My manager introduced a “quiet hour” where nobody is allowed to speak, then scheduled meetings during it
Our office started doing a daily quiet hour from 2 to 3 because management said casual conversations were hurting productivity. No talking, no asking coworkers questions, no chit chat.
My manager has scheduled a meeting during quiet hour three days in a row. On Friday he spent almost the entire hour explaining why we need to respect quiet hour.
A coworker finally asked if meetings count as talking and he said meetings are productive communication, so they dont count. Apparently two employees discussing an actual task is distracting, but twelve people listening to him read a spreadsheet is fine.
Jobadvisor
That's a genuinely funny irony to sit with — the guy running a "no talking during quiet hour" policy has personally been the loudest voice in the room every day it's existed, including a full hour spent defending it.
The "meetings are productive communication, chit chat isn't" line is doing a lot of work. It's not really a coherent policy distinction — it's just a way of saying "communication I control is fine, communication I don't is a problem." Which suggests the actual goal was never "reduce noise," it was "reduce communication I'm not part of."
Worth noticing too: two employees quietly working through a task is often more productive than a scheduled meeting, not less. Task-focused conversation between coworkers is usually exactly the kind of thing that gets things done efficiently. If that's the thing getting silenced while status-update monologues get a protected hour, the policy is optimizing for something other than what it claims.
A few honest options depending on what you want out of this:
- Say nothing, adapt. Use quiet hour for heads-down work when there's no meeting, accept the irony as an office joke. Lowest effort, changes nothing.
- Ask the obvious question, sincerely. Something like "should we avoid scheduling meetings during quiet hour then, since it's meant to protect focus time?" Framed as helpful rather than confrontational, it puts the inconsistency on the table without accusing him of anything.
- Raise it with data. If quiet hour is genuinely hurting collaboration (people can't ask quick questions, work stalls, then it gets "fixed" with a meeting instead), that's a concrete cost you could point to — not as a complaint about him personally, but as "here's what's actually happening under this policy."
What's your read on why he's doing this — genuine belief the meetings are different, or more that he just didn't think it through?
That's it. My manager won. I bail.
I've worked at Mt new job for a year and a half, and I've always hated working with my boss. He is amazing at *his* job, but he sacks at management.
He didn't hire me, his manager did. And he didnt hide the fact that, had he had his word to say, he wouldn't have hired me at my current position, but one rank lower.
For the record : my position had been vacant for more than a year before I filled it, mostly because the wage was below market. They offered more at each new offer. I took my chance when it reached a reasonable amount for my experience
I admit I'm still young, but older people refused that job for more than a year. Plus, when it was reoffered (French public service, your job is reoffered to the public every year, and you have ti re-apply), only 1 other guy send his resume, and he had never worked in that specific field, while I've had for several years.
Yet, my manager always complain that I'm too inexperienced, and tried to convince his manager to take the other guy. His manager refused, because I'm actually doing my job, even if it may take me longer than he wants (I'm alone in a 3 people service) and I stayed for a year, while some other people left after 4 days.
So, my manager has tried new strategies.
He took away my bonus last year.
He gives me work that isn't in my domain or even in my line of work.
He gives me stupid task that don't go anywhere.
He deliberately makes my stress go high by letting me know he has something bad to say about my work, and then telling me "we will discuss it tonight" or "tomorrow" and leaving me to wonder what the hell this is about.
What does he have to say about my work ?
I apparently consult with him too much. I started doing so after I sent (meaningless) emails that he wanted to review first. He never correct the informations I write, just my writing style, and then sent the emails himself. I've always been suspicious that he is just trying to take credits for my work (he admitted that I'm a better writer than him).
So I asked what I should consult him about, and what I could do without his first approval.
"You should know that. I would know if you had more experience".
I've just come back from vacation. He wants to talk to me about some task I "left out" before leaving. I left instructions and direction s before leaving, but I didnt find any trace of him following through, and now he apparently wants to scold me for it.
I'm done. He won.
Tomorrow, if he wants to put the blame on me for the task he didnt follow through, I'll ask for it in writing (because I left the instructions in writing).
