my coworker smells like mildew, everyone forgot my birthday, and more

It’s four answers to four questions. Here we go…

1. My coworker smells like mildew and our managers won’t say anything

We have a first shift and a second shift and rotate placements each week. I am on second shift, and my issue is with Ryan on first shift. Ryan is very nice, is a friend of my friend who got me the job, and seems to have pretty normal interests for a young man, but he absolutely reeks of mildew. So bad that every single one of our chairs permanently smells like mildew, as well as our floor mats, and whatever work area he is assigned to that week. I have worked here for just over a year and this issue started about six months ago. I realized how bad it was when I went home and my clothes still smelled like mildew.

I asked my manager, Michael, and his senior manager, Jan, to say something, as Michael cannot handle anything on his own and always needs Jan in the loop (a whole other letter). They said they they went by but couldn’t smell anything, and thus wouldn’t say anything. I spoke to another coworker, Jim, who could also smell Ryan and said this has happened before. There was a serious Environmental, Health, and Safety (EHS) issue in a work area a few years ago, and both Michael and Jan claimed they couldn’t smell anything, even though Jim and others said it was one of the worst smells they had ever encountered in their lives.

Michael’s solution was to first order a custodial cleaning (where they didn’t clean the chairs), order a second custodial cleaning (where they again didn’t clean the chairs), order an EHS analysis (where they only tested the air, not surfaces, and not where Ryan had been assigned that week), and finally they asked me for some recommendations for mildew-specific cleaners. However, if the mildew coming from Ryan is not resolved, it is still going to be deposited, for lack of a better word, on the chairs and work areas when Ryan is rotated each week.

I have taken to bringing my own air freshener every day, cleaning every surface before I start working, and covering the chair I am using with a trash bag. I don’t feel I can go to HR because of how cruel they were when handling my denied disability accommodation recently.

If I want this to change, I need to do something about it myself. How do I talk to Ryan about this without hurting his feelings? I don’t want him to feel awkward or attacked, but I also need it to stop. The room smelled so bad today that I physically had to take a few steps back after opening the door.

Mildew smells are often a laundry issue, where the person isn’t fully drying their clothes — and once a mildew smell gets into something, it can take some work to get it out. The good news, though, is that this can be less awkward to raise than if it were body odor, which can feel a lot more personal. So could you approach it from a laundry angle? For example: “I don’t know if anyone has mentioned this to you, but your clothes have had a strong mildew smell lately — there might be an issue with your washer or dryer. Would you mind checking? It’s one of those smells that you can go nose-blind to when it’s on your own clothes.”

He might be mortified, but it’s still a kindness to tell him. (And if it is mildew and not a medical issue, he should actually be able to fix it.)

Related:
my coworker told me I smell

2. Everyone forgot my birthday — but I celebrate theirs

I work on a multi-country team of about 18 people, and in my local office there are seven of us. Many colleagues have recently been on leave or traveling for work. I’m one of the longest-tenured members, and I’ve played a big role in maintaining and rebuilding our team culture, especially after a major layoff two years ago. I’ve onboarded many new teammates, preserved a lot of historical context, and naturally fell into being the “culture champion.” I genuinely enjoy celebrating others’ milestones and birthdays, and I’ve always tried to create a warm, connected environment despite all the turnover. This isn’t an official part of my job, but it’s something I take pride in.

Recently, it was my own birthday. I knew many people were out, but almost everyone forgot. The few who remembered were colleagues working in other countries. My own manager didn’t remember. In our office, it’s customary for managers to get a birthday cake for their team members. When someone else wished me a happy birthday in front of him, he simply looked surprised and said, “Oh it’s your birthday? Happy birthday.” But there was no Slack message, no acknowledgement later, and no cake. It seems small, but it stung more than I expected.

Part of this is because our relationship has been complicated. My original manager retired, and the company never hired a replacement, so my current manager inherited me by default. Since then, I’ve felt like I lost an advocate and gained someone who is distant, cold, and often seems too busy or important to engage with me. I know he’s stretched thin, but I often feel overlooked or dismissed.

So when even the simple, customary gesture of acknowledging my birthday didn’t happen, it felt like confirmation that he doesn’t value or even particularly like me. I’m not planning to bring it up or ask for anything. I’m aware it sounds childish to be upset about a cake. But emotionally, it really bothered me. I keep replaying the moment and feeling embarrassed for caring, yet I can’t quite shake the hurt.

