I recently moved to Grand Cayman to avoid London in a recession. I’m house-sharing with a friend of a friend who is a bit of a Jack-the-lad. I recently came home to find him and my boss going at it on the sofa. My boss has now confided that she has strong feelings for my housemate. The problem, besides feeling like my mum is dating my headteacher, is that my housemate is seeing at least three other women my boss doesn’t know about. As I am very new, I do not feel comfortable discussing the situation with either of them.

Will I be judged by my boss once the truth comes out? Do I risk ruining an otherwise very peaceful (and cheap) house-share to protect my boss?
Consultant, male, 25

Lucy’s answer

In conventional organisations, knowledge is power. If you know something scurrilous about your boss, you have a weapon against her. In less conventional ones, knowledge is dangerous. If you have dirt on your boss, your boss can take you out. I fear your outfit may fall into the second group.

Your problem is not just that you stumbled on your mother embracing the headteacher. That must have been traumatic, but is now in the past. The difficulty is that your mother has chosen to confide in you.

Your boss has now breached all the usual divides between professional and personal life and by treating you like an intimate, she makes you feel you ought to tell her about your lothario flatmate. I beg you not to do this: you would be jeopardising your cheap lodgings and will make her doubly dislike you.

I dare say she dislikes you already: that she has confided in you is almost certainly born of distrust more than trust. You burst in on her doing something dubious and she is trying to neutralise it by involving you. Unless she is a very odd woman indeed, she would not pick the newest hire, and a young man at that, as a confidant on matter of the heart.

To prevent further confidences, you must adopt the role of gauche young Englishman (even if you are not English, this is the best role for you). Next time you must blush and look uncomfortable and give surprised utterances such as “Oh dear me”. This will make these conversations so sticky that she will desist. And when the blow falls on her she will be less likely to take revenge on you.

You could solve the problem by coming back to recession-hit London, where you would be less likely to have such excitements in your life. Though you would also be less likely to have a job.

For eight years I’ve been a loyal and hardworking manager at a small, family-run business. I like and respect my employer. Yesterday I was made redundant. I feared it was coming, as my boss would not meet my eye and I knew someone had to go.

However, I don’t think the company followed the correct legal procedure. I received no warning, no explanation and no right to appeal. I feel wronged and suspect that I was chosen because I am well paid and work part-time. Do I seek legal advice for unfair dismissal, despite how much this will hurt my employer (who I do like and usually do respect)? Or do I rise above the perceived injustice and console myself with the thought that they probably won’t make it through this recession?
Senior manager, female, 34

Lucy’s answer

It sounds as if the real problem is not that you’ve lost your job but that you are very angry about it. It’s quite understandable to be spitting with rage when you’ve given eight years to a company only to be cast out on your ear: I’d be really angry in your shoes, too. But what troubles me is that your anger has a nasty side. You protest how much you like your boss but then say you’ll console yourself with thought of the company going bust.

I think it would be much better to console yourself with the thought that there was nothing personal in this, that these things happen and to concentrate on getting a good reference and finding another job.

I’m not quite sure what you want to happen now. Do you want an apology from your boss and a nicer goodbye? If so, a lawyer is the last thing you need.
Instead, you should talk to this man whom you used to like and respect, and tell him just how you feel (omitting the bit about hoping his company will end up going down the tube).

If what you want is more money, a lawyer may not be able to help much there, either. If the company did not follow the correct procedure – the rules are different for small companies – then you might have a case for unfair dismissal, but unless you can prove discrimination on grounds of sex or race, the size of the payout is going to be tiny. And the process of suing is expensive and exhausting.

The only good reason for seeking legal advice is if you are lying awake at night fretting over what your rights are and a lawyer will be able to tell you. If you consult one, don’t feel bad about your boss: you don’t owe him anything. But you do owe yourself something and for your own sake I’d let it go. Nice endings are better than nasty ones.

I am a newly appointed department head and have been conducting interviews for my deputy. The two leading internal candidates are both capable and ambitious – though there is no love lost between them. I decided to go with the person I feel I will work with best, but unfortunately some idiot in HR has got into a muddle and announced that the other candidate has got the job. This man has just come up to me all smiles to ask when he begins, while the other guy is angry that I did not tell him that he had not got the job. Should I go with the wrong candidate, or try to unscramble the situation, which would risk my credibility, even though the fault was not mine?
Manager, male, 37

Lucy’s answer

Some idiot in HR may have screwed up, but so have you. Instead of e-mailing me you should have gone stomping straight up to the idiot and demanded that he sort it out at once. In these things you have a window of a couple of hours to rectify the problem, but after that it’s too late. The wrong candidate has already opened the champagne and boasted to their friends; to take the job away would be to invite him to bear a lifelong grudge

Now you must concentrate on making the best out of a bad situation.

