Must I help a friend if doing so tells her too much about me?

How much responsibility do you have to a good friend to provide advice even if you have reservations about disclosing too much about yourself in the process?

That’s essentially the question a reader we’re calling Dempsey emailed me recently. Dempsey has been good friends with Joan for more than a decade. They’re neighbors. They socialize regularly. And when one of them has been in need of help over the course of their friendship, the other has stepped up with little hesitation.

But recently Joan decided to retire from her job. Because most of her retirement funds were set aside in self-directed retirement accounts she would have to manage how her retirement money was invested as wisely as possible to make sure it lasted for the duration of her retirement. Joan decided that she would be wise to seek the help of a financial advisor to guide her through the investment process and to establish a sound plan for her retirement. Joan was pretty confident she had set aside enough retirement savings to last which played into her decision that she would finally be able to retire from her job.

“Joan sent around a note to a bunch of friends asking if any of us had worked with a financial advisor we liked,” writes Dempsey. Dempsey is not yet retired, but it turns out she had been working with the same financial advisor for at least the past three decades and had always found his advice to be helpful and sound. Even during economic downturns, Dempsey writes that her advisor had taken the time to contact clients to reassure them and to let them know how he planned to respond.

“I would recommend my financial advisor in a heartbeat based on how good he’s been in helping me plan for my future,” writes Dempsey. But Dempsey is hesitant to recommend him and here’s why. Her financial advisor directly manages his client’s money and takes a percentage of how much he is managing as his compensation. He has a minimum portfolio requirement for any new clients he takes on.

“I’ve always been pretty private about my finances,” writes Dempsey. Even though the minimum portfolio requirement was much lower when she started working with him years ago, she feels uneasy about her friend knowing how much money she has or assuming she knows how much money she has.

“Is it wrong for me to not recommend my advisor even though I believe he would be a great resource for my friend?” she asks.

It’s highly unlikely that Dempsey’s recommendation would be the only one Joan received. It’s also unlikely that her advisor is the only one who could provide Joan with good advice. It’s pretty likely Joan has a sense that Dempsey has been saving some money toward retirement. Knowing the minimum amount the advisor will work with doesn’t really tell Joan exactly how much money Dempsey has if that’s her largest concern.

The choice Dempsey has to make is whether she values her financial privacy more than she values giving a recommendation to a friend. That choice can only be made by Dempsey and the right thing is to decide if recommending her advisor would outweigh any discomfort she might feel about Joan knowing she might have a minimum sum of money at her disposal.

Jeffrey L. Seglin, author of The Simple Art of Business Etiquette: How to Rise to the Top by Playing Nice, is a senior lecturer in public policy and director of the communications program at Harvard's Kennedy School. He is also the administrator of www.jeffreyseglin.com, a blog focused on ethical issues.

Do you have ethical questions that you need to have answered? Send them to jeffreyseglin@gmail.com.

Follow him on Twitter @jseglin.

(c) 2021 JEFFREY L. SEGLIN. Distributed by TRIBUNE CONTENT AGENCY, LLC.

Two recycling stories and one good neighbor

I received two recycling stories this week from readers in different parts of the country.

The first is from a reader we’re calling Glen. Typically, during a week when a holiday falls, the neighborhood recycling is picked up a day later than the regular schedule. But the week after the Fourth of July, Glen was surprised to hear the recycling truck drive past his house on the regular pickup day. Glen had not put his recycling out but in his neighborhood he knows the truck makes its way up his side of the long street he lives on and then turns around and makes its way back down the other side.

Rather than miss out on the pickup, Glen texted an across-the-street neighbor to ask if he was OK with Glen rolling his recycling bin over to his house for pickup. “Sure,” the neighbor texted back letting Glen know they were out of town anyway. Since it was rainy out, the neighbor asked Glen if he could switch off the irrigation timer on his faucet so the lawn wouldn’t be watered during the rain.

Glen’s recycling got picked up. His neighbor’s lawn wasn’t over watered and all was well between neighbors.

Seven-hundred-and-thirty miles away, another reader (this one we’re calling Paula) was having her own recycling rendezvous with a neighbor.

“We live next door to a couple with whom we have a friendly, though not social, relationship,” Paula writes. “One of them told my husband recently that they had a number of cardboard boxes to dispose of and wondered if we had any space in our recycling rollout container, which the town comes by to empty every other week.” Paula’s husband told the neighbor they had plenty of room and that they could put in the boxes when they saw their container out for pickup.

The next morning Paula looked out her window and saw the recycling container with the lid open and overflowing with boxes that were not broken down and flattened as their town requests them to be. Fortunately, the recycling truck operators emptied the container in spite of the “irregularity.”

