My mom, Barbara Green, died two years ago this week. I wrote this for her. It is not about work. (Also, I saw some confusion about this below — it is not a reprint, but a new piece!)

My mother scheduled her death for 10 a.m. on a Wednesday.

Two years earlier, she had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer — metastatic, we learned one horrible afternoon at Johns Hopkins, which meant surgery wasn’t an option, which meant terminal. When it comes to timelines for when you’ll die, doctors don’t like to commit to specifics but after she pressed them, they guessed she had eight to eleven months.

My mom was not afraid to die, but she was deeply afraid of suffering. And pancreatic cancer is not an easy death.

So very early on she began telling my sister and me: Switzerland. When the pain got too bad, she said, we would fly to Switzerland, where medically assisted dying is legal, and we would sit with her as she peacefully ended her life. There was no question for her that this is what she would do; I didn’t see her waver even once. In fact, not only did she not waver, but knowing she had a way to prevent the worst of the disease was what let her make peace with the diagnosis.

My mom had always lived life on her own terms, so it wasn’t surprising to anyone who knew her that she was determined to die on her own terms too. From the time my sister and I were very young, she always taught us that you should think for yourself and choose a life path without concern for what other people thought, as long as you felt your choices were ethical ones.

She also taught us that when something is wrong in the world, you speak up about it. Throughout my childhood, she was always writing letters to the editor to our local paper and to legislators, or even just to the phone company to take issue with a charge she felt was an error. She brought that same ethos to the rights that she wanted in death: she lobbied elected officials to legalize medically assisted dying in our home state of Virginia, testified at state hearings, and talked to multiple reporters about her battle to die with dignity. She also talked with every doctor and nurse she came into contact with about medical aid in dying for the terminally ill; she wanted to know where they stood on it, and she wanted to try to persuade them to support it if they didn’t. Many of her doctors were visibly uneasy with the topic, while the nurses — who generally had more hands-on experience caring for the dying — already all supported it, every last one of them.

She also talked about it to me, my sister, and my two nieces constantly. I must have heard “Alison, you have to accept that I’m going to die” at least weekly. My mom saw those frequent reminders — very frequent — as an act of love, something she did to make sure we were prepared.

After multiple rounds of chemotherapy, she ended up getting more time than we had been told to expect. A year went by, then a second Thanksgiving, when we had thought we might have none, and she was still here. We knew the reprieve was temporary, but no one knew how temporary. But then, in June of 2024, she started having abdominal pain that no drugs could ease.

She could see what was coming and by that time, the Switzerland plan had morphed into Washington, D.C. instead. She and I both lived in northern Virginia, about 15 minutes from D.C., where medical aid in dying is legal, and she decided to establish residency there so she could use it.

If you’re thinking that moving is awful under the best of circumstances and must be particularly nightmarish when you’re sick and exhausted … yes. It made my mom angry, too — angry that she had to leave the place she’d lived in for decades just so she could have the right to die peacefully instead of spending weeks or months in agony.

But she did it. She found an apartment and met all the other requirements of the law, and after getting multiple physicians to attest that she had less than six months to live, and multiple appointments to confirm she was mentally capable and not being coerced into the decision, a doctor wrote her a prescription for a drug that would, at the time of her choosing, kill her.

Once she had the prescription in hand, her relief was palpable. Knowing she wouldn’t need to suffer brought her an enormous amount of comfort.

The abdominal pain kept worsening and she started spending part of every day in pain. In late September, she told us she was ready. In fact, she said she had waited a week too long — she hadn’t meant to let the pain get to that point, but it’s hard to know until you’re already in the middle of the thing you wanted to avoid.

* * *

My mom, who excelled at the practical aspects of caretaking, was never super comfortable with the mushier side of mothering. Throughout my life, when there were deeply emotional things to be said, she would sometimes communicate them through other people’s words. A few months after her terminal diagnosis, she sent my sister and me a Donna Ashworth poem titled “The Loss of a Mother”: “She built all of her love into you / cell by cell / thought by thought / lesson by lesson … mothers cannot leave / they are in you / look inside / she’s there.”

And so the day before the date she had picked to die, she told my sister and me to sit with her while she played us A Bad Goodbye by Clint Black (“I’m still bound to leave you, I surely don’t know how, my heart won’t let me put you through what my mind says should happen now”). Earlier that morning, she had been blasting Don McLean’s American Pie: “This will be the day that I die.” (“It was particularly badass,” my sister said afterwards.)

