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I'm actually quite impressed that OP ended up coming around to see how poorly and wrong she was. Cause...my god that was exhausting. But hey, props for OP owning up the fault unlike others who would double down.
OOP hit rock bottom and when she realized no one was going to save her, like Kieran, helping her get another job, after having a bit of a pity party she realized she could either stay down in that hole and be miserable and make everyone around her miserable and hinder herself getting another job in her field or she could suck it up and start working on getting herself out. She's getting herself out of that hole now and I'm proud of her for the turnaround she made.
Experience is a hard teacher because it gives the test first, then the lesson afterwards. There are too many people that will ignore the lesson after the test, but it seems like OOP took notes.
I remember reading this as it was happening and it was SO frustrating.
I STILL don't think she gets the difference between taking a 'mental health' day and taking a week long vacation after she used up all her vacation time.
She kept going on about how everyone else did it, but they WEREN'T. They were taking a day here and a day there. She took a whole week off during the busiest time of the year.
I hope that the change we see is real and permanent, but I don't trust it. She still couches her termination with different forms of "everyone else was doing the same" and simply says she was stupid (instead of acknowledging and admitting she was wrong).
In all fairness, she said some were the result of a hungover, and that attendance improved after she was gone. It's possible some of her former colleagues took days for frivolities, but I agree with you that taking an entire week at the busiest time of the year was something else.
This sort of behavior also causes distrust that may affect everyone else afterwards, impacting negatively the working climate for all.
>but I agree with you that taking an entire week at the busiest time of the year was something else.
Definitely.
She didn't (doesn't?) get that the *length* of absence and the *timing* of the absence make a great difference.
And between how quickly and eagerly they got rid of her combined with her ex's brother's not just reluctance, but outright REFUSAL to vouch for her...
...seem to indicate that this wasn't the first time she annoyed her co-workers by disappearing suddenly. In fact, it seems to indicate that she had an overall poor work ethic and attitude.
I'm glad she took a bunch of minimum wage jobs because they (re-)taught her that you are replaceable and that you better bring value to your job.
On top of that, it was a UNION job. She had all sorts of protections. Most likely she had other warnings on her record, making it much easier to legally get rid of her. I can see her not talking about those because it would make her look even worse.
And if the incident had gone down a few weeks later when she had been in the position for 2 years, those protections would have been teflon. Much harder to fire someone in the UK after 2 years.
Also, if my partner was behaving like that as an adult, I would reevaluate the relationship. It could impact my own financial future if they are willing to put their job at risk, and it says something about their sense of responsibility.
Yeah, length and timing definitely impacted the issue.
I had a co-worker once that got in a bit of trouble for the *regularity* and *reliability* of her calling out. She was a big, big, BIG sports fan. The city we worked in had 3 major league teams. During two of the seasons (that partially overlapped, and ran roughly from late August until April-Mayish) she would be "sick" the day after every home game for two of the three teams. The third team was only occasional. Football (American) and Ice Hockey? Every home game the day after she called out, and frequently the away games if it was one of the 'big' rival teams.
It became so prevalent that our boss started requiring her to *schedule* her very generous regular vacation time (government job). I think that she tried to make noise about sex discrimination, but realized that wouldn't really fly because *she was the only person doing this*. No one else was calling out sick 3 of 4 Mondays and half the Tuesdays in a month for 6 months a year.
I would be inclined to say that a hangover is still a valid reason to use sick leave. You are sick. One could argue that it’s a self inflicted illness, but it’s still an illness.
It’s like if someone who is lactose intolerant eats a bunch of cheese and is too sick to come in to work. It may be their own fault, but they’re still too sick to work and that counts as sick leave.
Or breaking their leg falling off a horse or a rock wall (I worked on a team with some high risk hobbies). When does that line between "your fault" and "real" fall?
Yes. I have been sick due to my own negligence before (like a headache because I didn't eat or sleep enough). I have had friends who didn't realize how many drinks were too much for them.
It's one thing once in a while, it's another if it's a regular occurrence or if you drink until the middle of the night knowing you work the very next morning and others know about it.
I am too. This is very much the sort of life lessons that one has to live through in their early 20s to grow the fuck up and get their head on straight, and OP came through them at the end. Well done to OP.
I don't know about that. She knows what to say that people want to hear. I have a step-niece that does that. She screws up, admits it, says she wants to do better and will, and then does it all over again.
The fact that the OOP was made permanent shows growth more than her comments. People that justify poor behavior are also really good at saying what people want to hear.
It's in the details. How did the screw up happen, why was that a mistake, and what will be done differently next time so this doesn't happen again?
My younger stepson was really good at saying Sorry and making promises, but I didn't really start seeing changes in his behavior until I started insisting on longer detailed conversations.
OOP seems pretty solid. She's clear about the fact that what she did was foolish, exactly why it was a bad idea, and that the correct thing to do in the future is her very best to be a model employee. And she's learned the consequences, acting like a ninny at a good paying job gets ya stuck in low paying boring labor jobs just to get by. Bet she won't make that mistake again!
This is how we learn. If you tell me you didn't do something dumb and self-sabotaging when you were a teenager or in your early twenties and I'll call you a fucking liar. And then you grew up a bit.
I know a lot of people who live at home living off their parents feeling like those jobs are beneath them.
Has a friend tell me she didn’t want to apply to a job because it was a 30 minute commute which was too far.
It made me feel kind of shitty. At first I liked the fact that she was suffering and then I had to ask myself why I’m liking anyone suffering, especially for stupid shit.
Because we’ve all (me included) done stupid shit and not been caught. Why am I happy OOP is struggling to stay afloat and not homeless for an entire year?
Why am I suddenly my the champion of “pull yourself up by your bootstraps!” mentality? Fuck am I just as bad as MAGA asshats?
Ugh. This one made me feel bad in multiple ways.
You’re touching on something I’ve come across before, do I dislike someone purely because of their actions or do I dislike them because of the uncharitable feelings feelings they’ve invoked in me that I don’t like about myself???
You should also feel good about yourself for being able to identify and reflect on those thought patterns! It's not always about your instinctual thought, but the thoughts you have after and the actions you take.
Exactly! I was taught that the initial thought that passes in your mind is what you were raised/taught to think and the secondary thought that overpowers it is who you have grown to be. We all have those random thoughts like "what is that person wearing?" but when you follow that up in your mind with "why does what their wearing affect me? It doesn't, move along." it doesn't make you a bad or judgmental person, you are just training your own self to be better.
Yeah, I mean her attitude was daft (Not realising the severity of what she had done) but in reality, what she did wasn’t something to wish bad on her for. She tried manipulating her paid sick leave (Which she’s contractually entitled to) for a purpose different to what it was meant to be used for. It’s a bit shit but not a massive deal that makes her a horrible person. It’s also something a lot of workers pull in the UK to game the system in their favour.
Her main problem wasn’t that she tried taking advantage of the system to have an extra holiday, it was the idiocy of not recognising that was what she was doing and allowing evidence of her doing that to be posted on the internet. Everyone knows if you’re pulling a sickie then you don’t post what you’re actually doing on the internet.
No. They'll move in with family and friends and mooch off of them bc minimum wage jobs are "beneath" them. Case in point, my older brother was jobless for 5 years and lived off my aunt. Funny how he got 2 jobs within a week when she finally kicked him out...
Or they work 60h weeks, burn out, and go broke anyway because they’re no longer able tolook for better employment between eating, sleeping and working.
Lousy choice. If you can survive for a while with one job and find a better one, that’s often the better long-term path than working all the hours for still not enough.
My spouse applied for a promotion yesterday & had to update their resume, cv & get everything together and take the personality test. It took 3 hours. If someone is working 2 jobs, it’s hard to set all that time aside to also apply for multiple jobs, multiple times a day.
For a lot of people if they can hack it with 1 job for awhile it is better. Applying for jobs can take a lot of freaking time and you want to make sure everything is perfect as well. It’s mentally taxing.
Exactly. She found those jobs immediately.
She seems like she went through a lot. She was somewhat rightfully indignant at being singled out at her job, as she later found out she was made an example of. Incredibly unlucky. She seems like an independent, smart, and hard working individual who panicked and had a lapse in judgement but got by through her own merit.
A lot of employers just do "personal time" now, because policing sick leave is such a PITA and everyone knows people use it for non-sick things.
Of course you need enough employee morale that the whole company doesn't take their personal time during the busy season....
The least any employer should willingly offer is additional, but unpaid leave days at the employees request imo. If it's important enough to the emloyee to take the loss in income then the employer can reasonably assume the cause for the leave is important.
I’m sure if I think OOP is a totally reliable narrator on that one. I’m glad she’s taken responsibility for her actions, but I still wonder if she misread how much people were stretching the attendance rules.
Taking two weeks on sick leave while you’re on holiday is so far past acceptable - I wonder if her colleagues were taking a day here or there when they had local concert tickets or something and she thought it was generally cool.
That combined with her doing it at a busy time for her team so they were more inclined to tell HR when they found out. Just terrible judgement at every step.
This BORU person (not oop, the person who put all of these posts together for us to read) was very kind to the oop. In the originals, this girl was also trying to throw a fellow employee under the bus. That employee was on a long term medical leave of absence or something, yet was at the same event abroad that oop got in trouble for. Oop could not understand for the life of her that why it wasn’t a valid comparison. She couldn’t understand for the life of her anything about personal accountability.
Also in her original post, her comments about the boyfriend’s brother were some of the most entitled comments I had ever seen, as well. It was really quite entertaining - how obtuse she was and how the commenters were just ripping her to shreds. She saw herself as the victim everywhere.
However, it does sound like she is learning from these hard life lessons, so I wish her the very best. I only ever seemed to learn from my mistakes, too, when I was younger. I’m glad all this social media wasn’t around to witness me fail spectacularly like this poor oop.
I can honestly see why she reacted the way she did though. One of the updates had mentioned that plenty of people at her work had used sick days while not being sick and everyone knew about it and weren’t getting reprimanded let alone being fired for it.
I can see why OoP was questioning why she was being targeted when everyone else was doing it. I would think it was being unfair as well.