“I was a little concerned at what the neighbors in our small community thought of our apparent laziness and noncompliance with the rules as they walked or drove by,” Paula writes, wondering what to do if the neighbor should make a similar request in the future.

The neighbor was wrong not to breakdown the boxes. If Paula was overly concerned with what the neighbors thought, I suppose she or her husband could have gone out and broken down the boxes, but they shouldn’t have had to. If the neighbors make a similar request in the future, the right thing would be to simply say no, but if they agree then they would be wise to make a point of asking the neighbors to breakdown any boxes they place in their recycling bin and not to put more in the bins then will fit and enable the cover to close. The right thing would be for the neighbors to thank Paula and comply, something they should have done anyway without having to be asked. Sometimes, however, people need to be reminded of how to be a good neighbor.

Jeffrey L. Seglin, author of The Simple Art of Business Etiquette: How to Rise to the Top by Playing Nice, is a senior lecturer in public policy and director of the communications program at Harvard's Kennedy School. He is also the administrator of www.jeffreyseglin.com, a blog focused on ethical issues.

Do you have ethical questions that you need to have answered? Send them to jeffreyseglin@gmail.com.

Follow him on Twitter @jseglin. 

(c) 2021 JEFFREY L. SEGLIN. Distributed by TRIBUNE CONTENT AGENCY, LLC.

A jamoke's take on using the word "jamoke"

An email arrived early last month from Lindsay Tucker, a former graduate student who is now an accomplished writer, editor, and podcaster.

“Did you write this?!” she asked, using both the question mark and exclamation point to expressively end her question. A screenshot from Merriam-Webster’s online dictionary definition of the word “jamoke” followed with this sample sentence attributed to me: “Why hasn’t anyone thought of inventing a laptop case that converts into a portable office so that when a jamoke like me is stuck in a joint like this, he can use the case as a portable work desk?”

It sure sounded like me, but I had no recollection of where I might have written it, so I had to search the sentence to find the source. Sure enough, it appeared in a “Road Warrior” column I’d written for “Inc.” magazine in December 1998, about a decade before Lindsay ever had to endure taking a course with me.

After I emailed Lindsay that those were indeed my words, I asked why she was asking. She responded that she was having a debate with Aviv Rubinstien, her co-host on her podcast “Lyrics for Lunch,” a podcast that explores the meanings of popular songs. It was “a plea really,” she writes, “for him to stop saying ‘jamoke’ on our show” because she felt like it was racist. It was then that Aviv quoted me to prove her wrong.

Jamoke is a slang word used pejoratively to describe someone as “inept” or “ordinary.” It’s sometimes interchangeable with the Yiddish word “schlub” which the earlier mentioned Merriam-Webster translates as “a stupid, worthless, or unattractive person.” In the article I wrote about the inability to find a laptop case that could be used as a good portable desk while stuck in the Detroit airport 23 years ago, I was using the word “jamoke” to describe myself.

To my knowledge, there are no racist connotations or derivations to the word. That doesn’t mean that the word couldn’t be used to make a racist comment. Most any word can be used to make a racist comment if the speaker is determined to use it that way.

Some who use the word “jamoke” or “schlub” do not intend either as the most uplifting of descriptors. Then again, often they are stand-ins for describing someone as an ordinary person as I did about myself in my column.

The right thing if you are uncomfortable with a word’s meaning is to look up the word as Aviv did or email the jamoke whose words Merriam-Webster used to show the word in action as Lindsay did. If you remain uncomfortable with the word, the best solution is not to use it even if it turns out to not have racist origins or not to mean what you thought it meant. One of the beauties of having a large vocabulary is the vast array of choices available to say something in a way that doesn’t make you uncomfortable to say it and avoids being offensive to whoever you’re saying it to.

In their podcast, which is a great listen, Lindsay and Aviv regularly butt heads but “in a playful way” she assures me. “He won this round, but he doesn’t win many,” she wrote, followed by a semicolon and parentheses to indicate a wink emoji. Lindsay and her expressive punctuation.

Jeffrey L. Seglin, author of The Simple Art of Business Etiquette: How to Rise to the Top by Playing Nice, is a senior lecturer in public policy and director of the communications program at Harvard's Kennedy School. He is also the administrator of www.jeffreyseglin.com, a blog focused on ethical issues.

Do you have ethical questions that you need to have answered? Send them to jeffreyseglin@gmail.com.

Follow him on Twitter @jseglin. 

(c) 2021 JEFFREY L. SEGLIN. Distributed by TRIBUNE CONTENT AGENCY, LLC.