I slept through my alarm this morning. I was late for work and made my boss late for a meeting. The message he left on my phone indicates he is not a happy man. In fact, he is a very pissed off man.
I’m shaking. He’s going to tear me new holes when he gets back. I have no excuse, it’s totally my fault.
I don’t even have one of those ‘crazy-but-true’ stories to give him as a reason.
Well, you may as well regale me with your interesting ‘late’ stories and your best excuses while I await my gruesome fate.
All right, Buckler, calm down and breathe with me. Go ahead . . . breathe.
In . . . and out . . .
In . . . and out . . .
OK, count to ten nice and slowly. Are you feeling better? Good.
Now listen. You are not the first person in the world to screw up. Most people here have made their bosses unhappy at some time or other. Sometimes very unhappy.
Have you made a habit of doing stuff like this? If not, fine. He’ll yell at you a little bit, and a day from now it’ll be forgotten. OK, maybe two days from now. It’s not like this was the only chance he ever had to go to a meeting, and he was looking forward to it like a kid waiting for Christmas. There will be other meetings in his life.
Whatever he throws at you, you will be better equipped to deal with it if you are on an even keel. Don’t make excuses, don’t get defensive. Just let it pass through you, and in a little while, you’ll both have forgotten it ever happened.
Unless your boss is an asshole. Oh, well, it’ll be OK one way or another.
I once slept through an exam that was worth half my grade in a class that I needed in order to graduate. A class offered once a year. During my senior year.
I wound up making up the exam at his house, and learning a bunch about automatic organs as a side bonus, so things worked out fairly well for me.
I can’t seem to get over just how anal this modern society is about being on time. If you oversleep or, say, forget to go to work, just once, everybody’s all over you like a pack of rabid wolves with a mood disorder, and never let you forget it.
Come on, Society - just how tight a schedule can you expect us normal human beings to keep? Listen - once or twice over the course of a year I’m going to sleep through the alarm, be a bit late, or think that it’s Sunday when it’s actually Monday. It’s not like it happens every week, but it will happen now and then. You see, I’m not a robot. Just give me a break already. Jeez.
Yeah, I never did fit in with the rest of the pack in the rat race.
To be fair, they don’t pay me 300 times a year. Based on my paycheck schedule, if they forgot to pay me on time twice in a year, that would have to entitle me to approximately 52 days of oversleeping a year based on a 1:1 ratio.
On top of that, if things are busy, most companies will more or less require you to work late and that wasn’t planned. It’s only fair that once or twice a year they look the other way on an oversleep, provided the employee works hard and does a good job the rest of the time.
Just the other week, I had insomnia and was completely awake at 2:30am, and just couldn’t force myself to go back to sleep.
I went out on the couch and watched TV until 6:30, when I decided that it was a cool enough time to go into work early. I hopped in the shower, got dressed, made coffee and sat on the couch to watch the morning traffic report.
…and woke up at 11:54. With the hour ride to work, it was almost 1:00pm before I made it there.
I explained this to my boss, who called me (in jest) an idiot. The whole thing was forgotten immediately.
As long as this is not a habit and you are a good employee, I wouldn’t worry about it.
Since the OP was posted yesterday in the evening, Buckler may not be able to post from work (probably not a good idea today, even if he could). We may have to wait until this evening to find out what happened.
I’ve had that happen to me a few times. My boss was a jerk about it too. I can totally understand if a person is consistently late for work, but I’ve been at my job for 4 years and I’ve been late less than ten times, not always for the same reason. And it was never more than half an hour late. I mean, geez - the way some bosses react, you’d think you’d slaughtered their whole family.
I can see if you work someplace that has shifts and you’re supposed to be covering someone else’s shift and forget or something like that (I’ve had that happen) but if you’re in a M-F 9 to 5 gig? I just don’t see it.
I noticed you said in a later post that perhaps you thought it was a Sunday on a Monday. Okay, I can see that for maybe an hour in the morning or something, but all day long? You didn’t get one indication at any point in the day that it was a weekday and not a weekend?
I believe Buckler is an Aussie, so it would be Saturday morning right now. Maybe she was up all night drowning her sorrows and is now sleeping off a terrible hangover. Maybe.
One of my coworkers didn’t show up for work one morning a few years back. This was someone who was pretty reliable, too. Since he drove an hour to get to work we originally thought that he’d gotten stuck in traffic. By about 11 a.m. we were wondering whether he’d gotten in an accident on the way to work (he lived alone and had no family in the state who would have notified us).
Our supervisor called his apartment just after noon and woke him up! He jumped out of bed, threw on some clothes and raced to work, getting there about 1 p.m. I remember he had a long meeting with our supervisor in her office when he finally showed up. Everything was forgotten in time, though. Just six months later he was given an award for being an outstanding employee.
Not really a good analogy, as that’s somethign that’s recitifiable after the fact. The company I work for has made a couple mistakes on paychecks before. When it was brought to their attention, it was rectified the next day. Although it hasn’t happened to me, I don’t see myself holding a grudge over it. Mistakes happen.
Well, I did put it that way for a bit of comic effect… but it has actually happened to me. However, it did happen, as you say, in a situation where I had constantly changing shifts and very flexible hours. And I’ll admit that the misunderstanding about what day of the week it was didn’t last all day long, just about an hour or so until the big “oh, shit” hit me.
However, it did happen, as you say, in a situation where I had constantly changing shifts and very flexible hours. And I’ll admit that the misunderstanding about what day of the week it was didn’t last all day long, just about an hour or so until the big “oh, shit” hit me.