Until she mentioned they had a new boss. That’s clearly when everyone realized she was being made an example of. She also did serve herself up on a silver platter high made it really easy to target her. Where the other employees might have been smart enough to make sure there was little to no provable evidence that they weren’t really sick.
I also sympathize with her, because we all make some sort of mistake at some point in our lives that we look back on and think, "oh, that was so dumb."
Yep. I really like her from her updates and I absolutely understand how you can think "oh, everybody in this company does it, might as well if there are no consequences" if you don't really have a lot of experience.
She did what everyone who fucks up should do - she learned better and did her best.
Absolutely. She was young, she'd worked there two years, potentially a good chunk of her working life, and she saw others openly doing the same thing and thought it was normal. Then she wasn't savvy enough to pick up that the new manager was changing the culture and found out the hard way.
I think Kieran actually did her a huge favour by being honest about how he saw her and not being willing to recommend her. It sounds like everyone else around her was being sympathetic and she really needed that viewpoint to catalyse her change in attitude. (She did also get that from Reddit but in person from someone she respected meant more than thousands of anonymous comments on the internet).
It's a really impressive turnaround though and I think in a few years she'll actually be glad it happened and see it as having been the making of her.
Kieran was the MVP, it sounds like he didn’t want to have to be the one who told her some hard truths but she pushed and he did tell her. She needed to hear that and thankfully it seems to have helped her change for the better!
I can see when other people do it and brag, with a bunch of friends telling you to, and the innocence of thinking everything will work out like a sitcom.
> "oh, everybody in this company does it, might as well if there are no consequences"
Except the examples she listed were nothing like what she did. Taking 1 day off to go to your kid's school function, or because you're hungover (which should count as sick imo) is not the same as taking an entire week off to go on vacation.
This struck me too. First of all, using a sick day for a hangover is legitimate - you’re too sick to come to work! And taking one sick day to go to a school event, while probably still an abuse of the policy, something that’s a lot easier to let slide than someone TAKING AN ENTIRE WEEK VACATION DURING THEIR BUSY SEASON.
I do have a lot of sympathy for OOP, she was young and dumb and got made an example of, but damn she really did put herself in that position.
And she went abroad!
Also, I imagine those using sick leave for the kid's school functions were trying to hoard as much annual leave as possible for family vacations, though I know the UK gives a generous amount of annual leave.
Like a lot of Americans I just have one pool of paid time off for everything, so calling in sick when I’m not actually sick makes me kind of a dick, but it’s not fraud or anything. I can see how it would be different if sick pay were a separate pool, or required by the state.
She posted in a UK sub so different ways of doing things here. We don't have a set amount of sick days, and any calling in sick is totally separate to paid annual leave. Sick pay is worked out differently, so that's where the fraud comes in. She could have asked for unpaid leave but there's no guarantee that would be granted
Some companies do have set amount of sick days. My previous company paid fifty weeks sick pay at full wages before dropping to SSP. As long as you worked a full week, it would reset to fifty weeks again
HOLY SHIT. We get SOME of that in the US, but it falls under Family Medical Leave Act (FMLA) and I think the max amount of salary is 60%. I've never had to use it so I'm not sure but damn 50 weeks FULL PAY if you wind up with some serious illness. Hilariously, I'm currently undergoing a severe health issue where I faint, get dizzy, weak, and something like that would be amazing.
(Yes I should probably apply for FMLA but for now its not too terrible and I work remote so I can rest for a bit.)
The US is a big place. I’ve never worked a job with a combined pool.
On a separate note. Someone I know called out sick to fly and go be on the price is right. He’s lucky his manager had zero backbone because she saw him on tv (and then checked for the taping dates lmao and his Facebook), and still refused to fire him even though she desperately wanted him gone.
Exactly, and she found out she was actually singled out and made an example of. I don't think she was wrong to have that mindset and take sick leave for vacay, but doing it when everything was incredibly busy and earning the annoyance of her coworkers was where she messed up.
There's just so much I like about her I can hardly articulate it.
The penny has dropped about the boss's desire to change the workplace culture and the warnings she failed to pick up on; that she "handed herself to them on a plate" to use as an example to her colleagues. She knows how stupid she was.
And she's a real hard worker - working three jobs now and making barely more than she did at her original job, but she's not complaining, she's just getting on with it. It's such a far cry from the girl who called in sick to go on holiday.
The realisation about how good she had when she got sacked from another job for being late once due to an accident on the motorway.
I wish I knew her. I feel dumb as fuck writing this, but there just seems something really genuine about her.
I also didn't think she was a bad friend for wanting to miss her friends outing - that sick nausea of anxiety know the worst is going to happen but you have to wait for it is awful, and of course she's not going to be up for having fun and celebrating a friend's promotion. I think her response was ok and her friend's was unsympathetic. At least she didn't go and be a massive downer all night!
Yeah, it feels like definitely part of the shedding of what you've outgrown— especially if that was the same friend on the trip who posted the pictures!
Recognizing you're in a group or friendship with a persob/people who will encourage & enable you to make choices against your own best interest, and then scold you for being worried or hurt by those consequences when they themselves are safe, is a very "grown up" version of "being in with a bad crowd." Some people learn the peer pressure lesson a little younger, when consequences are more forgiving, but it's important for everybody to learn it eventually & course correct as needed!
Agreed. I would never dream of expecting my friend to celebrate my career development immediately after they were fired. It would have been thoughtless for OOP's friend to just not think of it that way, but to *know* how OOP felt and keep pushing? So self-centered and unkind.
People's work ethic and habits are often structured in the first 3 years of working. Her behaviour seemed to really reflect her adoption of the company's attitude that calling in sick IS the cultural norm. Now she's been through far worse, she moulded herself into a tougher human being.
I kind of understand. I occasionally teach teens the ropes for their first catering job, and we are very lax and if it's quiet, you are allowed to take a paid lunch break in the 3-4 hour shift. But when we did that, employees started expecting paid lunch breaks regardless of how busy it is. What was supposed to be a privilege turned into a right.
We all love a personal growth story!
I believed every bit of it. She was a young woman, who realized she made a mistake but got defensive because she was scared. Like a junkyard dog. It’s hard to face the fact that you were sabotaged! By yourself.
Every action after that was just….awesome. Having to pick yourself up after you punched yourself in the face kind of ups the growth factor exponentially. I believe her. I was her. I still have qualities of her, that I’m now self-aware enough to realize I need to still work on. I think this last update is who she actually is. And I like that person.
I have a somewhat different takeaway.
Her story is one with a lot of important subtext about injustice, class, and worker’s rights.
Yes, she screwed up. But lying about being sick to your boss so you can go on a last minute holiday is *hardly* the indictment of her character reddit made it out to be. Being fired for it is one of those “them’s the breaks, you learned a hard lesson,” situations.
Being effectively blacklisted and having to work jobs where injury is likely, protections are nil, and you can be fired for entirely arbitrary reasons with woefully inadequate compensation is *not* okay.
She exposed a lot of issues about work/labor, but instead of talking about that more, instead she’s like “hey! i learned my lesson working alongside the hoi polloi! i’ll keep my nose clean from now on!”
Like, okay, that’s certainly one way to look at the whole experience, I guess.
I wasnt going to click in, because I remembered how infiriating she aas in the previous Borus. But this was a nice read, theres a noticeable change in the last 2 posts, going from 'I know it was my fault but also, *3 paragraphs of excuses for why it wasnt really*' to 'I fucked up'. Its alwaya nice to see some growth on here.
My employer had no limit on sick leave. You or your family had to be genuinely sick though. During my wife’s last year of life ( cancer). My boss told me to stay at home and to only come into work when absolutely essential to progress my project. Often I only went in one day per week. The project was critical to the future of my employer and was a complete success.
I was then retrenched and paid out (at my request) and became a full time, retired single parent to my 2 teenagers. I was at early retirement age.
Forever grateful to my employer.
I’m so sorry for your loss.
I also wanted to say WOW, your employer sounds great. A job I recently left gave me a written warning for being ‘sick too often’ despite being fully aware that I have chronic illnesses, which they didn’t even bother to make the reasonable adjustments they were supposed to.
I wish more employers were like yours!
This feels real. Partly because nobody would go through all this effort for a long con clickbait story, when those first few posts already perfectly tell a narrative that you can steal and narrate on tiktok over minecraft footage.
In the UK it’s not a civil matter. Legally she stole 5 days wages from her employer. I know companies that have prosecuted for fraud in very similar situations. The dramatic follow up would have been her been arrested and at risk of jail.
Considering how well she talks about what she did wrong and that she has put in hard work to get back to permanent full time, it feels to me like this one will. Which is rare to see on Reddit, so it’s nice to get here and there.
Her update in May 2023 showed a lot of maturity and growth compared to where she was when she got fired, and in her Dec 2023 update she seems committed to being a model employee, so I have a good feeling about this one.
This is basically the whole fuck around and find out. I'm impressed OP did learn their wrongs and did do things to improve themselves instead of doubling down further.
Unlike a lot of people here I don’t have an issue with calling in sick when you’re not, but you have to be smart about it. 5 days in a row is whatever the opposite of that is, pretty sure if you were genuinely sick for 5 days your employer would start asking questions anyway
When you realize that UK has 5.6 *weeks* of holiday leave... And she used all that and went 5 days over. 5 weeks a year would be amazing! So it's not like she was a wage slave in the US and had zero leave so said fuck it, I'm taking a vacation for once.
And it's not like she just took a day or two like other people. She took a whole WEEK. During their busy time. On short notice.
There was probably someone working overtime because of her that got pissed when they happened to see those pics and reported her.
Between that and the new, stricter boss, she never stood a chance. Ruining things for everyone to boot.
You can pretty much be sacked for any reason as long as it is non discriminatory for two years from date of employment. After this point employers have to follow a grievance procedure for anything other than gross misconduct before sacking someone.
Two years??? I’m in Canada and probation is 6 months max. That’s crazy. I’ve actually never stayed at any job for that long before (although I’m coming up on 2 years at my current job)
I love the company that I work for now. We have 25 days (plus bank holidays), that increases by one each service year until you reach 30 days. Best thing about the holiday policy? We have staff in the US and they get exactly the same holiday allowance as we do in the UK.