And I've started to send my resume an hour after he scheduled my scolding time.
Have fun managing alone !
Jobadvisor
Good. You've read the pattern correctly, and it is a pattern: took your bonus, gives you tasks outside your role, sets you up to fail with "pointless" work, then dangles a vague accusation overnight so you stew in it before he even says what it is. That last one especially — "we'll discuss it tonight," then radio silence until the confrontation — is a known way to keep someone off-balance. It's not you being too sensitive. It's a deliberate use of uncertainty as pressure.
And the "you should know that, I'd know if you had more experience" answer to a completely reasonable question — "what needs your approval and what doesn't" — tells you everything. There was never going to be a real answer, because a real answer would give you solid ground to stand on, and solid ground isn't what he wants you to have.
For tomorrow, your instinct is right: get it in writing. A few things that might help going in:
- Don't over-explain or get defensive in the moment. Something like "I left written instructions on [date] before I left — can you point me to what specifically wasn't followed through, so I can address it?" puts the burden of specifics on him.
- If he stays vague ("you should have known," "it's obvious"), ask directly: "What would you like me to have done differently, specifically?" Vague criticism that can't survive being made specific usually collapses on its own.
- After the meeting, send a short recap email to yourself or, if you trust it won't backfire, to him — "Per our conversation, you raised concern about X, I noted I'd left instructions dated Y." Paper trail, calmly, no accusation in the tone.
- You don't owe him emotional reassurance or a defense of your competence. You've already been evaluated — by his own manager, who rejected his attempt to replace you, and by the fact that you outlasted people who left in four days.
On the resume-sending: smart timing isn't spite, it's clarity. You're not doing anything rash — you're a year and a half in, you know exactly why you're leaving, and you're leaving on your terms instead of waiting for him to manufacture a reason to push you out.
One practical thing worth thinking about for interviews: you'll likely get asked why you're leaving. "Management style wasn't a good fit" is true, professional, and doesn't require you to relitigate the bonus or the credit-taking. Save the details for people who've earned them.
How are you feeling about the job search itself — do you have a sense of what you're looking for next, or is that still forming?
Have no friends at work and it’s making me depressed.
I work in an office and I’ve been here for about a year. Despite that, I genuinely haven’t connected with anyone.
I have social anxiety and ADHD, and lately I’ve started wondering if being neurodivergent is a big part of why this keeps happening.
When I first started, I really tried. I smiled, made small talk, asked people questions, tried to be upbeat and approachable. But it always felt one-sided. Nobody really initiated conversations with me or seemed interested in getting to know me. After months of putting myself out there and getting almost nothing back, I just decided to give up. It was exhausting to constantly mask and be “on” all day.
Now I feel like I’ve become the office pariah. Nobody says hello to me. Nobody starts conversations. I know I’m part of the problem because once I stopped trying, that was the nail in the coffin. I know socializing is a two-way street, but it felt like I was doing all the work and eventually I just didn’t have anything left.
At this point I avoid every office happy hour or social event because I know I’ll just be standing there awkwardly by myself, trying to look busy while everyone else chats in groups. That’s what I usually do anyway. The thought of it makes me want to disappear.
I hate working in an office. I hate that social interaction feels so difficult for me. I wish I could just be one of those people who naturally clicks with others without having to think about every little interaction.
Jobadvisor
A year of putting in effort and getting almost nothing back would wear anyone down — that's not a character flaw, that's just what happens when the cost of a thing keeps outpacing the payoff. It makes sense that you stopped. Masking all day while also trying to build connection is two exhausting jobs at once, and it sounds like you were doing them alone.
I want to gently push back on one thing though: "I've become the office pariah" and "nobody says hello to me" — is that actually what's happening, or is that how it feels from inside the withdrawal? Because those are different things, and the gap between them matters a lot for what you do next. Offices are usually full of people who are similarly not-going-to-initiate, not because they've collectively decided to freeze you out, but because most people don't initiate with anyone, ever. It's genuinely common to mistake a room full of non-initiators for a room that has rejected you specifically.
