My colleague’s long, pointy fingernails make me retch

October 17, 2026 — 5:00amQ: I have weekly meetings with my work team. One team member has long, pointy fingernails that curl up at the ends. He taps his fingernails on his laptop and cleans them in our presence. It makes me retch just thinking about it and I dread every meeting. What should I do? C.O., Northcote, VICDo your colleagues have good fingernail etiquette?Drew AitkenA: Now you’ve got me thinking of those Guinness World Record fingernails, all curly and yellowish, like wolverine blades made of cannelloni. If your team member has fingernails like that, then I totally get why you feel like retching, especially if he’s tapping them on his laptop and it sounds like a demonic spider skittering across a room. Or if he’s cleaning them, using one nail to dig crud out from under another, then dropping it into a wastepaper basket on the other side of the room without having to leave his seat.But as retchy as long, pointy fingernails can be, there might be a good reason for them. Maybe he’s a classical guitarist and he needs long nails to scratch the face of other classical guitarists because it’s a very competitive industry. Or maybe he was a chronic nail-biter, so he used that horrible-tasting nail paint to break the habit – and now he needs a delicious-tasting nail paint to get him biting again. Or it could just be a fashion thing: he may think it’s sexy and stylish, walking around with sea anemones dangling from his fingers.But if it doesn’t impede his work, there’s not a lot you can do, apart from being honest: tell him that someone anonymously complained about the nail-tapping and nail hygiene and “Maybe you could give them a little trim to appease a whiny, cowardly team member. Not me, though. I like your fingernails. They look great and not like calcified pigs’ tails at all.”Danny Katz is a columnist for The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald. He writes the Modern Guru column in the Good Weekend magazine. He is also the author of the books Spit the Dummy, Dork Geek Jew and the Little Lunch series for kids.From our partners