receptionist makes loud sound effects all the time, coworker is sticking me with all the weekend work, and more

by Alison Green on July 8, 2025

It’s five answers to five questions. Here we go…

1. My coworker makes loud sound effects all the time

At what point is something a legitimate distraction rather than a pet peeve? At my job we have an open concept office and only managers have offices while everyone else sits in the open space with little privacy, meaning everyone can hear everyone.

Our receptionist makes loud … sound effects all the time. For example, every yawn is a FULL BODY experience complete with a cartoonish exaggerated yawn/yell. When she gets frustrated that her computer is running slowly, she lets out a groan/whine. (I cannot think of a better way to describe this other than the sound little kid makes when they don’t get their way.) This is not constant by any means, but the yawn thing is several times a day and every time it sends my blood pressure rising.

Is this something that I can reasonably say something to her about? Often after a particularly loud yawn/yell, I will ask her if she is okay. Normally she will just say yes, she is okay, just tired. Is it too much to ask that bodily sounds be kept to a minimum? This seems not to bother others as much as it does me and miraculously doesn’t happen as much when the big bosses are around.

You could try: “I’m sorry to ask, but is there any way you can keep those noises down? I jump every time you do that.”

There was also this resolution from someone with a similar problem.

And a general PSA for everyone: if coworkers are asking if you’re okay whenever you make a particular noise and this happens repeatedly, there’s a good chance they’re hinting that they’d like you to stop.

2. My coworker decided to stick me with all our weekend event work

My coworker and I make up a two-person team that manages community programs for our county. Overall the job has a great work-life balance but over a 3-4 month season we have 5-6 weekend events with long hours. It’s pretty tiring but our boss gives us time off before or after these events to rest.

A few months ago, my coworker shared that she felt like the event work wasn’t being evenly split. I privately felt this was unfair, but I worked with her to make things more balanced. She also admitted that she was getting a lot of burn-out from an optional but job-related class. She had actually wanted us to take the class together but I said that it would be too much with the events.

A few days before our last event of the season, she told me she “didn’t want to do it” and that she wasn’t going to do long event hours anymore. Our supervisor, without involving me, told her that not working overtime at events was fine. At this event we had a miscommunication and she thought we would only be at the event on Saturday. The schedule ended up being a four-hour Saturday shift for her and I worked long days Friday/Saturday/Sunday.

As far as I know, she doesn’t have a disability or familial reason. She is capable but drained. We both have anxiety/mental health things so I want to be respectful, but I am also exhausted and becoming resentful. The job otherwise has great work-life balance, and I feel that the event schedule is a stressful but manageable part of the job.

I feel like she managed her time poorly with her optional class and didn’t prioritize the mandatory parts of the job. Plus, her expectation that we would only be at one day of a two-day event is, to me, a sub-standard job. I sense she feels she is setting up a boundary and I’m not respecting it and creating a bad work environment. But I feel abandoned and like she isn’t committed to the job, and that it’s disrespectful to think a few long event days is unreasonable in an otherwise good workplace.

How do I tell to my supervisor that it is unrealistic for my coworker to not work overtime for events? How do I tell my coworker that this isn’t an unreasonable schedule and I can’t do this by myself?

You shouldn’t be in a position of needing to convince or cajole your coworker to split the work evenly. Instead, you should talk with your boss and say you’re not able to take on more than your half of the weekend event hours, that the last event where your coworker worked four hours and you worked long hours three days in a row was exhausting and unsustainable, and it’s not something you can do going forward.

If you’re nervous about drawing that boundary, realize that it was apparently very easy for your coworker to make a much bigger demand and have it accepted!

It sounds like this might be less of an issue next season, if your coworker’s class is over — but either way it’s reasonable for you to raise it now and say this division of labor won’t work for you.

3. What is it appropriate for HR to tell emergency contacts?

Your column about the person whose coworker had a heart attack at work reminded me of an event at my workplace many, many years ago.

A coworker experienced a grand mal seizure at her desk, which was located in a row of desks in an open-plan space. The seizure lasted several minutes (someone had the foresight to time it) and she was unconscious for several minutes after. Of course, we called 911 and notified HR. HR notified her parents, who lived locally and were listed as her emergency contacts.

The coworker regained consciousness before the EMTs arrived, but she was disoriented and didn’t comprehend when the HR rep told her about the seizure and that her parents would meet her at the hospital.

Flash forward to later: she was livid that the company had contacted her parents. I think her rationale was that emergency contacts are supposed to be informed something is wrong and that they need to help, but it’s inappropriate to give the contacts medical information (in this case, the seizure).

She left the company shortly after. I don’t know why or what transpired with HR (rightfully so).

Was she correct that emergency contacts shouldn’t be advised of the nature of a medical incident? It seems unreasonable, but what does the law say? (We’re in the U.S., if that’s matters.)

U.S. law doesn’t prevent employers from sharing medical info with an emergency contact (unless the employer happens to be a health care provider, in which case HIPAA would likely be in effect — but HIPAA doesn’t apply to most non-health-care employers).

In many cases there’s no way to contact an emergency contact without explaining a bit about what’s going on. And really, just saying “she’s being taken to the hospital and you should meet her there” would be far more alarming in a lot of situations than just explaining the basics.

In general, people should assume that if they have an emergency at work and their emergency contact is contacted, info about what happened may be provided. If someone doesn’t want that, they need to say it explicitly at the time when they provide the contact info (“please do not release details about any medical situation to X; contact them only for ABC”).

4. Should I use one of my few personal days to travel for an interview when I might not get the job?

I have been interviewing for a position that is mostly remote but would require some travel to a central office a few times each year. My interviewers told me that they would like to bring finalists out to this location to meet the staff in person. I have very few personal days in my current position and don’t love the idea of using one (or maybe even two) of them to travel for an interview if I’m among a few finalists and there’s still a good chance I won’t actually get the position. I would only have 1-2 days left after that until next summer, which would make things difficult this coming year if I had to stay at my job.

At the same time, I don’t want to make it seem like I’m not as committed as other candidates, and I worry that even if the organization accommodated my position, they might still end up going with someone else just because of the merits of these in-person interactions. I will find out if I made it to this round in a couple of weeks and am feeling nervous about what to do if I am invited to continue. What do you think?

If you’re seriously interested in the position, you probably need to take the day(s) off to travel there. It’s still pretty common for employers to want to meet candidates, particularly finalists, in person before hiring them, and declining to do it is likely to put you at a disadvantage unless you’re already head-and-shoulders above the other finalists. That said, you could definitely ask for a date where you’d only need to take one day off rather than two (like by doing it on a Monday or a Friday so your travel day is on the weekend).

5. We’re supposed to complete our self-evaluations on our own time

Just got this notice from HR: “Annual reviews season is upon us! This is a friendly reminder to please complete your self-evaluation form in the Intranet on your own time by August 1.”

I’ve never been asked to do my self-eval off the clock in any other position. This is my first review season with this organization. The request to do this on my time gives me major ick.

If you’re non-exempt, this is illegal; they have to pay you for the time.

If you’re exempt and aren’t paid for overtime, there’s less of a distinction in terms of pay, but you could still ask your boss why you’re being told to do a work task on non-work time.

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  1. Sam*

    The idea that work shouldn’t tell your emergency contacts what the emergency is…that’s super weird right?

    If work called my emergency contact & couldn’t give them a little info to let them know what’s going on so they could prep & help me that would be so much worse.

    1. MK*

      I agree. Even Alison’s exception feels a lot to ask, frankly (it’s not inherently unreasonable, but it’s likely not to work in the moment).

      1. Leenie*

        Right? My immediate thought was that they can tell HR whatever they want, but if someone is having a serious medical event out in the branch office where I work, there’s almost zero chance that a special request would be delivered to and understood by the person who actually has to make the phone call. I can pull up emergency contacts for anyone who reports to me. But there’s no notes section associated with that particular record.

        Also agreeing with Sam. I can scarcely imagine a higher drama, more anxiety provoking way of approaching an emergency contact than telling them that their daughter (or sibling, spouse, friend, etc.) has been rushed to the hospital but I can’t tell them anything at all about it.

        1. I Super Believe In You, Tad Cooper*

          Agreed. This seems like the emergency contact equivalent of “Hey, we should talk.”

          1. night cheese*

            Or your mom leaving a VM saying “give me a call when you get a chance” in that “trying to be casual” tone

      2. Cmdrshprd*

        I disagree, I think it is inherently unreasonable to expect work to only say “Jane had an emergency at work and was/is being taken to Noah Wylie hospital.”

        There are several reasons that it would be good for the contact to have details of the situation beyond better peace of mind for them. In OP situation, having had a seizure and the time length of it, although I’m sure the first responders were told the length, you never know when it could get lost in translation and the emergency contact being able to tell subsequent medical professionals the seizure lasted 3 minutes could be helpful.

        also as you say I don’t think even a warning in advance would work. Verbal warning/request don’t share any details will likely get forgotten, and even a note written on the file would probably get overlooked in a true emergency when they are just looking for a name and number.

        if you don’t want your emergency contact being given details, then they are the wrong/inappropriate person to be listed as an emergency contact, especially when they are the next of kin/standard decision making authority.

        1. Not Australian*

          “if you don’t want your emergency contact being given details, then they are the wrong/inappropriate person to be listed as an emergency contact”

          Absolutely, 1000% in agreement with this: the person whose name appears as your emergency contact should always be someone you are willing to share health information with *in an emergency*, i.e. someone you trust, and that need not be a family member.

          I think there’s a bit of confusion here with ‘next of kin’ which is usually a straightforward matter, but if your legal next of kin isn’t reliable or not a suitable choice for any other reason then your emergency contact should certainly be somebody else.

        2. Michigander*

          “If you don’t want your emergency contact being given details, then they are the wrong/inappropriate person to be listed as an emergency contact”. That was my prevailing thought too. Why are they your emergency contact if you don’t want them to know any details when you have an emergency?

          1. GreenApplePie*

            It’s not that uncommon for people to have no real emergency contact, especially if they’re young and/or single. Having living parents in town that one is on speaking terms with is rare enough, I wouldn’t question why she put them down as contacts.

            That being said, I do know people who assume that “emergency contact” just means “please notify these people in the event of my death” and nothing more.

            1. Smithy*

              If anything, I’d say this is a good reminder to young people to actually think about the types of emergencies that happen at work and who you’d want called. Even if you have a fairly standard office job, then thinking about things like an accident in the office where you’re unconscious, an incident of violence or weather at the office where you’re out of contact – none of those things are common, but just include a lot more categories than death.

              1. AF Vet*

                Yup. The Air Force does a few things really well, and this is one of them. Before everyone, even the 19-year-old singleton deploys, they MUST go by Legal to get a will. When I was young, mine basically said, give $10k/ea (of a $400k policy) to my best friend and siblings, so they can go on a vacation we would have enjoyed together, and split the rest between my siblings to use as they see fit. I had no other assets, except a car, so it was really easy to keep it simple.

                Your emergency contact can be your best friend 8 states away, or the neighbor who watches your dog, or whoever. If they specify a local emergency contact, I’ve used all kinds of folks in my community. I just let them know that if they ever get a call about feathers hitting the fan, this is where I keep the info they’ll need.

              2. Jackalope*

                I’m close to my dad and he’s one of my emergency contacts but isn’t at the top of the list because he’s a couple of hours away by car. I instead have someone else (well, now it’s my spouse, but before I got married it was some good friends) who are in the area and can both respond immediately and also have my dad’s contact info so he’ll know too.

                1. Elizabeth West*

                  I have nobody here. Mine is my mom, 1200 miles away. When she passes, I guess it will be my brother, 1500 miles away. :\ If I had someone here, that’s exactly what I would do — they would have that contact info.

                  I wouldn’t care if my work said, “Hey, a file cabinet fell on Elizabeth’s leg and they took her to Beth Israel,” or whatever. I’d rather they give details than to just say EMTs rushed me to the hospital and freak everyone out.

              3. Properlike*

                ANY person living in their own. Car accidents, weather events, random disasters. Put that all in your emergency contacts on your phone (the part you don’t need a password to access) along with your medical conditions.

                Because a first grand mal seizure is a LOT different than a history of seizures.

                Don’t assume you will be conscious when this info is needed. Trust me. From experience.

              4. Always Tired*

                Up until my friend got move-in serious with her current boyfriend, I was her main emergency contact. Her parents live halfway across the country and are known to be easily overwhelmed, and I work in HR and have had enough medical issues to be a good advocate at the hospital. Plus I have her spare key for cat-sitting. Most workplaces have you list 2 contacts, in case one cannot be reached. She had me down as #1 and her mom as #2, and I also have her parents number and they have mine.

