Kate
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Yes, I was just clarifying, but I do think it makes it worse if anything.
This LW is a man…
I could see how your mom may have raised you somehow to think of her and others as fragile beings who need protection from men, but the reality is different and it’s good you’re working on that in therapy.
Like, yeah, call out rudeness when it happens, with a “hey, that’s rude,” but you absolutely do not have to confront people and make it personal. At the end of the day here, a couple people had rude or snarky comments made to them about their dietary preferences. From someone who’s known to be rude and had been warned as part of their terms of doing business. No one was harmed.
If your mom has you fired up to believe you must deal with these things, be conscious of taking a step back and thinking about, really? Does it need to be dealt with? Do *I* need to personally handle it? The answer is usually no.
“In regards to my mother, for reasons I don’t really want to go into, she doesn’t deal well with people being aggressive towards her, and she shuts down.”
Ok, so… one or the other of you should have submitted a complaint afterward, like the others did.
“As I do a bit of public speaking I know how to control tone of voice and voice projection. If I had intended to yell at him the whole hall, and everyone in it would have heard me.”
This makes it sound even worse that you yelled at your senior. If he doesn’t see immediately that you learned from this and will never act like this again, trust me that he has serious concerns about your ability to lead.
And, the caterer got blacklisted all on his own. People complained about him after the event, it was evident he broke the terms of his agreement, and the proper consequences happened. All of this happened exactly the way it should, and would have happened without you getting involved. Your involvement only made it more of a headache for your supervisor.
“while I was sitting there, the caterer began to chastise a native man with facial tattoos for taking a dessert before eating his mains, like the guy was a child.” In your post just above you say the caterer berated this guy. So chastising a man like a child is berating then, but what you did wasn’t berating because you didn’t raise your voice?
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This reply was modified 2 years, 3 months ago by
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This reply was modified 2 years, 3 months ago by
“The core was that he yelled my mother when she asked him a simple question”
She’s a grown woman. Myself, my mom, my boss, most women I can think of, know how to deal with a service person being rude to them, or they just figure the guy’s a dick and don’t worry about it. We don’t need a man to go threaten him.
“I did not berate him. I corrected him.“ This is splitting hairs. You threatened him. Raising your voice or not is irrelevant. Also, we know / believe that you didn’t. It’s worse that you raised your voice to your superior.
“My language may have been passively threatening, and timing poor, but that is the extent of it.” That’s not the extent of it though. You shouldn’t have talked to him at all. That’s stepping on someone’s toes whose job it was to speak with him.
“I just wanted to correct some misunderstanding regarding the degree to which I screwed up. I admit I did screw up.” The even bigger screwup was yelling at the senior minister. Never yell at work.
The defensiveness here, look, we’re a bunch of strangers. We gave you solid advice and now you’re back to saying we’re not really getting it and you didn’t screw up that bad. Yes, you did. You made some huge mistakes from a career perspective. I would go so far as to say you made some career-limiting moves. You have to make sure these behaviors never happen again. And for that to happen, you have to understand what you did wrong. It’s okay, we’ve all messed up at work. I’m afraid you are at risk of not learning from your mistakes.
It reminds me a tiny bit of last week when we were out at work after an “offsite” that was really at the office. We were at this, like, hip and trendy food hall downtown and had sent our intern over to reserve a table early. We were getting settled in when the catering manager and a more junior person came by and told us they were setting up for an event and we could hang out at that table for a little while longer but then would have to move. My boss was PISSED, but instead of telling them off, she managed with a smile to send the message that we are from X company bringing 15+ people to their establishment to spend money. She was very nice and polite and got the manager’s contact info. We moved to an empty table the manager showed us.
I know, not the same situation, but that is how a professional person handles it. Manager knew we were displeased but no conflict. Next time we’ll arrange things with her directly (no one answered all the times the person planning this happy hour had tried to call the main number), or we’ll go somewhere else. Issue solved.
Yeah… you’re young and this comes with time, but you have got to stop taking anything personally at work, and involving yourself personally in things that aren’t your responsibility. If someone’s being a dick, they’re probably a dick to everyone. And/or they are going through something challenging. It’s got nothing to do with you. And if you don’t involve yourself in things, there is less opportunity for trouble. Also, don’t get angry at work. Don’t yell. In that situation with your senior minister telling you he heard you berated the caterer, a better response would have been a thoughtful pause, and then maybe, “wow, Jim, that’s really surprising. I am trying to think how they could have gotten that impression. Did they give you any specifics?” And then you’ll have a chance to calmly explain what happened from your POV. Practice taking your *self* out of the situation entirely and focus on resolving the problem with the right outcome. Trust the Lord or whoever.
To be clear, I’m not sure that anyone needed to be pulled aside during the event. I think you did your due diligence before the event by letting people know that this caterer is rude to folks. They knew that and hired him anyway, I assume because of some combination of price and quality. I think after the event may have been the right time to mention that the guy didn’t hold up his end of the deal, and then they’d have that information when deciding whether to use him again.
It’s true what Ron said that there’s a pattern here of you getting personally involved in situations you don’t need to be, and becoming very emotional. You can absolutely work on that and fix it.
“my mentor has since messaged me, apologizing for calling my integrity into question and explaining he understands why I lost my temper. He also apologized for assuming that what one person told me was the absolute truth and for calling my professionalism into question. He did, however, still accuse me of being emotional in how I dealt with it and that I should have waited until the event was over.”
Ok, this is good. Focus on this, and on not making it worse. The thing is, you *are* actually letting emotions get the better of you, and that’s something you need to work on if you’re going to be in a leadership position.
I think you went into this expecting to see rudeness on the part of the caterer. Jesus wouldn’t do that, he’d be looking for the good, right? And this situation wasn’t yours to handle. It was the responsibility of whoever was in charge of catering, and had worked out the conditions of the deal. I think if you saw the caterer not making good on his part of the deal, the thing to do would be to tell the person in charge of contracting for the catering, whoever it was that set those terms, and let them deal with it. It may even have been that person who reported you because they were annoyed that you jumped in. It probably would have been better from a business perspective to let the person who made the deal with the caterer handle any discussions about him not fulfilling the terms of the deal.
Anyway, you have to absolutely stay calm and collected no matter what when you have this follow up conversation. Thank him for his apology and understanding. Acknowledge that you did get emotional, first because your mom was insulted, and then because you felt you were being accused of being untruthful. You do realize in hindsight that it would be better to have communicated you complaints to the person who contracted with the caterer. You are sorry that you got emotional and it’s something you’re working on.
But yeah. You did go into that situation looking for trouble. You had already communicated your concerns and it was out of your hands.
The washcloths comment was from her father, about her sisters having sex with guys and then getting sexual fluids on the family washcloths, like he doesn’t use them to wash his own ass. And there was more than one comment like that from this Father of the Year.
I don’t know, Ron. Like in this case, yeah, get out. But for a lot of people I don’t think the answer is to just pay the high rent, not save anything, and potentially get into bad debt and/or eat rice and beans for every meal and never go out. The answer would be a roommate or multigenerational or unconventional living situation, not a single expensive apartment that could fuck over your credit. Trends are starting to show young ppl not being able to pay their cell phone and credit card bills and carrying too much debt. That’s not a good direction.
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This reply was modified 2 years, 3 months ago by
