Category Archives: Workplace

Coworking spaces in New York City are not all created equal

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Since I started using my coworking space work perk last October, I’ve only visited one coworking space, which is The Malin SoHo, just an eight-minute walk from Kaia’s school in Chinatown. It has a great location, near lots of food and shopping, and of course, its proximity to Chinatown. The space is clean, premium, with lots of lighting, healthy snacks, proper kitchen setups, a fancy coffee machine, and upscale soaps and lotions in the bathrooms and kitchens. Although initially I found the clientele a bit snobby, I’ve gotten used to the vibe there and found areas that I camp out in, so I’m pretty settled in there. Now, I go about once a week, so the staff always recognizes me.

I was planning to meet a friend for lunch today in Nomad, and I figured I’d check out a new coworking space in the area given the lunch location. I chose a space called Nomadworks, which is walking distance from Madison Square Park, Flatiron, and Koreatown. The booking fee, which my company pays but I can see, is less than half the cost of The Malin SoHo. I took a quick look at its listing on the coworking space booking app, and it seemed fine. So, I booked it on a whim the day before.

I came in and immediately felt the difference. The coworking space is essentially a bunch of open tables with outlets and monitors you can use. There’s an option for standing desks upon request. A handful of phone booths are available for private calls. The “kitchen” has no sink or fridge, though the description in the app said it had a fridge. A few bags of Doritos were at the entrance upon coming in. There’s premade drip coffee for all, which I’d never dare to have because I am 1000% sure it’s revolting. Oddly enough, there’s a variety of several loose leaf teas. There are little compostable paper bags for you to use a teaspoon to measure your tea leaves into, and then you close the bag with a drawstring on top. I used the China jade green tea, and I really think the bags gave an off flavor to my tea. I did not enjoy it and just ended up having hot water because I wanted a hot beverage, but did not want to deal with weird tea bag off-flavor or awful drip coffee.

The space also has rare rooftop access, which I will check out shortly before I leave for the day.

I texted Chris about this, and told him that at least the staff is very friendly and nice, and there’s ample natural light. He responded: “Of course they are friendly. What else do they have when they don’t even have a sink? Sounds like some shitty studio apartment in some dump.”

This type of response is one of the many reasons I truly love my husband.

Grown men who cannot handle direct feedback are an embarrassment to society

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One of the things that I have always struggled with is confrontation. I don’t necessarily mean about really big, deal-breaker things, but I mean about sharing any type of “constructive feedback” to people that is ultimately not a compliment. You never know how they are going to receive the feedback. You never know if they will really understand or hear, even if you state it, that your intentions are positive, and you just want them to be the best version of themselves. Oftentimes, people will hear constructive feedback as a personal attack or a tear-down of who they are, take it really personally, get defensive, and just shut down. I think we’ve all been there, and it never feels good. But as I’ve gotten older, I’ve realized exactly how important it is to be honest and forth right about constructive feedback, even when it’s difficult. It benefits the relationship in the long run. It’s transparent. It’s not passive aggressive. It’s direct. We ALL need to work on being more direct with each other, while also not being total assholes.

On my team, we actually had a “taking and giving feedback” session at our offsite last month. It was very introspective, and it was also a practice in… just being a damn adult. But it probably was needed because like most organizations, our company is full of people who clearly cannot handle getting feedback from their colleagues. A colleague of mine who I’ve worked with for over 4.5 years was sending me really passive aggressive Slack messages yesterday. He was insinuating that an email I had sent to a customer was going out of my swim lane and that he was “concerned” that I was not aligned with him on roles and responsibilities. I re-read his messages a few times, compared it to the benign, friendly email thread I had with the customer, and felt very confused. He was clearly overreacting, and I have a feeling it’s because of pressure on him to hit his number this year as a sales person, especially since he missed it last year. So I very directly told him over Slack that I found his commentary counterproductive, that I had done nothing out of bounds, that my manager was aligned with my approach, and I would appreciate it he could get on a call with me to talk this through.

Instead of looking back on what he said and reflecting on our interaction and wondering why I would react this way, he instead shut me down and said, “If you don’t like my approach, then you can talk to (your manager), who can talk to (my manager), who can then address it with me. I’d like to avoid this type of confrontation in the future. Thanks.” He also made excuses about being “too busy” to get on a five minute call with me for the rest of the week.