                It is actually much better to have one local contact and one out of area. Example 1: have a medical emergency at work. You’ll want someone local to meet you at the hospital to advocate for you, someone to feed your pets or water your plants, and someone to help out of town next of kin with arrangements and updates, if needed. Example 2: larger natural disaster. you’ll want an out of town contact who can coordinate affairs, as your local contact will be dealing with the same issues.

              5. Woodland*

                I’ve got two categories of emergency contact stored with work:
                – Hey something happened and I need someone available to support me day of (come to the hospital that day, bring a phone charger and help with next steps)
                – Big big thing happened and these are the people that should get on a plane/make decisions on big medical things on my behalf
                It was clearer when I lived across the country from the people who should make legal decisions for me the need to have two levels but I’ve kept it now that I’m back in the same city.

            2. Observer*

              t’s not that uncommon for people to have no real emergency contact, especially if they’re young and/or single.

              Then you leave it blank. (Or put in NA so that people know that it was deliberate.)

              You simply cannot expect someone to be in the “emergency contact” field and expect them to *not* be told what the emergency is.

              That being said, I do know people who assume that “emergency contact” just means “please notify these people in the event of my death” and nothing more.

              That’s not a really sensible reading. And certainly not reasonable enough to be “livid” when you find out that emergency contact actually means just that.

              1. GreenApplePie*

                I didn’t say it was reasonable, just that it’s a common misunderstanding. I work in a healthcare-adjacent place and people have some really strange interpretations of emergency procedures…

              2. Not The Earliest Bird*

                An emergency contact is a required field in our HR software. You can go ahead and fill it out with a fake name and phone number, but there needs to be something there before you can get to the next section of on-boarding. I didn’t design the software, I’m just required to use it.

                1. Glenn*

                  Yeah, it took an incident of my emergency contact being inappropriately contacted (much more inappropriately than OPs, there was no emergency at all) before I became willing to push back aggressively when someone says “it’s required that you provide one”. Now I give fake info if they insist. (As I said in another comment: I’m not married, and there’s nobody else I’m willing to volunteer to have called with my private business, if this doesn’t even require there to be an emergency.)

          2. Cow whisperer*

            At my first teaching job, I donated blood, felt fine while eating cookies and drinking punch in the canteen, then passed out cold in a staff meeting 90 minutes later.

            The blood donation folks were still there and got me up and going after a Coke and a IV of Ringer’s – and the staff called my mom who was my emergency contact to drive me home.

            I hadn’t thought of that exact scenario – but Mom and my bro came, loaded me up in Mom’s car, my bro drove mine and took me to their house to be sure I was through the worst of it.

        3. Laura*

          He’s fine now but my son recently had a seizure and ended up hospitalized and the number of times I had to tell the story over and over again – definitely best to have another person to advocate (and as is common in seizures, he doesn’t remember anything about it).

        4. Chick-n-boots*

          Should I ever have a medical emergency at work I hope the universe can get me to Noah Wylie hospital. And I hope Dr. Robby is there to oversee my care.

        5. toolegittoresign*

          Absolutely with you on choosing an emergency contact based on who you feel is the person in your life you want to help in an emergency, not just “next of kin.”
          I’m in my 40s and my best friend, before she had a live-in partner, had me down as her emergency contact for work. Not because she doesn’t love her parents but because 1. I live much closer and 2. I know what she would need someone to take care of in event of an emergency (board her dog, go grab clothes and things from her apartment and I know where they are, etc.)

      3. Dido*

        yeah, they need to pick a different emergency contact if they don’t want their original emergency contact to be informed about their emergencies

    2. Sara K*

      Agree with Sam it’s a weird assumption. I mean if you don’t want work telling your emergency contact what the emergency is then maybe you need a different emergency contact.

      Also, speaking as a senior manager, I would class being taken to hospital in an ambulance as an emergency and would have contacted whoever was listed as the emergency contact.

      1. emmelemm*

        Right? Like if this is not the appropriate person to help you in an emergency, do not list them as the emergency contact!

    3. File Herder*

      Possibly she was thinking of an emergency contact as “who gets called if you’re knocked down in front of the office”, and not a long term medical condition. If there’s some family drama around the epilepsy (e.g. helicopter parents who think it’s dangerous for them to be working) there might have been family drama at the hospital, and she was blaming HR for that.

      1. Anonys*

        I mean she was knocked out by the seizure. Plus, you can have grand mal seizures for reasons other than epilepsy (stroke, brain infection), so we don’t know if this person has epilepsy or any long term medical conditions.

        If someone is an epileptic with frequent seizures I know they sometimes tell their employer/colleagues along with a plan on what to do when seizures occur but it doesn’t sound like something like that was in place here. But if she had her parents as her emergency contact, it’s reasonable they were told by she was taken to the hospital (and the parents would have found out once at the hospital anyway).

        1. HigherEdEscapee*

          I’m an epileptic and I do exactly this. I know quite a few epileptics and we’ve all talked at one time or another about when to disclose, whom to disclose to, and what to teach them. Based on the fact that the OP mentions that someone was timing the seizure, either someone in the room knew what to do from outside experience or the subject of the letter had clued them in.

          Regardless, the advice still stands, don’t put someone down as your emergency contact if you don’t want them knowing what happened to you, AND you can update your emergency contact at any time. If you’ve had a falling out/separation/divorce/etc., time to update.

      2. Observer*

        Possibly she was thinking of an emergency contact as “who gets called if you’re knocked down in front of the office”, and not a long term medical condition.

        That would still be stupid and unreasonable. The company did not call her parents because she had a “long term medical condition” but because she *had a seizure* at work. Think about it for a minute. What if she had a “long term medical issue” like insulin dependent diabetes? Or some comorbidities that implicate how her chronic condition gets managed?

        Also, how on earth is her management supposed to know that a seizure (and subsequent unconsciousness) is not “something wrong that requires help”? And the fact that even when she regained consciousness she was *so* disoriented that she didn’t even understand this very simple thing that she was told shows that they actually made the right call. Because no matter what the history is, if there is any chance you are going to the hospital, you *need* to either be fully lucid yourself or have someone else to be there to talk for you. In other words, if you’re disoriented, there most definitely IS “something wrong and you need help.”

        1. Seashell*

          I think it depends on the circumstances. I have had a seizure and was treated at the emergency room. The doctor gave directions about what to do if it happened again and it said no need to go to the ER unless the seizure lasted for 5 minutes. If the person had explained instructions like those to their co-workers, it would be unnecessary to call anyone because they didn’t need to go to the hospital.

          1. NotAnotherManager!*

            I think expecting your employer (or coworkers) to accept and follow second-hand medical advice is not something most are going to want to be that involved with. If you have a seizure, most people are going to simply call 911 to have people with actual medical training deal with the situation, not time the seizure, ensure the person having the seizure is not in danger of harming themselves during the seizure, and make a judgment call about when to call the EMTs. That’s too much to expect of HR/colleagues, and the employer is going to have liability concerns about just waiting for a seizure to hit the five-minute mark.

        2. File Herder*

          Still unreasonable, but I can see that being her thought process.

          Also, she might not understand how serious this is from an outside perspective. I was a first aider at an industrial lab, and had a couple of “no, you *will* go to the medical centre / A&E” episodes”. (I particularly liked the burn case who refused to go to the medical centre until his shift had ended and demanded I just bandage it, and then told me the next day that the medical centre staff were angry with me because I should have sent him there instead of just bandaging it.)

      3. TheseOldWings*

        I was thinking maybe she is driving despite the active epileptic seizures and didn’t want her parents to know. My husband was hit several years ago by someone having an epileptic seizure who wasn’t supposed to be driving and unfortunately it’s not that uncommon.

          1. Old Bag (Coach, specifically)*

            It is a common problem. It’s a pretty regular fight between teenagers with seizure issues and their parents. This is an understandable problem, because the restrictions are quite severe and dramatically affect someone’s life for something that may happen once a year. So it’s understandable why people might hide it, or at least want to, or feel justified doing so. I’m absolutely not excusing it. I’m saying I get how it happens. It’s also understandable why the restrictions exist. It’s not unfair at all, or painting with any sort of broad brush, to suggest this might be something in play. It’s especially rather insensitive to get all upset someone suggested it when that person actually had a loved one harmed in an accident due to this very issue.

      4. Crooked Bird*

        Yes, I’m almost sure that’s the scenario. She didn’t want the seizure brought to her parents’ attention and it was, and she’s picking someone to blame for it. Can’t people at least occasionally just blame bad luck?? There’s no way HR (or anyone) calls your emergency contact and refuses to disclose what the emergency is; she’s not thinking straight.

    4. Ganymede II*

      If my spouse’s workplace called me and said “Partner is being taken to the hospital, but we’ll keep you guessing why, just find her there” I would be furious forever, and that would be one of the rare things making me want to meddle in his professional life and ask him to quit.

      It is very very weird to expect that info to be kept confidential. If you can’t trust someone with your medical information, they should not be your emergency contact.

      1. Michigander*

        If I got a call telling me to go to the hospital immediately but they couldn’t tell me why, I would assume that my husband was dead and the office didn’t feel qualified to tell me that information and wanted a doctor to do it.

        2. Observer*

          If I got a call telling me to go to the hospital immediately but they couldn’t tell me why, I would assume that my husband was dead and the office didn’t feel qualified to tell me that information and wanted a doctor to do it.

          This. And it’s really the only sane reason to handle it that way. Not great, but understandable.

      2. Pumpkinn*

        God same. I’d also be furious if I was the one in hospital- like he needs to know if this is “calmly grab her stuff and make his way over” because I broke my leg and will be in hospital for a few days, or “drop everything and charter a helicopter to get to her”

        (I’m not rich we have no helicopter it’s just a great image)

        1. londonedit*

          Yeah, I mean my mum is my emergency contact and she’d panic anyway, but she’d also want to know whether it was a ‘she’s broken her leg and is in hospital, she’s fine but they need to assess whether they’ll need to operate so she’ll be in overnight at least’ or ‘she’s been blue-lighted to A&E and it’s all hands on deck, you need to get there ASAP’.

        2. A Simple Narwhal*

          Yes! There’s a huge difference in reasons someone might be going to the hospital, is this a “he tripped and broke his wrist” so you don’t need to run over in a panic but also don’t need to pack a bag, is it a “he had something bad happen” so pack a bag and head over quick because you might need to be a medical proxy and you might be there a few days, or is it a “something catastrophic happened” and you need to get there ASAP to say goodbye in time?

          Without any details I’m going to assume it’s the last one and be freaking out the whole time, when just a few details would clear all that up.

          1. Seven hobbits are highly effective, people*

            This is also why it’s best to tell them if someone has already died, or at least tell them something other than “we need you at the hospital right away” in that circumstance. My dad got a “needed at the hospital right away call” a few decades back and drove like the former rally driver he is to try and get there as fast as possible for his father, who was already dead. He shouldn’t have been driving that way regardless (it’s not like he’s a medical professional who can actually help in an emergency!), but he definitely had time to drive like a normal person in that situation.

      3. CMOT Dibbler*

        When my grandmother was in her 80’s she was still angry about the time the hospital called her and said, “Mrs Fergusson, we have your son Ronald here. Do we have your permission to operate?”
        He had gotten somebody’s cleat up in his facemask at football practice and needed a few stitches.

    5. LielaLune*

      I would be furious if my work called my emergency contacts and *didn’t* tell them what happened to me! That’s what they’re for! If you don’t want them knowing that, why are they your emergency contact in the first place?

      Not to speculate too hard, but this sounds like it may be an issue on the part of LW3’s ex-coworker…

    6. HailRobonia*

      Yeah, if my hubby’s job calls and says he’s in the hospital because of an emergency but no other details I would immediately assume the worst. Obviously there is no magic formula for exactly what to communicate because each emergency is different, but even “he appeared to be having an asthma attack” or something would be incredibly helpful.

      Otherwise it’s like getting a message from your significant other “we need to talk” with no details… I might think “oh no, he’s leaving me!”

      1. Anon4This*

        As the recent recipient of a text that started, “Don’t panic, but I’m going to the ER.” I totally agree. Fortunately, my spouse was able to follow that up with more specific details that were, indeed, no panic-worthy – but all that popped up on my watch was the first part, and telling people not to panic is about as effective as telling an upset person to calm down. :) This is definitely a situation where more specifics are better.

      2. Educator*

        I think the correct formula–at least the one we use in my corner of the education world for both minors and adult–is to describe what happened without any assumptions or conjecture. So it’s “John told us he was experiencing shortness of breath and pain in his chest. He asked us to call emergency services. The EMTs did an initial assessment and transported him to x hospital.”