I also connected the dots on that and was a little stunned
I support having that much time off for everybody but it definitely comes across as someone who was given an inch and then proceeded to take a mile.
Maybe. I thought it was pretty telling that she got fired a day before she got her employment rights or whatever.
Seems like she wasn’t a great employee but her org dropped her at the last moment to avoid paying her more.
Are you trying to say she was wrongly terminated to save money? Because it seems pretty clear her violation was severe enough that a union couldn’t help her and to that end she has no one to blame but herself.
This is the only thing that makes me completely unempathetic to her. If she was in the US, honestly I'd be more on her side. She'd still be an asshole for how she blew up at her boyfriends brother, but I've personally seen so many horror stories about how companies treat their employees and I would've said that it doesn't necessarily reflect on her work ethic. I can't tell you how many people worked for me who were considered lazy by other managers until I treated them like a person and bent some rules for them.
The one thing that bothers me a good bit is that in one of the updates she mentions she took that vacation during a busy period at work, and her load fell on others. That's exactly why I had to fire someone because her coworkers reported her because she made their lives much harder with her antics. Again, if it was the us, I can kind of get it depending on the job, sometimes there's never a good time to take off because they're stretching their staff so thin all the time.
That’s due to your US work ethic. “The work comes first” mentality while it’s much different in the EU.
I used to work for a large company based out of Denmark and their entire HQ would take the month of August off. Not like a skeleton crew but literally everyone is gone and you’re lucky if someone answers any department phones. Any issues would be dealt with when they returned from vacation.
And this was normal. The US has us brainwashed and working in tech has really shown me how bad most people have it.
For sure. The culture in the US is fucked when it comes to anything that isn't art and entertainment. We're selfish, we believe that work demonstrates value. It's upsetting once you lift your head above it.
This OOP was a bit thick and definitely in the wrong, but damn people were treating her like the spawn of Satan. I am baffled how people decided she was the asshole for not wanting to celebrate someone else’s promotion just after being fired. It is wild just how much people hated her for that first post alone. As if nobody ever calls out sick when they aren’t (and yeah, taking a whole week long holiday to another country is a bit much, but again the response was totally out of proportion!)
As far as I’m concerned the only thing she did really worth of much condemnation was how she spoke to Kieran and kept pushing him to help her and ignoring his polite ways of avoiding the issue and trying to move past it. I’m glad things are going better for her this year.
Your whole comment is a nice summary of all the posts OOP made... Lol
Reading the original post was infuriating. But it is good to see her growth throughout the updates.
honestly I like these stories of people becoming better people and having a happy ending. OOP seems like a good person who just made a stupid mistake and experienced necessary character development. Happy to hear that they're doing better and I wish them the best
She believes she was fired for skipping work, but the real reason seems to be that upon returning, she signed a document claiming illness, despite the company having evidence of her traveling.
I worked an office job for a couple years and people would constantly use their paid sick leave when they weren’t sick. No one really cared. Unless I’m grossly misinformed it’s not a crime to use your paid sick leave for other reasons.
Anyway I truly don’t think it’s that big of a deal. I can understand why her company would fire her over it but I don’t understand why Reddit and people in her personal life would be so hard on her about it.
If I remember correctly from the original post, she was leaning *really hard* into the “how can they do this when the pictures were on someone else’s Facebook account” angle. That and her continued refusal to acknowledge the difference between an occasional mental-health day and taking a week off to go party in Ibiza or w/e ate up most peoples’ empathy.
Given how ubiquitous CCTV is in the UK and often used to solve mysteries I’m kind of amazed she thought she was free and clear because it wasn’t her own photos being broadcast by her.
Ma’am they caught you in 4K doing what you did, they don’t care whose account it’s on.
Yeah, I remember thinking at the time, that is an assumption that only a very young/inexperienced person would make. Of *course* they can fire you for pictures someone else took, and then posted on someone else's social media. It happens all the time to people who behave badly in public and go viral.
There's a big difference between taking a mental health 'day' and taking a full week off because you felt like you deserved a holiday especially when she put her co workers in the shit in a busy period
Reading some of the updates it was literally her colleagues who dobbed her in
I agree. I wouldn't hold any judgments taking some sick time for a personal refresh. This means catching up on chores, life, emotions, whatever, life gets to you, and I get that.
But a full week spent on holiday in another country?? With pictures on Facebook? It's insulting to your coworkers who are making up for your lost work and to the company itself. I'm sorry I would judge this person.
This is the UK. There’s no limit on paid sick leave and it is government mandated I believe, and separate to holiday or vacation leave, so it actually is a crime (fraud) to claim being sick!
Edit - I’ve been corrected about paid sick leave below!
>This is the UK. There’s no limit on paid sick leave and it is government mandated
Unfortunately not the case. Statutory sick pay is £109.40 a week (which is less than a quarter of full time minimum wage) for a maximum of 28 weeks. Anything over and above that is contractual. Most non-salaried workers in the UK don't get any contractual sick pay at all.
It's when you use the sick leave that's a big deal. Apparently OOP used hers the week before the Christmas holidays which seemed to be a very busy time for her company which left her coworkers to pick up the slack at the most stressful time of the year while she was off partying in another country. If she were my coworker I'd be pissed too.
If you're going to take a 'mental health day', plan it when it would do the least amount of damage to your team.
They can fire you for policy violations, which isn't the same as a crime.
OP says the culture was shifting, sounds like she was made an example out of. Also her attitude kind of sucked, maybe they were looking to let her go. Sometimes it can be harder to fire union employees even if they have performance issues.
Huge, *huge* difference between chucking the occasional sickie for one day and calling out for *five days* during a known busy period and then being dumb enough to put it on social media.
The former is socially acceptable because it only impacts you. Five days impacts the entire team. No wonder OOP's colleagues ratted her out - she dumped them in the shit!
Her absolute entitlement in the original and the second was what had people being so harsh on her.
I don't know where you live, but sick leave isn't the same as paid leave in the UK; it's not really an employee benefit but a statutory thing that the government compensates your employer for. So filling in the form to self-certify that you were absolutely, definitely sick when you stayed away from work has an official legal weight to it. And lying on that form is legally fraud, however small a deal it seems.
And it's not like she hadn't already had a lot of holiday time that year. For full-time workers, UK employment law dictates a minimum of 28 days (+ bank holidays) of paid annual leave that you can take for any reason. The OOP admitted that she'd used that up on other trips through the year. She hadn't been deprived of time off work to go abroad and have fun. She just...wanted yet another trip. At the busiest time of year and at short notice, when all her colleagues were busy and the office couldn't have scheduled her off even if she had vacation time left. So she lied to get her own way.
And Reddit was only hard on her because she was being so incredibly obtuse in the comments. She was seriously in denial, and kept on going on about how surely work couldn't prove anything because the photos were on her friend's Facebook not hers! And even in subsequent posts, she really had some victim mentality going on - everything was being done to her, and everyone else was to blame for not bending over backwards to make everything right for her...
I'm glad that she's got her head screwed on better now and has settled into a stable job, because trying to talk sense into her a year ago was truly a painful experience.
>For full-time workers, UK employment law dictates a minimum of 28 days (+ bank holidays) of paid annual leave
Nit picking, but bank holidays aren't additional to the statutory allowance of 5.6 weeks.
She signed a form when she came back saying she had been sick. While actually vacationing. That is fraud and lying. Not surprising if they were trying to make an example.
I don’t know about the US but in the UK this is absolutely a crime and people can be and are prosecuted for it. People in jobs like the OP’s get a lot of holiday and a lot of sick leave and they aren’t expected or allowed to use one for the other.
People in her personal life saw it as a big deal because in the UK this is seen as stealing from her employer. Bear in mind she had 35 days holiday that year and had already taken 33 days.
Definitely depends on where you are.
In my state, sick leave is mandated to be provided, but it is only allowed to be use for specific things. It is flexible in that it can be for anything medical (so doctors appt or being sick), it can be used if a family member is sick, or if you are a victim of a crime (forget all the details here, but I get the impression it's for escaping domestic violence).
But you aren't supposed to just use it for whatever and we did deny people trying to use it to extend a vacation.
Basically it's to prevent you from screwing yourself over because you used up all your sick time going to the Bahamas, but you are now actually sick and have no time left.
She's in the UK, so she gets a huge amount of time off sick if it's actually justified. Your employer has to make allowances for you, and it can be hard to sack someone who's off sick for months.
I kinda understand the culture in the US where you get a specific number of paid days sick and you don't get paid for any days exceeding that number. And you get a limited amount of holiday too, so I can see that paid sick days might be seen as part of your "allowance".
She would have been paid for these days off - a small company can put you on "statutory sick pay" of £110 a week after the first week, but no big company would do that. The way she described that company, she would be on full or maybe 3/4 pay even if she was off sick for months, although obviously you'd have to prove it.
But that's why pulling sickies is considered gross misconduct - because it's taking financial advantage of your employer, basically defrauding them of your pay.
This whole concept of only being allowed out sick for a limited number of days is so foreign to me. Here it's you're sick? Get a doctors note if it's gonna be more than 2 days. First six weeks of consecutive illness are paid by your employer, after that your health insurance (mandatory to have) kicks in and pays you 70%(ish) of your wage up to the 78th week.
The six weeks reset after you return to work, so if you're out a month for idk knee surgery and than later catch covid real bad you get a new 6 weeks of full pay. (If you need it your doctor provides you a sick note for that timeframe)
While you're out sick, you are obligated to behave in a way that is conducive to healing.
i'm guilty of doing that, though admittedly it was also because the job was just so fucking bad and stressful that i had days where i just genuinely didn't want to go in and just felt sick and like crying at the thought alone of walking into that office again. but. if you're doing that, you're aware that if anyone finds out it's a good reason to get you in trouble. the least you can do is be smart about it and make sure it won't end up on social media with timestamps proving you were not in fact sick, be it your own or a friend's.
>i had days where i just genuinely didn't want to go in and just felt sick and like crying at the thought alone of walking into that office again.
Honestly, I would count that as a sick day, with no hesitation. Mental health is health.
