Dear Aunt Acid,

Am I asking too much? Is there a way for me to realign what I want out of a career, even if that means being okay with picking up other people's lunch every day until I die? At what point should I admit that I am not a strong enough writer to make it a career? Or do I just need a thicker skin?

I started working as a writer for reality TV the same week I graduated from my MFA program. For eight hours a day, I sorted through footage of uniformed men and wrote deep-bellied voiceovers full of puns that would make your dad cringe for a show that I will refer to as "Rural Cops."

Let's all just move to the beach.

Even if you’re not afflicted with Must Always Make Everyone Like Me Syndrome (which I definitely suffer from), anyone trying to move forward in their career is going to feel a certain pressure to agreeably take on as much work as they’re capable of doing. The line between “happy to help out” and “being a doormat” is often both fine and blurry.

The job where instead of firing employees she didn’t like, my manager would move their cubicle every three months until they quit.

The job where I knew it was time to go when she moved my cubicle to a spot directly under the air conditioning vent.

The job where my director would look at my lunch and say, “Wow, are you going to eat all of that?”

You know how "the customer is always right"? That phrase takes on a whole new meaning when you get inappropriate questions about your racial and ethnic background in your place of employment.

You don’t have to stick it out indefinitely in an environment where explosive rage is the norm. While you’re there you might as well treat it like bootcamp, where you can learn to inoculate yourself against taking things too personally, but you might also consider following in your former coworkers’ footsteps and developing an exit strategy of your own.

Putting the finishing touches on a scathing satirical novel about this place.

In bookselling, and in no other sphere of my life, I do believe in divine Providence. Bookselling is a petty god, but I am its favorite.

Friendships and work relationships can be a bad combination even when everyone’s on their best behavior—and what you have here is the rare trifecta of romantic relationship + work relationship + third-party friendship, all in the unstable context of a brand-new business. If you were writing to me four months ago, I might not have said “what a terrible idea,” but I’d have advised you to tread very carefully. But now that you’re in the…

Dear Businesslady, I started a job about a year ago at a small, woman-centered non-profit organization. My boss, the executive director ("ED"), is a few years older than me. We're alike in many ways and get along fine, but there seems to be a class/income divide coloring our interactions, and I need help in navigating it. I grew up in a solidly middle-class home where I didn't lack for much but money wasn't something ever…

Dear Businesslady, I work in a small office (like we-don't-have-any-HR-department small). My co-worker, who is my age (30), is an alcoholic. He used to be a really intense one -- like fucking-up-all-the-time, mystery-sick-days, smelling-like-a-distillery, positively-purple-and-about-to-pass-out-in-meetings kind of intense. Then he was sent on a mandatory leave of absence by the management, for detox. He came back sober, but flash forward a year and he's back to drinking at work on the regular. He's not as extreme…

I. TAKE THE MONEY AND RUN When I am driving across the desert at 85 miles per hour just after sunup moving back from Iowa channeling my mother’s father who died on the job trucking liquid nitrogen in three-day stretches around the country I am thinking about how perhaps the most subversive thing a female can do is travel alone. In the past year, during which I have I have lived in five different cities…

Email us questions at advice@the-toast.net, subject line “businesslady.” Previous installments can be found here. Greetings, Toasties! Dear Businesslady has been around for long enough that I’ve accrued a robust backlog of unanswered letters, and a lot of them present issues that seem to have pretty straightforward solutions. Leaving them unpublished feels like a violation of my advice-giver mandate—and it’s starting to make me feel guilty. (You know that thing when an old friend…

Email us questions at advice@the-toast.net, subject line “businesslady.” Previous installments can be found here. Dear Businesslady, I have a situation at work that is stressing me the heck out! I've been an associate at my current firm for about three years now. It's a great place to work and I think I'm fairly good at my job. When I first started, I worked most closely with one of the partners, let's call her…