A few things worth separating out:
Social anxiety and ADHD make initiation exhausting, not impossible. The skill isn't broken, the fuel tank is smaller. That's a real, practical constraint — it means you probably can't sustain "smile at everyone, ask everyone questions, be upbeat all day" as a strategy, because that's high-output for you in a way it isn't for other people. That doesn't mean connection is closed to you. It means the approach might need to change, not the goal.
Depth over breadth might work better than what you tried. Trying to charm a whole office at once is a lot of surface area to maintain. One person, in one recurring low-stakes context — the same lunch spot, the same coffee run, the same person you sit near — is a much smaller ask on your energy, and repetition does more relational work than intensity does. You don't need the room. You need one person.
The happy hour thing — standing alone, trying to look busy — that image you're describing sounds genuinely painful, not just inconvenient. You don't have to keep doing that to yourself. Skipping the ones that are pure standing-around-mingling and going to the ones with any kind of structure or shared task (if any exist) is a reasonable accommodation, not giving up.
I'd also gently flag: it sounds like this has tipped from "work is lonely" into something heavier — "makes me want to disappear," hating yourself for how you're wired. That's worth taking seriously, not just as an office problem but as how you're doing generally. Is the low feeling mostly contained to work, or has it been bleeding into the rest of your life too?
First Day on a new job, i hate travelling
I travelled 3 hours total to go to my new job today, that is after switching from a vehicle to the subway and again vehicle to reach the office. Repeating the process at night as well after 9 hours. I'm 23, just because i can doesn't mean i have to, companies build offices far off so they're cheaper, and my wallet and mental sanity pay for it. Not to mention my time which i don't have enough to do anything during the week. Anyone who has a remote job. help?
Jobadvisor
Six hours a day round trip on top of a 9-hour workday is brutal — that's basically a second part-time job's worth of time, unpaid, and it makes total sense that you're running on fumes after day one. You're not being dramatic about it.
You're also right that it's not really about willpower — it's an actual structural cost. Companies externalize that cost onto employees by building where rent is cheap, and the employee eats the time and money. Naming that clearly isn't complaining, it's accurate.
A few angles, since "anyone with a remote job help" could mean different things:
If you're looking to negotiate remote/hybrid at this new job: it's usually easier to ask after you've proven yourself for a few weeks/months than to ask on day one. Frame it around output, not commute pain — "I can be just as productive working from home on X days" lands better than "the commute is killing me," even if both are true.
If you're job hunting for something remote outright: worth being specific about what you want — fully remote, or just no soul-crushing commute (could include hybrid, or a job closer to home). Fully remote roles are more competitive right now, so casting a slightly wider net (remote OR short-commute) usually moves faster than remote-only.
If you're stuck with this commute for now and need to survive it: the biggest lever is usually reclaiming the transit time itself — audiobooks, podcasts, sleep, or just protecting it as decompression time instead of trying to "make it productive," which often just adds more pressure. Not a fix, but it changes how it sits in your week.
Which situation are you actually in — is this job non-negotiable for now and you're looking to cope, or are you already thinking about getting out and want to search smart?
Is it stupid to consider dropping uni 3 weeks in for a support work opportunity with more freedom?
19M, first year Bachelor of Commerce thinking about doing finance, and I keep going back and forth on whether I should stick with it or pivot towards NDIS support work instead.
Is a standard 9 to 5 really as bad as I'm picturing it, or am I creating a fake vision based on not having tried it yet? I've never worked an office style job, so I don't actually know if I'd hate it or if it's just anxiety talking.
On the other side, there's a real opportunity for NDIS support work about 2 hours from where I study. Both my family and my girlfriend's family live there. My girlfriend already does this work there and says it's been easier to find clients than in the city and she earns about 70k while only working 2-3 days a week. flexibility is real.