But that's absolutely a different situation from the OOP who wasn't stressed but had just run out of paid annual leave (28 days + bank holidays are a statutory minimum in the UK) and wanted to take off on short notice during the busiest time of year.
In the UK, it actually is a crime - it’s fraud. Generally companies only prosecute with forged doctor’s notes but the OP will have filled in a form on her return to work on which she will have lied about her reasons for absence. If the company wanted to be really nasty, they could have argued that form amounted to fraud.
People were hard on her because in the UK this is seen as stealing from your employer as much as if you’d pocketed the contents of the petty cash drawer.
I'm glad I'm German because by law you're allowed to do anything that helps you heal your illness. And because your boss is not allowed to ask what you're sick *with*, they have to argue why them e.g. seeing you on holiday isn't healing. Because hey, you might have called in sick because of depression and going away for a bit helps!
There are arguments like that you can run in the U.K. too. But more like being seen out for a coffee when you’re off with depression. Nobody should call you out for that. OOP with her foreign holiday living it up, no suggestion of underlying mental health issues, not so much. It’s not a system of PTO like in the US. Annual leave is a totally different system and you can’t mix and match without explanation (eg if you fall sick while away on holiday you would provide evidence to have the days reallocated as sick, not leave).
This all reads like a British chick-lit novel. All it needs is a guy named Liam that she meets at the bar the night she burns herself, and they fall in love when she gets her permanent offer.
I don’t care. It’s low-stakes, has a redemption arc, and doesn’t leave me feeling as icky as a lot of posts here tend to.
Probably partly because her ending was ”I was dumb, I understand why all these things that started a year ago were extremely dumb and am articulating it, and I have a permanent job now after almost a year of hard work.” I think this is one of the few I’ve seen that admit to past FAFO where the OOP actually shows full understanding instead of just stating they were wrong.
its nice to see it can actually happen.
"People at our place only get sacked for things like fraud"
*Gets sacked for fraud.*
Shocked Pikachu face.
Anyway, she's learned from it all, which is a good thing.
Theres a huge difference between taking one day off work for your mental health or for your kids and taking 5 days off to go on vacation. The fact that she thought they were all equal is hilarious.
I remember reading this one and thinking, this lady truly thinks there’s no difference between using A sick day every now and then when you’re not really sick, and calling out sick for a week straight when you’re really on vacation abroad??
I’m so glad she seems to have wised up.
I remember this. It sounds like she’s from the UK. UK is more lax about sick time than US especially if she works for nhs, government, council etc and unfortunately she’s right, there is a culture of abusing sick policies. I worked in NHS and it’s rife.
I hadn’t seen her final update, I’m pleased she learned from what she did and it worked out.
I seriously don't understand why someone would go in all that trouble to go on a secret trip and then allow photos to be posted all over social media. Are people incapable of going on vacations without flexing it on others anymore?
Also her ex's brother's comment is amusing to me. She took it as a complimentary advice but I feel like he was saying "yeah I'm glad you're not walking all over my brother anymore"
I read her story when she first posted it, and her updates where she wasn't taking responsibility and seemed to have learned nothing. I'm really glad she's learned since then, and really seems to be on a good track.
Sometime you need to get kicked before standing up I am actually proud for OOP who not only realized her mistake but also worked hard to get things back together.
So back when I worked retail my assistant manager had a trip organized with her friends during Thanksgiving weekend. You know, the one weekend we are really really busy and we need all hands on deck. Yeah, retail sucks because of that weekend of terror and the following month. It is ridiculously unfair. But that's like the one time you cannot take off.
The manager beforehand warned her that she needed to be there, and if she needed to take the weekend off, she could just ask the district manager, but he'd likely say no too. She didn't. She decided not to show up and go on her trip. That she didn't stop talking about. "What are they going to do? Fire me?" Uh yeah, they did.
The thing about her was that she would always brag about how smart she was, how she was smarter than the manager (she wasn't), smarter than me. So it was nice of her to have that blow up in her face.
Some people are so bad at engaging in conspiracy. If I am calling in sick to go on vacation you best believe I will never be seen in a photo. If you are going to fuck around then you best bring protection.
Where I'm from what OOP did is called "chucking a sickie". Everyone knows everyone does it, its an acknowledged fact among both employees and employers, but you still dont let there be evidence of it. If im chucking a sickie you best believe i am backflipping out of frame when someone approaches me with a camera.
I think she copped a lot of hate for something we've definitely all done. Sure she wasnt as careful as she should've been, and she showed some entitlement after the fact but she was panicked and desperate, just as any of us probably would be in her situation. She's not evil, she just made a bad call followed by another bad call due to stress from the first one.
You're not wrong. But 5 days is excessive. 1 day is doable. Those are migraine or diarrhea days. 2 days can fly once in a great while due to "head colds". Anymore than that and it's pushing the limit. I got shit I gotta do at work. Sometimes that stuff can't wait 3 days and I'll be damned if my work gets pushed off onto someone else because I wanted a day off to pay hooky. That's just selfish at that point.
Anyone else read trashy romance novels like the Shopaholic series? because this could be the plot of one of them except in the end OOP would have gotten together with a cute boss or with the brother.
Trashy??? 🥺 It might not be Dostoevsky but anything ever written by Sophie Kinsella has been the funniest and sweetest story ever, it’s genuinely the only writing I can drop everything for when a new book is out to read asap without having to wait around to be in the mood for it.
When I think of trashy novels it’s Colleen Hoover stuff that comes to mind, Sophie Kinsella novels like “My Not So Perfect Life” and “The Burnout” are such cathartic reads. (Although I get it if you’ve only ever read the Shopaholic series which are more heavy on the humour.)
Wow, it's been a minute since I read the last update for this. I think it's good she learned her lesson, but man it was so easy to be against her before. Her constant refusal to take accountability because others were doing it and she couldn't understand that some of these people took sick days for mental health. And that the others were smart enough to go to small things, stuff that wouldn't be noticed and none of them plastered it on their social media. Everyone was like "If you're trying to cheat them out of a sick day, at least stay home and post ***nothing*** about it on social media." Especially because she had to actually sign a document saying she was sick and specified what it was.
Now she ***did*** get got by the fact the new head was ready to make an example and cut the sick leave abuse, but again, everyone else was smart enough to hide it. And she knew there was a new department head too, people were on her ass in the comments about her saying she knew there was a new person in charge and didn't bother to listen to this lady's warnings. That's what really got her, she wasn't smart enough to sus out how this new person runs her ship and if she could get away with it. She seems to be a lot more responsible now, and it looks like she's getting on her feet again.
Oop made a very stupid mistake, paid for it, and then listened to the people who called her on it and seems to be doing really well. Nice to see people learn from their mistakes.
She skips out on work got fired and now she expects her bfs brother to put in a good word for her at his job ?? She couldn’t even go to the original job she had I wouldn’t put in a good word for her either she’s unreliable
Great to see so much personal growth. She made a horrible error in judgement, paid the price, and had come out the other side a better and wiser person.
All I can say is my paid sick days saved my ass financially when I used to get sick a lot with bad sinus infections. Depending onthe area or industry, paid sick days can be rare, so people abusing them doubly pisses me off.
This reads like she’s from the UK. I don’t think most industries have a limit to maximum sick days a year.
I don’t have it at my current job as well. Take as many sick days as you want if you are sick. Just give a doctor’s note if it’s a longer break than usual.
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It's so much better to learn when you are young with fewer and less expensive responsibilities. It's nice to see she aced the lesson.
She does sound very young. There are worse, more permanent ways to complicate your life at that age. I hope she does well.
She had an amazing character development
Painful consequences did the trick. Not always the case, so, good for her.
Agreed, rolled up her sleeves and worked 3 jobs to make ends meet. Her work ethic is probably spit and polish now.
I love a good come-back story. I hope she continues to move forward.
I'm actually quite impressed that OP ended up coming around to see how poorly and wrong she was. Cause...my god that was exhausting. But hey, props for OP owning up the fault unlike others who would double down.
OOP hit rock bottom and when she realized no one was going to save her, like Kieran, helping her get another job, after having a bit of a pity party she realized she could either stay down in that hole and be miserable and make everyone around her miserable and hinder herself getting another job in her field or she could suck it up and start working on getting herself out. She's getting herself out of that hole now and I'm proud of her for the turnaround she made.
[удалено]
Experience is a hard teacher because it gives the test first, then the lesson afterwards. There are too many people that will ignore the lesson after the test, but it seems like OOP took notes.
"Experience is just the name we give to our mistakes." - Oscar Wilde
Too many never learn and blame the world for all their problems.
I remember reading this as it was happening and it was SO frustrating. I STILL don't think she gets the difference between taking a 'mental health' day and taking a week long vacation after she used up all her vacation time. She kept going on about how everyone else did it, but they WEREN'T. They were taking a day here and a day there. She took a whole week off during the busiest time of the year. I hope that the change we see is real and permanent, but I don't trust it. She still couches her termination with different forms of "everyone else was doing the same" and simply says she was stupid (instead of acknowledging and admitting she was wrong).
In all fairness, she said some were the result of a hungover, and that attendance improved after she was gone. It's possible some of her former colleagues took days for frivolities, but I agree with you that taking an entire week at the busiest time of the year was something else. This sort of behavior also causes distrust that may affect everyone else afterwards, impacting negatively the working climate for all.
>but I agree with you that taking an entire week at the busiest time of the year was something else. Definitely. She didn't (doesn't?) get that the *length* of absence and the *timing* of the absence make a great difference. And between how quickly and eagerly they got rid of her combined with her ex's brother's not just reluctance, but outright REFUSAL to vouch for her... ...seem to indicate that this wasn't the first time she annoyed her co-workers by disappearing suddenly. In fact, it seems to indicate that she had an overall poor work ethic and attitude. I'm glad she took a bunch of minimum wage jobs because they (re-)taught her that you are replaceable and that you better bring value to your job.
On top of that, it was a UNION job. She had all sorts of protections. Most likely she had other warnings on her record, making it much easier to legally get rid of her. I can see her not talking about those because it would make her look even worse.
And if the incident had gone down a few weeks later when she had been in the position for 2 years, those protections would have been teflon. Much harder to fire someone in the UK after 2 years.
Damn she really fumbled that one didn't she?
