Five answers to five questions.

Is it terrible to call in sick after a big work sprint?

We just went through a very busy, all-hands-on-deck period at work that was unavoidable. Think along the lines of a G20 conference or an election — requiring a lot of events and focus with little room for error, but slightly less seasonal or predictable, so we couldn’t have planned our life around it in advance. We’ve all been working long hours, and today we are jumping directly into postmortems, follow-up outreach, and keeping momentum with clients through follow-on events.

I didn’t have the easiest job at the events, but I also didn’t have the hardest role. I tried one evening last week to give myself an hour away from my desk, but it was very hard fought. I still feel like at best I pushed myself too hard this week, or at worst I genuinely picked up a bug. Either way, I feel I’m bordering on incoherent. My temper is short, my head pounds, and my stomach lurches every time the phone rings.

The problem is, I’m sure a lot of people are feeling the same way, and they are showing up today at full speed. I don’t want to leave them in the lurch when many of them need rest as much, if not more, than me. I worry people will feel abandoned.

There was no drinking involved. I’m mid-career and have tons of vacation and sick days saved. Our work encouraged us to take leave in the summer so we would “be rested” in September. But I didn’t have money to go on vacation, and I need my vacation days to visit family overseas, so I just took a long weekend. I’m not sure that it would have prevented this situation. Is it possible to pre-empt this type of adrenaline-withdrawal-immunocompromised state? Is there a way to show up as my best self without abandoning my team?

If you’re sick (“at worst I genuinely picked up a bug”), you’re sick and you should take a sick day. If you’re having trouble giving yourself permission to do that, remind yourself that if you did pick something up, your office is better off with you not spreading it to others anyway.

If you’re just burning out from the intensity of the sprint and need a break but aren’t actually sick, ideally you push through for a few more days since the project isn’t quite over yet. But look for ways to make it easier on yourself — can you work shorter hours this week, or work from home at least part of the time? You can also suggest, if at all doable, that schedules for these sprints in the future build in some recovery time before expecting people to jump straight back in at the same intensity. A lot of people’s bodies experience an “now that I’m through that, my immune system can collapse” response.

Could you get rejected for a job because you have an active eating disorder?

Something came up at work today and my Ask a Manager radar went off. I’m a clinical intern at an outpatient eating disorder clinic, and we were talking about a residential eating disorder recovery company. My supervisor said, in a disapproving tone, that they hire providers who are currently in their own active eating disorders. It should be said that many ED providers used to have EDs, which is actually wonderful to model to clients and patients, but she was saying these employees are not yet in recovery.

This got me thinking: could a company choose not to hire someone based on whether they have an active ED, or an ED at all? I don’t think it’s protected under the ADA, and I know some states have laws about sizeism in hiring practices, but this doesn’t quite seem to fit that either. Everyone in the room strongly agreed that people who are currently deep in an ED shouldn’t be responsible for treating others with EDs, but no one was suggesting that people already hired should be fired. I’m just curious whether someone rejected on the grounds that they might not be in the best place to offer treatment due to their own active behaviors would have grounds to sue for discrimination or any other recourse.

Eating disorders can indeed be protected under the ADA, depending on severity. But a requirement for this type of job could reasonably be that employees are able to model healthy eating — including things like participating in meals with patients, challenging eating disorder rituals, and helping distinguish recovery behaviors from ED behaviors. The ADA does allow employers to establish qualifications that include specific physical or mental abilities, judgment, and health and safety considerations, as long as those qualifications are job-related and consistent with business necessity.

In theory, if a candidate had an active eating disorder diagnosis but was still able to do all of the above and otherwise perform the duties of the job, rejecting them would be much iffier legally. The safest employer position would be “we require these recovery-oriented competencies, and employees must consistently model recovery-oriented eating behaviors” — rather than “we don’t employ people with active eating disorders.”

Work location changed during the interview process

I interviewed last week with the hiring manager for a remote position in a field adjacent to my current one. Today I got an email from HR saying they would like to move on to the next round of interviews — and by the way, the job is remote for right now. By the end of next year, the company would be relocating and the job will then be on-site, more than 1,000 miles away from my current city.

I am not opposed to an on-site job, but I am opposed to moving that far from my family, friends, and the city I love. My instinct is to say I would consider it, just to stay in the running and kick the can down the road — I may not get the job after all. But if I were to get an offer, would I be a horrible person to accept and hope that the company’s move gets delayed or cancelled altogether? When the move happens, could I try to negotiate some kind of hybrid situation? I’ve been applying for positions in this field for a while and getting no interest, and even if I only worked there a year the experience would be great. But would I be burning bridges?

Yes. They’re being up-front with you and telling you that this job is only remote temporarily, and that you’d be expected to move and be on-site within a year. If you accept those terms and then try to backtrack, it’s highly likely that you will burn the bridge and possibly lose the job. They’ve told you the terms; you get to take or leave them, but you can’t secretly plan to ignore them and hope for the best — not if you want to be seen as someone who operates in good faith.

Can I shorten my notice period if I’m in a mental health crisis?

I accepted a new job, gave notice, and will be out later this month. I work a public-facing job where a lot of my responsibilities involve running events and generally doing public-facing work. My office is currently a huge mess and I have a lot of events to run, items to organize, paperwork to file, stats to input, goodbyes to say, information to pass on, and documentation to create for the next person.

I’ve also recently been going through one of the worst mental health crises of my life. I know the biggest driver is my current job, which was stressful even before I gave notice and has now become infinitely more so. My new job starts in a few weeks and I really want to focus on my mental health so I can be okay there. I’m getting my meds adjusted but it’s unlikely to be an instant fix. My official last day is in about a week and a half. I tried to shorten my notice period a bit but got a ton of pushback because it would likely mean canceling an event with a large number of registrants. I have some sick and personal days, which I’ve already been using. Is there anything else I can do?

Notice periods aren’t some inviolable covenant that can never be modified. It’s good to work out your notice period if you can, but there are all kinds of reasons why you might not be able to — such as your own medical crisis or a family member’s. That is the situation you are in, just as if you had been hit by a car or come down with pneumonia. The framing to your office would be: “I’m so sorry about the timing of this, and it’s the last thing I would have chosen, but I’m having a medical emergency that I need to deal with immediately, which means I’ll need to wrap everything up today.”

Can you include good online reviews on your resume?

My husband (mid-40s) is changing careers. He was burnt out in tech and went back to school to jump-start a career doing his first love, landscaping. He’s been working part-time at a local nursery during this time. He’s passionate about plants and helping people and has had a huge influence on the business. He won’t stay on with this employer once he graduates, but he’s received some truly stellar callouts on online review sites. Is there an appropriate place in his application materials to highlight these public kudos? Their overall ranking has increased during his tenure and he’s pretty much the only employee called out by name frequently.

Yes. For example, under the relevant job entry on his resume, he could include a bullet point such as:

  • Regularly lauded by name in online reviews for excellent customer service — for example, “Cecil’s expertise and helpfulness saved my gardenias; he went above and beyond to ensure I had what I needed” and “I would trust Cecil with my plants, my garden, and my entire botanical future.”

This is a great way to let concrete customer feedback speak to his impact without coming across as self-promotional.