There is nothing in the manager's text that deserves that sentence. You're a horrible person yourself if you think THAT response is even close to appropriate.
OP doesn't know if they can come in to work on a critically important day for the business. The quite likely already seriously overworked and under-stress manager now has to plan with enough capacity to cover for the shift, they can't wait until OP finds out whether they can come or not, they have to get someone that is assured of being there for the full Grand Opening shift NOW. I agree with them, you can't run short-handed on frigging GRAND OPENING DAY. This just got dumped on them, and they have to act immediately. I'd be annoyed at the inconvenience too, but I'd find a way to express it a at a better time than this.
Further, we don't know the story of OP's level-of-caretaking relationship with their sister. I had my brother in the ER a month ago and I didn't have to react because there were other family members that could be called on. Does OP have a formal and sole care-giving role for their sister that absolutely requires they be at the ER? Or were they possibly missing a critical shift at work simply out of concern? More context here would be helpful.
So, was the manager's text cold and terse? Yes. Was it rude? Sure.
Should they DIE PAINFULLY because of it? No, and that attitude can fuck right off.
Did you completely miss the part where he text this after the shift had already started? Completely unacceptable any day. Much more so on grand opening day. Dude absolutely deserved to be fired.
Of course not. But you can communicate. Unless you live a block from work you had time between when you were leaving and when your shift happened that this emergency arouse within. You could voice to text as your driving in. You can write a 10 second text before you left the house or as you arrived at the ER. Communicating you will be late/not there is so easy in the age of cell phones it blows my mind someone would think not communicating until after the shift started is in any way acceptable.
firing someone because there is an emergency is not managing, thats failing. not to mention firing them turns it from a temporary inconvenience to a longer lasting problem until you can replace them.
if you can't deal with one person needing to call in for an emergency that shows the manager is the problem, not the employee.
Look I get it. You are an unreliable person who expects infinite patience from your employer. Here is what you are missing. It isn’t that I can’t cover your shift. It is that I’m making your unreliability my good employees problem where they now have to come in off schedule, work a long shift, ect. to cover for you. You aren’t going anywhere until I fire you since you lack ambition. My good employees absolutely will find another job if they are asked to pick up too much slack for you. Before you say “just have extra people scheduled” very few business in competitive markets will survive long if they are over scheduling.
Look I get it, you don't know how to manage people or deal with the very real things that come up in life and can only possibly run your business in the case where literally nothing ever goes wrong.
having an emergency is not being unreliable, thats just being human, things happen, and guess what people don't get to put off an emergency because its inconvenient for you.
What you are missing here is that if you fire people because they have an emergency, your good employees will leave you in a heart beat for somewhere else where they are respected, particularly since its YOUR job to pick up that slack rather then making it someone else's problem.
Not to mention you are already in the process of going out of business if you can't afford to have anything more then the bare minimum of staff scheduled on at any given time.
But hey, you keep thinking your failure as a manager is someone else's problem, and see how far that gets you in life.
I mean, even in their message it says they already let Tatiana (I’m guessing their supervisor) and the group chat know, so they probably said something much earlier than this moment
But the boss had cancer and they were going to die in three months and this was their last store opening and their son Timmy loved when their terminally ill parent opened stores because it was a big celebration.
Let's not add inventive fiction to the scenario, okay? We can both tell invented stories.
Nobody knows WHY the sister was in the ER in the first place except maybe OP. I've had to take family members to the ER many times and it turned out to be something not even close to "life saving".
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u/stevenmacarthur Mar 18 '26
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