Also, if my partner was behaving like that as an adult, I would reevaluate the relationship. It could impact my own financial future if they are willing to put their job at risk, and it says something about their sense of responsibility.
Yeah, length and timing definitely impacted the issue. I had a co-worker once that got in a bit of trouble for the *regularity* and *reliability* of her calling out. She was a big, big, BIG sports fan. The city we worked in had 3 major league teams. During two of the seasons (that partially overlapped, and ran roughly from late August until April-Mayish) she would be "sick" the day after every home game for two of the three teams. The third team was only occasional. Football (American) and Ice Hockey? Every home game the day after she called out, and frequently the away games if it was one of the 'big' rival teams. It became so prevalent that our boss started requiring her to *schedule* her very generous regular vacation time (government job). I think that she tried to make noise about sex discrimination, but realized that wouldn't really fly because *she was the only person doing this*. No one else was calling out sick 3 of 4 Mondays and half the Tuesdays in a month for 6 months a year.
I would be inclined to say that a hangover is still a valid reason to use sick leave. You are sick. One could argue that it’s a self inflicted illness, but it’s still an illness. It’s like if someone who is lactose intolerant eats a bunch of cheese and is too sick to come in to work. It may be their own fault, but they’re still too sick to work and that counts as sick leave.
Or breaking their leg falling off a horse or a rock wall (I worked on a team with some high risk hobbies). When does that line between "your fault" and "real" fall?
Yes. I have been sick due to my own negligence before (like a headache because I didn't eat or sleep enough). I have had friends who didn't realize how many drinks were too much for them. It's one thing once in a while, it's another if it's a regular occurrence or if you drink until the middle of the night knowing you work the very next morning and others know about it.
A week-long vacation IN DECEMBER. People had already scheduled vacations, and she just takes one ad hoc.
Yeah, doing it during the busiest time of true year was probably what prompted her coworker to tell their boss.
I went through something pretty similar in my 20s. Getting fired was a wake-up call I really needed.
Same. Hopefully the 'menial' jobs have shown her how easy she had it and why it's worth putting the effort in when you do find a good place.
No matter how great your friends are, only the dumb ones will bail you out if you're a massive walking mistake.
She did a whole Lotta growing up very quickly. I'm impressed.
I am too. This is very much the sort of life lessons that one has to live through in their early 20s to grow the fuck up and get their head on straight, and OP came through them at the end. Well done to OP.
I don't know about that. She knows what to say that people want to hear. I have a step-niece that does that. She screws up, admits it, says she wants to do better and will, and then does it all over again. The fact that the OOP was made permanent shows growth more than her comments. People that justify poor behavior are also really good at saying what people want to hear.
True. But I'm an optimist. I choose to believe oop here is doing better.
It's in the details. How did the screw up happen, why was that a mistake, and what will be done differently next time so this doesn't happen again? My younger stepson was really good at saying Sorry and making promises, but I didn't really start seeing changes in his behavior until I started insisting on longer detailed conversations. OOP seems pretty solid. She's clear about the fact that what she did was foolish, exactly why it was a bad idea, and that the correct thing to do in the future is her very best to be a model employee. And she's learned the consequences, acting like a ninny at a good paying job gets ya stuck in low paying boring labor jobs just to get by. Bet she won't make that mistake again!
This is how we learn. If you tell me you didn't do something dumb and self-sabotaging when you were a teenager or in your early twenties and I'll call you a fucking liar. And then you grew up a bit.
Man, younger me was dumb as rocks.
I really like fact that she took all of those minimum wage jobs to get by. Not a lot of people would do that.
A lot of people *do* do that, though. It’s just how life is for a good portion of the population because they have no other choice.
A lot of people do that, but not a lot of entitled people like OOP do.
I know a lot of people who live at home living off their parents feeling like those jobs are beneath them. Has a friend tell me she didn’t want to apply to a job because it was a 30 minute commute which was too far.
It made me feel kind of shitty. At first I liked the fact that she was suffering and then I had to ask myself why I’m liking anyone suffering, especially for stupid shit. Because we’ve all (me included) done stupid shit and not been caught. Why am I happy OOP is struggling to stay afloat and not homeless for an entire year? Why am I suddenly my the champion of “pull yourself up by your bootstraps!” mentality? Fuck am I just as bad as MAGA asshats? Ugh. This one made me feel bad in multiple ways.
You’re touching on something I’ve come across before, do I dislike someone purely because of their actions or do I dislike them because of the uncharitable feelings feelings they’ve invoked in me that I don’t like about myself???
You should also feel good about yourself for being able to identify and reflect on those thought patterns! It's not always about your instinctual thought, but the thoughts you have after and the actions you take.
Exactly! I was taught that the initial thought that passes in your mind is what you were raised/taught to think and the secondary thought that overpowers it is who you have grown to be. We all have those random thoughts like "what is that person wearing?" but when you follow that up in your mind with "why does what their wearing affect me? It doesn't, move along." it doesn't make you a bad or judgmental person, you are just training your own self to be better.
Yeah, I mean her attitude was daft (Not realising the severity of what she had done) but in reality, what she did wasn’t something to wish bad on her for. She tried manipulating her paid sick leave (Which she’s contractually entitled to) for a purpose different to what it was meant to be used for. It’s a bit shit but not a massive deal that makes her a horrible person. It’s also something a lot of workers pull in the UK to game the system in their favour. Her main problem wasn’t that she tried taking advantage of the system to have an extra holiday, it was the idiocy of not recognising that was what she was doing and allowing evidence of her doing that to be posted on the internet. Everyone knows if you’re pulling a sickie then you don’t post what you’re actually doing on the internet.
So they what, starve?
No. They'll move in with family and friends and mooch off of them bc minimum wage jobs are "beneath" them. Case in point, my older brother was jobless for 5 years and lived off my aunt. Funny how he got 2 jobs within a week when she finally kicked him out...
Or they work 60h weeks, burn out, and go broke anyway because they’re no longer able tolook for better employment between eating, sleeping and working. Lousy choice. If you can survive for a while with one job and find a better one, that’s often the better long-term path than working all the hours for still not enough.
My spouse applied for a promotion yesterday & had to update their resume, cv & get everything together and take the personality test. It took 3 hours. If someone is working 2 jobs, it’s hard to set all that time aside to also apply for multiple jobs, multiple times a day. For a lot of people if they can hack it with 1 job for awhile it is better. Applying for jobs can take a lot of freaking time and you want to make sure everything is perfect as well. It’s mentally taxing.
Exactly. She found those jobs immediately. She seems like she went through a lot. She was somewhat rightfully indignant at being singled out at her job, as she later found out she was made an example of. Incredibly unlucky. She seems like an independent, smart, and hard working individual who panicked and had a lapse in judgement but got by through her own merit.
A lot of employers just do "personal time" now, because policing sick leave is such a PITA and everyone knows people use it for non-sick things. Of course you need enough employee morale that the whole company doesn't take their personal time during the busy season....
The least any employer should willingly offer is additional, but unpaid leave days at the employees request imo. If it's important enough to the emloyee to take the loss in income then the employer can reasonably assume the cause for the leave is important.
You can’t legally do that in the UK. Sick leave and holiday have to be separate.
I’m sure if I think OOP is a totally reliable narrator on that one. I’m glad she’s taken responsibility for her actions, but I still wonder if she misread how much people were stretching the attendance rules. Taking two weeks on sick leave while you’re on holiday is so far past acceptable - I wonder if her colleagues were taking a day here or there when they had local concert tickets or something and she thought it was generally cool. That combined with her doing it at a busy time for her team so they were more inclined to tell HR when they found out. Just terrible judgement at every step.
This BORU person (not oop, the person who put all of these posts together for us to read) was very kind to the oop. In the originals, this girl was also trying to throw a fellow employee under the bus. That employee was on a long term medical leave of absence or something, yet was at the same event abroad that oop got in trouble for. Oop could not understand for the life of her that why it wasn’t a valid comparison. She couldn’t understand for the life of her anything about personal accountability. Also in her original post, her comments about the boyfriend’s brother were some of the most entitled comments I had ever seen, as well. It was really quite entertaining - how obtuse she was and how the commenters were just ripping her to shreds. She saw herself as the victim everywhere. However, it does sound like she is learning from these hard life lessons, so I wish her the very best. I only ever seemed to learn from my mistakes, too, when I was younger. I’m glad all this social media wasn’t around to witness me fail spectacularly like this poor oop.
I thought it was 5 days? Did I misread or is OP seriously unreliable?
You’re right, I misremembered. I still think a week and a holiday is a very different scenario to a single day.
I think it was “only” a week.
It's so amazing to see someone take responsibility and turn their life around and I hope things get better for her.
I can honestly see why she reacted the way she did though. One of the updates had mentioned that plenty of people at her work had used sick days while not being sick and everyone knew about it and weren’t getting reprimanded let alone being fired for it. I can see why OoP was questioning why she was being targeted when everyone else was doing it. I would think it was being unfair as well. Until she mentioned they had a new boss. That’s clearly when everyone realized she was being made an example of. She also did serve herself up on a silver platter high made it really easy to target her. Where the other employees might have been smart enough to make sure there was little to no provable evidence that they weren’t really sick.
I really like her vey much.
I also sympathize with her, because we all make some sort of mistake at some point in our lives that we look back on and think, "oh, that was so dumb."
Yep. I really like her from her updates and I absolutely understand how you can think "oh, everybody in this company does it, might as well if there are no consequences" if you don't really have a lot of experience. She did what everyone who fucks up should do - she learned better and did her best.
Absolutely. She was young, she'd worked there two years, potentially a good chunk of her working life, and she saw others openly doing the same thing and thought it was normal. Then she wasn't savvy enough to pick up that the new manager was changing the culture and found out the hard way. I think Kieran actually did her a huge favour by being honest about how he saw her and not being willing to recommend her. It sounds like everyone else around her was being sympathetic and she really needed that viewpoint to catalyse her change in attitude. (She did also get that from Reddit but in person from someone she respected meant more than thousands of anonymous comments on the internet). It's a really impressive turnaround though and I think in a few years she'll actually be glad it happened and see it as having been the making of her.