The first task is to repair the morale of the right candidate. Tell him what a close thing it was. Tell him the announcement was rushed out too early, apologise for not having spoken to him first. Give him a pay rise. Or if there is no money for that, give him a fancy title. Call him associate department head.

Next, you must manage the situation with the wrong candidate. You say that he is good, but that you aren’t sure if you’ll work well together. You may find you get on better than you had thought: it is impossible to know until you try it. The wrong candidate might turn out to be the right one after all.

If he isn’t, then you should get him moved after a decent interval. If your company is large enough to have an out-of-control HR department, it must be large enough to shift people around a bit. Tell HR they must engineer this. After all, they owe you one.

The final thing you must do is what you should have done at once. Give the idiot a rocket. From the wording of your e-mail I have a feeling you have no fondness for the HR department and that this may well be a task you will enjoy.

Three years ago I quit my job as a manager and have thoroughly enjoyed pursuing more meaningful activities (gardening, fishing, writing, etc). Concerned that my elysian existence is not sustainable, I went to see a recruitment agency and explained the whats, whys and wherefores of my past three years. He looked as if I had just been sick over his shoes. I fear any future employer would react similarly. How should I present my current circumstances to best effect at the next interview?

Unemployed, male, 41

Lucy’s answer

Your timing is doubly bad. Not only are you competing with armies of the newly unemployed, who have not spent three years putting maggots on the end of a fishing line, but employers are playing very safe indeed. They will look on your CV with even greater suspicion than usual and worry that your experience is out of date. They will fret that if you got sick of working last time, you might do so again. Above all, they will want to cover their backs by hiring a person who may not be the brightest, but is the safest.

This means you must lie. I’m not suggesting big lies, such as claiming to have held jobs you did not or have qualifications you do not. Instead I suggest extreme spin is in order. Most CVs are built on this, with oafs routinely claiming to have unrivalled leadership skills or a passion for opera, when they like America’s Next Top Model. You must talk as positively as you can about your three years, building up your story to assuage their fears and making clear that you are now all the more committed to 9-to-5 as a result of your rest from it, and that you have kept up with changes in your industry.

However, even with a more plausible CV you are going to have to tolerate a lot of people being sick on your shoes before you strike lucky and land a job – which, if you persevere, you will do eventually, especially if you are not fussy about the job itself.

There are two bits of good news. The first is that the things you like to do are cheap, so you won’t have to earn a lot to support your Arcadian existence on the side.

The better news is that you enjoy not working. Most people think they will love it, but find they hate it. This means you can soften the hard weeks and months you will spend opening rejection letters with some soothing weeding and pruning, enjoying the evenings as they get longer and protecting your soul from destruction.

My boss has instructed me to distribute misleading information to all employees in my name. He is the company president and majority owner and what he says goes. I guess it’s his right to feed the staff balderdash and, while I don’t like it, I can tolerate it. Having it go out with my name attached is what bothers me. I’ve got a dependent wife and two kids, and not enough money in the bank to feel comfortable losing my job over it. What to do?

Manager, male, 38

Lucy’s answer

It depends on what he has asked you to write. Clearly, if it is illegal you must refuse. If it is merely the sort of averagely misleading balderdash that almost every corporate memo is stuffed with, I don’t know why you are making such a fuss. Working life involves doing all sorts of things that are mildly distasteful; if we queried everything that struck us as less than perfectly straight, working life would grind to a halt.

In any case, employees generally don’t bother to read the management drivel that lands in their in-boxes, and when they do they hardly ever take it seriously.

However, I suspect from the tone of your message you have been asked to do something worse than put your name on distorted guff, and to do something you find morally objectionable. In that case you must say something to your boss. I don’t envy you this discussion, as it sounds as if his management style is not strong on listening. However, autocrats are sometimes so surprised when someone dares to stand up to them that they can be shocked into taking note. I know a man who dared to say No to his famously tyrannical boss Robert Maxwell. The tyrant threw a tantrum, but then backed down.

Even if your boss refuses to yield, he cannot fire you on the spot. And if you end up capitulating, all will not have been lost. You will have registered a protest and made it harder for him to redouble his lies next time.

I am, by the way, slightly troubled by your obsession over whose name is on the memo. If you have drafted it or are involved in the implementation of the plan, you are implicated either way. His name, your name: you will be in it together.

