Coworker Passed Out in My Bed and Four More Questions

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

1. Coworker Passed Out in My Bed

I am an attorney in an office with a few other attorneys, paralegals, and an office manager (who manages the admin function of the office, not the attorneys). I am an associate, so pretty low on the hierarchy.

The office manager called me at 10:30 am on a weekend and said that she had been to a party the night before and was feeling sick and needed to stop at my house. She has never been here, and I didn’t even know that she knew where I lived.

I am sort of a hoarder, so my house is embarrassing and messy, but I couldn’t tell her no, since she was sick. I warned her that my house is gross. She came in, puked in my (filthy) bathroom, and went to sleep in my bed (thankfully, I just changed the sheets a couple of days ago). She slept for six hours, then got up and left. Is there anything I could have done differently?

This isn’t the sort of thing anyone would expect to happen, so it makes sense that you weren’t prepared in the moment.

In theory, if you weren’t comfortable with her coming over, you could have told her no — saying you weren’t home currently would have been the easiest way to do it. After all, if you actually weren’t home, or didn’t live nearby, or she didn’t know where you lived, she presumably would have found some other solution. But in the moment, with someone sick asking for help, it’s easy to understand why you just said yes — and arguably it may have been the right impulse.

To whatever extent you’re worried about her judging you for the mess, try to tell yourself it’s canceled out by the bad judgment she showed (if in fact she was driving and if “sick” meant “drunk” — although in fairness, it’s possible one or both of those weren’t the case) and that either way, she was likely very grateful to you for giving her refuge when she needed it.

2. Can I Tell My Awful Boss and the Board That I’m Quitting Because of Her?

I work for an incredibly small organization (there are only two employees, me and my boss) in an incredibly competitive field. The problem is my boss, the only other employee, is incredibly toxic. She calls herself a direct communicator but she’s really just mean, rude, and harassing. She constantly snaps at me and accuses me of withholding information, which puts me in the awkward position of having to forward her emails I had previously sent with the information I’m being accused of withholding. After starting, someone at a partner org told me that I have the sympathy of the entire field’s community for having to work for this person. She is well-known in the field and, even though her reputation precedes her, she is still well connected.

She fired the last person who had my job who tried to go to the governing board in search of better working conditions. The board has no say in my hiring or firing and we don’t have HR. If she decides to, she can fire me tomorrow.

We have never had a one-on-one or check-in. The entire time I’ve been here, I have had to figure things out myself and then be berated for not knowing what she’s thinking. We share a small office and I don’t have a separate space. She constantly speaks badly about other people in the field, and that makes me really uncomfortable. She has also made disparaging comments about the food I eat (I’m not white and she is) and the clothes that I wear (even though it’s within dress code, according to the handbook).

I know the solution is I need to leave. Leaving means finding a job outside my current field because of how competitive it is. While I don’t want to do that because I have over a decade of experience in my field and a postgraduate degree in it, I have accepted that this is what I need to do. When I leave, is there a way to tell my boss and especially the governing board that the harassment and toxicity are why I’m leaving, but keep the door open with other organizations so I can come back in the future? I don’t care about burning bridges with her, but I don’t want it to get in the way of working in the field ever again.

Based on your contact telling you that you have the entire field’s sympathy for having to work with your boss, and your note that her reputation is well-known, I don’t think you need to worry that honesty when you quit will stand in the way of being hired in your field again. It sounds like everyone knows what she’s like.

That said, think about what you’d want to gain from telling the board while you’re leaving. If you genuinely believe you’d be giving them new information that they might actually act on, that could be a reason to do it. But if you think they already know — and it sounds like at least one other employee has tried to tell them — and they’re unlikely to act, it’s probably not worth bothering. They know, they don’t care, and you don’t owe it to an organization that’s treated you this way to try to help them improve as you’re leaving, particularly if there’s any risk to yourself (although I continue to think there probably isn’t).

3. Coworker Is Doing Far Less Work Than She’s Supposed To

I work as a therapist within a fairly specialized program. In private practice, a full-time therapist might reasonably be expected to see 20–25 clients per week. The clients we work with, however, tend to present with significant complexity and acuity, and the work requires a great deal of emotional energy, flexibility, crisis management, and coordination with other systems. Because of that, a more realistic full-time caseload is probably around 15–20 clients per week, with 20 being on the high end and not really sustainable for a long time.