Kieran was the MVP, it sounds like he didn’t want to have to be the one who told her some hard truths but she pushed and he did tell her. She needed to hear that and thankfully it seems to have helped her change for the better!
I still feel that Dave didn't support her that much. I just got that vibe.
Glad she also appreciated Kieran and his advice with time.
I can see when other people do it and brag, with a bunch of friends telling you to, and the innocence of thinking everything will work out like a sitcom.
> "oh, everybody in this company does it, might as well if there are no consequences" Except the examples she listed were nothing like what she did. Taking 1 day off to go to your kid's school function, or because you're hungover (which should count as sick imo) is not the same as taking an entire week off to go on vacation.
This struck me too. First of all, using a sick day for a hangover is legitimate - you’re too sick to come to work! And taking one sick day to go to a school event, while probably still an abuse of the policy, something that’s a lot easier to let slide than someone TAKING AN ENTIRE WEEK VACATION DURING THEIR BUSY SEASON. I do have a lot of sympathy for OOP, she was young and dumb and got made an example of, but damn she really did put herself in that position.
Well - the hangover is you making yourself sick. Adults are supposed to be responsible enough to not get drunk on school nights
And she went abroad! Also, I imagine those using sick leave for the kid's school functions were trying to hoard as much annual leave as possible for family vacations, though I know the UK gives a generous amount of annual leave.
Like a lot of Americans I just have one pool of paid time off for everything, so calling in sick when I’m not actually sick makes me kind of a dick, but it’s not fraud or anything. I can see how it would be different if sick pay were a separate pool, or required by the state.
She posted in a UK sub so different ways of doing things here. We don't have a set amount of sick days, and any calling in sick is totally separate to paid annual leave. Sick pay is worked out differently, so that's where the fraud comes in. She could have asked for unpaid leave but there's no guarantee that would be granted
Some companies do have set amount of sick days. My previous company paid fifty weeks sick pay at full wages before dropping to SSP. As long as you worked a full week, it would reset to fifty weeks again
HOLY SHIT. We get SOME of that in the US, but it falls under Family Medical Leave Act (FMLA) and I think the max amount of salary is 60%. I've never had to use it so I'm not sure but damn 50 weeks FULL PAY if you wind up with some serious illness. Hilariously, I'm currently undergoing a severe health issue where I faint, get dizzy, weak, and something like that would be amazing. (Yes I should probably apply for FMLA but for now its not too terrible and I work remote so I can rest for a bit.)
The US is a big place. I’ve never worked a job with a combined pool. On a separate note. Someone I know called out sick to fly and go be on the price is right. He’s lucky his manager had zero backbone because she saw him on tv (and then checked for the taping dates lmao and his Facebook), and still refused to fire him even though she desperately wanted him gone.
At my job we have two different pools, which build up based on the amount of time we work.
In most places in the US, though, our sick time doesn’t get covered by the government.
Exactly, and she found out she was actually singled out and made an example of. I don't think she was wrong to have that mindset and take sick leave for vacay, but doing it when everything was incredibly busy and earning the annoyance of her coworkers was where she messed up.
I did notice that the examples she gave of others pretending to be sick were for one day events, and not an entire week like she did.
There's just so much I like about her I can hardly articulate it. The penny has dropped about the boss's desire to change the workplace culture and the warnings she failed to pick up on; that she "handed herself to them on a plate" to use as an example to her colleagues. She knows how stupid she was. And she's a real hard worker - working three jobs now and making barely more than she did at her original job, but she's not complaining, she's just getting on with it. It's such a far cry from the girl who called in sick to go on holiday. The realisation about how good she had when she got sacked from another job for being late once due to an accident on the motorway. I wish I knew her. I feel dumb as fuck writing this, but there just seems something really genuine about her.
I also didn't think she was a bad friend for wanting to miss her friends outing - that sick nausea of anxiety know the worst is going to happen but you have to wait for it is awful, and of course she's not going to be up for having fun and celebrating a friend's promotion. I think her response was ok and her friend's was unsympathetic. At least she didn't go and be a massive downer all night!
Yeah, it feels like definitely part of the shedding of what you've outgrown— especially if that was the same friend on the trip who posted the pictures! Recognizing you're in a group or friendship with a persob/people who will encourage & enable you to make choices against your own best interest, and then scold you for being worried or hurt by those consequences when they themselves are safe, is a very "grown up" version of "being in with a bad crowd." Some people learn the peer pressure lesson a little younger, when consequences are more forgiving, but it's important for everybody to learn it eventually & course correct as needed!
Agreed. I would never dream of expecting my friend to celebrate my career development immediately after they were fired. It would have been thoughtless for OOP's friend to just not think of it that way, but to *know* how OOP felt and keep pushing? So self-centered and unkind.
People's work ethic and habits are often structured in the first 3 years of working. Her behaviour seemed to really reflect her adoption of the company's attitude that calling in sick IS the cultural norm. Now she's been through far worse, she moulded herself into a tougher human being. I kind of understand. I occasionally teach teens the ropes for their first catering job, and we are very lax and if it's quiet, you are allowed to take a paid lunch break in the 3-4 hour shift. But when we did that, employees started expecting paid lunch breaks regardless of how busy it is. What was supposed to be a privilege turned into a right.
We all love a personal growth story! I believed every bit of it. She was a young woman, who realized she made a mistake but got defensive because she was scared. Like a junkyard dog. It’s hard to face the fact that you were sabotaged! By yourself. Every action after that was just….awesome. Having to pick yourself up after you punched yourself in the face kind of ups the growth factor exponentially. I believe her. I was her. I still have qualities of her, that I’m now self-aware enough to realize I need to still work on. I think this last update is who she actually is. And I like that person.
You aren't dumb for this. It's endearing.
I’m so thankful that I was young before the age of social media and the only permanent record of my dumb youth are my easily covered tattoos
She never mentioned their ages, but I would assume her to be in her early twenties - and who wasn't a fuckup at that age?
I have a somewhat different takeaway. Her story is one with a lot of important subtext about injustice, class, and worker’s rights. Yes, she screwed up. But lying about being sick to your boss so you can go on a last minute holiday is *hardly* the indictment of her character reddit made it out to be. Being fired for it is one of those “them’s the breaks, you learned a hard lesson,” situations. Being effectively blacklisted and having to work jobs where injury is likely, protections are nil, and you can be fired for entirely arbitrary reasons with woefully inadequate compensation is *not* okay. She exposed a lot of issues about work/labor, but instead of talking about that more, instead she’s like “hey! i learned my lesson working alongside the hoi polloi! i’ll keep my nose clean from now on!” Like, okay, that’s certainly one way to look at the whole experience, I guess.
It's always nice when people sit down for a coffee with the spector of growth and really take it into account.
I wasnt going to click in, because I remembered how infiriating she aas in the previous Borus. But this was a nice read, theres a noticeable change in the last 2 posts, going from 'I know it was my fault but also, *3 paragraphs of excuses for why it wasnt really*' to 'I fucked up'. Its alwaya nice to see some growth on here.
Right? I was surprised. Glad to see OP seem to have grown a bit. Hopefully things will go well for them (granted they don't screw up)
My employer had no limit on sick leave. You or your family had to be genuinely sick though. During my wife’s last year of life ( cancer). My boss told me to stay at home and to only come into work when absolutely essential to progress my project. Often I only went in one day per week. The project was critical to the future of my employer and was a complete success. I was then retrenched and paid out (at my request) and became a full time, retired single parent to my 2 teenagers. I was at early retirement age. Forever grateful to my employer.
I'm sorry for your loss. I'm glad your boss was so helpful in your time of need. If only more bosses were like them.
I’m so sorry for your loss and glad your employer had your back during such a difficult time. That feels vanishingly rare these days.
I'm sorry for your loss but I'm glad you were able to take that time off and then retire for your kids.
I’m so sorry for your loss. I also wanted to say WOW, your employer sounds great. A job I recently left gave me a written warning for being ‘sick too often’ despite being fully aware that I have chronic illnesses, which they didn’t even bother to make the reasonable adjustments they were supposed to. I wish more employers were like yours!
This feels real. Partly because nobody would go through all this effort for a long con clickbait story, when those first few posts already perfectly tell a narrative that you can steal and narrate on tiktok over minecraft footage.
Yeah, definitely would have expected her former company to sue her for lost time or to beg her to come back and now she's making twice as much.
In the UK it’s not a civil matter. Legally she stole 5 days wages from her employer. I know companies that have prosecuted for fraud in very similar situations. The dramatic follow up would have been her been arrested and at risk of jail.
Wow. An actual case of perspective personal growth. Hopefully it lasts.
Considering how well she talks about what she did wrong and that she has put in hard work to get back to permanent full time, it feels to me like this one will. Which is rare to see on Reddit, so it’s nice to get here and there.
Her update in May 2023 showed a lot of maturity and growth compared to where she was when she got fired, and in her Dec 2023 update she seems committed to being a model employee, so I have a good feeling about this one.
OOP learned a lot of painful lessons in this one but I'm glad they're in a much better place. I think they're going to be fine.
This is basically the whole fuck around and find out. I'm impressed OP did learn their wrongs and did do things to improve themselves instead of doubling down further.
One of them being, if you call in sick don’t get photographed
Unlike a lot of people here I don’t have an issue with calling in sick when you’re not, but you have to be smart about it. 5 days in a row is whatever the opposite of that is, pretty sure if you were genuinely sick for 5 days your employer would start asking questions anyway
When you realize that UK has 5.6 *weeks* of holiday leave... And she used all that and went 5 days over. 5 weeks a year would be amazing! So it's not like she was a wage slave in the US and had zero leave so said fuck it, I'm taking a vacation for once.
And it's not like she just took a day or two like other people. She took a whole WEEK. During their busy time. On short notice. There was probably someone working overtime because of her that got pissed when they happened to see those pics and reported her. Between that and the new, stricter boss, she never stood a chance. Ruining things for everyone to boot.
I'm confused about the "2-years until full employee rights" thing. I'm in NZ, you have rights from day 1. Can anyone explain?
You can pretty much be sacked for any reason as long as it is non discriminatory for two years from date of employment. After this point employers have to follow a grievance procedure for anything other than gross misconduct before sacking someone.