I work for a small consultancy and over the past couple of years have fallen in love with someone who is senior to me. We are close friends and socialise quite a lot together. Although I have never said anything, I think she knows how I feel and sometimes I get some really mixed signals from her that may indicate she feels something other than friendship. The rational part of my brain has thought of resigning so that her position is not compromised by the way I feel (which has been remarked on by some of my colleagues). The fantastical side of my brain hopes that if I resigned, I’d then be able to ask her out properly. Any suggestions?
Consultant, male, 28

Lucy’s answer

If you were a suitor in a fairy tale who had been set three tests to prove your love, you would certainly win your prize.

You have loved this princess doggedly for two years. You are so worried about protecting her reputation that you are ready to give up your job in the deepest recession of your lifetime. And your most secret fantasy is not of ravishing her but of simply being able to ask her out.

One doesn’t get much more chivalrous than that.

Alas, this isn’t a fairy tale; it is a common tale of office romance in which the doling out of prizes goes according to harsher rules.

Your colleagues have noticed your devotion and are almost certainly laughing at you behind your back.

What interests me more, though, is her reaction. Most women in offices find the doggy infatuation of male colleagues whom they do not desire irritating at best, and repulsive at worst.

The fact that she is not put off by your attentions and is even prepared to favour you as a friend could mean that she is emotionally warped and gets a thrill out of being loved in vain by underlings.

Or it could mean she is in love with you too.

The only way to find out is to ask her. The good news is that there is absolutely no need to give up your job in order to do this. Half the population (including me, as it happens) meets their husband or wife at work and, as long as she isn’t your direct boss and as long as you don’t behave in a vulgar manner in the office, there is no reason you should not go out together.

The only problem is what will happen if she says No. You will lose your special ambiguous friendship with her, and going to work with a broken heart may make the office a grim place for a while.

Last October I was made redundant and set up a business as a hotel agent working from home. I am finding it pretty soul destroying working alone: some days I find it easy to sit down and “get on with it” but on other days I will think of any excuse not to do so – and will suddenly realise I urgently need to do some laundry. How can I motivate myself during the “off days” and discipline myself to make the most of my time, in order to try to establish and grow my new business? None of my friends or family are remotely interested in business, so I can’t talk to them about it. And I’ve bored my boyfriend with it to such an extent that he’s now history.

Director, female, 42

Lucy’s answer

Workers naturally come in two types: wage slaves and sole traders. I am most decidedly a wage slave, and it sounds as if you are too.

We find working from home hell. As you rightly say, there are two particularly hellish things about it: the loneliness and the lack of structure.

The only way I can cope at home is to treat myself like a five-year-old and play at make-believe offices. First, I always get out of my pyjamas before going into my study. Then I set myself office hours and create a system of targets, with rewards and punishments. When I have written 1,000 words I can do the laundry. When I have made three difficult phone calls I can go shopping.

The artist Magritte took this game further still. He used to put on his pin-striped suit and bowler hat every morning, kiss his wife goodbye and walk around the block a few times before arriving back at home, ready for a productive day at the easel.

If you can find the right structure, working from home can be efficient, as up to 80 per cent of the day in the office is frittered away in meetings.
I know I should be urging you to network to combat the aching loneliness, but the very word fills me with gloom. Instead I suggest having lunch with friends, although this isn’t really the answer if what you want is people around while you work. You could rent office space, but if that is too expensive I suggest either the library (if you like quiet) or a café (if you like noise).

Finally, your ex-boyfriend. As you have discovered, most boyfriends have a finite appetite for stories about being a hotel agent. Find one who is a hotel agent himself and who wants to merge his agency with yours. Hey presto: all problems solved.

The company where I have been a manager for eight years has hit hard times, wages are frozen and heavy job cuts are on the way. A generous voluntary redundancy scheme has been announced and even though I don’t want to leave, and have a wife and children to support, it seems stupid not to apply.

If I am turned down, it will mean my job has been marked essential and I’ll be safe from future mandatory redundancy. If I am accepted, it is surely best to be one of the first out, before the market is flooded by all the other people who have been kicked out compulsorily.

Or am I missing something?

Manager, male, 42

Lucy’s answer

Yes, you are missing something. You are assuming that companies are consistent in deciding who to keep and who to chuck. Just because you get turned down for voluntary redundancy this time does not mean that you will be safe next time. It is perfectly possible to be deemed essential one minute and cast on to the scrap heap the next.

