'My Manager Sucks, and There's Nothing I Can Do About It'

I work in marketing at a large company. I relocated for this job, but we’ve been remote during my entire year-and-a-half tenure. Initially, I gave my new manager, “Josh,” the benefit of the doubt and assumed his shortfalls were due to the steep learning curve of the role. He seemed to constantly forget conversations we’d had or items that were discussed in meetings. He also repeated ideas I presented to him as his own. At first, I assumed he was overwhelmed by his new role. But after a few months, I saw patterns emerge and realized that this was not a temporary problem.

Although he has a lot to say about every project, when it comes to doing the actual work, he disappears, leaving me to figure everything out by myself. He usually makes an appearance toward the end of a project, adding something or demanding a last-minute change so his involvement is visible and he can claim credit.

Since I don’t know anyone in this city, all I do is obsess over work, and it’s bleeding into the little personal life I do have. Is there anything I can do to make things more bearable and to hate my boss a little less?

When did this time of year go from fall to “spooky season”? A woman won a million-euro Spanish literary prize. It turned out “she” was actually three men. Thank the streaming gods, there’s finally a trailer for The Great’s second season, and it looks great. Teenage girls across the globe have been showing up at doctors’ offices with tics since the start of the pandemic, and TikTok may be to blame. This excerpt from Huma Abedin’s Both/And: A Life in Many Worlds convinced us to preorder the upcoming memoir. And we love Lucy … we’re just not sure we love Nicole Kidman and Aaron Sorkin’s version of her.

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