        Our rule is that anyone who is not the patient’s nurse/doctor should not jump to a diagnosis like “asthma attack,” just lay out the facts. It’s not HR’s job to evaluate the seriousness of the emergency, just to say that there was one and what happened.

    7. Juli K.*

      I’m in HR and I’ve had to reach out to emergency contacts about two dozen times. I share 1)whether it was a spontaneous medical event or accident (I may give additional info about type if I know), 2) if the person is conscious and 3) where the person can be met.

      About a third of the time, I’m yelled at by the employee later for giving too much info. About a third of the time, I’m yelled at by the employee later for giving too much info. And a third of the time I hear nothing further. This mix tells me I have the correct approach.

      1. Lenora Rose*

        (I assume one third was too little)

        I’m sorry they yell at you at all, regardless of the reason. But yes, it sounds like you have a good balance.

    8. learnedthehardway*

      I would think that if an employee is being transported to hospital for something that happened at work (whether work related injury or health emergency), that this would be THE time to inform their emergency contact.

      Heck, if they passed out in the parking lot after work and had to be sent to hospital, that would count, too.

      The employee was being unreasonable. I can understand that they didn’t want to worry their parents, or that perhaps their parents are a PITA, but if they didn’t want their parents contacted, then their parents should not have been listed as their emergency contacts. Put a reliable friend or another family member, who will know when/if to call their parents.

    9. Mommadog*

      Correct. Nurse here. thank you to the person who timed the seizure. Good info for EMS. Also the striker employee was out of line. The hospital is also going to want an emergency contact, as they can’t send you home in a cab if they have to give you IV seizure meds,& you usually sleep A LOT ( Post ictal state ) for a while post seizure. and you can’t drive for 6 months after active seizures ( esp grand mal..forget what they call it now)
      Plus the want to know the rest of her medical history.

      2. HigherEdEscapee*

        Tonic Clonic is the term you’re looking for, but I still call it grand mal too.

    10. fhqwhgads*

      Yeah. I’m wondering if that person really meant they didn’t think it was an emergency and were mad the contacts were contacted at all? If that’s not it, then none of the reaction makes any sense.

      1. Observer*

        I’m wondering if that person really meant they didn’t think it was an emergency and were mad the contacts were contacted at all?

        That’s a reasonable read. But not reasonable behavior on the part of the employee. Unless people had explicit instructions about seizures, they really had no choice but to treat it as an emergency.

      2. HigherEdEscapee*

        I know that as an epileptic in the US, I can’t afford an ambulance ride. This is why I tell folks that unless I’ve been seizing for 5 minutes or more, which has never happened to me, to please not call an ambulance. If the subject of the letter was at all like me, I can see them being upset and seeing this as Not and Emergency.

        1. Observer*

          Sure. If you know this, and you let people know, they should absolutely respect that.

          But that’s not what happened here. The employee apparently did not provide any instructions for people. And also, she was not angry that they called the ambulance, but that they called her parents (who were listed as her emergency contact.) And that is just not reasonable. If it was appropriate to call an ambulance, then it was appropriate to call the emergency contact.

        2. fhqwhgads*

          Of course, but the puzzle in the letter is the person was upset about the emergency contacts being called. No mention of being upset about the ambulance. So it’s very difficult for me to suss out how this might make sense.
          In other words, the most logical conclusion is the person was not being reasonable.
          If they’d previously said “don’t call an ambulance if I have a seizure” and one were called anyway, being perturbed at that is totally reasonable. There’s no indication they said that nor that they were upset about the ambulance.
          But I can’t really think of any reasonable scenario in which the ambulance call would be a-ok but the emergency contacts being contacted is not.

    11. Boof*

      I’m really wondering what they think the point of an emergency contact is – how are they supposed to help or provide guidance in an emergency if they are given zero information? Did they think their contact was only supposed to be called if they died or didn’t show up for work unexpectedly or something? It is very puzzling.

      1. PegS*

        The Air Force example up top is totally different — the possibility of death in a profession like that is very real. But in a normal desk job, I imagine a young person doesn’t take the emergency contact very seriously, just writes it down as part of normal onboarding paperwork, and wouldn’t think about updating it often either.

        I also wouldn’t be surprised, as others said above, that she was hiding a medical condition from her parents.

    12. MCMonkeybean*

      Yes, this seems like pretty much a textbook case of what emergency contacts are for!!!

      I feel like with the loss of control over our privacy since the internet became what it is, a lot of people have swung kind of way too far in the direction of wanting to lock down absolute all information in ways that are just completely unreasonable.

      I think there is also an extra piece where a lot of people are confused about what is “private medical information” like, legally and about who is or is not bound by HIPAA.

      I’m sure there are a ton of individual circumstances people could provide where they wouldn’t want their parents to know this kind of information… but emergencies are emergencies and they do not have time to sort through a detailed list of your specific individual hangups. If you don’t want someone to be told that you’re having an emergency medical situation then don’t list them as your emergency contact!

      1. Laura H*

        You’re definitely right about people not understanding the nuances of HIPAA. It requires confidentiality from your medical providers. Your boss/HR/front desk admin is not your health care provider, so they are not prohibited from sharing this info in any legal way.

    13. RagingADHD*

      Yes, that’s super duper weird. This wasn’t detailed information about a diagnosis or treatment plan (which HR wouldn’t have anyway), it was a basic description of the event, similar to if they had said the coworker had fainted or been in a car accident.

      If you don’t want people to know anything about a significant medical event, don’t make them your emergency contact.

    14. LL*

      Yep! That’s a really weird thing to think. Of course they’yre going to say what the emergency is, otherwise it will make your contact freak out even more.

    15. iglwif*

      Yeah, that seems deeply weird. Like, I of course get that people often have difficult relationships with their parents and need to keep them on an information diet! BUT if that’s the case for your parents, for goodness’ sake put someone else as your emergency contact.

      Which is extremely normal to do! List a friend, a sibling, a housemate, a cousin … whoever you list just needs to be someone you trust to handle the information.

      And 100% agree that my spouse’s or kid’s workplace calling me and going “there’s been an emergency and that’s all we can tell you” would be SUPER MEGA worse!

    16. GreenDoor*

      I assume that one of the things my emergency contact may have to do is speak on my behalf if I’m incapacitated. How can they do that if they don’t know what’s wrong? If the co-worker in this scenario wants to keep their medical issues private from their parents, they shouldn’t have made their parents the emergency contact!

    17. zuzu*

      Also: chances are that the coworker’s parents know she has epilepsy (or whatever), since the most common age of onset is in childhood (or older adulthood). Though it can come on at any age – I was once in a restaurant where a guy at the next table, who looked to be in his late 20s or early 30s, suddenly pitched out of his chair and had a grand mal seizure. From the conversation he had with his rather shocked friends after he came out of it, that had never happened before.

      I also had an experience with a coworker who had a grand mal seizure at work – it was the very weird post-9/11 time where my workplace was displaced into a different office because we worked for the City and were unable to access our building. There were three divisions that were crammed together in one big room. My division and another tended to work late and the guy’s (I never did learn his name) tended to go home at five, except for him, because he had ambitions to transfer to a different division. It was about 7 p.m., he suddenly stood up and then fell down. Someone else wanted to stick a pencil in his mouth but I yelled at him to stop because I remembered what a friend of mine with epilepsy had told me to do if she ever had a grand mal seizure in front of me (put something under her head and don’t put anything in her mouth). Fortunately, we had a former nurse working in one of the other divisions who was able to take charge, and were able to contact the guy’s boss, who got in touch with his emergency contacts. He did wind up breaking his arm against the desk when he fell, but he had no memory of the whole thing. Those of us who had witnessed it kind of left him alone because he had no memory of us being there and we didn’t know each other anyhow.

  2. coffee*

    I hate annual reviews anyway, but having to do them on your own time?! A whole new level of hell.

    1. I Have RBF*

      Seriously.

      My view is that if I wouldn’t be doing it but for the request from the job, then it’s work time.

      Examples:
      * If I needed to take work mail to the post office, it’s on their time, not mine. But personal mail is on my time.
      * If I have to fill out forms for government compliance for work, it’s their time. If it’s for me, it’s my time.
      * If I have to take a training/class for work, required by work, it’s their time. If it’s for my hobby, it’s my time.

      If it wasn’t for the job, I wouldn’t be doing that self evaluation garbage. My personal introspection does not have KPIs and SMART goals.

  3. Sara K*

    Could “on your own time” be a typo for “in your own time”? That’s how I read it at first, meaning do it whenever, as long as it’s done by 1 August.

    1. Sara K*

      To clarify my own comment, I read ‘in your own time’ as meaning not out of hours but that you can schedule it within your work hours at a time that makes sense for you.

      1. Leenie*

        I read it the same way. I had to go back and reread it to see what the LW was referring to. Let’s hope it is a typo. Self evaluations are awful enough without being expected to do them outside of work hours.

      3. Turquoisecow*

        Yeah this is how I read it, like we’re not going to schedule a time to make you do it, and it’s not urgent, but there’s a deadline so do it when you can.

      4. Dust Bunny*

        That’s how I would have read it, because that’s the only thing that even begins to make sense.

      5. Emilia Bedelia*

        That’s how I would read this…. I use “on my own time” to mean the same thing (i.e., do it yourself outside of an organized meeting) in a work context all the time.
        For example, “Should I set up a working meeting to review this?” “No, I’ll review it on my own time and get back to you”.
        “This meeting is to discuss the teapot test report. Please review on your own time prior to the meeting so that we are prepared to discuss”.

        In this context, I would read it as meaning “Do this yourself before your review” so that people are not coming into the meeting without their self review complete.

      6. Elizabeth West*

        That’s how I read it too — just do it when you have a slack moment in between work things and get it done by X time/date. I’ve never had to do that outside office hours, and at a job where my work computer didn’t go home with me, I wouldn’t be able to get on the company intranet anyway.

    2. Nat20*

      That’s how I read it at first too, like they just meant “no rush, just sometime before August 1”. That may or may not mean they expect it done outside of work hours. Worth clarifying!

    3. Double A*

      Yeah, I would assume they meant something more like “at your convenience but by this date” but phrased it…wrong.

    4. Mad Scientist*

      Unfortunately, I doubt it. “On your own time” is a common euphemism for “unpaid” and/or “outside of normal business hours”. I believe my last job asked us to do self-evaluations “on our own time”. I can’t help but wonder if LW5 works at that same company, but I won’t speculate any further out of respect for their anonymity.

      1. Pepperminty*

        Right, but it could also be a typo / badly written way of saying ‘in your own time’ which seems rather more likely.

        1. Mad Scientist*

          I wouldn’t say that a typo is the “more likely” explanation, but that’s also because for me these sorts of tasks have almost always been “on my own time”. So if that’s not the norm in LW’s office and/or industry, it’s worth double checking.

          1. Radioactive Cyborg Llama*

            I agree with you. “By August 1” already covers the general timing, so it’s more likely that “on your own time” means what it says. But I might advise interpreting it as a typo and if anyone asks, use the Alison “of course I assumed the reasonable way” approach.

          2. CC*

            I would say it’s the more likely explanation because SO many people are saying that’s how they read it, lol. Your situation is unusual. I would bet quite a bit that they meant “in your own time”.

            1. Mad Scientist*

              LW5 clarified in a separate comment below that it was not a typo, even though “so many people” read it that way.

        2. LL*

          I don’t think “in your own time” is a common saying in the US, but “on your own time” definitely is. So if they’re in the US, I doubt it’s a typo.

      2. Serene*

        I agree with you, Mad Scientist. I was so surprised to see so many commenters who have never worked at a company that expected as much of your life as they could squeeze out of it. IME, they are quite common.

        1. Orange Line Avenger*

          I think you’re making a weird assumption that people assuming that it was a typo or awkward phrase haven’t had overbearing jobs. I assumed it was a typo, and I’ve had a job where I was told to remove overtime from my time card, one where my manager made us attend “lock-ins” to complete work, and another where I was regularly doing 60 hour weeks with no OT compensation and guilted for complaining.

          I think LW should ask HR or their manager for clarification in a non-adversarial way. And even if they are directed to do it outside of their normal working hours, they can just ignore it and complete it during the day.

          1. Irish Teacher.*

            Agreed. “Well, it’s only one letter (and a letter beside it on the keyboard) away from a sentence that would be perfectly reasonable in this context” does not mean “I never heard of a company that expects people to work extra hours unpaid.”

            I hadn’t thought of it originally, but now I think a typo does make sense, not because I don’t think jobs that squeeze as much as possible out of you are common, but because it makes more sense in the context. Saying “there’s no rush with this” makes a lot more sense than “but make sure you do it after hours or in your lunch break. Do not do it when you have downtime at work.” Plus “on your own time” is just…quite unclear in this context. Does it mean the version I gave above of “make sure you do it at home and not at work” or just “we aren’t going to give you specific time to do this. Squeeze it in whenever you can”? I guess in some jobs, it might be clear. Like a retail cashier is unlikely to be able to do it when serving customers. But in general, if they expected that, it doesn’t seem the clearest way of phrasing it, whereas “in your own time” is pretty standard for requests like that.