To offer yourself for voluntary redundancy as a tactical move would be madness. You say you don’t want to leave your job, and that you need the money. In that case, the only reason to put yourself forward would be if the pay-off were so large that it would more than cover you while you found another job.

But I can’t see how this could be. If you have been in the job for eight years you will probably get about a year’s money.

It could easily take you that long to find something else good. Most companies are barely hiring at all, so unless you want to work in the public sector you may have a long wait ahead of you.

I know two people of roughly your age who took voluntary redundancy a little over a year ago. Neither has found a full-time job and both are trying to keep busy with a bit of consulting here and there.

I also think it is a mistake to assume that you are bound to lose your job at some point. Unless the company is going to go bankrupt, some people will survive; I’d concentrate on making sure that I was one of them. That means keeping your head down and trying to look essential. This is quite tedious, as it not only involves working hard but being seen to work hard.

It may be grim busting a gut to look so keen but it is not as grim as touting your CV around companies that don’t want to know.

I have just applied to a leading business school,and have been called for interview. But instead of feeling excited, I’m getting cold feet. If I get a place I would have to leave my current job in a professional services firm, and would pay up the whacking £45,000 for a year­-and-­a-­half’s teaching.

However, thanks to the recession, there is no guarantee of a job at the end of it, and in taking up the position I would be losing a safe (if somewhat dead­-end) job. Is this one of the worst returns on investment going? Or is it worth it for what I would learn, for the long­-term career boost and for the hope that the economy will be looking better when I graduate?

Professional, female, 31

Lucy’s answer

Yes, it’s a terrible investment: if you get out your calculator and run one of those discounted cash flow calculations that MBAs favour, you’ll find it hard to come up with a positive number. Many people leaving business school now are not only failing to change career, they are crawling back to their old jobs with their old employers.

The odd thing is that MBAs still claim the experience was worth it. If you read the replies below you will see every single MBA is breathless with admiration: how stretching, how great the contacts, etc.

I find this a bit suspicious. I can think of no other form of education that inspires such fervent devotion from its graduates. Is it that, having parted with so much money, they are obliged to say it was good? More likely it is that being cooped up for 18 months with clever, like-minded thrusters means they all reinforce the others’ belief in the value of the qualification.

Lots of readers suggest you keep your job and do the degree part-time. This may be the most sensible way out, but I can’t sincerely recommend this as I once tried to do an evening MA in economics while working full time, and it was far too much like hard work.

Perhaps you are made of sterner stuff. But if you aren’t, there is another thing to make your cold feet colder: the value of the MBA may be changing. I fancy that the new fashion in business is to rate common sense and experience more highly than Swot analysis. So stay put and bide your time. If you are bored, try evening classes. I’ve always wanted to learn upholstery, and courses near me start at £130.

I run a specialist subsidiary of a large bank. The bank has got into serious difficulty and although my business remains highly profitable, I have been sent a cost-cutting edict from head office and may have to fire competent people whom I can still profitably employ. This will cause them financial hardship, while the former top management of the bank, who got us into this mess, walked away with millions. I find this so hard to stomach I am tempted to refuse to carry out orders. Would this be pointlessly quixotic – as I risk getting fired along with the people I am trying to protect – or would it be a comfort to know that at least I had tried to do the right thing?
Manager, male, 50

Lucy’s answer

Refusing to carry out orders would not only be pointlessly quixotic, it would be downright stupid. You would get fired, and so would all the people you are trying to protect. I very much doubt if the glory of moral victory would last more than five minutes in the teeth of practical defeat. Failure in his quests made Don Quixote so melancholy that in the end he abandoned chivalrous deeds altogether.

But that does not mean you should follow orders unquestioningly, or at least not at once. Instead, you should be invisibly obstructive and drag your feet. Let others make their swingeing cuts first in the hope that they will deflect attention from you.

Meanwhile, you should go on the offensive and explain to anyone who will listen that your department is profitable, and that your team is earning the salaries and supplying extra to fund your bosses’ bonuses. Back up your arguments with numbers, with Powerpoints, with anything to hand.

It is possible that your bank has taken the decision to cut costs across the board because it does not know what it is doing. In that case it might be grateful for a little guidance. More likely, however, it will not go back on the decision, because it may see dogmatism as a virtue. In which case you will have tried and failed, but you won’t lose your job as a result and you may allow yourself to salve your conscience a bit before doing the necessary and firing some of your team.

If I were you, though, I’d stop fretting about the huge bonuses paid to former managers. That is in the past and whipping yourself into a state of moral indignation does not help your team and does not buy you a place in heaven.