Later that day, though, she used her own words: “It’s really hard to leave your kids,” she told me, her voice breaking.

I can’t describe what it’s like going to sleep knowing that the next morning you’ll be accompanying your mom to her death.

“You are my favorite person,” I told her that night. “All the best parts of me come from you.”

The next morning at 10 a.m., my mother hugged my sister and me for the last time and told us she loved us. We got into bed with her, and the death doula who she’d hired handed her a cup of the medicine that would kill her. She did not hesitate for even a moment; before I could process that it was happening, she had drunk it down. The doula gave her a small dish of lemon sorbet to take the bitter taste out of her mouth, and then we held her hands and waited.

Within a few minutes, she told us, “I’m starting to feel something” and closed her eyes. That was the last time she spoke.

Over the next several minutes, she squeezed our hands repeatedly: this is okay.

No more than 15 minutes later, she stopped breathing and was gone.

It was extraordinarily peaceful — exactly the death I’d think anyone would want if they had the choice. It’s the death I would want if I could choose.

When I think about how differently her final months would have gone if she didn’t have the right to make her own medical choices, I’m so angry that she could have been forced to suffer. She had terminal cancer; it was always going to end with her dying, no matter what anyone did. Whose interests would have been served by forcing her to linger in pain for a few extra months?

She viewed her ability to minimize her own suffering as a great gift, one that brought her immense comfort, and so it brought us comfort too.

I hate that she is gone, but I love that she got to die exactly the way she lived: saying, “This is not right, and I’m going to work to change it” and making her own decisions right up until the end.

In honor of my mom’s memory, I hope you will push your legislators to give terminally ill adults legal access to medical aid in dying, no matter where they live.

The post my mom appeared first on Ask a Manager.

Earlier this summer, we talked about times you should have stopped reading something … but didn’t. Here are 15 of my favorite stories you shared.

1. The bulletin board

One time, legitimately poking around a server trying to find something I was legitimately entitled to read, I found a spreadsheet with everyone’s salaries. No password or anything.

I looked. And what I saw was sufficiently eye-opening that I waited until I had the office to myself and printed it and pinned on the bulletin board. Management were super mad and went on a hunt to find the perpetrator, even proposing that there should be 100% camera coverage in the office precisely to catch anyone doing this again.

2. The set-up

I read something I wasn’t supposed to, and it was a set-up! Staff knew that legal needed to be involved in a meeting but team members were explicitly told not to include any attorneys. A staffer intentionally printed the meeting agenda to the printer in the attorney hallway, hoping someone would see it on the printer and get curious. I saw it, I read it, and I invited myself to the meeting, much to the executive’s chagrin and the staff’s relief.

3. The sex transcription

I used to review medical transcription and dictations for chart accuracy. One of our married, beloved, most charming doctors was having a very salacious affair with one of the nurses and nobody knew. Then he forgot to shut off his dictation when she paid him a closed-door sexy visit. The software we used was surprisingly cutting edge for the time and even now with AI and would transcribe everything even “thumping noise” and “gasping.”

I took it to my supervisor and never heard about it again. Last and only sexy transcription I got to read.

4. The Copilot incident

At one point, Copilot was able to read and reference all non-private documents on our intranet, including Teams meeting notes, sharepoint documents, etc. I was looking for an HR policy doc and couldn’t remember where it was saved, so I asked Copilot to find it.

It came back with a detailed summary of a fairly high-level manager’s challenges following this policy (which was about fostering a non-toxic workplace). It turns out that person’s manager hadn’t locked down access to the folder where they were keeping their investigation notes. It was stored in a place that wouldn’t have normally been findable if you didn’t know what you were looking for, but if you did find it, there was nothing blocking access for me (or Copilot).

I never fessed up to what I saw, but I did mention to HR that they may want to up their training on protecting private info in the age of Copilot, and that we may want to train Copilot to not necessarily do a deep dive into individual’s One Drives if it wasn’t asked to do so. I think they listened, because now it’ll search my own One Drive and folders shared with me, but I haven’t gotten a response from a public folder that hasn’t been explicitly shared with me in a while.