The way I read that message from his side is: I’m a late 40s/early 50s-year hold grown man who is incapable of receiving direct feedback from peers or being introspective at all about areas where I could potentially be wrong. I would prefer that you tattle on me to your mommy, who can then discuss with my mommy, and then my mommy can determine whether I get a punishment or not.

I responded with, “I think that after 4.5 years of working together and given that we’re both adults that we should be comfortable enough to give each other direct feedback. If that is not the case, then clearly there is a disconnect between us.”

Work doesn’t have to be awful if your colleagues aren’t awful. But it’s in moments like this where I wonder how people get older and never really grow up?

To my mom, “work travel” = free meals

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Ever since I first started working, my mom always gets excited whenever she hears I go on business trips. For her, all she seems to hear is “free hotel and food,” and so she thinks it’s extremely luxurious to have the privilege of free lodging and meals. While yes, it is very nice and convenient to have your temporary housing and food paid for, it’s not like it’s just a “you take” situation. You are getting free food and housing in exchange for your professional services that you are offering on behalf of your company. It’s very much a transactional expectation.

It has not always been that luxurious, though: at one company I worked at, I only had a $75 per diem, so that was challenging when I went to larger, more expensive cities, especially once you factor in tax and tip. Today at my current company, I have $125/day, which is the highest I’ve had anywhere. It’s a nice and reasonably generous allotment, but again, dinner time tends to be challenging to stay within guidelines if you’re in a larger city.

Sometimes, I feel sad that my mom doesn’t know what it’s like to travel for work. She worked hard her entire life in a white-collar setting, but she never had the opportunity to “move up” out of the equivalent of an admin role. She looks at me going on work trips, and she thinks it’s all fun and games, wining and dining. She doesn’t quite see the “work” part about it; she focuses on the “trip” part of it. At the same time, I also get a little annoyed that all she focuses on is the “free” stuff I get. My mom grew up quite poor, as did my dad. Today, they have far more than they will ever be able to spend on themselves. Yet somehow, they are still obsessive about anything that is either extremely cheap or free; they are like the millionaires who jump at free stuff and hoard everything they humanly can. I can see how that’s the poor person’s mentality, especially with immigrants like my mom, people who had to work very hard to get to their comfortable standard of living today. But in my parents’ situation, they erroneously believe they are still poor or are at risk of being poor any day, so they try to take anything they possibly can that is free or cheap to make their money last even longer. I grapple with what to make of it. I would like for them to be comfortable, to enjoy life, to acknowledge that they have far more than enough and are quite privileged with all that they have (and have earned), but I doubt they ever will.

Family style eating goes awry (in a work setting)

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I’ve spent almost 17 years working full time. My happiest times with my colleagues were likely for about two years while at my second company, and about 1.5 years at my last company. Both times, we had a good group of people of different backgrounds, from different parts of the country (and occasionally, world), most of whom loved food (and drink) and were just fun to be around. I didn’t always feel compelled to talk about only work with them. In both situations, I was often known as the “foodie,” so whenever group happy hours or dinners had to be arranged, I was given the responsibility (and privilege) to choose where we would eat/drink, and to make the reservation. Price was rarely an issue, and the company (or vendor) always paid for it. And most of those times, we would share food, and people would leave full and happy… and occasionally tipsy to drunk.

Well, fast forward to today, when I’m on my fifth year with my current company, and my entire team is fully remote. We don’t get to spend much in-person time together. If we have regular “catch-ups,” they are usually on Zoom and inevitably 99 percent about work. We don’t really know each other that well. Though most people know I’m into food and cooking, my manager has been told that he has to stay within really tight budget guidelines for team meals. So he half jokingly told me he doesn’t trust me choosing a restaurant for us, though he has no doubt it would be amazing. Given this, when we’ve had team meals out, he typically will choose a place off the cuff, and it’ll be fairly basic. Other people on the team have made side comments to me that our manager’s taste in food stinks (he is known for his addiction to Coke and eats way too much fast food, particularly chicken wings, burgers, and bad pizza), and that our team meals are rarely things to look forward to because of it. He has plenty of strengths; diversity in or knowledge of food is not one of them.

For this past Wednesday’s team meal, he chose a family-style Italian restaurant right next to our hotel. When I’ve had family-style Italian meals in the past with colleagues, the great thing was that whenever the powers-that-be ordered, we’d always have a good variety of dishes: starters, vegetables, pastas, proteins/plant-based proteins, dessert. I always felt like the meal was well rounded, and we always ate well. This time, however, it wasn’t that well rounded, and I felt limited because of the limited palates of my teammates.