            1. Myrin*

              Yeah, I didn’t even think of the possibility of it being a typo (although with realising the keyboard layout, I’d now say it’s actually not unlikely) but it immediately jumped out at me how weird this would be as an actual request.

              Like you say, “Do this, but make sure that you’re doing at during a time you’re not working, or else!!” seems really strange and somewhat cartoon-villain-ish. Like, I’m sure there are employers who want exactly that and phrase it that way, too, but… IDK, OP doesn’t say anything about her company one way or another but it seems like she at least didn’t see this coming from general clownery going on so I’d indeed err on the side of unfortunate phrasing.

          2. Nola*

            Yeah, I got my start in Big Law – an industry well known for expecting people to work crazy hours, that laughs at work life balance, and, not for nothing, often leads to folks crying in the bathrooms – and even I thought it was a poorly worded way of saying “when you can.”

        2. fhqwhgads*

          I’ve worked plenty of places that expected as much of your life as they could squeeze. They still never explicitly indicated review stuff was not to be done on work time. That’s completely bizarre to me.
          Make me work 28 days straight? Sure. Self-review paperwork? While I’m in the office.

          My take on this situation is even if typo is not the most likely interpretation, I’d probably choose to read it that way anyway and then act super confused if confronted and told otherwise. Because I genuinely would be confused.

      3. Annie*

        Yes, that seems like the more common use of the phrase. I would actually just ignore that unless it was something like nurse (for example) or some other job where you can’t sit at your desk and choose what projects to work on and when. If you are in a job where you can’t be at your desk then I can see why they’d want you to do it “on your own time” but those may be jobs that are hourly and would have to be paid for that work.

    5. Yoli*

      Piggybacking – where I work “in your own time” means “take your time” and “on your own time” means “there won’t be a meeting held to complete this*; get it done before the deadline.” If the nature of OP’s job is such that there is no non-structured/scheduled time, I agree with asking the boss. But if not, they run the risk of coming off as pedantic or passive aggressively correcting the message sender’s grammar.

      * The nature of our work is lots of tasks are designed to be completed in certain meetings based on org-wide norms and the union contract, so it can be helpful to clarify when a to-do is not embedded in a meeting.

    6. AnotherLibrarian*

      I was wondering that as well. Doing one “on your own time” just sounds… so absurd. But maybe… I don’t know.

    7. bamcheeks*

      That’s how I would understand it, but that’s because I’ve mostly been in jobs where I organise my own tasks and schedules (and to be honest, my employer would have no idea whether I’d done it on work time or on my own time!)

      I could well imagine that it literally means “outside of work hours” if LW has a more structured job like teaching, retail, healthcare etc where the vast majority of their time is not sat at a computer and they only get a bare minimum amount of time for administrative tasks– it could well mean, “you aren’t getting extra admin time for this”.

      1. londonedit*

        With a similarly autonomous job and as a salaried employee, I’d think the same. I’d assume it was a ‘do this whenever you have a chance’ thing, because being specifically told to do something outside of work hours doesn’t happen in my job. My only experience of ‘do this in your own time’ like that comes from school, where we’d sometimes be given a task to do and the teacher would say ‘Don’t start it now! Do it in your own time!’ which meant it wasn’t a task to complete during the lesson, it was one for us to take home and do as homework. But of course that doesn’t apply at work!

        I can well imagine the scenario you describe, though, if it’s a job like teaching etc where you have only short periods of time that are officially set aside for admin. It could mean then that you’re not meant to use your lesson planning time (for example) for that task, and you’re literally supposed to do it ‘in your own time’ (and not when you’re at work).

        1. Humble Schoolmarm*

          Interesting! As I teacher, I would probably assume that it meant that no coverage or meeting time will be provided to get this done. If you can smoosh it in to a planning period or while you’re supervising detention, great! If not, it still has to be done. Teachers are rarely explicitly told to do a certain task on the evenings or weekends, it’s just understood that since there’s a lot more to do then there are work hours in a day and none of us has a time-turner, we’re going to end up doing it outside of work hours.

      3. Mad Scientist*

        Even if you have a fairly autonomous salaried job where you can schedule your own tasks, many types of jobs primarily consist of billable tasks associated with a specific client or project. Any general admin tasks that are not associated with a specific client or project would be considered non-billable, and there probably isn’t a code to account for those tasks on your timesheet. So, yes, you can do it “during the work day” (as in the literal time of day), but you wouldn’t have anything on your timesheet for the time you spent on it, so you’d still need to do your regular work on top of that. Some organizations allow you to charge non-billable tasks by dividing the time evenly between all of your projects (ex: if you have 4 active projects and you spend an hour on your performance review, then each project gets charged 15 minutes for that). But when you charge time to projects, you need to have something to show for it. 15 minutes here and there might not be noticeable to the client, but when it adds up, the client isn’t going to be happy to hear “Oh that time was actually all non-billable stuff, I didn’t make any progress on your project during those hours.”

    8. Carmina*

      Yes I read it also like “at your convenience” – an eval seems so obviously like a core work duty that it’d seem insane to request it on personal time! Some employers stop at nothing of course, but this is so close in formulation to “in your own time” that I think a typo/misspeak is more likely here.

    9. Hyaline*

      I had the same thought. I imagine it is most likely intended to convey “do this at your own pace and your own convenience by x date”—badly.

    10. Penthesilea*

      I’m assuming that LW #5 works in consulting, because this seems to be consulting language/approach. When I worked in consulting, I was also directed to complete my self appraisal “on my own time,” meaning that the time spent doing that task could not be charged to a billing code on my timesheet, and since I had to account for my “best 40” hours every week, this would end up being time in addition to my 40 hours of billable (or 90% billable) work.

      LW #5, it sucks, but that sounds very typical of consulting, AEC firms, any place that is focused on billable hours.

      1. NotAnotherManager!*

        Did your organization not have a timekeeping code for internal processes/work? I’ve been in environments that track time for both billing and level-of-effort tracking pretty much my whole career, and there was always a time code for administrative processes that were not recoverable/billable but also constituted worked hours. When we sent out self-evals, there was always a direction about the time-tracking code to use for completing it.

        1. Mad Scientist*

          Correct, I’ve worked in a couple different consulting firms and there was never a default code for non-billable work. Sure, for some tasks, we might get a pre-approved code to use, but that was usually for unique situations like interviewing candidates or attending a conference (but not preparing a conference presentation, that was always unpaid and had to be done on top of your normal 40+ hour workload). And whenever the phrase “on your own time” was used, definitely no code. In LW5’s case, considering that phrase was used and they were obviously not directed to use a specific code for that time, I think it’s pretty clear what HR meant by it.

          Maybe this is specific to AEC firms?

          1. Penthesilea*

            Ah, AEC firms. I once listened to an engineer talk fondly about the project where everyone regularly worked 20-ish hours a week of unbilled overtime. That was the point where I decided they were all crazy and perhaps it was time to look for another job.

            1. Mad Scientist*

              I’m lucky in that the firms I’ve worked for have all paid overtime, at least for billable work. But they always acted like it was some crazy unheard-of perk that no other firms were doing or that we should be super grateful for. I remember getting a job offer that wasn’t quite the salary I asked for, but they tried to justify the low salary by saying “We pay overtime, unlike other firms!” I was like, I hate to break it to you, but my current firm and every other firm I’ve interviewed with lately also pays overtime… You aren’t special!

              Then again, my first firm wouldn’t pay overtime if you had non-billable work in the same pay period, so even if we were allowed to use overhead codes for things like performance reviews (although that firm definitely didn’t have a code for performance reviews), no one would have used it because it would mean they couldn’t earn overtime for the next couple weeks.

              Overall, I enjoyed the work enough and the pay was good enough that it all balanced out for me, at least at the time. It’s a bit of a relief not to have to worry about it as much anymore though, now that I’m out of the AEC life.

      2. fhqwhgads*

        You worked for a jerk consulting firm. When I was in consulting, it was considered reasonable for 20% admin/overhead time. Everything else was billable. They’d be happy if it was closer to 90% billable in a given week, but no one was penalized or looked down upon for 80%.

      3. Mad Scientist*

        Yep, consultants know exactly what is meant by that phrase, and it’s not a typo. LW5 also confirmed that it wasn’t a typo in a separate comment further down.

      4. I Have RBF*

        I worked for seven years for an environmental consulting firm, billable in tenths of hours. My self evaluations were on the clock, billable to overhead. Yes, we worked long hours in the field, but they didn’t cheese-pare us on time for self-evaluations that were only useful to them.

        90% billable is 36 hours a week. If your self evaluation takes an hour, you are still over 90% billable.

    11. I'm just here for the cats!!*

      That’s what I was thinking too. Like do it between tasks, etc.

    12. Allonge*

      Well, no matter which way it is intended, that is what I would claim I read it as for sure. Like, obviously nobody would tell me to do a work task outside of work/paid hours!

      (Also, English is my second language, so how much difference that one letter makes could very reasonably escape me, even though I actually know both phrases and would understand them with sufficient context. I was going to google which one is ‘in’ and which one is ‘on’ until I saw the comments here.)

    13. MCMonkeybean*

      That’s an interesting thought. It definitely seems like it might be something communicated poorly if only because I assume a form on the intranet can usually only be filled out at the office right?

      I suppose they could expect you to stay an extra half hour to complete it or something, but personally I don’t think I’d even go to my boss over this—I’d just assume I was of course meant to do it on work time and proceed accordingly (unless there is something about the way your time at work is structured that makes this not an option)

    14. Purple Tiger*

      This is how I read it too — do it at your own pace, but it must be completed by the deadline. But I’m also hourly at a company that doesn’t try to get us to work off the clock and is not legal-adjacent, so I am probably predisposed to reading directions in a common-sense but not extremely precise way.

  4. Parcae*

    I know “on your own time” can refer to non-work hours, but in this case I would aggressively interpret it as meaning “at your leisure” (but before August 1).

    1. Eldritch Office Worker*

      Agreed. It’s poor wording, especially from HR, but it seems like a reasonable assumption. If nothing else I would choose to interpret it that way because *of course* work should only be done on work time and my very reasonable not evil employer would never imply something different.

    2. huh*

      Yeah, even if I knew for a fact that they meant to do the evaluation during non-work hours, I would still just do it during work hours.

        1. Academic Physics*

          It’s been a minute since I did a timesheet, but I think I’d be honest. Let them come back and tell me that was not supposed to be done on company time, hopefully in an email.

          1. Mad Scientist*

            They already told LW5 that it was not supposed to be done on company time in an email. That is what “on your own time” means. :)

            And hey, if you’re not used to filling out a timesheet, then I understand where you’re coming from, but it’s a very different situation than LW5 is in. I think a lot of commenters must be used to jobs where all of your labor comes from the same pot of money (which is honestly surprising to me, I didn’t realize how many jobs still functioned that way). That would explain all the confusion in the comments.

            But if your time is funded by different sources depending on the specific task you’re working on, then you have to account for each hour of your day that way. If you don’t have a code to enter on your timesheet for a specific task, then you can’t just “be honest” because there is no way to submit the timesheet without a code. By not providing a code and telling the LW to do it on her own time, they were pretty clearly communicating that it was supposed to be done on top of her regular 40+ hour workload and was not supposed to be recorded in their timesheet. And if it’s not on your timesheet, then you don’t get paid for doing it.

    3. Pastor Petty LaBelle*

      Definitely. Just do it doing work hours. What they are going to check the time stamps? The chances of anyone noticing when it was done are pretty close to nil. And if they do call you out on it, just adopt the attitude of surely they meant at my convenience as noted above, you really did not mean that I should do work during non-working hours.

      1. Mad Scientist*

        I don’t think it’s about the time of day. It’s about whether or not you get paid for it. Sure, you can do it “during the work day” but you would still be responsible for completing your regular work on top of that.

  5. Nodramalama*

    It is so weird to me to think that if you’ve provided your workplace with an emergency contact, your workplace wouldn’t then contact them in an emergency and… Tell them what the emergency is. What on earth did LW3 coworkers think would happen? Emergency contacts get some vague text saying “an emergency has occurred involving your loved one.” the end.

    1. Saturday*

      Can you imagine how furious most employees and their emergency contacts would be if you did this?