5. The Word doc

Not me, but former colleagues of mine in a different department. Some colleagues who hated my terrible ex-boss kept me updated on her antics for the 2.5 years between when she laid me off and when she herself was fired. She had managed to replace everyone in my former department with her incompetent and vicious minions, who were making said colleagues’ jobs harder. Exboss decided to foster this toxic atmosphere by creating a Word document that they used in lieu of an internal chat program that she and her minions could use to trash talk everyone else at the organization. I guess the thinking was it would be more hidden from IT? The problem was … the Word document was on the department’s Public folder — meaning anyone in the org with access to the server could access the document … including my disgruntled colleagues.

Said colleagues used said Word document to stay one step ahead of Exboss in her machinations to make the “collaborative” work her department did with their department more difficult. They eventually brought the document to the attention of the head of the organization, although it is unclear how much that document played a part in Exboss’s eventual firing (she was already on thin ice at the time as it was for being generally bad at her job, and all the document did was show she wasn’t professional in her relationships with others).

6. The Zoom transcript

I had a Zoom interview with a panel including the HR person. After the interview, I noticed I had a missed call and a message from that same office. I was surprised to have heard back so fast, and I regretted that I had missed the call.

The message was L O N G. When I played it back, it was a voice message taken IN the meeting held directly after my interview to discuss me. The whole thing. All of it was accidentally recorded by their HR person. I did get the job, they were terrible, but that is another story.

7. The hiring notes

When I became department chair, I had access to my own hiring folder — and I could not resist. I am ashamed but yeah I looked in it. Nothing much of interest except this one thing. I was asked during the meeting with the department if I planned to have more children (I had a two-year-old son at the time). It was before there were clear rules about this — gender discrimination was barely illegal and still the norm. I was offended but couldn’t BE offended or tell the senior person that is was inappropriate so I said, “Well, that is between me and my husband and God.” Turns out one key person who voted to hire me did so because of my “deep religious faith.”

8. The personal inventories

We had a weird online file management system back in the early 90s. I was looking for something that had been created before I worked there, and none of the files had very useful names, so I ended up poking around quite a bit until I stumbled upon my manager’s personal household inventory. Literally a list of every box in her attic and very detailed lists of what it contained (like, not “summer clothes,” but “red Calvin Klein v-neck dress bought for conference in NYC in 1985”). Nothing embarrassing but fascinating. And when I found similarly named files, I couldn’t help looking. Again, nothing anyone would be embarrassed about, just an odd peek behind the curtain of someone else’s life.

What I didn’t realize about our weird file management system was that when you opened it, the last few files opened by ANYONE showed up at the top of the list. So the next day my manager was confused to find all of her personal inventory files right there at the top of the “recently accessed” list.

9. The software demo

An accounting software rep gave a demo of our new system at our all-staff meeting using live salary data, names and all. I could see the finance director’s creeping horror when he realized what was happening.

10. The resolutions

A few jobs ago, I worked for a boss who was a doofus and also just an asshole. Think Michael Scott but also an arrogant asshole who blamed others for his mistakes. (I couldn’t watch The Office and still can’t.) Anyway, I was dropping off a note on my boss’ chair to let him know I would be out the next day (he forgot about emails and verbal reminders and I guess it didn’t occur to him that he could check people’s calendars?). As I bent down slightly to put the note on his chair, I saw a small notepad on his desk with a list that went something like this:

Things I will do for our relationship:
-I will not go to the bar alone
-I will not go salsa dancing alone

The list had two or three other items that I’ve forgotten, but the “I will not go salsa dancing alone” is burned in my brain.

11. The File

I used to work at a large state agency. Management was about as transparent as a brick wall, and this was especially true when it came to promotions and new hires – hiring managers had to provide written justification for why any given interviewee was or was not selected, then several layers of management had to approve those decisions, HR had to run recommended candidates against Civil Service requirements to make sure they were actually eligible for the job, and only after clearing those hurdles would HR approve a hire, which was then communicated (slowly) back down those several layers of management to the hiring manager, the candidate, and other staff.

