A reader writes:

My manager is a hoarder, and our office space is odious. There is no trash can, because my manager treats the office as one giant trash can. She leaves leftover lunch and discarded wrappers all over, sometimes even on my desk. She uses the office as an extension of her own home: old furniture, broken devices, and moving boxes full of her belongings clutter the space. Important files are constantly mislaid, and valuables such as her driver’s license will suddenly show up while sorting through a pile of junk. When I clean my workspace, she chastises me for potentially getting rid of valuable things amidst the junk, but she won’t give me permission to remove anything if I ask.

We are a small company with no HR. There’s no going over her head, because she owns the company.

While she is a seemingly kind person who always apologizes profusely for the unhygienic and chaotic state of the office, she does nothing to actually change it. How my colleagues who have to work daily in that office manage to navigate that hellscape, I will never know. When I first started, I got us to push back as a group, but all she did was arrange a group mediation session with a “corporate therapist” that led nowhere.

After that, I avoided the issue altogether by coming up with ways to save the company money by working remotely, mainly by digitizing and automating processes that had previously taken place via paperwork and face-to-face meetings. Since then, I’ve rarely ever come into the office, and my manager has been very pleased with my cost-effective “innovations.” Win-win.

However, now that there are only three months left on my contract, my manager doesn’t want me to start a new project (since a project takes at least six months, it would be very impractical if I left halfway in). So she is taking me off of the digital tasks I was doing up to this point and has assigned me to administrative duties … in the office. For various reasons, such as our office receiving lots of mail daily, these tasks cannot be done remotely. So two weeks ago, she announced that I will have to come into the office almost every day for the remainder of my contract. Men plan, God laughs.

If I quit my job early or get fired, I wouldn’t be eligible for unemployment in the country I live in (not the U.S.), and I have dependents to support. Also, my manager currently loves me, and since this is my first job in this field, it would be really important to get a strong recommendation from her, which she has promised me. Her husband is in local politics, and she has friends in high places, so she could get me blackballed. I talked to a lawyer, and theoretically I have various legal rights (hygienic workspace, wrongful termination etc.), but in reality, suing the company to enforce them would cost A LOT more than three months’ wages.

Can you please recommend a script to tell my boss that I refuse to work at the office under these conditions … without getting fired and, ideally, without burning that bridge? Because something tells me my initial impulse of shouting “Not today, Satan!” at the top of my lungs would backfire. Since she reacts with so much shame, it’s hard to even broach the subject. Clearly, she needs professional help, and I empathize with her condition, but I refuse to sacrifice my own well-being to accommodate it.

Oh my goodness.

You’ve got a couple of options.

First, could you just tell her straightforwardly, “I’ve stayed as long as I have because I was allowed to work remotely. That’s really important to me. Since it’s been a driving factor in me staying, could we look at other ways for me to use the remaining time productively while staying remote? For example, I could do X and Y.”

She may be assuming it’s no big deal for you to return to the office, and if you push back — and especially frame it as “this is a near-requirement for me” — she might be more flexible, particularly for an employee she loves.

Or you could try telling her that since you’d understood she was happy with your remote work arrangement, you’ve planned around that and can’t work in the office at this point for logistical reasons — or at least not without more notice. There’s a whole range of reasons why this could be the case for someone — from needing to be present for a dependent (i.e., a school-age child or older adult who doesn’t require constant supervision but does require someone’s general presence), to a health issue that means they can’t compromise on remote work, to all sorts of other things that you might come up with if you think on it. I’m not advising you to lie … but think about what you could plausibly cite.

There’s also the option of total honesty: “I found it really hard to work in the office previously because of  the chaos of the physical space. I know it works fine for some people, but it was really rough on me. Can we talk about other options?”

Since she loves you, it’s very unlikely that she’s going to fire you on the spot or blackball you in your field simply for raising this. Worse case scenario, she’ll tell you there’s no flexibility. But it’s reasonable to try.