In middle school, Abercrombie & Fitch was the place to shop. If you weren’t wearing A&F, you weren’t cool. Done and done.

My mother hated it. Hated that I wanted to shop there. Hated that I was so concerned about being cool. Hated the loud music. Hated the bratty employees. She let me shop there but only with my money.

Years later, I realized how ridiculous the store was. And how ridiculous it was that my classmates and I all wanted to look alike. That is was Abercrombie is about: uniformity. It doesn’t take long to notice that most of the employees are young and attractive. You wont find much diversity.

Twenty-two year-old Riam Dean is young and attractive. She also has a prosthetic arm. The British student was working at Abercrombie & Fitch to earn extra money while she was in-school. According to her, when her employer became aware of her prosthetic arm she was told she’d be working in the stock room until winter, when their uniforms would cover her arm.
Dean is now suing Abercrombie & Fitch for disability discrimination.

Abercrombie & Fitch has been criticized in the past and according to Jezebel, hiring managers at the store are given a guidebook of mostly photos of examples of the “look” minority employees should have. Their tipster said “all of the minorities, by the way, are as white looking as a person can be without actually being Caucasian.”

It’ll be interesting to see what happens with Dean’s case. Regardless, the allegations against Abercrombie & Fitch are appalling.

[source, source]

Last week, it was officially announced that my boss (aka the best boss ever) would be leaving our company. And I have probably been more heartbroken than I should about it.

It’s hard to describe why my boss leaving is so heartbreaking. And try as I might, explaining it to my friends and family always leaves me coming up short. My explanations are never on point, or do the situation justice. And I think unfortunately this is something only my co-workers can fully understand.

But I’m going to try and explain to the best of my abilities.

The news came really suddenly. I had no inkling or women’s intution that this news was about to hit the airwaves (or in this case I guess hit the fan). And my boss told me first so that I wouldn’t hear it from someone else, which was really considerate but also horrifically painful. Now, I’m pretty good at keeping secrets, but when it affects me in some way (aka my job description changing drastically) then it’s hard for me to keep it in. And that’s what I had to do for 5 days while my boss and the rest of the higher-up’s were away on a management retreat.

So I sat here and got more and more depressed because while I had been told my job wasn’t in jeopardy, I still felt weary about the whole thing. Not to mention this is the best boss I have had ever. In the existence of bosses, I don’t think anyone could do much better than the one I have now. He is fair, kind, hard to make angry, self-sufficient, and treated me with a lot of respect.

So last week was a pity party. And the party was for 1.

Eventually my new boss sat me down and we had a heart-to-heart about she wants me to grow in the company. She also let me know that she has no use for an assistant, so really my new job description will be of the make-it-up-as-we-go variety. (I will still get to do events, but my special projects will all be different).

So this convo lifted my spirits for about a minute and then I went back to depresso mode. All my friends and family tried to make me see the light. “This will be good for you” and “there’s a silver lining in this change”. I would get to move up in the company, not handle calendars and schedules. I would pretty much get betting a better job by default. And yet this didn’t make me feel better.

When the news was officially announced to the rest of the company, everyone came over to give me their condolences like he had died and wasn’t just moving on to a better job in the suburbs. Which made me depressed all over again. But at least now I had people to comiserate with. His old assistants (who still work at the company but have been promoted) came over crying. See! That’s how great he is!

I think a part of me is just really depressed because he was such a great boss, but I know I’m also sad/depressed because I’ve never been left behind. I always did the leaving. At my last company, I left them. At internships there was always a time limit. And I don’t like being left behind.

A part of me really wishes he had asked me to go with him to his new company, but I know I should be happy about the changes and advancements that I’ll be able to make under my new boss. This just wasn’t in the plan (aka how I thought this job would pan out for me).

I’ve always been really great about handling change, but this has been extremely hard for me to stomach.

Tonight is his going away party (that I planned of course!) and it’s going to be a lot of fun – people are even flying in for it from other offices around the country. And right now instead of being depressed, I’m going to try and be happy for all the changes and to celebrate having a really superb boss (even if it was just for eight months).

For three summers, I was a shop girl. A book shop girl.

Shortly before my senior year of high school, my mom drove me (cause I was awesome and still didn’t have my driver’s license) to our local book shop and forced me to go in and ask if they were hiring. By forced, I mean threatened. She wouldn’t let me drive my new hand-me-down car to school (when I eventually got my license that September) if I didn’t also have job to drive to.

