From work to home: how to avoid blowing up in anger

I am not good at confrontation. I avoid it at all costs.

In my home life this has been manageable for the most part. Not that I haven't let lose in front of the kids during their lives, but when people want to work together and respect each other, they learn tricks to make that work (I will revisit this topic later).

However, how do you manage that if you work outside the home? What if your boss is pushing you. How do you respond?

I find this a challenge. For good or bad, my boss has mostly done this using email (perhaps because I diffuse the situation when she is in the office?). The benefit of an email is that I can choose to respond, or to avoid responding.

The last time this occurred I declined to answer via email, because I felt it was not the place to have that type of discussion. Plus I was really upset.  Seriously. And when we both came into the office we had a good talk, albeit stiff, and then we seemed to go on even better than before.

However, I had one of those emails again today.  It has been about 6 months. This was asks me about something that was not done when she wanted it done.

I was stunned when I read it. Unfortunately I read it when I got home from work. I only logged on to work email to get someone's email address.  Darn. Because it threw me over the edge and I admit I even browsed local job postings.


Should I have responded with my actual answer? Which was that the first delay was because you forgot to include me in the email, and when you finally sent it to me (14 days later), it was on my to-do list and as I work for her 10 other employees, I have to set things up in order of importance.

Boy am I pissed. Its taking everything not to rant and swear here.

So as you can imagine, I could use some tips to learn to avoid blowing up in anger, so that I can keep my job, lol.  Help!

Just a note: My stress was for naught. I didn't respond, and after the weekend this not a worry. I addressed it in my own time and my supervisor didn't even sweat this. See what we do to ourselves? I don't know about you, but I've got to let things go a little more and not jump to conclusions! :-)

Gifts for Coworkers

It's getting to be holiday time, and for some reason, we seem to have more birthdays in our office as well.  What do you do about birthday gifts for your co-workers?

Do you give any?

Birthday Ideas on Parents.com

I would love to hear your take on this.

As I have worked in an office, I find that it can be quite expensive to recognize birthdays. Some people have found a solution by giving a card along with a $1 scratch off lottery ticket. Cards used to be expensive, and happily they aren't any more.  There's no excuse for not having a few in your desk (see this).  At my local Dollar Store you can buy nice cards (funny, too!) for two for $1 (yes, one DAHLLLER). So at the very least a card is nice.

But how do you decide who is going to get a present?  There is one woman in my office who gets lots of gifts, from lots of people in the whole building, and she doesn't do anything special.  Honestly, I always feel like buying her gifts, too, lol. She's someone whom I always want to take under my wing and encourage, and I have a feeling that's what happens to other people as well.  Weird. Not sure how she makes that magic happen, but I love her!  She's like my crazy sister.

On the other hand, some people keep to themselves and no one even knows when their birthdays are.

We took care of this in our office by making an office phone number contact list (just for our division) that also has our birthday month and day on it. So each month we can wish each other happy birthday. I take the dates off the list on the first of each month and send out an email to our whole team, reminding them of the birthdays. I love this because I end up talking to some people with whom I might never exchange words.

So what do you do about birthdays in your office? Any tips or advice?

AmericanGreetings.com