BookWoman56

Hell to the no. You wouldn’t be facilitating a family birthday party; you’d be facilitating a birthday present and money grab. If your daughter wants some outpouring of physical tokens of affection from her family, then she needs to act as if she actually cares about that family. This is a prime opportunity for her to see that if she ignores her family on a consistent basis, they are perfectly free to ignore her in return. As others have said, everyone has contact information and can send a card or gift if they want to. OTOH, if you were to organize a family party, then the invitees might feel obligated to bring a gift, when your daughter has essentially blown them off for a while now. Personally, I might be tempted to set up as if for a party, let your daughter show up anticipating presents, and then tell her nobody wanted to come, but that’s just me imagining a harsh reality check.

Not a big fan of his music (didn’t hate it but didn’t especially like it), but the first time I saw a music video featuring Ocasek, I thought he would be a great choice to play the character of the Mule in Asimov’s Foundation series, if it were turned into a film. He just seemed very different from other lead singers.

I agree with @Bastet‘s suggestions on the cell phone and bank account monitoring, with a couple of caveats. Don’t take her off your cell phone plan prior to her first payday from the new job. If she ends up without a working phone prior to the start date or during her first week or two of work, she might miss a critical call or message from work and end up losing her job. That would then give her ammunition to blame you for losing her job. So, let her know that effective the day after her first paycheck, she’s off your plan and responsible for her own phone service. If she fucks that up, that’s entirely on her. I’m unsure how you are able to track her spending, but I am guessing that you might have a joint account with her, separate from your own checking account. If so, contact your bank to see if you can be removed from the joint account. If not, explore options with the bank. Again, you don’t want to close the account (assuming you can do so) with no notice, if that’s the account your daughter’s paycheck gets direct deposited into. Depending on how the account is set up, you can remove yourself from the account, notify your daughter you are closing the account effective on a certain date, or request that your privileges to see her account activity be removed. Finally, make it clear to her that you are not her ATM. If she has a genuine emergency (medical event or needs to escape from an abusive relationship) that’s one thing. Even then, though, I would probably pay the doctor directly or buy a Uber trip, bus ticket, or whatever directly rather than provide cash.

Yes, there are Uber gift cards; I have seen them at the grocery store, which is the only reason I knew they exist. I did just google them, to make sure I hadn’t hallucinated them, and it does sound as if they’re only redeemable through Uber, no trading in for cash. I have used a similar strategy with one of my siblings at times, giving her a grocery store gift card rather than cash which her husband would undoubtedly take for his own use on drugs.

I agree with the advice to not make a big deal of her birthday. Maybe an Uber gift card for $20? Not entirely sure how those work, but presumably she wouldn’t be able to cash it in and could instead use it for commuting expenses for her new job, which is a desirable thing. Yes, your daughter is being ungrateful, selfish, and entitled. But with the exception of the drug use, quite possibly there’s nothing wrong with her that five years of having to support herself won’t cure. Many people go through similar stages of being self-centered jerks at this age and come out of it as reasonable adults. That said, her father is doing her no favors by enabling this behavior. From things you’ve said previously, my guess is that doing so is some kind of vengeful action on his part; that is, he’s tolerating and possibly encouraging this behavior because he knows it upsets you. Eventually he should get tired of it. Maybe when he does, she will learn to rely on herself rather than expecting everyone else to cater to her whims. In the meantime, focus on things to make yourself happy. It’s possible that your daughter may turn her life around, but it’s possible she will continue to make bad choices. You did provide her with a grounded life and structure while she was growing up, and now she’s of an age where she has to choose her own path.

This drives me nuts. Per TV shows, I must either be overly involved in my siblings’, parents’ and/or children’s lives (to the point that I practically live with them, despite their ages) or I must hate one or more of them. There’s very rarely the real-life dynamic of getting along fine with one sibling and not really caring for another sibling. Nor is there the option to recognize that your parents did a somewhat good job of raising you, but if they weren’t your parents, you would have zero interest in them and quite possibly dislike them, but not hate them.