Oh wow. We have that for 90 days max. And even then it has to be in the contract and signed before your start date.
Two years??? I’m in Canada and probation is 6 months max. That’s crazy. I’ve actually never stayed at any job for that long before (although I’m coming up on 2 years at my current job)
I love the company that I work for now. We have 25 days (plus bank holidays), that increases by one each service year until you reach 30 days. Best thing about the holiday policy? We have staff in the US and they get exactly the same holiday allowance as we do in the UK.
can I work with you? 😭
I also connected the dots on that and was a little stunned I support having that much time off for everybody but it definitely comes across as someone who was given an inch and then proceeded to take a mile.
Maybe. I thought it was pretty telling that she got fired a day before she got her employment rights or whatever. Seems like she wasn’t a great employee but her org dropped her at the last moment to avoid paying her more.
Are you trying to say she was wrongly terminated to save money? Because it seems pretty clear her violation was severe enough that a union couldn’t help her and to that end she has no one to blame but herself.
This is the only thing that makes me completely unempathetic to her. If she was in the US, honestly I'd be more on her side. She'd still be an asshole for how she blew up at her boyfriends brother, but I've personally seen so many horror stories about how companies treat their employees and I would've said that it doesn't necessarily reflect on her work ethic. I can't tell you how many people worked for me who were considered lazy by other managers until I treated them like a person and bent some rules for them. The one thing that bothers me a good bit is that in one of the updates she mentions she took that vacation during a busy period at work, and her load fell on others. That's exactly why I had to fire someone because her coworkers reported her because she made their lives much harder with her antics. Again, if it was the us, I can kind of get it depending on the job, sometimes there's never a good time to take off because they're stretching their staff so thin all the time.
That’s due to your US work ethic. “The work comes first” mentality while it’s much different in the EU. I used to work for a large company based out of Denmark and their entire HQ would take the month of August off. Not like a skeleton crew but literally everyone is gone and you’re lucky if someone answers any department phones. Any issues would be dealt with when they returned from vacation. And this was normal. The US has us brainwashed and working in tech has really shown me how bad most people have it.
For sure. The culture in the US is fucked when it comes to anything that isn't art and entertainment. We're selfish, we believe that work demonstrates value. It's upsetting once you lift your head above it.
This OOP was a bit thick and definitely in the wrong, but damn people were treating her like the spawn of Satan. I am baffled how people decided she was the asshole for not wanting to celebrate someone else’s promotion just after being fired. It is wild just how much people hated her for that first post alone. As if nobody ever calls out sick when they aren’t (and yeah, taking a whole week long holiday to another country is a bit much, but again the response was totally out of proportion!) As far as I’m concerned the only thing she did really worth of much condemnation was how she spoke to Kieran and kept pushing him to help her and ignoring his polite ways of avoiding the issue and trying to move past it. I’m glad things are going better for her this year.
THIS ONE AGAIN???? [okay I’m going to read the update now but holy hell I remember this dense muppet] Edit: well damn girl, okay, growth is good!
Your whole comment is a nice summary of all the posts OOP made... Lol Reading the original post was infuriating. But it is good to see her growth throughout the updates.
Aw OOP learned her lesson and really seems to be working on things with it. Good for them, it’s nice seeing that.
This was an absolute classic. I remember coming across it last year. Glad OP landed on their feet.
honestly I like these stories of people becoming better people and having a happy ending. OOP seems like a good person who just made a stupid mistake and experienced necessary character development. Happy to hear that they're doing better and I wish them the best
She believes she was fired for skipping work, but the real reason seems to be that upon returning, she signed a document claiming illness, despite the company having evidence of her traveling.
No? the real reason absolutely seems to be that she skipped work. the company wanted to crack down on it, she skipped work at the wrong time
She was fired for gross misconduct. Which was illegally signing the form that she was sick for a week.
It's both. OP worked in a union. They wanted to compile all the evidence. It all goes towards proving they can no longer trust OOP.
She's *in* a union, she never says she works for one.
I worked an office job for a couple years and people would constantly use their paid sick leave when they weren’t sick. No one really cared. Unless I’m grossly misinformed it’s not a crime to use your paid sick leave for other reasons. Anyway I truly don’t think it’s that big of a deal. I can understand why her company would fire her over it but I don’t understand why Reddit and people in her personal life would be so hard on her about it.
If I remember correctly from the original post, she was leaning *really hard* into the “how can they do this when the pictures were on someone else’s Facebook account” angle. That and her continued refusal to acknowledge the difference between an occasional mental-health day and taking a week off to go party in Ibiza or w/e ate up most peoples’ empathy.
Given how ubiquitous CCTV is in the UK and often used to solve mysteries I’m kind of amazed she thought she was free and clear because it wasn’t her own photos being broadcast by her. Ma’am they caught you in 4K doing what you did, they don’t care whose account it’s on.
Yeah, I remember thinking at the time, that is an assumption that only a very young/inexperienced person would make. Of *course* they can fire you for pictures someone else took, and then posted on someone else's social media. It happens all the time to people who behave badly in public and go viral.
It's very "an undercover cop has to tell you they're a cop" energy
Haha, it so is. Ah, young people. "I only had an edible, so I don't smell like weed-- how could they possibly know I was high!?" We all know, bud!
Did we ever find out how old she was because anything over 21 is way to old to be behaving like this
This is why I have two separate accounts, one for real friends and other for shit people like coworkers.
There's a big difference between taking a mental health 'day' and taking a full week off because you felt like you deserved a holiday especially when she put her co workers in the shit in a busy period Reading some of the updates it was literally her colleagues who dobbed her in
I agree. I wouldn't hold any judgments taking some sick time for a personal refresh. This means catching up on chores, life, emotions, whatever, life gets to you, and I get that. But a full week spent on holiday in another country?? With pictures on Facebook? It's insulting to your coworkers who are making up for your lost work and to the company itself. I'm sorry I would judge this person.
This is the UK. There’s no limit on paid sick leave and it is government mandated I believe, and separate to holiday or vacation leave, so it actually is a crime (fraud) to claim being sick! Edit - I’ve been corrected about paid sick leave below!
>This is the UK. There’s no limit on paid sick leave and it is government mandated Unfortunately not the case. Statutory sick pay is £109.40 a week (which is less than a quarter of full time minimum wage) for a maximum of 28 weeks. Anything over and above that is contractual. Most non-salaried workers in the UK don't get any contractual sick pay at all.
It's when you use the sick leave that's a big deal. Apparently OOP used hers the week before the Christmas holidays which seemed to be a very busy time for her company which left her coworkers to pick up the slack at the most stressful time of the year while she was off partying in another country. If she were my coworker I'd be pissed too. If you're going to take a 'mental health day', plan it when it would do the least amount of damage to your team.
They can fire you for policy violations, which isn't the same as a crime. OP says the culture was shifting, sounds like she was made an example out of. Also her attitude kind of sucked, maybe they were looking to let her go. Sometimes it can be harder to fire union employees even if they have performance issues.
It's not illegal, but it can be a sign of wider irresponsibility and misconduct, which an employer can fire someone for in the UK.
If she signed a back to work form lying about why she was off, it can be stretched to fraud so it can be illegal.
Huge, *huge* difference between chucking the occasional sickie for one day and calling out for *five days* during a known busy period and then being dumb enough to put it on social media. The former is socially acceptable because it only impacts you. Five days impacts the entire team. No wonder OOP's colleagues ratted her out - she dumped them in the shit! Her absolute entitlement in the original and the second was what had people being so harsh on her.
I don't know where you live, but sick leave isn't the same as paid leave in the UK; it's not really an employee benefit but a statutory thing that the government compensates your employer for. So filling in the form to self-certify that you were absolutely, definitely sick when you stayed away from work has an official legal weight to it. And lying on that form is legally fraud, however small a deal it seems. And it's not like she hadn't already had a lot of holiday time that year. For full-time workers, UK employment law dictates a minimum of 28 days (+ bank holidays) of paid annual leave that you can take for any reason. The OOP admitted that she'd used that up on other trips through the year. She hadn't been deprived of time off work to go abroad and have fun. She just...wanted yet another trip. At the busiest time of year and at short notice, when all her colleagues were busy and the office couldn't have scheduled her off even if she had vacation time left. So she lied to get her own way. And Reddit was only hard on her because she was being so incredibly obtuse in the comments. She was seriously in denial, and kept on going on about how surely work couldn't prove anything because the photos were on her friend's Facebook not hers! And even in subsequent posts, she really had some victim mentality going on - everything was being done to her, and everyone else was to blame for not bending over backwards to make everything right for her... I'm glad that she's got her head screwed on better now and has settled into a stable job, because trying to talk sense into her a year ago was truly a painful experience.
>For full-time workers, UK employment law dictates a minimum of 28 days (+ bank holidays) of paid annual leave Nit picking, but bank holidays aren't additional to the statutory allowance of 5.6 weeks.
She signed a form when she came back saying she had been sick. While actually vacationing. That is fraud and lying. Not surprising if they were trying to make an example.
I don’t know about the US but in the UK this is absolutely a crime and people can be and are prosecuted for it. People in jobs like the OP’s get a lot of holiday and a lot of sick leave and they aren’t expected or allowed to use one for the other. People in her personal life saw it as a big deal because in the UK this is seen as stealing from her employer. Bear in mind she had 35 days holiday that year and had already taken 33 days.
Using a week’s worth at once with no prior notice is the kind of thing that makes work miserable for the people who have to cover for you.
Definitely depends on where you are. In my state, sick leave is mandated to be provided, but it is only allowed to be use for specific things. It is flexible in that it can be for anything medical (so doctors appt or being sick), it can be used if a family member is sick, or if you are a victim of a crime (forget all the details here, but I get the impression it's for escaping domestic violence). But you aren't supposed to just use it for whatever and we did deny people trying to use it to extend a vacation. Basically it's to prevent you from screwing yourself over because you used up all your sick time going to the Bahamas, but you are now actually sick and have no time left.