    2. LW3*

      Right? I can’t think of a good reason not to inform the emergency contact about the nature of the emergency, if not specific details that could be conjecture/weirdly personal—think “Jane fell and she’s being taken to the hospital to make sure she’s okay” vs. “Jane fell and she’s being taken to the hospital because head injuries can be fatal.”

      1. Annie*

        Exactly. I can’t see a reason you would have an emergency contact who you did not want your work to share with them what the actual emergency is!

    3. BadMitten*

      Yeah I think the former coworker in #3 should just be filed under “person with unreasonable expectations.”

      Maybe there’s some back story there, but clearly blaming HR makes no sense.

      1. Hyaline*

        I think this is exactly what happened—not unlikely there’s more to her story/relationship with her parents, but that’s not on her workplace to manage. (I wondered if she regretted having her parents as emergency contact for Reasons and was a little mad at herself for putting them down/not changing them.)

      2. Smithy*

        This – I also have sympathy for young, unmarried adults newer to the work world where putting down your parents is still an automatic reaction from a time where you have no choice literally (aka as a minor) or figuratively (aka during undergrad but your parents are paying).

        Your emergency contact at work does not have to fit with any formal or legal definitions – but literally who in your life you’d want to be told first in case something went wrong.

    4. Bluey*

      Honestly, I never knew that people had such intense feelings about emergency contacts until I started reading AAM. I remember the letter from someone who was so upset about being asked for emergency contact info that they wanted to give the number of the local Jiffy Lube as a way of showing them what for, and…just…what?

      1. Boof*

        OMG I can see it now “FERGUSIA FELL DOWN THE WELL”
        “… sir, this is an Arby’s”

      2. Antilles*

        I didn’t either. To me, listing emergency contacts just feels like a bog-standard part of being a responsible adult. You arrange car insurance in case you get in a fender-bender, you arrange home insurance in case a pipe bursts, you arrange an emergency contact in case you have an emergency at work.
        Also I remember that Jiffy Lube letter and the idea still feels wild. Because the *only* time your company is ever going to find out about your fake number ploy is in an emergency situation where they actually need it in a hurry.

    5. Ann Onymous*

      My dad’s phone (unbeknownst to him) was set up to text his emergency contacts automatically if 911 was called from his phone. One day my dad butt dialed 911 on his way to work and my mom, my sibling, and I got an automated text at 7:30 am from him saying “911 was dialed from this phone.” I spent my drive to work panicking and mentally planning in case I needed to drive across state to my parents that day. After about an hour, my dad realized what had happened and let us all know he was fine, but that vague emergency text caused a lot of stress.

      1. MigraineMonth*

        My iPhone had some sort of update that added new safety features, which I learned when I got a bunch of frantic texts from old coworkers at 8pm one evening asking if I was okay after my car crash and also asking why I was in Oregon. Turns out my phone thought it had detected a car collision and automatically sent my location to all my emergency contacts… which I hadn’t updated in at least five years.

  6. MillicentFenwick*

    Re:#4….do what you need to do in order to put your candidacy in the best possible light. I know using up previous days off is tough.

    I once interviewed for a job and the employer set the time of the interview. It was at 8 AM and I was working as a night nurse. I called the interview coordinator asking for a different time since I’d be exhausted. They were unable to accommodate any change but said the interview panel would take the fact into consideration.

    When I dragged my night shift butt into the interview, they had not been told I was coming off night shift. I did not get the job, the feedback was I was a strong candidate but lacked “energy”. Also they were upset I arrived in scrubs.

    Next job interview? I absolutely took a day off and was at my best.

    2. AnotherLibrarian*

      Maybe because I work in higher-ed and we have intense day long interviews as part of the process (and sometimes get to top them off with dinner and campus tours and the like), I tend to be of the opinion that using days off for interviews is just how it goes. Most places will try to give you a Monday or Friday slot and I’ve certainly asked for that before. I do think, as a candidate, I would be hesitant to accept a job where I hadn’t met my future bosses face to face. I just think getting a “feel” is important before you commit to taking the job.

      That doesn’t mean I like spending my days off wearing a suit and answering questions about academic goals. But then, who does? Interviewing is universally a pretty grueling experience.

      1. but why*

        No I agree. Taking time off for interviews was way more common even just 10 years ago when virtual meetings weren’t as prevalent. You would tell your current manager that you’re battling a medical issue and may need a few days off here and there for doctors appointments and hope that they believed you.

        I thought that post COVID, this wouldn’t be necessary for a lot of jobs but I just found out my manager brought in final candidates for an in person interview for what is essentially my role (when I interviewed, it was entirely virtual so I could interview on my lunch break).

    3. Sloanicota*

      At the same time I think OP can try to protect themselves. Beyond the excellent Monday/Friday suggestion, they could also ask how many people are in the running; you might feel okay about losing days if you’re in the top two, but not if you’re in the top five, and in my experience a lot of interviewing is not very thoughtfully done – they may be willing to wait to interview you if you advance (yes, this could put you at a disadvantage but you’re trying to balance your desire to save your PTO here). You could also ask if zoom is possible or if they can combine a few things so it’s possible to get it done in one day.

    4. Cosmerenaut*

      Feels like a bullet dodged, quite frankly. Unable to accommodate the time, but promised to be accommodated with some grace in the interview. Panel sees evidence of having spent energy on a night shift but is bent out of shape that you wore said evidence and lacked the energy (you just spent) for their precious interview.

  7. Myrin*

    #2, have you had a big picture talk about this whole situation with your supervisor at all? Or rather, does she even know that any of this is going on?

    I ask because I see you mention her in the context of her telling your coworker that it’s fine to not work overtime at these events, but might that have been a more general statement (in the sense that it’s fine to arrange your workday in such a way that you’ll still work your normal amount of hours, just at a different time)? I would assume your supervisor would realise if that’s simply not physically possible on these specific dates, but given that you ask how you can tell her that it’s unrealistic to not work overtime on dates, it sounds like you assume that she possibly doesn’t know that?

    Also, did you get that information (that your coworker doesn’t have to do overtime) from your supervisor or did it come through you coworker, who seems to be having a lot of motivation to twist it into something it might not be exactly?

    Other than that, I don’t see your boss mentioned here and, well, your coworker doesn’t get to unilaterally decide that she doesn’t want to do parts of her work and then foist that all onto you. As for an actual script, you could honestly just use your letter’s last paragraph and then use Alison’s words as explicatory padding (as in “it’s unrealistic for us … what happened last time is unsustainable”).

    1. Spero*

      I agree with that. It isn’t clear to me that the supervisor realized the event *WAS* the overtime. I can see the supervisor thinking, ok the event is Fri-Sun I don’t expect them to work a full M-TH on top of the event because that’s working overtime. But the compromise there is not to work the week so you work the event, rather than not showing up to the event.
      I also would have said “I understand that you approved coworker not to attend event. The event requires two onsite staff. It can’t be done with only one person. Who have you assigned instead of coworker to fill that role? These are the hours coworker has notified they will not be there on your approval, let me know who is filling those hours so I can get them up to speed”

      1. Ama*

        Yes I have seen communication failures like this before. Employee A tells Boss, “I am really overloaded, I am going to ask Employee B to take on a little more at X event is that okay?”

        Boss, thinking this is a one time request and that “a little more” does NOT mean A is going to work 10 percent of the event while leaving the rest to B, says yes.

        B comes back to Boss wondering why A doesn’t have to work overtime at events anymore and Boss is confused because that’s not at all what they thought they were asked.

        OP talk to your boss and don’t soften how little your coworker worked at that event compared to you. I would be shocked if that’s actually what Boss thought they gave your coworker permission to do.

      2. 1 Woman Event Crew*

        My boss is flexible with our schedules during event weeks, giving us time off before or after, so we are given time to rest but that doesn’t seem to be enough for my coworker. In our payroll system, overtime is when you work more than 40+ in a week, but my coworker seems to think that overtime is working 8-9+ hours and that is her limit for the events. We are also only a 2-person team and I am in the senior position, so there isn’t another staff member we can delegate these duties to.

        Yes, there definitely seems to be a miscommunication and I’ve set up a meeting with my boss and coworker to talk about it. My supervisor has been very understanding, and doesn’t know how my coworker interpreted “lets plan future events better” to not showing up at an event. I still don’t know how to talk to my coworker about this, though, and my mind is kind of boggled that she thought doing a few hours at a weekend event was acceptable.

    2. Skippy*

      Stop focusing on your coworker. Start focusing on your own job.

      Your coworker doesn’t get to assign you work, and you picking up the slack means that your boss doesn’t have the opportunity/responsibility to do their job. Your challenge isn’t to make their coworker do more work, it’s to stop more work from automatically falling on you.

      The standard isn’t necessarily what’s “fair” here–if your boss decides to solve the problem by hiring a whole different person, or leaving the work undone for those other hours, they can do that. What you push back on is you picking up the slack.

      1. 1 Woman Event Crew*

        I appreciate the sentiment, but we are a 2-person team without other staff to delegate this work to. We work closely together and our work is intertwined so there is no way for me to just focus on my work. I am not her supervisor but I am in the senior position and my coworker has only been here about a year so I tend to delegate things and my supervisor is pretty hands off unless they are needed.

        My supervisor said that what they said to my coworker was that we should plan and select future events better, not that my coworker could just bail. My supervisor was as confused as I was that my coworker interpreted this as skipping events. Even if my supervisor handled everything and smoothed it over with her, that still leaves me with a team member that broke the team dynamic. And, as I said, we are a 2-person team, and I’m struggling with how to move forward with a team member that thought this was acceptable behavior, miscommunication or no.

    3. 1 Woman Event Crew*

      To clarify some things – I am in the Senior position, and my coworker has only been there a year. We are a 2-person team, and there isn’t another staff member that we can realistically delegate event duties to. My boss is flexible with our schedules during event weeks, giving us time off before or after, so we are given time to rest but that doesn’t seem to be enough for my coworker.

      My co-worker was initially the one who told me about the overtime. When I asked my supervisor about this they said that we should be more critical about what events we pick up throughout the year to avoid burnout, which is reasonable. It didn’t sound to me like overtime was even part of their conversation so I’m not sure where my coworker got that from.

      My supervisor has been very understanding about this and is as confused as I am about the way my coworker interpreted their words, but I still don’t know how to talk with my coworker about it. Even if the supervisor smooths things over with a clarification, I still feel like our 2-person team dynamic is broken because she thought this was acceptable behavior.

      1. Academic Physics*

        It makes sense to me that you feel that way! Hopefully with communication and time the team dynamic can come back together. Perhaps if your coworker explains a bit where their head got off track that will help you ++ your supervisor begin to understand what happened again.

  8. Little Miss Helpful*

    Jewish humor aficionados will remember the classic “Jewish telegram” joke (still works today, just substitute “text message”)

    START WORRYING DETAILS TO FOLLOW

    1. Retired Vulcan Raises 1 Grey Eyebrow*

      Thank you for this! That joke was new to me :)
      and it sums up how the contact would feel

    3. Jay (no, the other one)*

      Oh, I love this! Hadn’t heard it before. Thank you! (Jewish, definitely an aficionado of Jewish humor from the mid-20th century, grew up with “Joys of Yiddish” in the house)

      1. Nightengale*

        Right? I read Joys of Yiddish cover to cover multiple times as a teen. How have I never encountered this one before?

    4. Insert Clever Name Here*

      Omg, my parents basically do this. I’ll get a text that just says “please call me” and then it winds up being literally nothing when I’ve worried that I’m about to hear about a diagnosis. Sigh.

      1. Bast*

        My mother does this, and then won’t answer the phone when you call her literally 10 seconds later panicking, because “please call me” is almost never good.

      2. Lacey*

        I have siblings who will do this. And to top it off, I will know from someone else that there’s stressful stuff going on in the sibling’s life and I’m like, ok, this is the phone call where we talk about this BIG THING.

        And then it will just be a call to shoot the breeze or tell me about a book on architecture they think I would enjoy.

      3. Constance Lloyd*

        My mom once sent me a text asking, “Have you heard from your sister?” before setting down her phone and walking away. For 2 hours, I couldn’t reach anyone in my family. I lived across the country and was looking up flights home in case she was missing or something. Nope! Just a college senior with a job offer.

        1. MigraineMonth*

          My mom constantly asks if I’ve heard from my sister or talked to my uncle lately, and every time I’m like, “Not since last Friday, why, what’s happened?!” she responds, “Nothing, just wondering if you were in touch.”

          When I get used to it being idle curiosity, she switches it up with, “Well, your uncle told me he doesn’t think he’s going to live until Christmas, so maybe call him sooner than later.”

      4. Karo*

        My parents do this all the time – to the point where we now have a rule in the family that you just go ahead and call, and you start the call with the prognosis before moving into what’s happening (e.g. “Everyone’s okay, but we were in a car accident.” “He’ll be ok, but Husband is in the ER for an appendectomy.”).