@magicdog, it’s very possible you just caught your colleague at a breaking point and he blurted out what he was thinking without stopping to consider how it would sound. I don’t know his situation but can offer my own as an example. My work life for the past 3 months has consisted primarily of people saying, “I know you’re really busy with project ABC, but I desperately need help on project XYZ, which is seriously behind schedule,” and then proceeding to throw the bulk of their project over the wall at me. I have worked late nights, weekends, and holidays to the point where I am ready to scream at the next person who brings up some non critical work item. The fact that I haven’t actually yelled at or been short with someone is only because I work remotely and so don’t encounter any colleagues in person. I would like to think I have enough self control to refrain from doing what your colleague did, but anyone can reach a breaking point where they just want to be left the hell alone on work matters, and even the slightest question can be too much to handle.

There is a special place in the hell I don’t believe in for people who set up work meetings for first thing in the morning, with essentially no notice. I normally start work at 8:30, give or take 5 minutes. I always check my calendar just before I log off for the day, just to make sure I don’t have any early meetings that might require me to start work a little earlier than normal. Yesterday I was last online for work around 10pm, and my first meeting for today was scheduled for 11:30am. This morning I logged in right at 8:30, to discover I was supposed to be in a meeting with someone who had sent the meeting invite at 6:30am today. This person then proceeded to be in a snit because I was “late” for her meeting. On top of that, the reason we’re meeting at all is because this person needs to be bailed out on a project for which she and her colleagues are seriously behind schedule. Fortunately most of the people I work with are not like this, but this behavior is typical of this person. I have talked to my manager about the situation as a whole, and post-project there will be some serious discussion about how this particular person and team need to get their shit together.

My general advice for a cover letter and interview is to focus as much as possible on how your skills and experience align with the new position, and how you can provide a benefit to them. If they ask why you are looking, spin it as you are ready to take on new challenges. This may sound cynical, but hiring managers do not give a flying fuck about what the new job will do for you; they care about what you can do for them. When they ask why you’re in the job market, all they care about is that you not bash your current or previous employer and that you don’t reveal yourself to be job-shopping for what they perceive as non-legit reasons (boredom, tension with colleagues, etc.). What may seem to you as neutral comments about your current situation can be perceived the wrong way. For example, when I recently hired someone, we had a panel interview. My preferred candidate mentioned that one reason she was looking was that she had been in a senior role, with another senior person and a junior person. The other senior person retired and the junior person was out on an extended medical leave, but management had decided to switch the open senior position to a different role entirely, and not to bring in a contract person for the junior role out on a leave of at least 6 months. I appreciated her candor but had to defend her to the other interviewers, who interpreted her comments as bashing her manager. So, I had to remind them that she did not in fact criticize her manager but instead stated that as a result of the situation, she was now the sole person handling the workload that had previously been divided among 3 people. I did hire this candidate and she’s doing great, but at least one of the other interviewers would have dropped her from consideration just because of those remarks.

I will echo the “No, you’re not an asshole for thinking this other teacher is an asshole” reaction. I no longer teach, but taught as an adjunct occasionally until a couple of years ago. The expectation for any teacher or tutor is that you use any required materials and supplement those as needed with your own materials. If you’re not willing to do that, then don’t take the job. I have shared bits and pieces of my own materials with colleagues on request. But these were instructors who also shared resources with me. I can think of only one occasion when a colleague made a large-scale request like you received, and that was someone who was asked on an emergency basis to teach a course she’d never taught before, which started 2 days later. Also, we were all working for the same university, teaching and tutoring students enrolled in that university. With your colleague, if she had shared she was going to be tutoring a non-district student in this particular course/topic, and you volunteered to share your materials, that would have been one thing. But for her to presume on you to just hand over materials you’ve spent years and years developing? No way. She can do her own work, which she’s getting paid for, rather than coasting by using your work.

