coworker saw me nude in a bathroom stall, former bosses keep checking my LinkedIn, and more

It’s five answers to five questions. Here we go…

1. My coworker saw me nude in a bathroom stall

I bike to work in a very hot, humid climate. I use a handicap stall to change into my work clothes and do a quick baby wipe bath when I arrive.

Today, a woman from another department, who I see regularly but have never spoken to, came up to the stall and put her eye up to the door gap to check if it was occupied. I was sitting on the toilet, nude. We made eye contact. She moved to another stall without ever touching the handle. I want to die! In the future, I’ll drape a shirt or something over the top of the stall so that it’s obviously occupied, but do I need to address this in any way?

I’m sorry but WTF? Who puts their eye to the gap in a toilet stall to see if it’s occupied? You knock or you ask out loud or you look to see if there are feet visible. You don’t look inside the stall, where by definition if someone is there you are highly likely to see them with their pants down. Your coworker is an absolute loon.

(That said, I would also avoid spending too much time in a work stall nude. Change your clothes, then do whatever else must be done in there. But this is 100% on her and 0% on you.)

In any case, you do not need to address this in any way. You could certainly have said in the moment, “Whoa, please knock on stalls rather than looking inside them!” And if you want to, you could say something like that now. But assuming you prefer not to ever speak of it again, you can just move on and know that she’s out of her gourd.

2. Should I expect my manager to help me move out of a dead-end job?

I work for a large, bureaucratic nonprofit, in a decently paid but boring admin role. For more than four years, I’ve been applying for other jobs, both internal and external, some at a lower rate of pay. In that time, I’ve had 11 unsuccessful interviews from probably around 100 applications. I’ve spent my own time and/or money on resume, interview, and career coaches, training courses, and voluntary work. The feedback from my most recent interviews has simply been along the lines of, “Another candidate had more relevant experience.” Yet when I ask my manager for more challenging work which would give me relevant experience, I’m told admin staff aren’t allowed to do this.

I often wake up at night thinking about how I’m wasting my life and dread seeing my family for fear of being asked, “How’s work?” and feeling like a complete failure for getting paid to do what feels like virtually nothing.

My colleagues seem happy to coast towards retirement doing as little as possible, which makes me feel isolated and alienated.

Am I expecting too much of my employer to provide me with career progression opportunities?

Well … maybe. They’ve hired you to do a specific job that they need done. If it would be possible for you to grow into other roles there, it’s often in an employer’s best interests to help you do that if you want to — because it’s a way of keeping good employees longer-term. But there are jobs without a realistic path for a particular person in a particular role to move up, and it’s not the employer’s responsibility to try to create a path that doesn’t naturally exist. In some cases they might be so highly motivated to keep a specific person that they look for ways to do it anyway, but more often that won’t happen. In those cases, their obligation is to just be straightforward with you about that reality — that this is the job they need done and that this role doesn’t have pathways for growth (and that if you want to take on new things, you’d need to leave the company to do that). It sounds like that’s what your manager is saying to you, rightly or wrongly (and it may well be rightly).

That said, if you see a specific project that you think would benefit your employer that doesn’t fall to anyone else naturally right now (or that falls to someone who’s unlikely to ever have the time to do it), you could propose taking that on. But it might be a matter of needing to spot those for yourself rather than expecting your manager to think them up.

3. My former bosses keep checking my LinkedIn

I was previously an associate attorney with a firm called, let’s say, Dragon & Stone in a fairly specific practice group. The group had two partner ranked co-chairs, Stannis and Renly. At the start of 2026, Renly joined a new firm, Stormlands & Stormlands, and took his book of cases with him (about half my billable work). Stannis asked me to stay at Dragon & Stone, but never replaced the work I used to get from Renly or reassigned my practice group to fill the gap. In May, I was laid off (no reason was given, but my billing was awful at that point so it made sense). The writing was on the wall for me, so I am doing fine.