We started with a caesar salad with croutons, which I loved because the caesar dressing was particularly pungent with extra, extra garlic. We got a “Tour of Italy” plate, which was essentially a mixed plate of cold cuts, antipasti, cut baguettes, and cheeses — this was pretty disappointing looking, and I didn’t touch this. Then, for mains we had… pasta. Just pasta. No parmigiano. No vegetables. Nothing else. Our manager chose four pastas: baked ziti (this felt like it was for toddlers with how basic it was; I wouldn’t even order or make this for Kaia), spaghetti bolognese, meatballs with vodka sauce and spaghetti, and carbonara. I insisted from the beginning that we must have clam linguine. The table was silent. No one wanted to eat clam linguine with me other than one other colleague. My boss conceded and said we’d get a smaller portion of the clam linguine just for my one clam-eating colleague and me. One colleague said she had a shellfish allergy. Another said shellfish made her mouth itchy. A third said she’d have some (just one bite; she ended up taking none). A fourth insisted she would try “just a small bite” and didn’t touch it. On a team of eight people, only two of us ate the clam linguine. It was freaking delicious, by far the best pasta on the table. There was so much leftover clam linguine (well, actually, we had so much leftover of ALL the pasta) that would ultimately go into the garbage bin. It always hurts a little to see how much food waste we generate at these team meals. But that is the way with corporate life and corporate dining out in general, sadly. We were served family style, so everyone got a little bit of each pasta (minus the clam linguine, which the two of us served ourselves) on our plates doled out by our server. But almost every single person looked like s/he barely ate half their plate. I had felt bloated most of the day, so I only ate my clam linguine and a bite each of the other pastas.

It feels spoiled and bratty to complain about this, especially given I’m traveling on my company’s dime and won’t be paying for any of my meals during this work trip. But I couldn’t help but feel annoyed at how unadventurous my colleagues were in terms of their palates and what they were willing to eat. I felt like I was the “different” one and slightly being “othered” once again, and in this case, it’s crazy because it’s just clams in pasta we are talking about! It’s like they generally lack curiosity about different foods… and perhaps it could even be extended to say that they lack curiosity about other cultures and the world outside their own bubbles. I mean, how else did we get into the crappy predicament we are in with our current government?

Back in the “Mile High City”

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For the last three years, I’ve come to Denver once a year in Q1 for work. The last two years, it has been for my company’s annual sales and success kickoff. This year, it’s for my company’s go-to-market value selling workshops. We’ve always been based in downtown Denver for these events, and so it’s given me time to walk around and see what’s here, especially since the last time I was here was in November 2012 with Chris. The first year I came for work in 2023, I walked up and down downtown, and it was like a ghost town. It didn’t matter if it was peak lunch time or around early dinner time/get-off-work time, but I barely saw anyone on the streets. It felt pretty eerie. Last year when I came, there was a bit more life. I definitely wasn’t totally alone, but it was still quiet. This year as I’ve walked the streets in the morning and during lunch time, it actually felt like a semi-busy downtown. I saw lots of people having coffee, at cafes, grabbing lunch with colleagues, coming in and out of office buildings.

I always make sure to do morning workouts while traveling for work and stick with my usual exercise routine as much as possible, so I brought my workout gear. This morning, I went up to the top floor gym, where the hotel had a large, separate yoga room that was flooded with natural light. Although I do a semi-rigorous workout every weekday, which consists about 30-40 minutes of cardio and 30-40 minutes of strength/pilates/barre, here, I could actually feel that I was “mile high.” The last two years, I didn’t feel the altitude, but this year, I was breathing much harder on the treadmill and sweating buckets more than I normally do. Denver is 5,200+ feet above sea level, so it makes sense that my body was working harder than it normally does.

As my colleague said, we should take it all in stride: our workouts are more efficient here! If we workout for 60 minutes at higher altitude, that’s like 120 minutes at sea level, so we’re doing our bodies a favor! I suppose that’s one way to be positive.

