As @Onomatopoeia@lemmy.cafe said, how you are perceived and how you interact with others (as in, being a “team player” and becoming a leader) is important. Period.

But as to the general idea of second chances, a manager wouldn’t agree to add you to their unit if they didn’t think you had the potential to excel (unless the decision was made for them, in which case, there’s no telling what the manager thinks). And once you are there, yes, you could start out pushing back against preconceptions. But I promise, your current actions speak louder than earlier memos. Managers are not stupid, they know people can grow and learn and change. If they don’t work with you directly, they take cues from the most recent information they have, like what your current manager says. (Obviously all of this on managers is very generalized, individually is another story, but you don’t do yourself any favors assuming everyone is opposed to you.)

You have the right attitude and that, along with your actions going forward, is all that’s really within your control. Focus on what you can control.

But it still depends on the industry, the company culture, and the individual people. At my job, I can use emojis with basically anyone under the VP level, even my boss’s boss.

Right… and I really wanted the OP to give an example in case everyone was misunderstanding some nuance in what they were referring to.

Probably to completely sidestep copyright / permission concerns. But can you give an example?

Exactly what I was thinking. Good for fiction, but in real life… cruel schoolchildren are cruel and unusual names just encourage them.

Fair enough. Thankfully like I said it’s small and my livelihood doesn’t depend on it.

You’re definitely not the only person proposing your course of action. By the way, it would be silly for me to refrain from filing taxes since I’m likely to get a small refund. From your own reasoning, why would I want the government to keep my money even longer interest free? In that case, I absolutely should file my taxes to take the money away from them.

ETA: As far as paying taxes in your paycheck, just talk to your employer and change your W-4 to the lowest payout. Your employer is required to withhold some of it for taxes, so talk to your employer if you want to pay absolutely zero on payday (and they will likely say no). Obviously that all varies depending on your employment arrangement, but it generally holds up.

Sounds like you should be writing an email to the producers.

Didn’t last season have 21 episodes? That’s not a short season, though maybe for The Voice it’s a little on the shorter side (I saw other seasons are more like 25 episodes).

They don’t publish that information in advance. You can only guess based on previous seasons.