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Posted by Ask a Manager

https://www.askamanager.org/2026/01/coworker-keeps-taking-off-her-pants-required-to-take-our-laptops-home-at-night-and-more.html

https://www.askamanager.org/?p=35639

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

1. Coworker keeps taking off her pants (she’s wearing shorts under them)

I have a coworker, Silvia, who almost exclusively wears thin cotton shorts to work. We work in a manufacturing facility and wear cleanroom jumpsuits that fit over our clothing. Since the weather has turned colder, she has started wearing sweatpants over her shorts. We can all be sitting in the lobby chatting, and Silvia will casually start kicking off her shoes and pushing her pants down to remove them, using her feet like a toddler to scrunch them on the floor and push them away. Today we were having our Monday catch-up with the supervisor and manager and she stood up from the conference table and took off her pants!

I find this extremely offensive. No one else seems bothered by it, so I’m trying to just let it go. It’s something I’ve never considered having to worry about as there is not another person I’ve ever worked with who I can imagine doing such a thing. Am I overreacting? Is this as unprofessional as it seems to me?

If I’m understanding correctly, she’s wearing sweatpants over shorts because it’s cold, and the issue is that sometimes she removes the sweatpants while leaving the shorts on? And does it in a notably casual manner? If that’s correct, it doesn’t sound particularly professional or polished, but it doesn’t sound offensive either.

I do think it’s surprising to see in a work environment — and our general norms make it feel different than taking off a sweater to reveal a shirt underneath — but as a coworker, it doesn’t rise to the level of something you need to or should address. If you were her manager, you’d have standing to ask her to deal with any clothing changes in the bathroom, but as a coworker I’d let it go.

2. Did my classroom aide use profanity to students?

I’m a teacher. I have a parapro. As she left (she switches classrooms mid-day) the room this morning, the students watched until the door closed, and then three of them said she had used the word “bullshit.” These three students are, for the sake of brevity, the troublemaker types. However, she has become less and less patient with the students as the year goes on. I did not hear her say it as I was talking to another adult outside. Should I escalate this to our boss, since I didn’t hear it myself?

Why not talk to her directly about it — as well as about the fact that you’ve noticed her becoming less patient with students recently? Ask her if she’s noticed that too, and ask how she’s doing in general. Have a conversation! The concern here is less about whether she did or didn’t say “bullshit” and more about whether she’s letting frustration / fatigue / burnout / whatever it is affect the way she’s interacting with students, and it sounds like you have concerns about that independent of whether she did or didn’t use profanity in this one case.

3. My coworker is terrible at taking notes

A critical part of my job is interviewing and taking detailed, almost transcript level notes. On my team of three, Fergus is notoriously bad at this. (Frankly, he is very nice, but he isn’t great at most elements of the job). These notes are official records, which we rely on extensively throughout our project. I cannot undersell how important these notes are. Every one hates this part of the job, but it is a critical part of it. Transcript tools like recordings are not allowed.

Fergus’s poor performance impacts all of us, but I am not sure what to say to him other than, “Be better, pay attention, write faster.” This is … hardly the most helpful feedback. He definitely pays attention during the meetings, but from my perspective, he is listening/engaging too much and not transcribing enough.

This hasn’t been a huge issue previously because our team was bigger and able to compensate by supplementing his note-taking (we all knew we’d need to fill in his blanks and mostly assigned less critical interviews to him). But our team is much smaller now and I simply can’t cover for him and do my job as well. He doesn’t even seem aware of his much poorer quality of notes or work in general. He is open to feedback, but it must be very direct and very specific. He is not someone who will take high level or general feedback and run with it. I am not his supervisor, but I am team lead and have some authority to provide feedback/guidance. Any advice?

Yes, as the team lead you should definitely have standing to take this on. The framing you want is two-part: (a) “your notes need to improve in XYZ ways” and (b) “while you’re working to improve them, you likely need to engage less in meetings and transcribe more.” That second part might be tough for someone who likes to engage a lot in meetings to hear, so it’s worth acknowledging the downsides (“it’s not ideal since obviously engaging is valuable too”) while explaining why it’s necessary anyway (“the notes are a critical part of our job / it’s a shared duty so we’re all in the position of not being able to engage actively at the meetings where we’re the note taker, and that’s a compromise we’ve decided is necessary”).

You should also sit with him and go over the sets of notes that do meet your needs (presumably those created by others) and his notes at the same time, and point out the difference very explicitly (even if you think it should be obvious, since clearly he’s been missing it).

4. Company requires us to take our laptops home at night

Recently our office (a small corporate building) had some laptops and mail stolen in the early hours before we opened. They found out the items were stolen by someone who walked straight into the office via a service elevator and just picked items off desks.

The office has cameras, so it was easy to find out what happened and the area the office is in is generally safe, but we are now all being asked to take our laptops home every night with us. At first it seemed like a suggestion, but there are now office-wide emails being sent that state desks are being checked for laptops and we need to take our laptops home. I’m not sure I agree with this; most of us don’t need our laptops outside of work hours and we have drawers with locks. Surely this is good enough? A few people in the office get in by bike or long train and bus rides, and taking a laptop everyday can be quite annoying and heavy. Do employers have any right to tell us to take items home?

Legally, yes, they can require that you take the laptops home with you every night. Practically, it’s a bad idea — laptops are far more likely to go missing or get damaged when they’re being carted around all over the place. And ethically, it’s pretty crappy — it’s your company’s responsibility to secure their own property, not yours when you’re off duty.

What would happen if a group of you pushed back, pointing out that it’s an enormous inconvenience and security risk to cart around a laptop when you might not be going straight home, particularly when you don’t need to use them outside of work hours anyway, and pushing for a more commonsense measure like, oh I don’t know, locking your doors? (Or since you have locking drawers, they could just require that laptops be removed or locked up.)

5. Applying for jobs with a bunch of unrelated experience

I have a resume question. I started my career as a project manager and then switched to graphic design. I had five different year-long contracts as a graphic designer but decided to switch back to project management, which is my current employment.

But now the two strongest jobs that I have for project management are separated by five unrelated jobs. I have called that out in my cover letter, but I know that doesn’t help with the HR quick skim of the resumes. Is this a good situation to split the resume with the relevant experience together and the irrelevant experience later on? Or is there another solution that would work?

Yes, if you’re applying for project manager jobs, list all the project management experience first under Related Experience. Then put a section after that called Other Experience and put the graphic design work there.

The post coworker keeps taking off her pants, required to take our laptops home at night, and more appeared first on Ask a Manager.

https://www.askamanager.org/2026/01/coworker-keeps-taking-off-her-pants-required-to-take-our-laptops-home-at-night-and-more.html

https://www.askamanager.org/?p=35639