Not to be all “my mom” about leading you to water, but I just typed in “Editorial Director” into this site’s search engine, and a whole ton of results turned up, from a gig at Lowe’s Creative Ideas (in Des Moines! I’ve never been, but I heard if sitcoms succeed among their demographic, network executives are happy) to various positions at Tufts University, near your own hometown. Good school, Tufts. I visited once. They have a cannon on campus and everything.

I hope this helps. Best of luck to you, Maria! And for what it’s worth, I adore your namesake on Sesame Street.

Red Bouffantedly Yours,

Julie