Welcome to special bonus content for the Ask a Manager podcast. In episode seven of the show, I talked with Jennifer Peepas of the Captain Awkward Advice column. Our entire conversation didn't make it into the show because we talked for a while. So this is bonus content for people who are advice column junkies or who just like insider baseball talk about advice columns.

A little bit of context to ensure that you can follow along. At one point in this conversation,

Jennifer and I talk about an especially memorable letter from her site. She printed a letter

at Captain Awkward back in 2012 from someone whose live-in boyfriend would hog the

bathroom for literally hours, like two to three hours in the morning and in the evenings.

And it wasn't a medical situation. He was just locked in there sitting on the toilet,

reading on his iPad. And it was their only bathroom. And it meant she didn't have any access to it.

At one point, she peed in the sink

out of desperation, and he still wouldn't alter his habits. It was pretty horrifying. Jennifer, of course,

gave her the very good advice that this was not okay, and that she needs to be able to use the bathroom

in her own home and not to have to pee in a sink. But as you can imagine,

people have really remembered this letter because it was such a ridiculous situation. And in the

conversation you're about to hear, that letter comes up. And I wanted you to have context for it.

So here we go. Let's dive straight into the conversation. One of the many reasons I was excited to talk to you is because writing an advice column is weird.

And there's not a huge community of other people doing the same work to talk to about things like moderating a comment section or screening reader mail or knowing if a letter is fake.

And I'm curious, is there anything that has

really surprised you about writing an advice column or that you think would surprise others?

I think, I mean, I've been doing this now for seven years. So I think the biggest surprise is that

people will still send things in, you know, that it just became so

self-sustaining. People get very invested in certain stories. And sometimes, like, the level of

investment surprises me of like, oh, okay. Like, people start sharing their stories in the comments, and it's just the common experiences.

Like, sometimes I get letters that I think are very strange.

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