Manager, male, 42

(This blog will be back on December 4)

Chief executive, male, 55

Lucy’s answer

From the way you write it sounds as if you think you are carrying the weight of both companies on your shoulders. And if you stumble, so will they.
This is most unlikely to be true but if it is, something has gone badly wrong.
Surely at the company you run you have installed a layer of people below you who are in this with you? And if you haven’t, why not?
It is ominous that you think the answer is to clone yourself: there is a high chance that two of you will be worse than one. Instead, you need to find other capable people who can share the load and perhaps allow you to have the odd night off.
At the same time you need to tell the chairman of the company where you are a non-executive that you are up to your eyeballs and would like to be excused from some of the emergency sub-committees that will be sprouting up everywhere.
You mention your legal and moral responsibilities. The legal responsibilities of an exec and non-exec are identical and I am not sure what you mean about the moral ones – although if you mean the practical responsibilities to your shareholders, staff and customers, they are clearly greater at your own company.
So if you think that by giving time to the non-exec role you are short-changing your own company, you must give it up. You might have thought more about accepting – I have never understood why CEOs want to serve on other boards, as they have plenty of work to do as it is and hardly need the extra cash.
Your problem is timing. Most non-execs are on a short notice period, but you may feel honour bound to stay longer until someone else is found. And then the difficulty may have solved itself: if things are as bad as you say, the company may go under quickly. I only hope you’ve got some good indemnity insurance.

Next time this happens – and I fear there will be a next time – should I accept guilt for what isn’t my fault, or should I lie and say I’m a librarian?

Investment banker, male, 42

Lucy’s Answer

I cannot work out if your question is a genuine inquiry about dinner party etiquette or a howl of pain at the unfairness of life.

If it is the first, the answer is simple. There is absolutely no point in trying to convince arty people that you are anything other than the devil; any attempt will make things worse. The complaint against investment bankers is that you have dragged the world into recession through your greed, stupidity and arrogance, and any attempt to say otherwise will enrage them still more.

To avoid further ugly scenes, next time say you work for the government. Which, depending on your bank, may be partly true. If there is a follow-up question (although there probably won’t be) say you work on the financial side. That will shut them up.

The good news is that if you go to dinner parties as infrequently as I do, things may be less intense next time. People do not obsess over the same things indefinitely, or else going out would be so dull no one would bother. Next time the topic will probably have shifted to Madonna’s divorce, and you will be returned to the status you probably always had: smug, boring, philistine, too rich for your own good and an eccentric choice of husband for your nice, arty wife.

The bigger question is, who is right: you or the outraged artists? The answer is neither. You weren’t personally responsible for what has happened, yet neither are you in a good position to claim the high moral ground. M&A is not the most honourable of callings: mostly it just added to leverage and job losses, so to show a bit of humility might have been seemly.

One other thing I would love to have known: what did your arty wife say to you in the car on the way home?

Lucy’s answer

Being bored at work is painful; being bored as a prelude to being fired is torture.

You ask what the work etiquette is for this situation. You already know the answer: if everyone else is sitting at their desks bored witless, pretending to work, the etiquette demands that you do so too.

What is interesting in your case is that the penalties for ignoring etiquette are lower than normal. This period of boredom will end with the fall of the axe and you will probably be fired, but so, probably, will they. Unless your bank is even less wise than the competition, it will not decide who to keep on the basis of who was best at faking industriousness when there was nothing to do.

So some slacking is safe, but I don’t think you can ignore the political game altogether. In normal times office politics is a part-time sport slotted in around work. But now that there is no work, your colleagues will be doing politics full-time. If I were you I would set out to play this game sparingly but efficiently. Be in the office long enough to find out what people are saying. Otherwise leave your jacket on the back of your chair and make it seem as if you are at meetings. Skive intelligently.

As you hate emptiness, I suggest you write a plan to get through the days. Allocate time for looking busy, time for picking up the gossip and time for your own affairs.

I should warn you of one thing. As you have always worked 14-hour days, you’ll be a skiving virgin, and constitutionally may not be cut out for it. The first salsa lesson on office time, like the first few three-hour lunches, may give you a thrill but after that you may find they start to pall. But then you can always devote yourself to what you really should be doing now: finding a career with better prospects.