We could go months between interviews and an announcement that so-and-so would be starting in the role in two weeks… unless you knew about The File. The File was an unlocked Excel sheet that belonged to HR, buried deep in the agency network that showed, for those who knew where to find it, everyone who responded to the job posting, who was interviewed, who was selected for the position (and any backups), and the hiring manager’s justification for selecting or not selecting each candidate that was interviewed. For the small group of us that knew how to find The File, we had the satisfaction of knowing who got a job weeks before it was announced, as well as insider info as to management’s opinions on anyone who interviewed for a promotion and you better believe we checked The File regularly every time our office had an open position or big shots were gunning for promotions at HQ.

I left that job two years ago and as far as I know, The File is still in use and HR is still completely unaware that it’s unlocked.

12. The stolen glory

I live in an area where a major disaster, one that you are aware of, and received national and international news coverage, occurred a few years ago. Let’s say it was the Hindenburg disaster. Unsurprisingly, it had a big impact on people who were local. It was scary and it was sad.

Maybe three or four years after, I was working on a project led by one of our VPs. On a day when he was out of office, he asked me if I could go to his office and locate a specific report we needed to reference. While looking for the report in a stack of papers, I saw a piece of paper and “Hindenburg” jumped out at me. Reader, I read it. It was a first-person essay, with some notes about where he might submit it for publication (the New Yorker, the Paris Review — he was aiming high) about his own experiences on the day of the “Hindenburg disaster,” and how he just happened to be in a nearby field, and felt the heat of the flames, how he did his best to help emergency responders, how he didn’t know what he would say when he arrived home that night and his children asked him why he smelled like smoke, and so on. The whole tone was “I don’t consider myself a hero, but … ” I had no doubt he was the writer, because the essay included lines such as “as the vice president of operations for a teapot company, I did not have any prior experience with German zeppelins, but I turned out to be a quick study.”

That man was sitting in the conference room watching local news coverage, like everyone else in our office, on that day. He was not in a field, he did not feel the heat of the flames, and so forth. He was not in any way dirigible-adjacent. I have thought about this essay every time I have interacted with him since.

13. The employee satisfaction survey

I work in IT so I have seen A LOT of things. The one that stands out though, has nothing to do with my role. A few years ago, we had an “anonymous” employee satisfaction survey from HR. Instead of sending the aggregate results, they sent out the responses. They attempted to unsend but at the time, if someone had opened it, it couldn’t be pulled back. So the entire document was still forwarded by anyone who had seen it to anyone who hadn’t. Some people really let loose in the supposedly anonymous survey, naming names and acts that had only been rumors. It was obvious many people didn’t understand that there is no such thing as anonymous at work and even if there was, they had put so many identifying details, they might as well have written their names in neon. There was a huge uproar for a few weeks and then everything settled back down. Nothing was done about any of the complaints, no one was reprimanded and HR has not sent out an employee satisfaction survey since.

14. The scathing exit

There was a hilarious, very long and articulate scorched earth “I Quit and You All Suck!” document that a departed employee saved in PCDocs, or whatever the DMS was at the time. No one ever deleted it, and once in a while I’d go have a look at it just for giggles. Of course in a DMS, every access to a document was logged – which showed that LOTS of people also checked it out occasionally. Shine on you crazy diamond!

15. The disclosure

At my first corporate job, I walked up to the printer one day to grab my file and found that someone had printed off an Excel file showing the salaries of every single employee, including the C suite. I took it to my boss to ask her what to do, and she said “Let’s snoop!” and took it from me. And BOY, did we snoop. Found out later that someone was fired from HR and sent that file to multiple printers on his way out to cause chaos. I used the data to show I was underpaid and multiple other folks did too, so I suppose the HR guy did us all a favor with his tantrum.

The post the salsa dancing resolution, the salary disclosure, and other times you should have stopped reading but didn’t appeared first on Ask a Manager.

Earlier this year, one of the smartest internet rights people around, Heather Burns, suggested the “Darnella Test” regarding any kind of “kid safety” rule online. It’s named after Darnella Frazier. You might not recognize her name, but you’ve seen her work. She was the 17-year-old who was walking to the corner shop when she happened to see Derek Chauvin kneeling on George Floyd’s neck, in the process of murdering him. She got out her phone and filmed it, enabling the world to see that the initial statement from the Minneapolis police — the one headlined “Man Dies After Medical Incident During Police Interaction” — was bullshit.

She won a Pulitzer Prize for the video.

