u/DesperateAnswer8094

Long story short, a coworker and I only get along in a group setting. I’ll call him Allen, and we have mutual friends through work. Recently I’ve been called out for not driving Allen home after group a hang out, even after I expressed that allen makes me uncomfortable.
Allen and I are both queer, but we have different perspectives. Allen believes that straight people are incapable of respecting queer people, while I believe we can coexist with the right communication and understanding. The last time I drove Allen home, he claimed that my roomates are brainwashed. My roomates are all straight, but they are pro lgbtq, and have supported me and my friends. Allen refuses to believe my roomates are good people, and since then I have refused to drive him home.
Here’s where I may be the ah.last night at dinner I said I wouldn’t drive Allen home because he’s unkind to me in my own car. Our mutual friend had to drive Allen home, which was out of the way for her. This added more time to her commute and she sent me a text saying how upset she was that I made her drive allen home. Am I an AH for for making a friend drive allen home when he was closer to me/ am I wrong for thinking allen is unreasonable?

Edit: allen and I live very close to each other, which is why im usually tasked with taking him home

I (24M) am working my first real management position. I’m 2.5 weeks into my new job as a bakery manager and while I’m running into a lot of roadblocks, the biggest one is half my team only speaks Spanish and the other half only speaks English. I have 1 bilingual employee, but she has a lot of important tasks and can’t play translator for me. My bakery has an EXTREMELY strict no phones policy for kitchen staff, so they have to go to the employee locker room, grab their phones, and use an app to translate. This was fine for the first few days since we were slow but I noticed it was completely throwing us off on the weekend. I’ve asked other store managers in my district for advice but all of them are bilingual with no issue communicating with staff. Starting next week, I’m done training with experienced store managers and I’m on my own.
This whole situation is frustrating for me and my team. I’d love to take the time to learn conversational Spanish, but I’m working 65+ hours a week and it’s just impossible. Corporate is making no exceptions on the phone policy, and I’m afraid I’m going to either lose my staff, or lose my job if I can’t find a way to get things to run smoothly.

For additional context as to how this is throwing us off
\-it’s a brand new store so 70% of my staff is new and training, but all of the physical training guides I have access to are in English only, so they have to step away from their station to translate instructions
\-plans constantly change on a day to day basis, and it takes 10-15 minutes to translate conversations on my phone until I’m positive we understand each other
\-English speaking trainers are losing morale trying to teach without words
\-order miscommunication has lead to some extreme losses because Google Translate isn’t the best for explaining how to customize the product or its decorations to a customers liking. I’ve had to refund orders/ remake ones that got lost in translation.
\- my team is starting to form “clicks” meaning some days my Spanish speakers feel ignored by other staff and vice versa.
\-my Spanish speaking team appears to lack confidence when it comes to approaching me, leading to multiple small problems collecting without my knowledge.

Overall I’m trying to acknowledge and work with my everyone on my team, and i want to make them feel respected and confident. Does anyone have a system that works for them?

TLDR: I need a solution to improve communication with my non English speaking employees before I get fired for running this bakery into the ground 🫪