Please, Take My Money
When favors are mistaken for gigs, plus excluding Stepmom and firing volunteers.
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Recently, a woman I know slightly from a class asked me to review her resume and help her write a cover letter for a job. I had never mentioned to her that I am a freelance writer, and I approached it merely as doing a favor for an acquaintance - but she insisted on paying me. I said I was happy to do her the favor, she insisted again, and I awkwardly told her my rates (quoting her the lower end of my scale and thanking her for her courtesy). How should I have handled the situation?
M.D. in Jamaica Plain
I think you handled it fine. It's always awkward when the person doing the work is thinking "favor" and the one it's being done for is thinking "gig," but nowhere near as awkward as the reverse!
Since the woman was just a casual acquaintance, she may not have wanted to feel indebted to you, or perhaps she's unemployed, and it matters to her pride to feel as if she's not mooching off others and can still pay her own way. At any rate, paying you for your work clearly felt important to her, so you were right to let her do so. Accepting payment for the sake of her psychological comfort was, in its way, the act of random kindness you'd intended the original work to be.
My 20-year-old daughter became engaged recently, and I suggested that we get together with the prospective in-laws for dinner. Her father and I are divorced, and he remarried four years ago. My daughter invited her father to join us for dinner but asked that her stepmother, with whom she is not close, not attend. My ex-husband was furious, and his relationship with our daughter was almost ruined over this. I maintain that since it is her wish, we need to honor it and that I would go along with whatever my daughter decided. What is the proper etiquette?
D.C. in Derry, New Hampshire
Your daughter should have invited her stepmother, whether they are close or not. You do not ask spouses to forgo each other's company at family dinners. It's an insult to do so. Your daughter is in the wrong - but if she's old enough to marry, she's old enough to make her own mistakes without parental interference. Advise her once, as you would a good friend, and then refuse to get in the middle of it. If she wants to force her father to choose loyalties, there isn't much you can do. If you and he still have a cordial relationship, you might want to let him know that your noninterference stems from respect for your daughter's autonomy, not from any personal animus toward his wife.
This is what you should do if the dinner is your daughter's party. If, however, you are hosting the dinner yourself, either in your house or in a restaurant, then you are well within your rights as hostess to insist that the stepmother be included. Hostesses have the power to enforce proper etiquette; parents of adult children, sadly, do not.
I'm on a committee at work made up strictly of volunteers. There are one or two people who can never seem to make it to a meeting and who seem to disappear whenever there is an event to plan and run. Can you fire a volunteer? And if so, how?
R.L. in Hingham
Yes, you can fire volunteers, and believe me, sometimes they desperately want you to and just don't know how to ask. Talk individually to all of the folks who aren't pulling their weight. Don't be hostile or act as though you're accusing them of slacking (even if you think they are) - set forth the information neutrally, as a problem that you hope you can solve together. Go over exactly what kind of time and energy the project needs from them. Ask them if they're able to commit to that or if they volunteered in an excess of enthusiasm and overestimated what their schedule and abilities would allow. If there are other less demanding ways that they can stay involved, discuss those options. Let them know there are no hard feelings. It's possible that they're dying to get out of the commitment and, for all you know, are writing to me right now to ask, "Miss Conduct, can a volunteer resign?"
The above are the basic guidelines for "firing" a volunteer, but you're in a slightly trickier position because the volunteer group is within a work setting. So be extra cautious that the politics don't backfire on you or anyone else, and put an even higher priority on communicating clearly. Make sure, for example, that you really do have your boss's backing to run the committee as you see fit and that the folks you want to get rid of are in fact free to abandon the committee without getting in trouble with their bosses. Or maybe the volunteers aren't doing much, but they have a lot of social capital and it's good to have their names associated with the project. Think through the implications before you have that talk.
My Word!
When the beloved Milo and I go to the dog park, there is often a small nucleus of dogs playing or wrestling together and a bunch of hangers-on at the perimeter not contributing to the action. And almost all the barking comes from the dogs who aren't really contributing to the action. There's a moral in that, and I'm sure you can figure out what it is.
Miss Conduct is Robin Abrahams, a Cambridge-based writer with a PhD in psychology.