Lucy’s answer

Is it fair to demand that she dumps her own friends? No, obviously it isn’t fair, and either is it kind, realistic or sensible. More to the point, it isn’t necessary. If you don’t like her friends, simply arrange your life so that you don’t have to see them. I very much doubt if she wants to spend time with your 40-year-old legal friends much either.

Various readers have written in asking what this personal problem is doing on these pages. As I see it, your problem is not altogether personal, and that’s the trouble with it. You look at your partner’s friends as part of a business continuum, and this makes you nostalgic for those charming soirées with your ex-wife when you would both spend profitable evenings chatting up legal contacts.

If your new relationship must pass the business test you should think coldly about what each of you gives the other. To her, you are presumably a source of financial backing. You may also help by making her seem more grown-up and giving her some bottom, as it were.

For you, she is a source of glamour and gratification to your male ego. Yet I’m not sure how this helps in business terms. Clients may envy your pulling power, but they may find her company as boring as you found her friends. They may also think you are having a mid-life crisis, and if I were hiring a corporate lawyer, I’d prefer mine crisis-free. It would be interesting to know why she wanted you to go to Las Vegas with her. Perhaps it was as simple as that you were paying. Equally, she may have been unsure about you, and saw this as a panel interview with her friends. Alas, it seems you failed.

That means your best bet now is to quit before you are fired and do the sensible thing and go back to your wife – if she will have you.

Chief executive, male, 51

Lucy’s Answer

You must decide if you want to spend management time sorting this out or whether to lavish money on it instead.

In the first case, you need to manage her downfall actively, setting clear performance targets and monitoring her failure to meet them. Then, when you finally fire her, she won’t be able to claim unfair dismissal.

There are three problems with this approach: you will have to put up with her laziness and incompetence for quite a while longer; it will eat up a lot of your time; and – worst – she might well end up suing you anyway on discrimination grounds.

If you are in the UK, the law makes the employer guilty until proven innocent: the onus is on you to prove that you did not discriminate against her. This can be quite tricky, especially if most of your senior people are white males and if you have not insisted on everyone attending diversity awareness courses.

You can risk it, but you need to think not just of the cost but of how bad the newspaper headlines might look.

If I were you I would deal with the problem quietly by throwing money at it now. It does not sound as if she is enjoying the job much at present. It is either making her ill or making her skive, neither of which are good. Her new boss is unsympathetic and possibly sexist and racist and seems to have it in for her. Her team are awful and her number two has just quit.

Call a meeting with her and offer her a fortune to go.

If for some bizarre reason she turns this down there is always the special projects option. Pay her to do a hugely grand-sounding yet utterly peripheral job where she has no one reporting to her. And then tempt the brilliant number two back into the number one slot.

Lucy’s Answer

Your problem has brought on such an outpouring of bile on FT.com that I strongly urge you not to look. According to readers, you are a chilly, go-getting cow in need of therapy. Your husband has toiled hard to keep you in designer frocks and needs your support; you are a sociopath for not providing it.

Maybe I’m a sociopath too, but I don’t see it like that. Wall Street jobs can gobble up a man’s life and soul (assuming there was one there in the first place) leaving him with nothing when the job ceases to be. I can imagine that a hyped-up, absent husband was not ideal, but that an angry, present one is even less so.

Should you pretend to be sympathetic? No, you shouldn’t. Former Masters of the Universe don’t like sympathy, especially if they sense it is false. But neither should you tell him to “suck it up”, as that would be unnecessarily unpleasant.

Instead, I suggest forbearance and patience.

His world has come crumbling down and while you can’t pick it up for him, you can provide continuity by being exactly as before. Don’t make allowances. Don’t patronise him. If he is being horrible to the children, tell him off – and tell them that he doesn’t mean it.

I suggest you make no attempt to manage his time, but manage your own to make the new circumstances easier for you. Take yourself off to the gym, if it gets you away from his sharp tongue for a bit.

As to whether MoUs recover, that depends on their mettle.

You may find that your husband is chastened by the experience of unemployment and becomes someone more to your liking.