I went in, I asked and they took my name and number. I left dejected and worried that I’d be the only senior taking the bus. Talk about LOSER! As we drove back to home, I got a call from the book shop. We turned around, I spoke to the owner and I had a new job.

For the last few weeks of that summer, I organized shelves, help other students find their summer reading books and got to know my coworkers. I was the youngest…by more than 25 years.

I never thought, at that time, that I’d become close friends with women older than my mother. The women I worked with became my friends. I spent three afternoons a week, every Saturday and every other Sunday with them.

One women, Linda, and I became very close. She was like the Aunt I never had. Not my mother bossing me around and not my grandmother worrying about whether or not I’ll meet a nice Catholic boy to marry.

She listened to me stress over my fights with my mother and listened to me worry that I’d never find a boy to even date. She’d buy me lunch every Saturday and I became the daughter she never had. She even considered, very briefly, setting me up with her son (he was a little too old for me)

I was probably closer with Linda than I was with any of my friends in High School. She had wonderful advice and great life experience to share with 18-year-old Working Girl One.

I cherish those summers (and falls and winters and springs) at the book shop. As stressful as working in retail can be at times, I miss it. I miss telling a customer about my favorite book or picking out a colorful picture book for a cute little munchkin but most of all I miss the women I worked with.

We are back with Ask Working Girl. We are only tackling a few questions in our first week back. If your question is missing, don’t worry. We thought a few warranted posts of their own so be on the look out.

Mrs. Beautiful asked…How do you keep your spirits up when you start a new job and your co-workers are very clique-ish and very passive aggressive? I’m having a hard time wanting to come to work in the morning.

Your new coworkers may not know they are cliquey or passive aggressive. My coworkers and I have been called cliquey in the past and we honestly had no idea we were acting in such a way that would make someone feel like an outsider.

I would suggest getting to know each coworker individually. You don’t need to try to join the clique but it will certainly make you feel better if you feel more comfortable at work.

It’s great to be friends and get along with coworkers but at the end of the day, it’s just work.

@vesari asked…how [do you] find motivation when work overall morale is low?

When I’m feeling unmotivated I create lists. When I first get in, I’ll make a to-do list for my morning. After lunch, I’ll make a to-do list for my afternoon. It helps me feel accomplished in my day-to-day tasks and motivates me to keep checking things off my list. Once one person starts feeling motivated, it can really catch on.

Ana from far away! asked…are leggings appropriate to go to work?

I love leggings with the right dress for work. And I think they can work in a business casual setting. But I strongly believe that leggings are not pants, your tush should be covered while you’re at the office.
Have a work related question? Send us email, tweet (WG1, WG2) or comment below.

Lately all I can think about are vacations.

I think this is for a few reasons. The first being that I feel like everyone is going on vacations lately – WG1 is taking the week of 4th of July off to go to the Shore, one of my friends just got back from Miami, and another one of my friends is off to Disney World in a few days.

Second, I have my own very exciting vacations coming up. One is a trip in August to go visit my sister who is studying abroad in Spain. My family and I are going to meet her in Venice and then take a cruise to Croatia, Turkey, and Greece (don’t let my calm facade surprise you – I can’t stop thinking about this trip). AND in addition, WG1 has planned this fantabulous trip for us and all our college friends to go to Vegas at the end of September. Yes, color you jealous.

Third, and finally, one of my bff’s just got engaged (eek! yay!) and asked me to be one of her bridesmaids (double eek! double yay!). And even though the wedding isn’t going to be until next year, I still have started thinking about how I’ll have to take a significant chunk of vacation time to be in the wedding since she’s English and will be getting married in England…which translates to me taking like a week off for hen parties and dress fittings and tea parties (haha probably no tea parties, but it’s just so English).

Which was the longest introduction ever to let you know that I would like to go live in Europe.

Yes, readers, I need to move there. Mainly, I would like to move there so I can have more vacation. Did you know that the average European gets 6 weeks paid vacation?

According to a commentary piece on ABC News’s website, the average British worker gets 28 paid vacation days a year, Germans get 35, the French get 37, and Italians get a whopping 42 days to lay around in the sun (or just a few days off to do laundry if they feel like it).