Brown nosers: the absolute worst in the corporate world

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This work week has been particularly vexing and not even remotely fun. It’s never exciting to be in a situation where a customer is annoyed and is asking for a refund. So it’s even more un-exciting to have to rope in executive leadership from both your side and the customer’s side to have a “tete a tete” to talk through this and get this resolved. What does this actually entail? It entails lots of internal meetings where people who like to think they are more important than the other talk over the other, people who think they know more than the other talks over others, and even more frustration ensues. It also requires people who actually are in the weeds and truly do know what is happening (alas, that person is me!) to do the grunt work and fill out documents that explain everything, bit by bit. And then it also requires people constantly messaging me to ask if I have thought about x, y, and z thing to add to said document. As you can see, this is super riveting!

I will say, though, that of all the things that I hate in the working world, few things are worse to me (other than outright toxic people who gossip and spread fake rumors) than brown nosers. I hate people who treat executives and their managers like they are God, like their time is so holy and that they need to be thanked over and over for… doing their job. Yesterday, I was on an internal prep call for this customer call today, and a brown noser on my team said to our exec who joined, “Thank you SO, so much for making time to meet with us today. I know your time is truly precious, and we don’t have much of it. So, we will jump right in!”

I thought all of our time was precious? Or is this person’s time just precious because he happens to be in a VP+ position, and he’s your manager’s manager, and therefore you feel the need to kiss ass to him to be “seen” by this person? This is not the first example of brown nosing I’ve seen from this individual, but I really had to deliberately stare hard into the screen to not roll my eyes or just vomit all over my keyboard when she said this.

As I always play back in my head, in the rat race, even if you win, you are still a rat in the end. It stinks to have to be in an environment where people feel like they need to suck up to get ahead, but apparently it works with a lot of people who like to have their egos stroked. And it’s yet another reminder to me how out of place I feel in the corporate world when these things come up because I’ve never really been able to do this and not feel like I had zero integrity. But I suppose that’s what tends to happen: people lose the meaning of “integrity” in the race to get ahead in Corporate America to the point where “integrity” means virtually nothing.

Customer relationships: relationships for life

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I’ve been in a customer-facing role at work for about 14 years now. As with any type of customer work, it can be pretty annoying, painful, and thankless. In my role, I have to get used to the fact that people will not always show appreciation for anything you have done for them, regardless of whether it fits your exact job description or whether you’ve truly gone above and beyond.

However, I do have a handful of customers over the years I’ve held in really high regard and have built really positive, mutually respectful relationships with. A number of us keep in touch via LinkedIn and occasionally still message. A handful actually follow me on Facebook and Instagram. And I have one customer who nearly made me cry about a week ago when I was transitioning off his account and handing them over to a counterpart on my team.

I announced on this call that after 4.5 years of working with these folks that I’d be transitioning off. They were my first customer at my current company since September 2020, and the only customer I’ve had since day 1; that’s 4.5 years of working together and chatting about everything regarding work and life. It was a bit bittersweet to be honest, as I really liked this group of people, but this decision wasn’t in my hands to make.

One of them took some time on the call, with my current colleagues taking over on the Zoom, to explain why it was so hard for them to see me leave. He said that among vendor/partner relationships in his 20-plus-year-long career that I was a rare breed. He never felt like I was trying to sell him or make him buy something he didn’t need. I was always straightforward and shared what I really thought could help them as a business. I was genuine to the core, inside and out, he said, and consistently so. And he could tell I truly cared for him and his team as people. He recounted the time, about three years ago, when his nephew had suddenly died in a tragic motorcycle accident. His nephew was like another son to him, as they were very close, so he took the news quite hard. He was out on bereavement leave, and his colleagues had shared this sad news with me. I immediately reached out to get his address and had some flower arrangements sent to his home to send our company’s condolences. No other colleague or vendor partner had done this, he had shared. “I will never forget you and will always remember how kind, generous, and compassionate you were at the time. You will always, always have my trust,” he said on the call.

To be honest, I had forgotten this had happened. I hadn’t thought about it much at the time, because to me, a gesture like that seems like a no-brainer regardless of whether we had a working relationship or a personal relationship. But when he mentioned it on this call, I was so shocked and caught off guard that I started tearing up that he even remembered this. “Ahhh, this is too much for work!” I exclaimed. I felt so embarrassed, especially with two of my colleagues on the call listening to this and watching our faces.

Work can be shmerk. But it’s in moments like this when I realize the real value of my job, and what I will remember long after I have left said industry and said company, which is, at its core, helping others.