More likely he will find another high-pressure job in time, and then you will find him just as hyped up and just as absent as before.

Banker, female, 40

Lucy’s Answer

The answers to your questions are No, No and No. Don’t confront him, as what would you say – “I still hate you, you beastly bully, and I’m telling you right now that your son isn’t invited to any of my son’s parties”? Don’t tell other parents, as you would only sound mad and bitter. And they do not need to be warned against him as he is most unlikely to start bullying stray parents at school functions. Above all, don’t tell your son. He needs to decide which of the other boys he likes without heavy breathing from you.

Comfort yourself with the thought that banking executives have rather a lot on their plates at the moment so are not likely to be taking their sons to school and even less likely to be hanging around the school gates for a gossip. Unless they have just been fired, that is.

Either way, you need to put what happened in the past. He isn’t bullying you any more. You left the company and he got into trouble, so he will want to avoid you even more keenly than you want to avoid him.

You may have to endure the sight of him at parents’ evenings, but there will be lots of other people there for you to duck behind. If you do come face to face with him, give an icy smile, say hello and congratulate yourself on being so dignified.

If the thought of doing that leaves you feeling too sick, you may need a bit of cognitive behaviour therapy to get the requisite distance from the blighter.

There is a danger that his son will become friends with yours, but more likely he will report that the boy is a knobhead. In
that case you can take great pleasure in saying airily that you aren’t surprised: the father is a cad, too.

Lucy’s Answer

As my own desk is a heap of papers, old magazines and dirty cups, I struggle to find my pad at all. I’m struggling even harder to understand how it can matter so much which side of the keyboard yours is on.

So I’ve sought expert advice from a colleague who is dedicated to leaving his pen exactly parallel to his pad at all times. I explained your problem and he looked stricken. “That is not laughably small – it’s terrible,” he said.

He urges you to stick a Post-It note to your pad saying: Please don’t move this pad. I see it might seem funny to you, but I have an obsessive-compulsive condition and so find it upsetting to find my pad in the wrong place. Thank you.

I bow to his wisdom and experience, but this strikes me as a little heavy-handed. If your colleagues are simply engaging in light joshing, they could be so mortified by this note they might start treating you as a leper. But if they are in fact trying to be horrible, your note will please them as it will tell them they are succeeding.

Most readers suggest you respond to a joke with a joke. Variously they urge you to Super Glue the pad to the desk, put petroleum jelly on the pen, write a jokey message under the pad or – most imaginatively – empty the hole punch into their umbrellas.

These pranksters all think the problem will be solved if you show you can take a joke, but I’m not so sure. My colleague has a stronger than average sense of humour - except when the positioning of his pen is at stake.

If I were you I would skip the schoolboy pranks, and do nothing. This does not make you a victim: it means you are rising above it. They only do it for a response, and if they don’t get one they will stop soon enough.

Lucy’s Answer

Unless you want to make a fool of yourself, there is only one thing you can do: nothing. To hunt down your detractors would be hideously embarrassing and would only confirm their dim view of you.

Instead you should try to rub the hurtful remarks from your mind, and stop the pointless agonising over whether you are in the right job. I imagine it is hard enough to keep up morale as a 50-something lecturer – what with the poor pay and the jostling of younger colleagues – without the nasty jibes from students.

Console yourself with the thought that the whole business of teachers being appraised by students is absurd. It is you who is paid to be teaching them and writing reports on them, not vice versa.

In a company there may be some sense in getting underlings to pass judgment on superiors, although most such schemes are badly designed. But to allow students to say what they like anonymously about their teachers strikes me as democracy gone mad.

When I was a student we used to whip each other up into disliking various teachers for mostly stupid reasons. We used to show our dislike of one poor physics teacher by putting crocodile clips on the back of her skirt while she was writing on the board. What your students are doing sounds like a legitimised version of that; you should do what this hapless physics teacher did and simply rise above it.

That doesn’t mean you should ignore all feedback; you should rely on better ways of measuring your worth. Do your students get good marks? Do they appear to be learning anything? Do they listen to your lectures? How many bother to turn up?

These are the things that matter. Whether or not they like you is quite beside the point.