For many therapists on my team, that means doing approximately 6–10 hours of counseling a week and supplementing the rest of their time with other responsibilities such as consultation, program development, training, assessment, or community outreach, while still maintaining a full-time position.

I have a colleague, however, whose position is intended to be almost entirely clinical and whose role was designed with the expectation that she would carry a caseload of 15–20 clients. Of course, that isn’t always realistic. Clients cancel, referrals fluctuate, contracts can be delayed, and crises can disrupt even the best-laid plans. That said, she is generally seeing about five clients a week.

This is particularly challenging because her position was designed to generate revenue for the organization. For comparison, I work half-time in a clinical role and typically see 6–10 clients a week while also taking on additional responsibilities outside of direct service.

Complicating things further, we work in a nonprofit environment, and there is sometimes an unspoken understanding that one of the trade-offs for lower salaries is greater flexibility and, at times, lighter workloads.

My manager is great and knows this situation needs to be addressed. I’m mostly curious from a management perspective: what should she do next?

If I were advising your manager, I’d tell her the first step is to talk to the employee about the gap between the expectations for the role (15–20 clients per week) and what’s actually happening (five clients a week), and ask for the employee’s perspective on what’s causing the gap. It’s possible she’ll hear something that changes her understanding of the situation — for example, that the therapist is in fact being pulled into lots of other work that’s leaving her without time for more clients, in which case your manager can decide if she wants to intervene and change that.

But if nothing like that comes up, she should lay out what needs to change (“we need you to increase your client load to 15–20 per week”) and talk about ways to make that happen. From there, she’d hold her to that like any other performance expectation — checking in regularly to ensure it’s happening, problem-solving and coaching if it’s not — and if that doesn’t change anything, she’d need to decide whether she has the right person in the position.

4. I Keep Getting Yelled at for Applying for Internal Jobs

I have worked for my company for 14 years (21 years total, but I left and came back). I have applied for an internal job posting here 11 times. There has been a management change since I started applying, and this is where I need help.

With the original hiring manager, I had a great rapport and she was always nice. She let me know that I was definitely qualified, but if the job was also posted externally, I would never be considered because I can’t move to another position afterwards since I don’t have a degree.

The current management team has been hostile in their rejections, not even giving me an initial interview. Their first rejection started with them yelling at me for being too passive. Once I got the hiring manager to calm down, they discussed getting me additional training, which they did raise with my middle management, but it was turned down by upper management. The next rejection involved the hiring manager and her manager, and I was told to just quit if I really wanted the job because my job experience was too old, and I could reapply when I had more current experience. The last rejection was with the hiring manager’s manager. Again, he started off yelling at me for not doing what I was told in the previous rejections. Once I got him calmed down, he said he was very upset that I never did the training they had offered. I let him know I was very open to training but it was not approved. He was not aware of this and said he would look into it again. Once that was settled, I was able to make my case for why I keep applying for the position. He said he was aware that I can only apply for two positions in the company and said he would like to see me get training in each, which he would look into. He also agreed that if the job is posted externally, I would not even be considered because they can easily get someone with a degree who can move up in the company. I let him know I was fine with that but just wanted to show that I am still interested, and he agreed that I do have the ability and experience to do the job and that I might one day be the person they need to fill the position fast.

I just don’t know how to proceed anymore because of the hostility I received from the current management in that job. I could tell that they never looked at my previous experience and just looked at what I currently do here. I am told I am qualified but as they and the previous manager have said, if it goes external, I am just a number. I did say the last time that they can just flip me to not selected, and I don’t need a rejection. I’m trying to make it easier on everyone, but my main concern is the hostility I get from the rejections now.

Their hostility is extremely weird, and it makes me wonder about the culture at your company more broadly. It’s not normal to yell at applicants for applying for a job, or to yell at colleagues at all, for that matter. The fact that you’ve now been yelled at twice for applying for a job is bizarre, and it’s a strong signal that something is seriously dysfunctional in how this team operates — regardless of how the application itself is ultimately handled.

At this point, it’s worth asking yourself whether this is a company where you want to keep building your career. Being treated with basic respect when you apply for an internal role is a reasonable expectation, and the pattern you’re describing suggests that isn’t likely to change. Whatever you decide about this particular position, that hostility is worth factoring into your broader thinking about your future there.