Part of me feels like I'd be silly to walk away from a degree three weeks in, and part of me feels like this is a genuine opportunity sitting right there. Would love outside perspective, especially from anyone who's worked a normal 9 to 5 and can tell me honestly whether it's as soul crushing as it sounds, or from anyone who's made a similar move towards support work.
also would need to get a cert 3 so 6 month course. thinking of doing that in the city and then maybe while studying looking for work in the regional 2 hour away area? logically i guess that sounds the best but if it does end up working then thats a pretty big commitment? not sure
Jobadvisor
Not stupid — three weeks in, you've barely paid any real cost yet (financially or in sunk time), so this is actually one of the cheapest points in a degree to seriously reconsider it. The "silly to walk away three weeks in" feeling is sunk-cost thinking dressed up as prudence. Three weeks isn't a commitment you're breaking, it's barely a commitment made.
But I'd separate two different questions you're currently blending into one decision:
1. "Is 9-to-5 office work as soul-crushing as I imagine?" Honestly — nobody here can answer that for you, because it's genuinely variable. Some people find office work fine or even good (structure, colleagues, clear off-hours); some find it slowly suffocating. You said it yourself: you don't know if it's the job or the anxiety, because you haven't tried either. That's real uncertainty, not something a stranger's anecdote resolves. What it does tell you is that dropping out specifically to avoid a hypothetical you haven't tested is risky — you could pivot to support work and discover the dissatisfaction wasn't about office jobs at all.
2. "Is NDIS support work a genuinely good opportunity for me specifically?" This one has much more concrete evidence in front of you. Your girlfriend is living the exact version of this — same region, same field, $70k for 2–3 days a week, client demand real. That's not a hypothetical, that's a data point sitting right next to you. It's reasonable to weight it heavily.
A few things worth being honest with yourself about before deciding:
- Support work and office work are different kinds of hard, not just different amounts of hard. NDIS work can be emotionally and physically demanding in ways spreadsheets never are — client behaviors, personal care, irregular hours, burnout risk. The flexibility and pay are real, but "easier" isn't guaranteed. Worth talking to your girlfriend honestly about the hard days, not just the schedule and income.
- Your own plan — cert 3 in the city, then look for work in the regional area — is actually a decent hedge. It doesn't require dropping out and burning the semester if you time it right (check whether you can get a partial refund or defer rather than fully withdraw, especially this early). It doesn't lock you into support work either, since a cert 3 is a much smaller sunk cost than a degree if you end up disliking it too.
- The proximity to both families and your girlfriend is doing a lot of emotional lifting in this decision — which is a legitimate thing to weight, not something to be embarrassed about, but worth naming explicitly to yourself so you're deciding with clear eyes rather than having it quietly tip the scales.
Given all that — does your uni offer a leave of absence or deferral rather than a full withdrawal? That would let you try the cert 3 and even some support work without permanently closing the commerce door, which seems like the least regret-prone version of this move.
30yo, never had a job, no skills, no interest in working. Advice?
30yo, never had a job, no skills, no interest in working. Advice?
Well, technically I have a part-time job once, but it isn’t a “real job”. It’s just 5 hours a day online. I make less than $21k a year.
30f. I’m diagnosed with social anxiety disorder, school phobia, and generalized anxiety disorder since fifth grade. I was a homeschooler from age 10 to age 16, then I got my GED. Went to elementary public school but homeschooled during middle and high school. I didn’t have a high school counselor or one of those help-choose-a=career electiver classes. So, once I finished high school I had no clue what to do.
I wanted to do part-time jobs as a teen--- like working at Dunkin, the local supermarket, etc—but my parents disagreed. They thought they weren’t good jobs. Too stressful, too many Karens, too much physical labor, (I have chronic pain and physical disabilities), etc. So, I stayed at home as a NEET for several years.
My parents were helicopter parents due to my mental illness and physical disabilities. It ended up backfiring once I was in my early 20s and had no goals. I used to overhear them say I was “like a child” and “had the brain of a 12 year old”, but no doctor ever diagnosed me as that. I’m perfectly normal. Just uninspired. If I’m childish, it’s because of lack of life skills, not a developmental disorder,
I just turned 30 a few weeks ago. I have no clue what to do in life. No goals in life, no want for a career, nothing to put on a resume.
When I think about my future… honestly, I don’t wanna “do” anything. I like playing video games, listening to music, reading comics, swatching tv, watching Youtube, reading fanfics, etc. Those are my hobbies and my interests. But they don’t make money, now do they?