        If I got a call to the effect of “Your son is going to the hospital, you should go there too,” I’d assume that he was already dead and they didn’t want to be the ones to tell me.

        1. Laura*

          My dad’s wife did this when he got really sick and had to go to the hospital; her play-by-play account was so alarming I had no idea if he was alive or dead until I finally interrupted her to ask.

          1. hugseverycat*

            A very good friend of mine who lives in another state was pretty ill, and then stopped responding to texts the next day. I didn’t know any of his local friends or his family so I started posting on his public Facebook in the hopes that someone who would know would see it.

            His sister-in-law did see the post and reached out to me via Facebook for which I am eternally grateful, but yeah, her message was basically:

            Message 1: Your friend was rushed to the hospital
            [About 15 minutes of “Typing…”]
            Message 2: [Multiple paragraph backstory of a local friend checking up on him and taking him to the hospital and him being transferred to another hospital for surgery]
            [About 10 more minutes of “Typing…”]
            Message 3: [More paragraphs of the rest of the story, with the ending being that he had surgery and is completely fine but needs to recover in the hospital]

        2. Turquoisecow*

          I very much appreciate that when the school nurse calls me she starts with “(daughter) is okay,” because I immediately start freaking out. Usually it’s something minor like a little scratch or a slight fever anyway but my heart starts racing anyway.

          If I got a call from my husband’s office that there was an emergency but they weren’t sharing details you bet I would give whoever was calling a piece of my mind!

          1. Shirley Keeldar*

            My mom was a teacher and then an administrator, and she says one of the most important rules is that you start every phone call with, “Hi, this is Jenny Jones from Happy Day Preschool, YOUR CHILD IS FINE, I’m calling about….” And then continue from there.

            1. Generic Name*

              Ha, my heart used to race anyway when I got a call from the school because it usually meant he was getting suspended. Again. And I’d have to drop everything to go pick him up. Ugh.

        3. MigraineMonth*

          My dad started one call with “Mom’s out of surgery and doing well”, which would have been really good news if he’d previously told me about her being hospitalized in the first place. He didn’t want to worry me, so he just waited until the issue was resolved before letting me know there was an issue.

          I countered that I’d rather worry for 36 hours while my mom was hospitalized with an issue that eventually required emergency surgery than worry *all the time* that my parents were sick or injured but they weren’t telling me.

      5. Pretty as a Princess too tired for mediocre men*

        Literal text exchange with my mother last year:

        Mom: (*bold subject line*) Interesting.
        Mom: (body of message) Did you ever do one of those DNA kits?
        Me: No
        Mom: Your dad did.
        Me: ok?
        Mom: Call us when you get a chance.
        …..
        ……….
        ………….
        Spousal unit, who is an adoptee and thus exploring implications of all sorts of interesting potential connections through DNA kits, assumes a quizzical expression and sits on the edge of his chair as I make the call….

        Mom: You’re more French than we thought.
        Me: ??
        Mom: Well we thought that your great-grandma on your dad’s mom’s side had a little French, but it turns out that your dad has more French than he thought.
        Me: Is there a story there?
        Mom: No, it was just interesting.

        Spousal unit collapses into silent, gut-busting giggles and slides to the floor.

        2. Phony Genius*

          If I got a message like that, I’d be wondering if he’s actually my father. Or if maybe I’m part ferret.

        3. Turquoisecow*

          You’re actually part French and a distant relative of (insert rich French person) and will be getting a large check would be more interesting and dramatic than “relative wasn’t just a little French, she was like mostly French.”

        7. Lunch Meat*

          I just need you to know that the first few times I read this comment I read “your dad died” instead of “your dad did” which made it much more confusing.

          1. Pretty as a Princess too tired for mediocre men*

            The day my father broke his ribs tying his shoes, the texts were INSANE.

      6. MsM*

        Meanwhile, there’s my family, where any call outside the designated catch-up times we’ve set triggers a panic because it’s so freaking rare. And then it does invariably turn out to be, “I forgot, what kind of drinks do you want me to get when you come visit for Thanksgiving?”

      7. KaciHall*

        My mother once posted in our family group chat (which is her and her three daughters; none of the boys count, apparently) and just said, “Dad’s CT scan went well, they’ll set a date for the surgery.”

        She had not mentioned dad’s health issues at any point, via chat or actually talking, to any of us. The panic that ensued was probably more involved than she expected. (He was eventually fine; he had a hernia that he avoided medical treatment for nearly a year that required two surgeries over six months to fix. Mom made sure to keep us more informed instead of just talking about it at home, where only the two youngest boys live, and assume we’d somehow know all about it.)

        1. AngryOctopus*

          My friend just told me that her dad talked to her and was all “oh, and the surgery went well.”. Neither she nor her siblings knew 1-that he was having surgery, 2-that it was for a lung mass and 3-that it was a melanoma metastasis, since he didn’t tell them he had melanoma. She said “he tells us all about all his dental issues which are annoying but largely treatable, but this? Nothing.”. Why????

      8. Annie*

        yes, Mom does this all the time. “Please call me as soon as you can.” *panics*

        *calls*

        “I need your help on the computer…”

        :0

        1. Anon for this*

          I had one of those at work! Coworker calls “Get to [Life Or Death Within Seconds] Place RIGHT NOW!”
          Me, running there as fast as I could, thinking there is someone dying… Upo. arrival they are sitting in front of thw computer. They: “I can’t get the computer to work!”
          (best thing: I clicked refresh, and suddenly their documents showed up as expected^^)

      9. Aurion*

        Mine too!

        My dad called me when I was taking an evening class, which I ignored (phone was on silent). Called again less than a minute later. While I was staring at my missed call notifications, he texted me with “Call me, it’s urgent”. So I immediately ran into the hallway and called him back, wondering who was in the hospital………..

        Dad: Can you look up the English transliteration of Grandma’s name, we need it for a few docs
        Me: …are you at the government office or in front of a judge or somewhere where you need this Right Now
        Dad: No?
        Me: (through gritted teeth) Then do not call me twice in two minutes and text me with “Call me it’s urgent”
        Dad: But it’s important!!!!!

        Sigh…

      10. Elsewise*

        My mom recently texted me, and the text preview that showed up said “Hey sweetie. [Uncle] has passed on”. The rest of the text said “to the next stage of recovery. He’ll be getting out of the hospital soon!”

        Somehow not the worst out of context text I’ve gotten from my parents.

        1. MigraineMonth*

          OMG!

          The funniest voice message transcription error I’ve seen was: “Hi, MigraineMonth is dead. Call me when you get a chance.”

          Puzzled, I checked the voice recording, and my father actually said, “Hi MigraineMonth, it’s Dad. Call me when you get a chance.”

      11. doreen*

        I think that might be a generational thing – I don’t text my kids “please call me” but if I actually call instead of texting they go straight to “What’s wrong?” when chances are , it’s just that the subject is not suited to texting.

    6. iglwif*

      AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

      And then there’s my (also Jewish) mom, who finally got a cellphone a few years ago but last year, when my stepdad had a MAJOR MEDICAL EMERGENCY, instead of calling any of us on said cellphone to tell us about it while it was happening, sent an email two days later.

    7. Might Be Spam*

      I had to start most family group texts with “Mom is Fine” before getting to the actual subject.

  9. nnn*

    One thing that occurs to me reading #3 is in general, for a seizure (as opposed to other emergencies), there’s a higher likelihood the emergency contact would have relevant information.

    Not everyone experiences seizures the same way and some people already have established systems in place, so the emergency contact could convey information along the lines of “You don’t need to call an ambulance unless she’s unconscious for more than 5 minutes” or “She has medication in a prescription bottle in her purse.”*

    *(Note: I’m just making stuff up, none of this is actual seizure medical advice, just an example of the scope of hypothetical information an emergency contact might have).

    Alternatively, the emergency contact might have information like “She has no history of seizures whatsoever and this is brand new”

    1. HiddenT*

      Yeah, I’ve heard of people with diagnosed seizure disorders wearing medical bracelets that say stuff like “please don’t call an ambulance unless I injured myself while seizing and am bleeding profusely, or the seizure lasts for more than X minutes.”

      Every time that’s shared in an international setting, people in countries with socialized medicine are horrified that’s a thing in the US.

      1. Hammer Time*

        It can be a thing with socialised medicine countries as well. Basically if someone has had epilepsy for a long time, seizures might be normal for them, and there might not be anything the hospital can actually do. They might have a plan where they just need you to keep them safe, move on gawkers, and let them recover. And if it happens a lot, it can get old real fast. As a first aider, I’d call an ambulance if:

        – it was a first time or they were a complete stranger and I didn’t know if this was normal for them
        – they hurt themselves on the way down
        – anything airway-blocking happened
        – it seemed to be a result of illness or injury
        – a single seizure lasted more than 5 minutes or they had multiple seizures without regaining consciousness in between

      2. LexiKon*

        I’m in the UK, and I have epilepsy and I absolutely don’t want you calling an ambulance if I have seizure but have not hurt myself and it doesn’t last longer than 5 minutes. I want you to call my husband, make sure I am safe and help me get home and into bed so I can sleep for a million days. Ambulance rides are ‘free’ in the UK but the hassle of being admitted and sleeping the whole thing off in a hospital, taking up a bed that someone else might need etc. is not worth it if this is just a ‘normal’ seizure for me.

        1. Lexi Vipond*

          Yes, I think it’s only when the exceptions are very restricted that it becomes a problem.

          Taking the example above – suppose you’d said to me ‘not unless I’m bleeding a lot’, but now I’d seen you fall awkwardly and apparently hit your head pretty hard, although it hadn’t drawn blood. You might be a bit cross with me if I decided you’d better have a paramedic look at you and they decided to take you to the hospital, when actually you were fine except for being a bit bruised, but you *probably* wouldn’t be furious with me for going against the letter of the instructions.

        2. CommanderBanana*

          There was a really long thread in some other column about how to react to medical emergencies that was pretty US-centric – as in, we live in a dystopian hellscape in which people cannot afford medical care – but the comment section raised a really good point: how can you expect coworkers or bystanders to know what your particular preference is for how people react to you having a medical emergency?

          1. Seashell*

            I guess you can’t do anything about random bystanders, but you could tell co-workers ahead of time or put up the information by your desk about what to do if you have X problem. If you don’t want to share your medical condition (which I understand), then you have to live with whatever happens in a potential emergency.

        3. Turquoisecow*

          I have epilepsy and yeah I don’t need you to call an ambulance not because I’m worried about the cost but because there’s not really anything the hospital would be able to do for me and it’s not likely I’d get taken to the hospital my neurologist is affiliated with (since I moved 30 miles away but kept the same neurologist) so the hospital would probably just give me anti-seizure meds. Then when I woke up and told them I had epilepsy they’d probably just refer me back to my usual doctor to adjust meds or figure out what went wrong.

          I know someone whose kid had a seizure and they took him to the hospital and the hospital basically discharged him the next day with a shrug because they didn’t find anything obviously wrong. (His pediatrician referred them to a neurologist and got them an emergency rescue drug.)

          If it’s the first time you’ve ever had a seizure then yes go to the hospital, absolutely, but for an epileptic, there’s usually not much an ER can or will do.

          1. SimonTheGreyWarden*

            This. My young son has epilepsy and basically we were told, if it is shorter than 5mins and he doesn’t hit his head on the way down/isn’t bleeding, there’s nothing the ER can do.

        4. Anon for This*

          I had an employee who said he sometimes has seizures. He said he just freezes in place for about two minutes, then returns to normal as if nothing happened. He told me only call 911 if it lasts more than 5 minutes. It never did happen in the office, and he has moved on to another job.

          1. Dahlia*

            Yeah, I have a friend with absence seizures and sometimes she has like 10 a day. A lot of the time they’re really short, she just goes away for a moment. You wouldn’t even really notice. Once I only did because she dropped something and it was loud.

            Like you’re just not going to go to the hospital for that, you know?

        5. CMOT Dibbler*

          I got a tiny bit of pushback from a parent for calling an ambulance for an injured kid. Thing was 1) the other parent was the one who made the decision and 2) the poor kid’s shattered collarbone was JUST about to poke through his skin.
          Great system we have here.

          1. Phony Genius*

            So if the first parent had been the one deciding, the ambulance wouldn’t have been called? Then what?

              1. CMOT Dibbler*

                The parent didn’t see the kid before the fentanyl hit. I don’t think they would have actually tried to get him up and walking. It would have been a long walk, too.

