Comment by vba616 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by vba616 | Hacker News Reader

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This is apparently from 2016, and it sounds so, so fake.

I could convince myself it could have happened through most of the story, but the last paragraph is just over the top.

"Even though she doesn’t work here any longer, I want to reach out and tell her that quitting without notice because she didn’t get her way isn’t exactly professional. I only want to do this because she was an otherwise great employee, and I don’t want her to derail her career by doing this again and thinking it is okay. She was raised in a few dozen different foster homes and has no living family. She was homeless for a bit after she turned 18 and besides us she doesn’t have anyone in her life that has ever had professional employment. This is the only job she has had. Since she’s never had anyone to teach her professional norms, I want to help her so she doesn’t make the same mistake again. What do you think is the best way for me to do this?"

I'm not familiar with askamanager, but isn't making up letters pretty standard and time-honored for advice columnists?

This was my exact reaction. I have to conclude this is a troll - I still think so based on the wording and such.

My counter-example, however, was a grocery store I worked in in college where the manager wouldn't give the weekend off to one of the hardest-working, friendly shelf-stockers to attend his father's funeral. I was there. It really happened. He quit on the spot. I was right next them in this interaction. It was so enraging I wanted to quit out of moral-support, but I did not.

This sort of interaction is absolutely unfathomable in my current professional environment. Whenever I feel injustice, or underappreciated, I frequently remind myself of those times to appreciate what I have today.

  I have to conclude this is a troll

It could be a troll, or it could be the author herself, chasing clicks and trying to sell her book.

I can even imagine how someone would rationalize it: "I don't have any good questions this week, but I can think of a type of situation that does happen. What's the harm? Nobody will ever find out, and I can use it teach a useful lesson about management"

>I can even imagine how someone would rationalize it

But you make it sound like a big deal. Like it would be a shocking scandal or lead to lawsuits. Who do you think polices advice columns?

Ann Landers was a pen name for multiple people. People used to joke about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dear_Prudence_(advice_column) being 90% fake (I never read it, or Slate, on a regular basis, so it's only hearsay).

I had a job stocking shelves at Target once. I quit after a couple of days, because it was too stressful and nobody explained anything to me. I had been hospitalized some weeks before and was adjusting to my new psych meds, but I wasn't crazy enough to share my problems and ask for accommodations.

It ruined my life, because everybody wanted to know why I left my last job and required contact information for my previous manager, and I didn't know what to put down. Nobody wants to hire a job-hopper! Then after a month or so I couldn't explain why I had a gap on my resume, and I realized I would never be employed again, which is why I became despondent and drank myself to death.

...the first paragraph is 100% true.

She was the most junior employee, and yet she worked 6 years in a call center. Yeah, that's extremely believable. Oh, and the colleague that went to a concert... that was just a pure indignation pump.

I always wondered how many of these kind of reddit posts are real. This one is just over the top, but I'm betting there are quite a few that play things just a bit more conservatively and pull it off.

The manager actually wants to punish the employee by calling them and shouting demeaning things at them.

Note, there's an "update" from the supposed spurned employee, that sounds just as, if not more fake.

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