Am I overreacting? I feel so silly and pathetic about it. How do I make sense of this, and how do I stop internalizing every small slight as proof that my manager dislikes me?

You’re not being silly or pathetic; birthdays mean something to you and you’ve made a point of celebrating them for others; it’s understandable to feel hurt that no one did the same for you. But I wouldn’t take this as confirmation at all that your manager doesn’t value or like you. I would take it as a sign that he doesn’t think much about birthdays, period, or doesn’t assign the same value to celebrating them at work that you do. Not everyone does!

It sounds like there are other, bigger problems in the relationship with your manager, and so it’s not surprising that you’re seeing this through that lens — but those other problems are the real place to focus.

For what it’s worth, this is one of the problems with doing birthday stuff (and similar) informally, with one person just taking it on because they like to and/or are willing to. Not only is it biting you now because there’s no formal system to handle it, but it also risks biting others in the future — for example, you could be unexpectedly out for a few weeks and someone’s birthday falls during that time and it gets overlooked, and they’re left wondering why everyone but them gets birthday recognition. If you’re going to do birthday stuff, you’ve really got to formalize a system for it (with buy-in from your management) or otherwise people feeling slighted at some point is almost guaranteed.

Related:
birthday cards are causing mayhem in our office

3. My coworker is incompetent and doesn’t do her job

I have a coworker who I have, frankly, disliked from the beginning. She comes off as rude, self-centered, and naive to a fault. For example, in her first week on the job (we are primarily remote, and have a lukewarm company culture that is mostly just focused on getting your work done on time), she blasted news of her engagement to every message channel she was in and openly just stared at her ring during meetings rather than listening.

We are in the same role on different teams, so I don’t have to work with her all the time, but I was assigned to help a project on her team and now I have seen firsthand that she simply does not do the work the rest of us with this title do. She tells her manager that working on more than one thing at a time is too overwhelming and therefore she just does not, leading work allocated to her to be reassigned to the rest of us. I am just as agitated with her manager for going along with this. She finally picked up one of her jobs that was reallocated to me, said it would be a great “change of pace” for her because she hasn’t done her core job duty in so long, and then privately messaged asking for help because she did not have “the brainpower.”

Due to our remote culture, new hires are placed with a social group to get acclimated, and I was speaking with my group about my frustration when I learned one of group mates worked with her at a prior company, and she behaved exactly the same way and was still allowed to reject regular job duties. This is driving me up the wall as a person who cares deeply about the work we do, and I’m insulted that she is collecting the same paycheck as I am while doing a fraction of the work. How can I manage my feelings about this without lashing out and being unprofessional?

You should be more annoyed with her manager! The manager is that one who’s responsible for seeing this and doing something about it and apparently just sucks at a core function of their job. I mean, your coworker does too — but the manager is a big problem.

You can’t really do anything about it; it’s not your job to manage the situation. But you can decline to take on her work for her, you can tell her that you don’t have time to help when she tells you she doesn’t have “the brainpower” for her own job, and you can encourage her coworkers on that team to do the same. Beyond that, be grateful you don’t work on that team; it’s got to be even more frustrating for them.

4. Can I ask for skip-level meetings with my boss’s boss?

I am a lower middle manager in a small organization, with a few levels above me. My immediate supervisor and I get along well enough but I don’t think they are really well suited for the job and their leadership often leaves something to be desired. My grandboss, though, is someone who I think really has it together and is someone who I think I could learn from as I grow in this organization. I’d love to have a skip-level meeting, not often but maybe once every two months or so, to be able to fill them in on things I suspect they aren’t hearing about in my department, to pick their brain about operations, and generally establish a rapport.

Is this something I could request, or do these types of meetings have to originate with the higher level manager if they want to do them? If I can ask, is there a way to do that tactfully without it seeming like I am trying to go around my immediate manager or cut them out?

The best thing to do is to find a way to ask for one once, ideally by contriving a plausible reason for it, like a tricky project that they have particular insight into and which you want their advice on. Then, at the end of it, say something like, “I found this incredibly helpful. Could we meet periodically so I could pick your brain on things like X and Y and get your advice as I progress in my career? Even just meeting a couple of times a year would be so helpful.”

Related:
how can I make skip-level meetings more useful?

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