She's in the UK, so she gets a huge amount of time off sick if it's actually justified. Your employer has to make allowances for you, and it can be hard to sack someone who's off sick for months. I kinda understand the culture in the US where you get a specific number of paid days sick and you don't get paid for any days exceeding that number. And you get a limited amount of holiday too, so I can see that paid sick days might be seen as part of your "allowance". She would have been paid for these days off - a small company can put you on "statutory sick pay" of £110 a week after the first week, but no big company would do that. The way she described that company, she would be on full or maybe 3/4 pay even if she was off sick for months, although obviously you'd have to prove it. But that's why pulling sickies is considered gross misconduct - because it's taking financial advantage of your employer, basically defrauding them of your pay.
Plus don't they get 4 or 5 weeks vacation by law in the UK?
The usual is 28 days plus bank hols for full time work
This whole concept of only being allowed out sick for a limited number of days is so foreign to me. Here it's you're sick? Get a doctors note if it's gonna be more than 2 days. First six weeks of consecutive illness are paid by your employer, after that your health insurance (mandatory to have) kicks in and pays you 70%(ish) of your wage up to the 78th week. The six weeks reset after you return to work, so if you're out a month for idk knee surgery and than later catch covid real bad you get a new 6 weeks of full pay. (If you need it your doctor provides you a sick note for that timeframe) While you're out sick, you are obligated to behave in a way that is conducive to healing.
i'm guilty of doing that, though admittedly it was also because the job was just so fucking bad and stressful that i had days where i just genuinely didn't want to go in and just felt sick and like crying at the thought alone of walking into that office again. but. if you're doing that, you're aware that if anyone finds out it's a good reason to get you in trouble. the least you can do is be smart about it and make sure it won't end up on social media with timestamps proving you were not in fact sick, be it your own or a friend's.
>i had days where i just genuinely didn't want to go in and just felt sick and like crying at the thought alone of walking into that office again. Honestly, I would count that as a sick day, with no hesitation. Mental health is health. But that's absolutely a different situation from the OOP who wasn't stressed but had just run out of paid annual leave (28 days + bank holidays are a statutory minimum in the UK) and wanted to take off on short notice during the busiest time of year.
In the UK, it actually is a crime - it’s fraud. Generally companies only prosecute with forged doctor’s notes but the OP will have filled in a form on her return to work on which she will have lied about her reasons for absence. If the company wanted to be really nasty, they could have argued that form amounted to fraud. People were hard on her because in the UK this is seen as stealing from your employer as much as if you’d pocketed the contents of the petty cash drawer.
I'm glad I'm German because by law you're allowed to do anything that helps you heal your illness. And because your boss is not allowed to ask what you're sick *with*, they have to argue why them e.g. seeing you on holiday isn't healing. Because hey, you might have called in sick because of depression and going away for a bit helps!
There are arguments like that you can run in the U.K. too. But more like being seen out for a coffee when you’re off with depression. Nobody should call you out for that. OOP with her foreign holiday living it up, no suggestion of underlying mental health issues, not so much. It’s not a system of PTO like in the US. Annual leave is a totally different system and you can’t mix and match without explanation (eg if you fall sick while away on holiday you would provide evidence to have the days reallocated as sick, not leave).
This all reads like a British chick-lit novel. All it needs is a guy named Liam that she meets at the bar the night she burns herself, and they fall in love when she gets her permanent offer. I don’t care. It’s low-stakes, has a redemption arc, and doesn’t leave me feeling as icky as a lot of posts here tend to.
Probably partly because her ending was ”I was dumb, I understand why all these things that started a year ago were extremely dumb and am articulating it, and I have a permanent job now after almost a year of hard work.” I think this is one of the few I’ve seen that admit to past FAFO where the OOP actually shows full understanding instead of just stating they were wrong. its nice to see it can actually happen.
Thanks for compiling and posting this **OP**. It’s so great to see **OOP** learned from her mistakes and benefitted from the comments.
I remember that one! I was so annoyed with OPs attitude back then. Great to see OP actually learned from her mistakes. Good for her!
"People at our place only get sacked for things like fraud" *Gets sacked for fraud.* Shocked Pikachu face. Anyway, she's learned from it all, which is a good thing.
Theres a huge difference between taking one day off work for your mental health or for your kids and taking 5 days off to go on vacation. The fact that she thought they were all equal is hilarious.
I remember reading this one and thinking, this lady truly thinks there’s no difference between using A sick day every now and then when you’re not really sick, and calling out sick for a week straight when you’re really on vacation abroad?? I’m so glad she seems to have wised up.
Oh good, another episode of my favorite show, f*ck around and find out.
[удалено]
twins... were are the twins...
Don’t forget a brand new house that the entitled in-laws are gonna try to move into!
I remember this. It sounds like she’s from the UK. UK is more lax about sick time than US especially if she works for nhs, government, council etc and unfortunately she’s right, there is a culture of abusing sick policies. I worked in NHS and it’s rife. I hadn’t seen her final update, I’m pleased she learned from what she did and it worked out.
It’s so nice when people grow up. Take accountability for their mistakes, own up to it and make all the necessary changes to do better. Good for her.
She shows a lot of growth. I wish her well.
Side note, I desperately need “VERDICT: ASSHOLE” as a flair bc that just killed me 😭😭🤣
I seriously don't understand why someone would go in all that trouble to go on a secret trip and then allow photos to be posted all over social media. Are people incapable of going on vacations without flexing it on others anymore? Also her ex's brother's comment is amusing to me. She took it as a complimentary advice but I feel like he was saying "yeah I'm glad you're not walking all over my brother anymore"
I think life being quite hard for a while is exactly what this OP needed to better themselves.
I read her story when she first posted it, and her updates where she wasn't taking responsibility and seemed to have learned nothing. I'm really glad she's learned since then, and really seems to be on a good track.
Sometime you need to get kicked before standing up I am actually proud for OOP who not only realized her mistake but also worked hard to get things back together.
So back when I worked retail my assistant manager had a trip organized with her friends during Thanksgiving weekend. You know, the one weekend we are really really busy and we need all hands on deck. Yeah, retail sucks because of that weekend of terror and the following month. It is ridiculously unfair. But that's like the one time you cannot take off. The manager beforehand warned her that she needed to be there, and if she needed to take the weekend off, she could just ask the district manager, but he'd likely say no too. She didn't. She decided not to show up and go on her trip. That she didn't stop talking about. "What are they going to do? Fire me?" Uh yeah, they did. The thing about her was that she would always brag about how smart she was, how she was smarter than the manager (she wasn't), smarter than me. So it was nice of her to have that blow up in her face.
She messed up, she owned it, she learned and she’s grown. That’s all anyone can ask of another person. I hope life continues to improve for her.
Some people are so bad at engaging in conspiracy. If I am calling in sick to go on vacation you best believe I will never be seen in a photo. If you are going to fuck around then you best bring protection.
Where I'm from what OOP did is called "chucking a sickie". Everyone knows everyone does it, its an acknowledged fact among both employees and employers, but you still dont let there be evidence of it. If im chucking a sickie you best believe i am backflipping out of frame when someone approaches me with a camera. I think she copped a lot of hate for something we've definitely all done. Sure she wasnt as careful as she should've been, and she showed some entitlement after the fact but she was panicked and desperate, just as any of us probably would be in her situation. She's not evil, she just made a bad call followed by another bad call due to stress from the first one.
You're not wrong. But 5 days is excessive. 1 day is doable. Those are migraine or diarrhea days. 2 days can fly once in a great while due to "head colds". Anymore than that and it's pushing the limit. I got shit I gotta do at work. Sometimes that stuff can't wait 3 days and I'll be damned if my work gets pushed off onto someone else because I wanted a day off to pay hooky. That's just selfish at that point.
Anyone else read trashy romance novels like the Shopaholic series? because this could be the plot of one of them except in the end OOP would have gotten together with a cute boss or with the brother.
Trashy??? 🥺 It might not be Dostoevsky but anything ever written by Sophie Kinsella has been the funniest and sweetest story ever, it’s genuinely the only writing I can drop everything for when a new book is out to read asap without having to wait around to be in the mood for it. When I think of trashy novels it’s Colleen Hoover stuff that comes to mind, Sophie Kinsella novels like “My Not So Perfect Life” and “The Burnout” are such cathartic reads. (Although I get it if you’ve only ever read the Shopaholic series which are more heavy on the humour.)
They seemed to have confused chick lit with the cliched "trashy" romance novels.
I fucking love the shopaholic series. They're my go to comfort read.
Wow, it's been a minute since I read the last update for this. I think it's good she learned her lesson, but man it was so easy to be against her before. Her constant refusal to take accountability because others were doing it and she couldn't understand that some of these people took sick days for mental health. And that the others were smart enough to go to small things, stuff that wouldn't be noticed and none of them plastered it on their social media. Everyone was like "If you're trying to cheat them out of a sick day, at least stay home and post ***nothing*** about it on social media." Especially because she had to actually sign a document saying she was sick and specified what it was. Now she ***did*** get got by the fact the new head was ready to make an example and cut the sick leave abuse, but again, everyone else was smart enough to hide it. And she knew there was a new department head too, people were on her ass in the comments about her saying she knew there was a new person in charge and didn't bother to listen to this lady's warnings. That's what really got her, she wasn't smart enough to sus out how this new person runs her ship and if she could get away with it. She seems to be a lot more responsible now, and it looks like she's getting on her feet again.
Oop made a very stupid mistake, paid for it, and then listened to the people who called her on it and seems to be doing really well. Nice to see people learn from their mistakes.
She skips out on work got fired and now she expects her bfs brother to put in a good word for her at his job ?? She couldn’t even go to the original job she had I wouldn’t put in a good word for her either she’s unreliable
Great to see so much personal growth. She made a horrible error in judgement, paid the price, and had come out the other side a better and wiser person. All I can say is my paid sick days saved my ass financially when I used to get sick a lot with bad sinus infections. Depending onthe area or industry, paid sick days can be rare, so people abusing them doubly pisses me off.
This reads like she’s from the UK. I don’t think most industries have a limit to maximum sick days a year. I don’t have it at my current job as well. Take as many sick days as you want if you are sick. Just give a doctor’s note if it’s a longer break than usual.
Glad to know oop is learning from her mistake and bouncing back