      3. Carmina*

        Yeah I also live in a country with socialized medicine and this seems pretty standard to me – I am trained in first aid for the office and it is part of the job that people on my floor can (voluntarily of course) choose to proactively share details of seizures, diabetes, such with me proactively, with instructions on when to call emergency services or not. It is not foolproof because we have instructions not to write it down, but better than nothing. Always timing seizures is also part of the training.

        If there are no such standing instructions, or we’re not sure, by default we do call of course, and indeed do not give a single thought about any cost. Anyway, if it happens in the office during work time, the office would be obligated to cover anything not already reimbursed by the state.

        1. Lady Danbury*

          Not being able to write it down sounds like a nightmare and more of a liability (I’m assuming that’s the reason why you can’t write it down) if you remember someone’s health info wrong than the company having to take proper precautions to secure sensitive personal information.

          1. Academic Physics*

            I agree, especially if it’s a larger office! Kudos to Carmina for being able to remember // keep track of that all, that’s very impressive.

        2. Freya*

          My phone has the ability to display the emergency info I’ve given it without being unlocked. There’s a notes section where you can write whatever you want (as well as the sections for blood type, allergies, and medications), and it’ll show it when someone presses the emergency button on the lock screen.

          I’ve not put my DOB nor home address into the thing, because privacy and safety, but blood type, significant allergies, and medications are all in there, because if someone mucks up and gives me something they shouldn’t, I could die. Like, my migraine preventative can increase the effects of fentanyl, so an anaesthetist needs to know to keep an eye on that, together with my normally low blood pressure. And I’ve had to ask ambos and ER people what they just measured my blood pressure at, and tell them not to worry because that’s actually a high reading for me – they were prepping to deal with me going into shock based purely on how low my blood pressure was.

          The same in-built app can be set to automatically send the info it has on me to emergency services if they get called from my phone. I do not have that on, because I’m just as likely to call emergency services from my phone on behalf of someone else, and emergency services has access to what I’ve added to my electronic medical record anyway.

      4. metadata minion*

        From what I understand, part of the reasoning there is that the hospital can’t actually *do* anything about a brief seizure, and if you already know you have a seizure disorder you don’t necessarily need to get checked out. So even aside from the cost, it’s a lot of hassle to go to the ER just to be told “yup, you still have epilepsy”. I have some heart issues that are similar — in someone who didn’t have a history of this kind of arrhythmia, you should go to the ER and get it checked out Right Away. But for me, unless it doesn’t stop doing the thing, there’s nothing the ER is going to do other than run about 5 EKGs and then tell me that yes, my heart still does the thing.

      5. Ana Gram*

        I’m an EMT and epileptics not wanting transport isn’t typically a financial issue. It’s just that they know they’re epileptic and there’s nothing the ER can do if it’s a typical seizure for them, so why ruin your day by spending it in the ER? Usually, they just want to sleep, take any meds needed, and maybe give their doctor a call if they feel it’s appropriate. Seizures can be emergencies but that doesn’t mean they always are.

        1. Georgia Carolyn Mason*

          I called 911 when the person in the next cube at work had a seizure (to be fair, I had no idea she had epilepsy and had never seen a seizure, so I’m sure it looked worse than it was). She was furious, primarily about cost but also because it was “useless.” She spent several weeks telling everyone how much of her time I had wasted by “sending” her to the hospital, which it may have been. She also forwarded me bills and told people it was my fault she couldn’t go on vacation because she had to pay for this instead. (She finally complained to HR about my not paying and I believe the company covered the bills, but also told her in no uncertain terms to stop dunning me for it.)

          1. Retired Vulcan Raises 1 Grey Eyebrow*

            That’s horrible of her. Your actions were those of a decent human being and very reasonable, especially in the absence of instructions.
            Gasp – actually sending you her bills to pay! I’d expect her reputation at work to be mud if that got around.

            I know in the European countries I’ve worked in that someone might not be delighted by the hassle of an unnecessary hospital visit and maybe a more complicated journey home if car were left at work. However, cost wouldn’t be an issue, so it would be astonishing for a Good Samaritan who called an ambulance to be criticised.
            So, I hope any org that employs people from European countries informs them about this very, very different ambulance etiquette.

    2. Lacey*

      Yes. I had a coworker with epilepsy. There were a few people trained on what to do when she had a seizure, so we’d always have someone working who knew. One of the important bits was that unless she was injured, we weren’t supposed to call 911, just follow the steps and she would be fine.

    3. Amy*

      I have a child with epilepsy. Our neurologist has instructed us to tell everyone to call 911 immediately, not to wait the standard 5 minutes from the start of the seizure. Her seizures are very poorly controlled and she requires massive doses of Ativan to stop them. It’s imperative she gets to the hospital ASAP, even if she gets the dose of Ativan we carry on us.

      So that’s what I’d tell anyone that called me as I’d be racing out the door.

    4. Artemesia*

      This. And in an adult a first time grand mal seizure is very significant often the first hint of a dire diagnosis whereas a breakthrough seizure may just mean adjusting meds.

      If I got a call, ‘your husband has been taken to the hospital and they refused information, then I would assume he was dead. A common way to delay sharing that information is something like. ‘is he okay’. ‘the paramedics are with him now’ — that is a very scary sequence.

      1. ReallyBadPerson*

        Yep. A man in our community had a seizure at his desk at work. It was the first one, and led to a diagnosis of terminal brain cancer.

    5. iglwif*

      Yeah, I know a couple of people with epilepsy who have seizures sometimes and would definitely not need or want an ambulance called unless they somehow injured themselves while seizing, because what are the paramedics or the hospital going to do?

      And then I have also had the experience of someone at work (who did not have epilepsy or any history of seizures) randomly and unexpectedly having a grand mal seizure, and you bet your ass we called 911, because when someone has their first seizure and falls on the uncarpeted floor and maybe hits their head, yeah they need to be checked out.

    6. Humble Schoolmarm*

      Similarly, I’m diabetic and although I’ve told my co-workers this already, my emergency contact should be able to give a better idea whether this is a “make her drink juice and wait 15 minutes to see if she improves” situation or an “ambulance now!” situation. (For people in that situation, if the diabetic can swallow enough to take something sweet like juice or pop, it’s probably okay to wait 15 minutes to see if they come around). I have socialized medicine, but having to spend a few hours in the ER (plus the inevitable vomiting if you get, glucagon, the injection that brings up your blood sugar) isn’t at all pleasant, especially if all I needed was a juice box or two.)

  10. Mad Scientist*

    LW2, this phrasing stood out to me: “A few months ago, my coworker shared that she felt like the event work wasn’t being evenly split. I privately felt this was unfair, but I worked with her to make things more balanced… Our supervisor, without involving me, told her that not working overtime at events was fine… The schedule ended up being a four-hour Saturday shift for her and I worked long days Friday/Saturday/Sunday.”

    If you agreed to make things more balanced, it seems like maybe you recognize that the workload was unbalanced before. Is that the case? If not, what was her reasoning when she originally brought up concerns about the unbalanced workload? Did your supervisor agree with her reasoning? Because it seems like your supervisor agrees with and approves of her current schedule. And I’m not sure why you would be involved in their conversation about overtime.

    I understand the resentment when workload becomes uneven, but considering that’s the same complaint that sparked these changes from your coworker’s POV, there seems to be a major disconnect in terms of what each of you consider “fair”. But it should be obvious to anyone who looks at the schedule on paper. Is there something drastically different about how each of you split up tasks during these events?

    1. Me Oatmeal*

      I agree with this, but regardless, I’d like to add that I think any conversation LW has with the boss should be about LW’s experiences, abilities, and limits. Who cares whether the solution involves making the coworker work more hours, hiring an additional employee, having the boss pitch in themselves, having the boss cancel some requirements so nobody needs to do them, etc.?

      1. Guacamole Bob*

        +1

        It’s the boss’s call how to respond to these employees’ limits on work outside of normal hours. Some places offer comp time at time and a half, some offer extra payment or extra comp time to people from other parts of the org to help with this kind of thing, some hire contract staff. Boss could do a shift! OP needs to tell her boss that the current situation is untenable, but coworker doing more is not the only answer.

        (Source: I work for local government at a desk job in a relatively senior role and have done multiple shifts of outreach handing out brochures and answering questions in the last couple of weeks because of a big new initiative.)

      2. Mad Scientist*

        Oh I absolutely agree! LW should keep the conversation with her boss focused on what she can reasonably do, not about her coworker. It’s up to the boss to decide what solutions make sense. Complaining about fairness might sound immature, whereas raising concerns about your own workload is a totally reasonable thing to do.

    2. Guinea pig squeaking*

      I wonder if by “unbalanced” coworker meant “too much for me”? And whether adding another person (even a temp) would be a better way to do it?

    3. Beany*

      If the coworker is counting the optional training as part of her workload, that might be enough to unbalance the scales, and factored into LW2’s original attempts to compensate, before they realized how it was screwing them over?

      1. Mad Scientist*

        I wondered that too, but the letter specifically mentions the event work being unbalanced, not the workload overall. It’s possible that coworker was doing more of the up-front planning and coordination, and then wanted to be less hands-on during the actual events to balance things out?

    4. Sloanicota*

      I had the same question. It could be worth going back to the drawing board on some of these events. Is there a way to split them that’s less exhausting for everyone? Can you just decide that at your current staffing level you’ll have to only do half-days, or skip some events this year or make them virtual or have less people there? These are conversations to have with the boss because it sounds like what you’ve got is no longer working.

    5. Mockingjay*

      I think LW2 is looking at the symptoms of the issue, not the issue itself. There is a resource shortage, not a coworker problem, and it needs to be addressed by their manager, not each other. Coworker pushed back on an unsustainable workload and reached out to LW2 for an immediate solution instead of talking to their manager. I think LW2 was a bit too accommodating in accepting a larger portion of the work as a stopgap, but I’ve been in similar circumstances and it’s a “what can you do at that moment?” – you don’t want the event to fail so you push through.

      LW2, follow Alison’s advice and have the staffing & scheduling conversation with your manager. If more help isn’t available, then shift the conversation to prioritize events or whatever else needs to be done to make the events doable without burning you out. You are allowed to draw a line in the sand yourself about what you can feasibly do. The solution isn’t to do your coworker’s portion on top of your own workload.

    6. Hyaline*

      Yeah I was confused by this, as well–unless there are other factors, like the coworker doing a lot of extra work/overtime *leading up to* events and then thinking LW should do more of the staffing *at* the events or something like that. But it feels like a huge disconnect for BOTH people to think the split is unfair and that they’re BOTH shouldering more than their fair share of the work! The boss absolutely should be making this call–and more proactively IMO. This is a case where letting the employees just hash it out isn’t giving them agency, it’s causing problems.

      1. Mad Scientist*

        Right, if both people think that things are unfair, something isn’t adding up!

    7. umami*

      I had a similar thought – if the coworker was handling the bulk of the work, and LW was just staffing the table for a few hours, that would be an imbalance. So they corrected that, and because coworker had been doing this for most of the year, they were allowed to work fewer hours for this latest event (I confess to reading between the lines a bit, but I’ve dealt with a similar situation). Sometimes, balancing things out will mean the second person does the heavy lifting toward the end of the event season if they haven’t been doing their share at the beginning of the season, which is my take on this situation.

    8. Van Wilder*

      Ok, now I’m reading between the lines and I think there might be something else going on here. Are LW’s standards higher than her boss’s? Is it really a requirement that one of them staff the event the entire time or does LW just believe (perhaps correctly) that this is what it looks like to do a good job, but maybe her boss doesn’t care as much?

      “Plus, her expectation that we would only be at one day of a two-day event is, to me, a sub-standard job.” Seems like the LW might have the option to also work shorter hours (and leave the event without a member from her team) but is taking ownership for the whole department. But I could be reading that wrong.

      1. Annie*

        That’s a good point, I didn’t catch that the first time. Is the LW doing too much or is the coworker just not doing enough? Maybe the LW’s expectations are too high and the boss doesn’t even know the LW is doing that much work, so thinks it is balanced already.

    9. Old Lady manager*

      LW2, I think you are taking on too much, not because your co-worker has stopped doing over time, but because it has become a regular part of your job for both of you to do overtime. Since you are picking up the hours, you are solving your managers problem for them. The problem is that you are short staffed. There is no wiggle room for illness, classes, etc. There needs to be a third person available who can cover when one of you can’t or you guys need to take turns working solo for these weekend events. Again this is a management issue that I see on a lot of 2 person teams.
      I suggest you approach you boss not to rat out your co-worker but instead to echo the sentiment that doing this long term the way it is setup now is causing burnout and your team needs help.