A tragic plane crash and frustrating flight delays

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My flight going back to New York today was originally scheduled for 11:35. Then it became 11:55. Then it went past noon. It changed about every 20-30 minutes once I got into my Uber to get the airport, until finally at around 1pm, they said that we’d actually be departing at 3pm local time. This means I wouldn’t land at JFK until 11pm ET. I was definitely not a happy camper, but it’s not like there was anything I could do to help the situation. I just had my laptop and a bunch of crappy chains to get food from in this terminal.

I was thinking back to a few nights ago when I was at dinner with colleagues, and we were all getting push notifications on our phone about the tragic AA plane and military helicopter crash into Potomac River. People went around the table, saying that they were flying on Delta or United or Southwest. When I said I was flying AA, everyone went silent. It was as though they were holding their breaths for me given that this plane crash was AA, so who knows if my plane would crash, as well….?!

Chris made a good point about this when I shared this anecdote with him. He said that it was dumb people would react this way given that fatal car crashes happen literally every single day in Toyotas and whatever other mainstream car brand there is, yet none of these people would hesitate to get into an Uber ride with any of these cars; they wouldn’t even think about it. So the same logic could be applied to airlines.

Well, I’m still waiting for my very delayed flight. I’m also wondering what the heck I’m supposed to eat for dinner.

Conference time – not enough time to have real conversations

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Our annual sales and success kickoff is the one time a year when a large chunk of my global company is in the same place at the same time. It’s a rare occasion, not just because we are all around the world, but also because a large number of us are 100 percent remote employees such as myself. It ends up being a bit of a stamina show to see how many people you can interact with in the space of two business days. You can’t talk to everyone. You want to chat with people you like and work with for obvious reasons. But you also want to meet with new people who you may have worked with briefly, have heard about, or would like to network with just because you either respect them or think they are interesting. Then, there’s also the idea that you want to network and build relationships with those who are influential at your company or who you could personally benefit from. Honestly, I’m done with number 3, so I really try to focus on 1 and 2.

Day 1 was rough. I barely got to talk to anyone for more than 2-4 minutes without getting interrupted and derailed. Then, I’d move on to the next person, and the same thing would happen. So really, the only time I was able to have a real, proper, in-depth conversation with anyone is if we actually went away from the conference area and did our own thing. We try our best to maximize our in-person time together, but it still feels like we’re all being stretched thin. Then, once the conference is over, you realize that there were 4 or 5 other people who were there, but you never even got to say hi to, much less interact with in any meaningful way at all!

“What dish would you make to impress me?”

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I was at dinner last night with my team. I’ve always been cognizant that on pretty much every team I’ve ever been on at any company, I’m usually one of the rare people of color. On my team now, the people who bring “color” to the team are a Mexican American, a Persian-French Canadian, and myself. One of my colleagues, who had had a bit to drink, brought up that he remembered I’m really into food and like to cook. So he asked me this:

“If you could make one dish from your culture that you think would impress me, what would it be?” He paused and took another swig. “You know how if someone were Spanish, they’d say that they’d make me a paella or if they were Italian, they’d make me handmade pasta. What would the Chinese or Vietnamese equivalent be?”

This was a very strange question for me. I don’t think it’s necessarily a wrong or an offensive question. But the reason this question is strange is that in order to “impress” someone, there needs to be a basis of understanding of what that individual likes (and doesn’t like). Are there foods the person doesn’t eat or has allergies to? For Cantonese food, I’d consider a ginger scallion lobster or crab to be an impressive dish, but that clearly would not impress someone who had a shellfish allergy. Do they prefer meat or carbs or what? If I don’t know what you like or how picky of an eater you are, I’d really have no idea where to start thinking of ideas of what dish I’d make to “impress” you. The only real context with this person I have is that he’s a White male who lives in Texas, he eats a lot of fast food/junk food, and he’s addicted to Coke. What do I propose then — Chinese-style lightly battered fried chicken or Vietnamese cha gio (deep fried spring rolls stuffed with shrimp, mushroom, and pork, wrapped in thin rice paper)? I’m not sure.

I said I’d need to think about it, but I’d need more context. The conversation moved on. But it still just felt weird. It felt like I was being outed as “other,” and being put on the spot for it, and it didn’t feel that great. It was kind of a reminder to me that in Corporate America, I’ll always be a little different, and as such, I’ll never quite “blend in” fully.