There are also people who are terrified of dogs, who might have the same reaction to having a service dog on the same flight, but I think the need of the person with a service animal outweighs the possibility of a passenger having a phobia or extreme anxiety about a service animal. I no longer fly at all, but would have no problem with any service animal. But if somehow I did need to fly and another passenger had a snake as an emotional support pet? Hell to the no. I had to take Xanax just to watch Snakes on a Plane.

@Petunia13, I would never be nasty to wait staff. I rarely give a bad tip (less than 20%) unless the service is horrible. But it does annoy me when I go to a restaurant during off hours, which is my preference as I dislike crowds, and the service is outrageously slow. I don’t expect a waiter to be there immediately if that waiter has a lot of tables. But FFS, if I am sitting there for 30 minutes, there’s only 3 occupied tables, and the two waiters are standing just outside the kitchen doing nothing but talking to each other, and I have not yet even been acknowledged by one of them, much less had my order taken, that’s the point at which I will walk out. It doesn’t bother me if wait staff are legitimately too busy to get to me as quickly as I would like, but I am unlikely to feel good about wait staff who can’t be bothered to wait on me because they are too busy socializing with each other.

@Scout Finch, a colleague gave me that mug a couple of years ago, because she knew how much time I was spending correcting grammar errors. I work from home, though, so I don’t have to worry about any of my other colleagues being offended by it. Of course, these are people who frequently claim to be “flushing out” the details of their project plans.

In retrospect, I find a lot of the YA books I read as a pre-teen or adolescent very preachy and much too directed at convincing girls that having sex one time would almost always result in pregnancy, saying absolutely nothing about the pros of using contraception, and implying to girls that even unplanned and unwanted pregnancies would ultimately lead them to end up in a marriage earlier than planned but a happy one. The two that come to mind are Too Bad About the Haines Girl and Mr. and Mrs. BoJo Jones. In the first one, a high school student gets pregnant, almost has an abortion (illegal at that time) but refuses because of the unsanitary conditions, and ultimately tells her parents that she's pregnant. They of course are completely supportive and understanding. In the second one, the girl gets pregnant and marries her BF, but their child dies when it is born prematurely. Everybody's parents then want them to separate and pursue their original plans of attending college, but they decide they really do love each other and end up in college housing for married students, poor but happy. And it's not that the books were completely unrealistic; there were arguments and hurt feelings, and concerns about money and crushed dreams. But I think about the people I knew who did get pregnant in high school and got married, and their reality was often quite different. There were parents who were horrified and threw their daughters out of the home, or forced them to go to homes for unwed mothers, or insisted on having a pro forma marriage with the father so the child wouldn't be illegitimate. There were parents who were convinced that the girl had gotten pregnant deliberately to trap their son, and harassed the girl. There were couples who got married because of an unplanned pregnancy and were divorced within a couple of years. I can think of exactly one girl from my high school whose path seemed to mirror what was in these books, and the last time I saw her she had two toddlers by age 20 and not the slightest expectation of ever having a paying job, when prior to the accidental pregnancy she'd been considered very bright and definitely planned on going to college. Who knows, maybe 5 years down the road she decided to get her GED or something and go to college, but I'll never forget the look on her face when I saw her last. She was looking at her two kids and she obviously loved them, but there was more than a hint of being resigned to a life quite different from what she'd envisioned just a few years prior to that. I know there are books now that give a more realistic and diverse view of sexuality in high school kids, the problems with marrying solely because of a pregnancy, emotionally abusive parents, and so forth; I also know that the books I read reflected some societal attitudes of that period. But I can't help feeling that with those books, and so many similarly themed books (don't go steady with someone because things will get too "serious;" don't be in a hurry to grow up because you should stay a child as long as possible, etc.), the intent was less to explore a character and more to be propaganda.

Not an employment or any kind of lawyer, but could you describe in general what’s going on with your work situation? Maybe some posters here can share similar experiences, point you in the right direction, or at least empathize.