Can you have a body and also a job?
Hey y'all it's been a week, what have you been up to? I've worked long days at the salon where I can't reasonably schedule breaks for myself for reasons that are too boring and convoluted to explain, but that means I haven't peed at work in like six months probably. Admittedly part of that is a "What About Bob?" OCD situation (as it is I wash my hands so much I wonder if the salon owner has noticed his paper towel expenditures go up since I started working there), but mostly I just rarely have time when no clients are looking at me, and I feel unnecessarily self-conscious telling my next client to wait a sec while I go to the bathroom. If you came to me with this as an advice question I would tell you that your clients appreciate that you're a human being and will wait for two minutes for you to go, and anyway you know that you'll make it a point to thoroughly, audibly wash your hands and open the door with the paper towel so they hear and see and don't worry that your hands are contaminated with bathroom right before touching their hair. Oh, is that not how your brain works? Must be nice!!
As to the other body-having activity I rarely do at work - eating - a client a while back mused that he was considering intermittent fasting and I told him that hairdressers have practiced intermittent fasting against their will since time immemorial, and I've got news for you: no health benefits!
Is it better to take health/life tips from your hairdresser than some men's rights podcaster on an all-meat diet or a techbro vegan whose son serves as his Blood Boy so he can reverse age and never die? That's real but don't look it up.
I'd say my advice is at least as qualified as any unlicensed dingus with a podcast or a blog, and in fact my cosmetology license required several hundred hours more training than the average American cop, so...ask me anything! Submit advice questions here: https://www.carolinemitgang.com/about or in my Instagram DMs. Next week because it'll be in the middle of the WNBA finals I'm going to lay out a curriculum for anyone interested in getting into this sport responsibly and respectfully as a new fan when next year's NCAA season gets going, because that's how I did it and have no doubt that mine is the best and most correct way. I recently saw that Russell Brand, having newly been saved, promptly began baptizing people in his underpants, which signaled that I too am probably a divine authority on a topic I've been enthusiastic about for five minutes.
This week's advice question from an anonymous reader:
I work on a team with two leaders who are both toxic which makes the whole team dysfunctional. I'm interested in approaching other teams or individuals at the office who seem like maybe a better fit, but I'm worried about confidentiality and my current bosses finding out. Can I approach these other people or is it too risky? And will they be hesitant to hire me away from my current team anyway? Help!
Wow I'm so sorry, that sounds outrageously stressful and demoralizing. The approach I'd recommend taking depends a great deal on the business and since you understandably kept it vague I'll try to cover a couple different scenarios.
If you're in a traditionally structured corporate environment with robust HR and intra-office transferring/hiring protocols then I'm much more gung-ho about your prospects. Assuming they're trustworthy, utilize those resources and ask a neutral party in HR to advise you on the proper steps to take, and then I say go for it! Get your life!
If you're in a loosey-goosey we're-like-a-family-here blurred-lines type of workplace?? Well, that's a big yikes whether you want to stay or not. For all the memes and opinion pieces and cultural discourse about how toxic that rhetoric and behavior is you'd think fewer bosses would say it, but I still hear that all the time. It's such a bizarre compulsion to want to blur the lines between personal and professional life and if you think about it for two seconds you realize it's bad and makes no sense. After college I worked for a couple years as an admin in a typical office with a kitchen that was the source of endless testy email threads. Once somebody spilled spaghetti and sauce on the floor and just left it, so the office manager emailed imploring everybody to treat the kitchen like they would their own kitchen at home, and I remember thinking that was probably what the spaghetti culprit had in fact done. We shouldn't want people behaving at work the way they do at home and with their families, we should demand better because a lotta folks are kind of gross and bad at home!
Anywayyyyyy if the workplace in question is the nebulous variety, yours is an unavoidably dicey proposition. Boldly trying to jump ship within the ship could blow up spectacularly in your face...OR the lack of structure could be precisely the reason that you should extremely go for it because nobody's following any traditional business etiquette in the first place. That calculus depends on your own propensity for risk. I'm going to suggest you split the difference and spend the coming weeks observing your prospective saviors closely and interacting with them as much as possible without being weird about it. The more you can casually chat with them the better you'll be able to judge whether and when to hail mary it and pitch yourself as the best decision they'll ever make despite the fallout of potentially pissing off your current team.
Before you make any moves, ideally be sure your life won't fall apart if the heist goes bad. Do you have a cushion of savings? Will you need your current bosses as references going forward, or is that not a concern in your field? Have you been stocking your home with office TP? As your hairdresser I want you to be safe and able to afford the haircut you'll need if you're suddenly back out in the job market.
It was definitely the right move to consult me first, so you're clearly a brilliant genius and I have high hopes for you! Good luck!
Love, Caroline
Submit advice questions here: https://www.carolinemitgang.com/about