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Is Drowning Them an Option?
Dear Work Friend,
I’m 13 years old, and I volunteer as an assistant to the lifeguards during my local pool’s swim lessons. There are eight volunteers — three girls and five boys — and our job consists mostly of standing in the water making sure that little Timmy doesn’t sink like a rock while practicing the front crawl. The lifeguards are also watching, of course, and the volunteers don’t need to be in the water unless the students outnumber the lifeguards.
The trouble is this. We are generally responsible for noticing whether or not we need to be in the water, and not all the volunteers need to be in the water. Usually, when our help is necessary, the other girls and I end up helping while the boys keep playing baseball (or something), oblivious. When we try to get them to help, they avoid it.
What annoys me even more, though, is that they (the boys) have figured out that I am a complete nerd, and seem to find this entertaining. They insist on me telling them a “fun fact of the lesson” during any session when they are not too busy playing baseball. I enjoy telling them things, even though I know they don’t want to know — they just want to laugh at me. But I struggle to find facts that I am really comfortable sharing in front of the young children, because most of the facts I find fun are related, in some way, to murder or corpses. (I have to know these things! I want to be a forensic pathologist or a private detective when I grow up.) Also, the boys have never stopped shouting “By Jove!” at anything remotely startling (e.g., someone getting a home run) after I muttered it when I was kicked by a 5-year-old doing a handstand, because they find it entertaining to mock my inexplicable old-fashionedness. Again, I don’t mind personally — it is a weird thing to say — but it disrupts class, and, as I’ve said, they don’t help with class.
I think that either the boys should start to pull their own weight or they should stop relying on me to entertain them when they don’t. But I suspect that anyone I talk to will just say something along the lines of “That’s just how teenage boys are” and do nothing. Or I could get revenge — this would be my preferred outcome — but I haven’t a clue how to do that. I have some ideas, but they are rather problematic in their implementation, and they’re not particularly sporting anyway. (I am willing to be a jerk, but I have to be fair about it.) What should I do?
— Anonymous
The unfortunate fact is that you are dealing, at age 13, with an eternal workplace problem, one that affects local pools and Fortune 500 companies alike (and, presumably, forensic pathology labs and private-detective firms as well): shirkers who palm off work and mask their lack of contribution with overfriendliness.
You say your colleagues’ teasing doesn’t bother you much on a personal level, and I can respect that. As behavior from 13-year-olds goes, this kind of needling attention isn’t the worst. If your main problem was merely that you had to deal with boys being socially annoying at work, I think I would advise you to ignore them until they moved on or turned 30, whichever came first.
But it seems to me — and I think you’ve realized this — that the mostly innocuous repartee is also being used to establish an atmosphere of clubby “fun” that excuses the way they’ve foisted their work on you and the other girls. So long as you play along, even begrudgingly, it’s easy for them to fool the lifeguards and any onlooking adults (and maybe even themselves) into thinking everything about the current arrangement is fine.
I think you need to more actively cut it off. When the boys ask for a “fun fact of the lesson,” decline. When they say “By Jove,” don’t crack a smile. Don’t even roll your eyes. You don’t need to be rude or mean — in fact, it’s best if you can maintain a neutral disengagement.
If they ask why you’ve clammed up, you can tell them: I don’t feel like joking around when I’m doing all the work and you’re goofing off. But you don’t need to find the perfect witty comeback, or plan an elaborate revenge scheme. That stuff is for movies. In real life, few things are scarier than a person who doesn’t acknowledge your jokes.
If we’re all lucky, at least some of those 13-year-old boys will learn blessedly early that you can’t spend your time goofing off and assume someone else — likely someone else female — will pick up the slack. The long-term satisfaction of having helped teach a valuable lesson may not precisely match the satisfaction of the revenge plot in your head, but it’s not such a bad consolation.
You will still need to talk to a supervisor or other authority figure about the specific problem of the boys’ avoiding work. I understand your worry that you’ll be met with “That’s just how teenage boys are,” but correctly staffing the lessons is a safety issue, and if the boys aren’t pulling their weight, the pool will want to know.
You can help by refusing to give the boys social cover for their malingering. You might also consider refusing to give them actual cover, too. If you can’t get a lifeguard to care simply by asking — and if you can’t persuade the boys to get in themselves — you and your fellow assistants can force the issue by declining to get into the pool until the boys have done their fair share of work. It’s never too early to begin practicing work stoppages.
The Friday Puzzle
Dear Work Friend,
This happened not to me, but to someone close to me that I’ll call “James.” James has been employed for two years in a small local office of a large corporation. There are six employees in the office, who all work in one large room. Only the manager has a separate office. The manager does not know how to use the computer systems and other technology.
There used to be an assistant manager who did know how to use the technology and trained people, but she no longer works there. Three of the six employees are new. One of them is still in training.
Recently, the manager called James into his office on a Friday afternoon and chewed him out. James was taken completely by surprise. He thought things had been going well. The manager told him, “Don’t say you don’t know what you did, because I know you do.” He added, “You need to concentrate on your own job and not worry about how other people do their jobs. You are making everyone’s lives miserable.”
That week, one seasoned employee was out on vacation and one was out on sick leave. Because of the absences, the co-worker who was still in training had been put on the job. James had been trying to help the new people, answering their questions. He thought everyone was working well as a team. He was left wondering which of his co-workers were unhappy with him.
How should James have handled this situation immediately and longer term?
— Anonymous
Sometimes, Work Friend will lightly clean up the emails we publish so that they are concise and easy for everyone to understand. But I’m leaving the details of this one intact — readers need to know what we deal with around here.
Your question reads like a logic puzzle, and like a logic puzzle it’s giving me a headache. Should I be trying to deduce which of James’s co-workers betrayed him to the boss — the one in training? The other new one? The other other new one? Should I be asking yes or no questions to come up with a satisfying but counterintuitive answer? (The doctor is James’s mother, of course.)
The problem, reading between the lines, is that James is treating this strange turn of events as a logic puzzle, too, trying to figure out through vague clues who complained, and what about.
But it doesn’t really matter which of the co-workers complained or what the supposed transgression was. The problem here is between James and his boss. It seems wholly plausible, based on what little information I have, that James was not as helpful to his new colleagues as he had imagined. But even if he deserved to be upbraided, it’s wildly unprofessional for his boss to say anything close to “Don’t say you don’t know what you did, because I know you do.”
As far as the direct question asked in the letter goes, James should have respectfully pressed his boss for specifics. (“Please tell me what I’m being accused of so I can try to fix it.”) And he should continue to do so if none are forthcoming. (“Boss, I’m still thinking about our conversation last week, and I’m worried I’ve offended some of my new co-workers. Can you help me better understand what I did wrong?”) But if this is really how James’s boss manages employees, I think that in the longer term James should be looking for new work. Maybe writing logic puzzles?