After my severance ran out, about once a week someone from Dragon & Stone or Stormlands & Stormlands has checked my LinkedIn. They send no messages, but LinkedIn gives me an update any time either of them checks. I upgraded my LinkedIn to find out who is checking, and LinkedIn just notes it is usually “staff” or “attorney” at Dragon & Stone, and “attorney” at Stormlands & Stormlands. Stormlands & Stormlands sometimes sends a paralegal I am connected to to check, and Dragon & Stone last sent an associate I know to check.

Why?!? It is annoying and against my “agreement” with Dragon & Stone’s HR (quiet mutual breakup with no challenge to my benefits). Both Stannis and Renly have my personal cell and can call or text me whenever they want. Neither firm has actually reached out in any way, they just check my LinkedIn.

I would prefer both firms to stop, but I am kind of curious why attorneys at two firms keep monitoring a former lawyer’s LinkedIn.

You definitely shouldn’t ask them to stop — that would come across very oddly (although I realize you’re not necessarily proposing that). More importantly, I would stop paying any attention to it! LinkedIn’s notification for this kind of thing isn’t 100% accurate, and there are other things that could be causing it too — like someone’s browser retained that URL and so now every time they type in “linkedin,” it’s your profile URL that gets auto-filled. Or who knows, maybe they keep checking because they’re hoping you’ve found a new job, which could be good will and/or guilt about laying you off. There’s no knowing what’s causing it, but there’s also no reason you need to devote any energy to thinking about it or caring!

I don’t see how it could really be against your agreement with them; nothing about this is a challenge to your benefits.

If the only reason you upgraded your LinkedIn is to monitor this, you’d be better off downgrading it again so you can pay less attention to it.

4. Should I include HOA experience on my resume?

I’m searching for a new job, and many of the roles I’m interested in request management experience. In my current role, I’ve had occasional projects in which I took the lead. But I’m not sure it’s adequate, based on the low responses I’m getting.

I live in a building made up of ~40 condos, and I have been president of the homeowners association (HOA) for a few years. Not to pull a “I’m not like other girls” but this HOA is chill: we exist for maintenance of common areas, and we have a “live and let live” attitude towards decorations. I lead meetings and delegate projects like water heater repair, pest control, and emergency snow removal, as well as overseeing budgeting for long-term maintenance and emergency repairs.

Given that HOAs are generally seen in a negative light (sometimes fairly, let Janet have her tacky doormat if it’s not a safety hazard), is it possible to include this experience in my resume and/or cover letter?

I think you could reference it in either one. If you include it on your resume, it shouldn’t be in the work experience section, but in a community involvement section or similar, and you should specifically focus on the work that most closely aligns with management jobs.

It’s true that a lot of people don’t like HOAs, but that’s outweighed by the value it could potentially bring in demonstrating management experience in another context.

All that said, if a job posting requires management experience, they’re nearly always going to want it to be in paid management roles. If you’re applying anyway, you should include the HOA experience — but it might be simply that you’re not quite a match for the qualifications they’re seeking for those particular jobs.

5. How to format my resume when my relevant experience isn’t all recent

What happens if your experience relevant to a job is recent part-time work and part-time work from years ago, but not your core career? Or vice versa — if your core career is followed by unrelated gigs or volunteering during a career break?

My background is part-time teaching work in college, then eight years of corporate work, and now six years of being a stay-at-home parent with a a small volunteer position at a local organization and occasional stints of a certain skilled part-time job, let’s say teaching and tutoring.

I am applying to both corporate jobs and teaching jobs because our family does need me back at work, and for both I’ve had this issue.

For the teaching jobs, I did a sort of functional resume, in which I listed “teaching experience” and then “other experience” in reverse chronological order, with dates up front (and the volunteering in with the other experience).

But what do I do for the corporate applications? Put my corporate experience and then hide everything else under “part-time and volunteer experience”? Or keep it chronological?

For the teaching jobs, a section at the top called “teaching experience” followed by “other experience” is exactly the way to do it.

For the corporate jobs, something similar: “related experience” (or “relevant experience”) followed by “other experience” or “part-time and volunteer experience.” Keep it chronological within each section, but it’s fine to divide the experience into two different sections like that.