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The Wedding-Slash-Corporate Off-site
A colleague is getting married next year and invited everyone on our small team to the festivities. We talk about the wedding every week during our team check-in, and it is joked about by team leadership as an informal team off-site. Everyone has RSVP’d except for me. While I’d love to go if it was happening in my own city, attending the wedding will require a cross-country flight, a hotel, dog boarding and the opportunity cost of missing a long weekend at home. My partner, who has never met my team, isn’t interested in attending. I really do like this colleague, but I prefer to spend vacation time and money away from work. I don’t think the bride will be too disappointed if I can’t make it, but attending feels like the expectation, and I’m worried that missing it will affect my standing within the team. How can I regretfully decline without becoming a pariah at work?
— Anonymous
I do believe that you would, under other circumstances, attend this wedding, but I don’t think you need to reach for “the opportunity cost of missing a long weekend at home” to justify not wanting to go. Objectively, even if you “really do” like your co-worker, everything about this is annoying, before you even get to its full imputed cost: the fact that you have to travel across the country for it, the fact that it’s (apparently) on a long weekend, the fact that your work team’s personal-professional boundaries are messy enough that you are worried you will lose standing if you miss a holiday-weekend wedding on the other side of the country.
I say this, by the way, as someone who loves going to — even traveling for! — weddings, including awkward ones in strange places. But that your managers are joking about this wedding as an “informal team off-site” suggests to me that this wedding is a lot less likely to be fun and relaxing and a lot more likely to be a social-professional minefield. You are allowed to not want to go regardless of your colleagues’ social pressure.
Here is my guess: Given that your team is apparently talking about this wedding all the time, presumably without your enthusiastic participation, they are probably already aware that you’re not going, and, so long as they’re not needling you about it, are not too fussed. I am also sure you’re right that the bride won’t be too disappointed if you can’t make it; I imagine she has her own mixed feelings about her bosses describing her wedding as a team off-site, and would be all too happy to offer up your seat to a great-aunt or second cousin.
In other words, I highly doubt that missing this wedding will really affect your standing within the team, unless something happens at the wedding that binds your co-workers closer together, like a murder they all have to cover up. But that doesn’t solve your basic problem: Saying, “I actually would rather sit around at home that weekend,” would break what appear to be, in your office, crucial social norms like pretending you all much closer than you actually are.
You could, perhaps, schedule something un-missable on the same weekend: Maybe there’s some kind of state certification or licensing test the same weekend as the wedding that you can sign up for. Haven’t you always wanted to be a barber, or a real estate agent, or a bail bondsman, or, let’s see, a durable child product manufacturer?
But unless you truly want to be a state-licensed pet cemetery owner, this is one of the many social and professional situations that call for a polite, relatively believable lie. Unfortunately your options are limited. You can’t fake a surgery or a death in the family to people you see every day, and you can’t plan food poisoning nine months out. You could, of course, offload all blame on to your partner, who has never met the team — but this too requires some delicacy, as you don’t want your co-workers believing you are struggling through a relationship with a control freak or a wet blanket. Perhaps your partner has a family reunion you simply must go to? Or one of their family members — maybe a first cousin, not so close that anyone at work would have heard of them before — is getting married that same weekend, right here in town, and, wouldn’t you know, they have a no-phones policy so you won’t be Instagramming from it?
In truth, the best kind of polite lie is a vague one. You don’t want to spend the next year trying to remember the exact illness you attributed to your grandparent, or the parameters of the event you made up as a double booking. I would simply go for: “I’m so sorry we can’t come, we just couldn’t make it work. Send a lot of photos!” Most people will accept this for the relationship-maintaining fib that it is and let it stand; anyone who pries is being rude and can be fended off with a simple “[partner] is so busy and money’s been tight lately. I’m so sad! Send tons of pics!” Any further inquiries should be met with a robotic “I can’t wait to see the photos!” until they give up.
Hungry Chefs
My son is a line cook in Brooklyn. He recently moved from one restaurant to another. Both restaurants serve dinner only. He works from 1 p.m. until anywhere from 10 p.m. to 11 p.m. (depending on how busy, etc.). In his former restaurant at about 4 every day, there was a “family meal” where all of the employees got together and ate before the start of service. His new restaurant does not do this. There is no family meal, and there is no time set aside for him and the other cooks to eat. He hasn’t asked anyone about this as he assumes that this is the culture. He and the other cooks “snack” on the food they are preparing, but that makes him uneasy, and it doesn’t take the place of a meal. I’ve suggested he talk with the manager, as I can’t believe that he has to work a nine hour shift without a dedicated food break. He doesn’t want to ask as he’s concerned if he brings it up they will think he’s just a troublemaker and fire him.
— Anonymous
First things first: Your son’s employer appears to be in plain violation of the New York state labor law that requires that all employers provide workers with 30-minute meal breaks on shifts over six hours.
Is it possible that some restaurants have a workplace “culture” that bucks this law in favor of intermittent snacking? I asked chef Jordan Frosolone, who recently opened the Manhattan restaurant Borgo, and he told me he found the whole situation “confounding.” Over his many years at restaurants, he has worked at places where family meal is “the last thing the cooks are thinking about” and places where cooks “come in the morning, like, What is our plan for family meal? Who’s doing what?” But he has never worked at a restaurant that didn’t have a meal break at all. “Family meal is one of the best parts of the day,” he said. “It brings everyone together. This is your opportunity to show your colleagues what you’re capable of doing. I think it brings a huge morale boost to the teams.”
It’s unfortunate, because workplace camaraderie sounds exactly like what your son could use. It’s not good to pass a nine-plus-hour shift without a meal, especially not in a high-stress workplace where you’re surrounded by sharp knives, open flames, boiling liquids, etc. But perhaps even more concerning long-term than your son’s daily blood sugar levels is his unwillingness to ask anyone in the restaurant what is going on.
Where I would differ from the advice you’re giving your son is in who I think he should talk to — at least at the start. Rather than marching directly to the manager, he should be asking the other line cooks and maybe also the dishwashers, bus boys and anyone in the front of house who seems tolerant of his presence. It’s not so much that I think his manager would be affronted by the question, but more so that I think you always learn more about your workplace from co-workers at the same level than you will from a supervisor. They know the real rules, the kind-of real rules, the fake rules, the bendable rules, the unwritten rules and aren’t constrained by human resources, employment law or propriety. Maybe more to the point, cultivating a strong relationship with his fellow workers would be the first step to your son effecting change in the “culture” that’s currently leaving him in a caloric deficit.
Maybe there is a family meal that they’ve somehow forgotten to invite him to. Maybe they’ve been agitating for one and would welcome his help. Maybe they can help him strategize a conversation with the manager, or maybe they can all agree to file complaints together. (Part 8, item 37a on this form.) Whatever it is, there’s a whole world between “assuming that’s the culture” and immediate recourse to uncomfortable conversations with management.
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