In contrast, Americans get about 10 paid vacation days off a year and America doesn’t have a set vacation policy for the country, unlike some European countries. (Which is most likely why last year at my first real job out of college in NYC, I got 5 paid vacation days, 1 sick day, and 1 floating holiday).

And I have to mention that those 10 paid vacation days are a starting norm for a full-time job. Part-time employees usually don’t get any paid vacation at all. And even when people DO get full-time vacations, they can hardly find time to take them with conflicting schedules or they just take their computer/Blackberry with them so they can put in some “weisure” time.

According to the National Survey of the Changing Workface, US employees in 1997 were “working 3.5 more hours a week than they did 20 years earlier”. Meaning, Americans work harder, do more overtime, bring more work home, and go on more business trips than ever, yet they still don’t have enough time to get things done and still have to take work on vacation with them.

Juliet Schor makes a good point when she says, “American corporations seem downright ungracious about vacations when viewed in this light, or when we consider that they give their European employees the same month to six weeks that European companies do.”

Which is so true! WG1 and I have one friend who works for a European company that is based in New York, and she gets the same amount of vacation that their European counterpart does. Why, oh, why can’t we make this an American lifestyle change?

It makes sense! Europeans see the value in letting their employees take time to relax, unwind, and recover from working. We Americans like to burn out to the point where we are forced to take vacations – and Juliet Schor points out that even when we are on vacation we use the opportunity of vacation to “consume more” by staying at expensive hotels, spending absurd amounts of money, or going on adventurous treks to exotic locations because we only get one vacation a year so we may as well go big or go home!

In conclusion, I’m moving to England where they work just as hard as Americans but get vacation like Europeans. Sounds like a perfect solution to moi!

When I have get-togethers at my faboosh apartment, me and my friends love to bring out Table Topics. It’s a cube filled with cards with questions on them to start conversation. Questions vary from, “Which celebrity would you most like to see in person?” to “If you had the means how would you address the problem of homelessness?”

When my first boss asked me to her Facebook friend, I kind of freaked out.

As an employee, a young one who remembers a Facebook that was just for select colleges and universities, being virtual friends with a boss or any coworker for that matter is still a tad bit weird. It used to be just your peers. Now, everytime I add a photo or my Dad post’s another video of me as a baby (yes, he figured out how to do this) I think so-and-so is going to see this.

I’ve grown used to that mentality and live my Facebook life accordingly. It doesn’t hurt I’m comfortable with all of coworkers, they know the real me and not just the work me. They know that I love karaoke and am a total light-weight (post-college of course, I used to be a champ). I’m comfortable with them seeing my Facebook page.

When one of my new interns asked me to be her Facebook friend I didn’t feel so comfortable. For the past year or so most of my interns have been my age or even older than me and it led me to feel like their peer in the workplace. This summer, all of my interns are four years younger than me so I finally feel like I’m a little bit of a boss.

Of course I was very intrigued and wanted to check out her profile but I wasn’t about to accept her friendship and see mine. First, I don’t think my intern needs to see photos me singing Ace of Base at a dive bar. I’m not comfortable with her getting to know the out-of-office me yet and probably not ever.

Second, I found it so odd that she would ask me to be her Facebook friend to begin with. I almost want to accept her friendship just to see her full profile and see if she puts me on any privacy settings.

Is it just kids these days? Are they so surrounded with all this technology and social networking that it doesn’t even phase them that it would be odd to ask your internship supervisor to be Facebook friends?

I haven’t accepted her friendship but her request is still sitting there…

These past few days at work have been hectic – you know, the kind of hectic where there are so many little things that have to get done that you can’t accomplish anything of importance. 

Because we know how smart we are and how much you all depend on our sage wisdom…okay, okay, we know, we aren’t career experts or anything but we do like to think we can help another Working Girl out so we’re bring back Ask Working Girl.

We fell off the wagon a bit. We couldn’t keep track of questions from all of you so we created an email just for Ask Working Girl: askworkinggirl@gmail.com. Creative, no?

Send us an email, comment below or send us a Tweet (WG1, WG2) and check back next week for our words of wisdom.

I’m sure many of you have seen the recent headlines of Tallulah Belle Willis “shadowing” in the fashion department of Harper’s Bazaar.  Gist if you haven’t heard is: Demi Moore and Bruce Willis’s daughter (who would like to officially change her name to Lula thankyouverymuch), at the ripe age of 15 is an intern at the prestigious fashion mag.