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agonyaunt2022-10-25 01:23 pm
minoanmiss) wrote in agonyaunt2022-10-25 01:23 pm
Entry tags:
Ask a Manager: My Mom's Advice
Actual title: my mom tells me to go to work sick, never take time off, and fear being fired every day
My mom once told me that what she does, and what I should do, is “go into work every single day convinced they are going to fire you if you make a mistake.”
Also, a few years ago my mom had so much PTO accrued that HR told her that she legally had to take time off or cash in some PTO because she had worked too many hours. We went on a 10-day Barcelona vacation with her cashed-in PTO.
Today, I have strep throat and a fever of 101 and my mom is worried about me missing work and thinks I should go in.
I’ve had to work hard to reprogram myself with more healthy work/life expectations. I think boomer parents can instill some very unhealthy values in their kids surrounding work.
Do not listen to your mom.
DO NOT LISTEN TO YOUR MOM.
Somewhere along the way, you mom picked up incredibly toxic and dysfunctional beliefs about work. Who knows where — it could have come from her own parents, or from some particularly horrible employers, or from financial insecurity that led to terror that even normal behavior could cost her a job and jeopardize her well-being.
But what she’s telling you is awful advice:
* Most employers do not want you coming in with strep throat and a fever and infecting the rest of your team! (There are some exceptions to that, but those exceptions are terrible employers that you don’t want to work for.)
* No decent manager — no even halfway decent manager — wants you fearing that you’ll be fired if you make a single mistake. (To the contrary, in many cases good managers want you to feel safe enough to experiment and take reasonable risks.) Decent managers know that fearful employees are less creative, less engaged, and less candid. Decent managers know they’ll lose good employees if they govern by fear.
* Vacation time is a benefit that you’ve earned, just like wages or health insurance. It’s true that some employers make it harder than others to take all your PTO, but that’s a problem to be solved with that employer — it makes no sense to proactively decide not to use any PTO just in case you’re at a crappy employer that makes it tough to do, since most don’t. (And even at those crappy employers that make it tough to do, there are people who just go ahead and take time off and the employer deals with it.)
It’s true that some members of older generations can have some outdated and overly deferential ideas about work, but your mom is on the very extreme end of that — enough of an outlier, in fact, that I’d hesitate to label this a generational issue at all. There are tons of boomers who don’t think this way! She’s not a representative of her generation in this regard, just a part of a small subset of people of all ages with truly corrosive ideas about work.
My mom once told me that what she does, and what I should do, is “go into work every single day convinced they are going to fire you if you make a mistake.”
Also, a few years ago my mom had so much PTO accrued that HR told her that she legally had to take time off or cash in some PTO because she had worked too many hours. We went on a 10-day Barcelona vacation with her cashed-in PTO.
Today, I have strep throat and a fever of 101 and my mom is worried about me missing work and thinks I should go in.
I’ve had to work hard to reprogram myself with more healthy work/life expectations. I think boomer parents can instill some very unhealthy values in their kids surrounding work.
Do not listen to your mom.
DO NOT LISTEN TO YOUR MOM.
Somewhere along the way, you mom picked up incredibly toxic and dysfunctional beliefs about work. Who knows where — it could have come from her own parents, or from some particularly horrible employers, or from financial insecurity that led to terror that even normal behavior could cost her a job and jeopardize her well-being.
But what she’s telling you is awful advice:
* Most employers do not want you coming in with strep throat and a fever and infecting the rest of your team! (There are some exceptions to that, but those exceptions are terrible employers that you don’t want to work for.)
* No decent manager — no even halfway decent manager — wants you fearing that you’ll be fired if you make a single mistake. (To the contrary, in many cases good managers want you to feel safe enough to experiment and take reasonable risks.) Decent managers know that fearful employees are less creative, less engaged, and less candid. Decent managers know they’ll lose good employees if they govern by fear.
* Vacation time is a benefit that you’ve earned, just like wages or health insurance. It’s true that some employers make it harder than others to take all your PTO, but that’s a problem to be solved with that employer — it makes no sense to proactively decide not to use any PTO just in case you’re at a crappy employer that makes it tough to do, since most don’t. (And even at those crappy employers that make it tough to do, there are people who just go ahead and take time off and the employer deals with it.)
It’s true that some members of older generations can have some outdated and overly deferential ideas about work, but your mom is on the very extreme end of that — enough of an outlier, in fact, that I’d hesitate to label this a generational issue at all. There are tons of boomers who don’t think this way! She’s not a representative of her generation in this regard, just a part of a small subset of people of all ages with truly corrosive ideas about work.
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All my jobs were like this. They were even "good" jobs.
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Call your manager, tell them you have a fever of 101 and a sore throat and you should probably call out, but you can come in if you're really needed. If they say "of course you shouldn't come in! I'll put in sick leave for you," stay home and come back when you feel better. If they say "oh, you don't feel well, but we do really need you today", call out anyway and spend your sick leave job-hunting. Especially post-Covid, nobody needs to be doing a job where they have to come in with a fever of 101. (Even my teacher parents would have called out.)
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- seriously endangers any of your coworkers who are chronically ill or immunocompromised
- seriously endangers any family members your coworker has who are chronically ill or immunocompromised, which could include your coworkers partner/spouse; your coworkers children; your coworkers elderly parents.
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Coming into work while sick is an excellent way to develop serious complications like pneumonia, Rheumatic heart disease [caused by poorly managed strep throat], Chronic Fatigue Syndrome...
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My subsequent jobs have been at companies were just about everyone was white-collar and salaried. Some of them have been situations where people wanted to conserve their PTO because it was a combined vacation/sick pool, but no one was going to be coming to work with strep.
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Oh my gosh please please please do not come to work with strep throat. I would pay you out of my own pocket the money you would have made that say to stay the fuck home, that shit is highly contagious and deadly to a lot of people.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rheumatic_fever
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Oh, I know, I'm doing the funeral studies microbiology class right now and every single parent in that class shrieked when we discussed strep. It's universally hated.
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It is also chronically traumatic, a health hazard, a terrible career strategy, and incredibly exploitive. It's taken some real work to reject this framing and not pass it to my kid. I feel for LW here, having to manage gross awful strep and gross awful mom-panic both.