But she was a teen. On social media. So Burns came up with the Darnella test, to explore whether any particular internet regulation would have prevented Darnella from documenting the murder of George Floyd:

For any young person who is just going to be walking along the street for a snack and ends up witnessing something that nobody should ever see because it should not be happening. For that young person whose only recourse, at that moment in time, is to document and report.

And as that future Darnella pulls out their phone to document the event:

1. Would they be allowed to have that phone, at all, under xyz regulation?
2. Would they be allowed to have that social media account, at all, under xyz regulation?
3. Would they be allowed to upload video, or livestream content, under xyz regulation?
4. Would the video, because of their age-verified account information, be instantly flagged and/or taken down for violent content?
5. Would the video, as urgent journalistic content in the public interest, be suppressed and censored based not on the content within it but on the age of the person who filmed it?

That’s your Darnella test. Run through it as if your life depends on it. Because it just might.

Thankfully, unlike the various outright bans of social media for teens, the newly announced Meta settlement with most state AGs does not actually ban kids from social media. But that doesn’t mean it passes the Darnella test. At the very least, the settlement will make it much harder for the next Darnella to document and distribute things that need to be documented and distributed.

Let’s start by running the settlement’s terms through the Darnella Test, question by question, to see what a future Darnella would actually be able to do. Especially since the goal of the settlement is that it become the industry norm across all of social media.

The first question doesn’t really apply here, since it has nothing to do with kids having phones directly, so that passes the Darnella test.

You could argue that the second question regarding whether or not the next Darnella would have a social media account also passes, since nothing in the settlement officially bars teens from having an account. But it certainly could impact them indirectly. The age assurance requirements make signing up more of a hassle, so the next Darnella might not bother creating an account at all. And if she does, that verification is precisely what marks her account as a teen account — which is what triggers everything that follows.

We can lump the next three questions together, because they’re all about the content itself. And here is where it seems clear that the settlement agreement fails the Darnella test. The “age-appropriate content restrictions” and the “content restrictions” for teen users would almost certainly create real problems for a teenager documenting a murder like George Floyd’s. A video of a police officer kneeling on a man’s neck until he stops moving is graphic violence by any classifier’s reckoning — and the entire point of a verified teen account is that graphic violence doesn’t stay on it.

And on that last item in the test — whether or not “urgent journalistic content in the public interest” would be suppressed — there are serious problems, even if the video somehow slipped past the content restrictions. The settlement imposes a default two-hour daily time limit on teen accounts — which means the answer might depend on how much time the next Darnella had already burned scrolling before she happened to walk past a murder in progress. Considering that George Floyd was murdered in the evening (around 8:30pm) there’s a good chance a teen user would have already used up their allotted time.

Yes, it’s possible that the next Darnella might have more time due to a parent or guardian bypassing the two hour restriction, but we don’t know that ahead of time. And a teenager watching a man die on the pavement in front of her does not have time to go find a parent and ask them to unlock the app.

Also, crime — and other things worth documenting — doesn’t happen only during your waking hours. The settlement includes “night mode” restrictions that say that teens will not be able to post content between midnight and 6am. If Darnella happened to witness Floyd’s murder past midnight, she might be out of luck. Or, at least, the police would have extra hours to lock in their false narrative.

And this is the problem with so much of the discourse regarding child safety online. It starts from the position that the internet is inherently unsafe for kids, and that the only remaining question is how thoroughly to block them from it.

But reality is more complicated than that. A kid with a phone and a social media account might also be the only thing standing between the official story and the actual truth. A teenager may be the one livestreaming a school shooting from a locked classroom. Or be a bystander filming ICE violating the rights of people across America. They might be the person documenting police violently attacking protestors.

Yet, under a framework built around “protecting teens from the dangerous internet,” such things will face multiple hurdles. A verified minor uploading graphic, unmoderated content in real time will violate all sorts of rules.

Run the actual Darnella video of Derek Chauvin kneeling on George Floyd against the “industry wide” standard Meta just paid $17 billion to create. It doesn’t pass. It’s graphic violence, filmed by a verified teen account late in the evening, perhaps after she’s used up all her allotted time. If it were after midnight she’d be barred entirely from posting. The next Darnella video might not exist. But at least 52 Attorneys General get to pretend they “protected kids.”

Click here to go see the bonus panel!

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And look where he put the anus. I mean it's right in the middle of the action. This guy is brilliant!