Friend of mine is having trouble at her job. She’s essential to the operation but is working too hard for what she gets paid and came out of a meeting wherein her boss rejected her preferences as to what tasks to cut and which ones to keep.

He acknowledged her excessive workload, but insisted she retain some things she doesn’t like for the good of the company and give up important ones she enjoys (and in which she has experience and expertise), even though doing so would require her to spend significant time training an inexperienced person to do it, almost certainly less effectively than she does.

I suggested she should email him, describe the role she wants and say it’s his company and perrogative to disagree, but in that case she’s probably not a good fit any longer. If he caves, she wins, and if he lets her go, she wins by no longer wasting time at a place that isn’t meeting her needs.

Her first instinct was to say, “But if I quit the whole operation would grind to a halt, they’d be out of business!”

And I was like, “That’s called leverage. Use it.”

Some people have a misplaced empathy for others when they ought to be standing up for themselves instead. I think this explains why a lot of them vote for policies that favor criminals over the law-abiding, unchecked immigration over legal citizens and special preferences for some over merit-only, identity-neutral ones for all.