updates: Gen X coworker is trying to “grandma” the Zoomers, falsely accused of using ChatGPT, and more

It’s a special “where are you now?” season at Ask a Manager and I’m running updates from people who had their letters here answered in the past. Here are four updates from past letter-writers.

There will be more posts than usual this week, so keep checking back throughout the day.

1. My Gen X coworker is trying to “grandma” the Zoomers and it’s getting weird

I took your advice of pointing out to our more junior colleagues that the behavior was not normal and it seems to have worked as well as it could. Unfortunately, Hannah is displaying escalated behavior, including taking personal calls in public areas that devolve into shouting at her children and discussion of even more inappropriate topics – we’ve moved on from “leave your future husband because marriage is a sham” to things like “if you have a child, they’ll have to (graphic description of an episiotomy) because your hips are too narrow.” Some of this behavior was present before, but it was typically when very few people were around; now, she does it in full rooms with managers and directors present. She is also comfortable enough now that she openly makes racist remarks to, and about, our non-white employees. For reference, Hannah is white but still considers herself marginalized because her grandparents immigrated from eastern Europe and faced discrimination. I’m also white, and I suspect that Hannah has been making these remarks since she arrived and just took a while to feel comfortable enough to make them in front of other white people.

Her behavior includes dramatically over-pronouncing “foreign” names, greeting employees in exaggerated and mocking versions of their home languages when all of these employees speak flawless English, asking employees if they are afraid of deportation, and more. She complains loudly to whomever will listen on the rare occasions that she gets reprimanded, so we know that she has been asked to stop and that she did this so egregiously to a global client that the client required she be removed from their project. My colleagues and I typically give her a pretty flat and direct “there’s no need to do that, everyone here speaks English” or other applicable response, but that does not seem to be helping and we honestly don’t know if escalating the situation in the moment would help or hurt when people are just trying to get their work done.

Hannah’s manager has ensured that the impact to our BIPOC employees is limited for now by ensuring they are rarely in the same physical space and by checking in with them once every two weeks to catalog any incidents and build a case against her. I think the slow build might be at the insistence of our legal team as Hannah has indicated that she will sue if she is fired. Her manager is also hesitant to discipline her in any real way because she had a very public emotional breakdown and threatened suicide when they discussed the idea of her going on a PIP, let alone if she got fired. I don’t really know where we go from here! I hope my next letter is that Hannah has gotten help and also found employment elsewhere.

2. I was falsely accused of using ChatGPT for my work

I don’t have much of an update, except that the client did pay the invoice without any additional back-and-forth. I have no idea if they ultimately believed me, but the work is live on their website. They must have decided it was good enough to use — whether it was generated by a human or by AI.

For various reasons, I ended up not taking on any new freelance projects after that, but I’m sure this conversation has only become more complex since last year. The technology is becoming more advanced and more unavoidable (I don’t need an AI copilot for my grocery pickup ordering experience, dammit!), and it is also being viewed with even greater skepticism from environmental, academic, and psychosocial perspectives. Like anyone whose profession is experiencing AI pressure, I’m trying to understand what, at a fundamental level, this all means for my chosen livelihood. An adapt-or-die moment, I suppose.

Finally, as you can tell by my initial letter, I love an em-dash, so perhaps that was what the detector was flagging. A word to readers who are under the impression that dashes are a dead AI giveaway: they are also cherished by writers who value varied sentence structure!

3. My boss keeps warning me she’ll get in trouble if I commit fraud (I’m not)

I really valued the insights from the commentariat and the analysis on what could be the cause of the manager’s rather unusual comments! The comments about whether there was a conscious or subconscious intention to create a sense of obligation resonated with me. I experienced the same emotive response in my conversations with the manager as I have had with the high-intensity friends who see friendships as a series of obligations or transactions, which suggested that the same interpersonal pattern might be happening. I don’t think there was any negative intention, probably just a poorly articulated effort to show value for my work and support for me at the organization.

Focusing on practicalities, the comments were useful that prompted me to consider whether there had been issues with fraud (or similar) at the organization before and this was the reason for the hyper-vigilance. This was also suggested by a friend who was in a similar situation. I don’t think that is the situation but also don’t have any insights either way. I am very sure there was no pre-meditated setup for anyone to commit fraud and make me the fall person!

In any case, I did not get resolution on the mystery … I had to delay my start date with the organization for several months and by the time I started, the manager had been reassigned to a different office for an extended period. (For the sleuths, there is nothing unusual about this — they reallocate staff as required depending on seniority and experience, and this is part of that process.) Since I’ve started, the new manager/colleague hasn’t made any unusual comments so I think it may have been a personal characteristic of the previous manager. By the time that manager is back, I will be well-established in my position and if they raise it again, I will be confident to just directly ask, “What the…?!”

4. Are colorful tights okay for work? (#4 at the link)

I decided to buy and wear the lilac tights and white dress combo to work and got a couple compliments that day.

In fact, I decided to lean into dressing (appropriately) nice for my office nearly all the time and wear things like silk blouses and scarves, lots of dresses, bright colored shoes, and now I’ve been seeing more and more people wear pretty, bright clothing! I even complimented a coworker on the way out of the office today and told her I loved her purple dress and matching knee-high socks.

The post updates: Gen X coworker is trying to “grandma” the Zoomers, falsely accused of using ChatGPT, and more appeared first on Ask a Manager.