I know people can and do make lives as Youtubers and streamers. But aren’t they, you know… good at games? I play video games but I’m no speedrunner. I guess I could start a fandom Youtube chanmel, but I worry AI slop is killing the ability to make those nowadays. Plus, is that even a a long-term goal? Are you gonna get Social Secrurity and retirement money from your Youtube channel decades down the line? Don’t views eventually peter down eventually?
My main subjects in school were writing, social studies/history, and animal science. Not astronomy or chemistry, though. I don’t know literally anything about chemicals. Never did experiments, learned the Table of Elements, etc.
I’ve thought about joining community college, but my math skills are piss poor. Like, I don’t even know how to multiply or divide. I forgot most of what I learned prior to, like, 3rd grade when it comes to math. Can’t even remember how to find the mean, median, and mode. I literally winged the math portion of my GED. I didn’t know anything on it and just chose what seemed plausible. After taking it 3 times, I finally got a passing grade/ n
I currently live at home with my 65+ year old mom. My dad died a few years ago. Me and my mom make due on assistance & her social security + my job.
Jobadvisor
There's a lot in here, and I want to start by naming something: you're not describing laziness or lack of ambition, you're describing what happens when someone spends their entire adolescence being told, implicitly and explicitly, that the world is too much for them to handle. Blocked from part-time jobs "for your own good," diagnosed with real anxiety conditions since fifth grade, homeschooled through the exact years most people learn how to function outside a family system, then called childish for the predictable result of all that. That's not a character flaw. That's what happens to a lot of people who grow up like this. The math thing especially — you didn't fail to learn multiplication, nobody built you a path to learn it and then acted surprised you don't know it.
So the starting point isn't "why don't I want anything," it's "I was never given the ordinary chances to find out what I want, at the ages when most people get to find that out cheaply and with less at stake." That's recoverable. It's just going to be a slower, more deliberate process at 30 than it would've been at 16, and that's okay.
A few honest reframes before anything practical:
"No interest in working" might partly be "every version of working I've been shown feels unsafe." You wanted Dunkin and the supermarket as a teen and were told no. Those instincts were fine — entry-level, structured, low-stakes jobs are exactly how most people build a work identity. You never got to test whether you'd hate it or handle it. That's still an open question, not a settled one.
Your hobbies aren't the problem — expecting them to become a career is what's setting you up to feel stuck. Most people's hobbies don't pay the bills, and that's normal, not a personal failure. You don't need reading fanfic to become monetizable. You need a job, separate from your interests, and your interests can just stay yours.
Math phobia isn't a life sentence. "I don't know how to multiply" at 30 is a very fixable gap — it's not a sign of low intelligence, it's a sign of a gap nobody filled. Khan Academy, free, starts at whatever level you're actually at, no judgment, no class to sit in. This matters because it quietly unlocks community college as an option later, if you ever want it — but it's not urgent, and it's not a prerequisite for getting a job.
On the practical side, I'd gently push back on jumping straight to "career" or "goals for decades from now." That's a lot of pressure for someone who hasn't had a normal first job yet. A more survivable sequence:
- Keep the $21k online job as your floor while you experiment, rather than treating it as either your ceiling or something to abandon.
- Consider one small, structured, low-stakes real-world job — even part-time, even something like retail restocking overnight, a library page, pet-sitting/dog-walking, anything with clear tasks and low social demands — not as a career move, just as data. You genuinely don't know yet if you'd hate working outside the house or if that was your parents' fear, not yours.
- If anxiety is the main barrier to that, that's worth treating as its own project, ideally with a therapist who works specifically with agoraphobia/school-phobia-type anxiety, since that's a fairly specific and treatable pattern, not a general "get over it" problem.
You're not behind in some cosmic sense — you're at the start of a phase most people go through a decade earlier, with less life experience protecting them from doing it badly. You have more self-awareness right now, in this post, than most 18-year-olds starting out. That counts for something.
Is the anxiety itself the main thing stopping you from trying a small step like this, or is it more that you genuinely can't picture wanting any of it?