    10. 1 Woman Event Crew*

      To clarify – I am not her supervisor but I am in the senior position. I was the one that interviewed and hired her, and I was pretty clear at the time that we would have several events in the Spring. It is a hard schedule, but it is only for 5-6 non-consecutive weekends out of the year. I’m involved in the overtime discussion because we are a 2-person team and events are not packaged in ideal 8-hour chunks. There really isn’t any other staff for these events that know our programs well enough, but we have talked about adding someone for extra help. We both do prep work for and staff the event, and for most of the events it is best if 2 people are there.

      For the bit about it being unbalanced, there was 1 or 2 events where she worked a few more hours than me, but there were several events that I did by myself. So, from a timesheet perspective, it’s pretty balanced. When she expressed this to me one of the things we talked about was making getting the event supplies easier – she lives closer to the office/event spaces so she was the one that would pack up for the event and then bring things back to the office. It would have added 3+hours to my day in order to handle the event supplies. To remedy this, I would try extra hard to have everything organized for an easy pack up and breakdown, but there were a few times where she left event-prep duties until the morning of the event. I can’t help her with that, and this made her late to events a few times and she had to work more hours than she expected. I also have always stayed for event breakdown with her, and there were few times I did all that myself.

      I appreciate all the feedback, but even if our supervisor smoothed everything over with a good solution, I still feel like the team dynamic is broken. I feel like her behavior was disrespectful and unprofessional and I’m not sure how she comes back from that.

    11. 1 Woman Event Crew*

      Our boss is flexible with our schedule before/after the event where we can take off the same amount of hours as the event, get overtime, or turn it into vacation time. This partly why I am struggling – I feel like is perfectly reasonable but it is not good enough for my coworker.

      When I asked my supervisor about this and told them that I didn’t think that would be sustainable, they said that they had told my coworker that we should be more selective of the events that we do to not overwhelm ourselves, which is fair. Honestly, I’m not sure where the overtime entered the conversation and my supervisor was surprised when I told them my coworker had interpreted it like that. My coworker was also the one that pushed to add several new events to our calendar this year, so, again time management was an issue.

  11. fluffy*

    #1: The yawn/yell thing is so bizarre. I’ve known a few people who do that and I can’t tell if it’s something that they are doing involuntarily or if they just like, learned how to yawn by watching cartoons or something. On the plus side, it’s a yawn that isn’t contagious, because it ends up waking everyone else in the room up!

    2. Banana Pyjamas*

      I usually don’t do this, but when I do, it’s unintentional/involuntary. I’ve usually sucked in too much air and end up making a weird noise. I can’t remember the last time I yawned like that though, like it’s by no means normal.

    3. M*

      Given the context for the other noises LW1 describes, and how they stop around management – I wonder whether this might just be… a bid for attention?

      I don’t mean that with any level of judgement, I mean it in the classic therapist-speak sense. LW1’s colleague has a job that involves a lot of non-collaborative work away from her colleagues, and likely a decent amount of “waiting for something to happen”. Receptionist jobs can be surprisingly isolating!

      I wonder if LW1 might find it less frustrating if they took 1-2 of those “several times a day” as a moment to make their colleague feel part of the team. A quick “urgh, it is one of those days, huh? I’m going to get another cup of coffee, want one?”, a “hey, if your computer’s playing up, can you take a look at this while it sorts itself out?”, a “how about them Mets?”, etc.

      LW1’s colleague doesn’t sound like the *least* irritating colleague in the world, it’s true – but we’re all humans working to survive, and we spend an awful lot of our time at work. A bit of social chat is sometimes a kindness.

    4. sb51*

      I’m not cartoon-level loud, but generally yes, the singing-y noise I make on a larger yawn is completely involuntary—it’s also fairly uncomfortable because it means the yawn is big enough all of my throat muscles are locked up in a weird position.

      (Writing this comment has made me yawn 7-8 times involuntarily, but only one that made a small noise. It does help that in this case I could brace myself because I knew thinking about yawning would cause some, but if one takes me by surprise it’s going to make noise.)

    5. BigLawEx*

      My experience is that these folks are attention seekers. I’ve had them in my family. Every yawn, sneeze, and other bodily noise is loud, and if you say something, they push back – they’re just normal bodily functions after all!

      It would irritate the F out of me, but I’d purposefully ignore it. Is everyone else?

      1. Venus*

        My one coworker who makes these types of noises, in particular loud sighing, is also an attention seeker who does this when bored. Commenting only rewards him and I’ve found that ignoring it is most effective.

      2. Hannah lee*

        Similar in my family! The yawn and sneeze yellers were often attention seekers and had other, more serious, problematic behaviors.
        It wasn’t just that normally bodily reflexes were sometimes loud (like the cousin who if he sneezes once will usually set off an intense series of 6, 10, 12 sneezes in succession).

        It’s that they were loud AND also ended with flourishes that seemed tacked on, like a yell or in one case,a loud, emphatic cock-a-doodle-do that often followed a yawn-stretch!

        Weirdly, these were people who had no tolerance when others made unexpected sounds, even not loud ones, like sneezing or coughing or clanking a utensil on a dish or spilling something (picture older George McFly’s “WHAAAT? Whhat happened to the car?!! at the end of Back To the Future or Henry flipping out over a spill at the breakfast table early in Regarding Henry)

        In OP’s case, it may just be a quirk and not a symptom of dysfunction. The tell is how they proceed if some points out how startling their exclamations are. (Hostility, acting the victim, or doubling down on their right to whatever in a shared environment would be not good)

        1. Another Kristin*

          Eh, my dad is a very loud sneezer and he’s generally a quiet, unassuming sort of person, he just has an unfortunate sinus arrangement that makes his sneeze sound like a gunshot. I’m sure SOME people sneeze or yawn extremely loudly as an affectation, but some people really just are like that.

          1. Festively Dressed Earl*

            I’m an occasional loud sneezer and am constantly trying to muffle the noise. So is my husband. We finally stopped apologizing about it*and started joking about it: “What county did you land in this time? I’m not getting dressed to pick you up, you’ll have to get a rideshare. Can you pick up dinner from that restaurant clear across town while you’re there?”

            *To each other, not other people who may be startled by the noise.

          2. Hannah Lee*

            My experience of “sneeze yeller” and “yawn screamer” is something different from “very loud sneezer” Though it’s hard to explain the difference without attaching video clips. The kinds of folks I was describing definitely appear to have some kind of affectation … ie the make up of someone’s vocal chords / sinuses would have to be once in a lifetime spectacular to naturally generate a loud cock-a-doodle doo at the end of every yawn LOL!

            Based on the OP’s description, including the way the co-worked never does it around higher ups, it does sound like there is some control over it, but who knows.

      3. GreenApplePie*

        I usually just put headphones on but it’s not feasible in every situation. My dad is a screamer and I’d rather not have headphones in 24/7 when he’s visiting.

    6. Ipsedixitism*

      My pet peeve is the sneeze shouter. My husband is a prime example of these. They’re really sudden, really loud and I startled so badly once I threw a cup of tea up the wall. I’m British, this is probably against several laws. Obviously sneezing is involuntary but I’m talking about the ones that really shout it!

      1. Analyst*

        I’m one of those people…and it is completely involuntary and trying to suppress/reduce it makes it worse. believe me, I don’t want to be sneezing like this…

        1. JB (not in Houston)*

          Yes, not everyone making a noise that other people find annoying is an attention seeker! I’m a loud sneezer and loud yawner, and I do try to suppress it when others are around, but it’s uncomfortable.

          But I’ve learned that there is a large contingent of people (I’m not talking about those commenting here, I don’t know them) who find anything anyone does that draws any attention is necessarily doing it for attention. See also: people who are quick to say that someone crying at work is doing it to be manipulative. “This makes me uncomfortable or annoyed and therefore the person is intentionally doing it AT me” is a real mindset that some people have, which is actually pretty self-centered thinking.

          Don’t get me wrong, there are certainly manipulative cryers and loud-noise attention seekers out there. But it blows my mind that how some people make that automatic assumption about others.

      2. Discombobulated and Tired*

        My ex-father-in-law used to SCREAM the word ACHOOO when he sneezed. I can’t help but feel that actually saying the word is completely voluntary, whether or not the volume was in his control.

      3. Teacher, Here*

        I am a loud sneezer. Not quite a shouter, but close. My family rule was that I had to declare a sneeze coming on. If I got surprised, no biggie, but otherwise I was expected to say, “I’m about to sneeze.”

        I still do this as an adult, and some people find it weird that I announce my sneezes. Like, “Okay… why are you telling me this?”

    7. Khatul Madame*

      As the LW so aptly observes, the yawn-screamer has enough self-control not to do it in the presence of higher-ups. This is by no means involuntary.
      I live with a yawn-screamer and somehow he never does it in front of strangers.

      1. Sloanicota*

        Yes, in my experience it’s somewhat controllable, like 30-50%. They don’t *have* to do that, generally. It’s not quite the same thing as a sneeze that gets away from you (and even then I think some sneezers could reign it in a bit if they really wanted to, but I’m prepared to hear that I’m wrong and they simply MUST scream “AH” at top of their lungs before sneezing and CHOOOOOOOOO” during the big event). I think it’s more of a self-soothing “feels really good” thing like a full body stretch, and they like doing it, and they assume it doesn’t count since after all people can’t control sneezing/yawning/stretching, without noticing that most people are not taking the production to 100 every time.

      2. metadata minion*

        It could be that it’s not involuntary, but it’s difficult or even painful to suppress. I *can* mostly suppress a sneeze if I get enough warning, but it’s uncomfortable so unless I’m in a very formal situation I just sneeze into my elbow and assume everyone around me knows that sneezes happen sometimes.

      3. Hannah Lee*

        There’s a difference, though, between completely suppressing an involuntary bodily function (a sneeze, a yawn) which is difficult to impossible, and suppressing an exclamation that happens with it. For example, one likely CAN sneeze without loudly vocalizing Aaaahhhh- CHOO!! without inflicting pain.
        Or yawn quietly without screaming at the end of it.

        Maybe there are exceptions to this, but in OP’s case, the yawn-screamer has demonstrated that they CAN contain it, at least around higher ups. So, they recognize on some level that it’s not a desirable work behavior, not a good thing (even if they don’t realize exactly how disruptive it is), since they don’t do it around people with power over them.

        They don’t make that effort around their co-workers, even though it’s negatively impacting their co-workers more than it would the higher ups (since they are presumably around only occasionally and passing through the area instead of deeply concentrating).

        Maybe they don’t realize how loud it is throughout the shared workspace? In that case, OP and others reacting to it, asking “are you okay?”, etc or even saying, “not sure you realize how loud, startling the “scream” part of your Yawn-screams are” etc can make it clear how noticeable, disruptive it is.

        1. Allonge*

          A yawn is different from a sneeze though, no?

          Sure, neither is very reliably controllable in the sense that not sneezing or not yawning are usually not an easy option. But the force / number / frequency of the sneeze is usually less controllable – or more personal – than whether someone’s yawn includes a roar.

        2. sb51*

          The “scream” part (assuming we’re talking about the same thing — I’d never call it a scream even at very loud volumes, it’s more like an opera singer warmup noise or something”) isn’t voluntary/intentional, though? At least my entire neck and jaw kind of locks in place on a big yawn, and if it’s the right angle, the air coming out just slams into my vocal cords. The first half is quiet because it’s an involuntary exhale, but holding back the air coming back out until my muscles have unlocked enough that it can come out silently varies. (It’s also why the stretching happens – the entire neck/jaw spasming hurts a lot if you let the rest of the muscles around the area also move.)

          Like many other involuntary noises, if you feel it coming you may be able to stifle it some, or prevent it (blow your nose to avoid sneezes for the next fifteen minutes, do something to increase alertness temporarily to avoid yawning, etc), but doing so is generally uncomfortable and something one does only for an important meeting.

          (Personally, a yawn is a lot less controllable than a sneeze. I can usually hold a sneeze off for thirty seconds or so, time to get something to sneeze into and turn away, but a yawn often startles me unless it’s in reaction to something. Like typing an entire comment about yawning, and I’m not even sleepy, but I’ve yawned three times.)

    8. Frittatas for Däus*

      I JUST spent the week with a relative who scared me out of my skin every time he yawned and it was like a yawn scream! and he did the same for just about everything involuntary, he’d tie a repeated phrase or sound to it like sitting on the couch with loud groans as if he was in pain (he wasn’t) or yipping if a car came next to him in the passenger seat one lane over. turns out in his early 70s he’s finally been diagnosed with pretty moderate ASD (not to armchair diagnose OPs receptionist), but according to his daughter, he learned long ago to add the sound effects to things from various sources as a mimicking thing and they stuck. once I learned that it was kind of interesting to observe even if it was still annoying

    9. yawn screamer*

      I admit I am a yawn-screamer, sneeze-yeller, and an audible groaner when I get up after sitting for too long.

      I genuinely don’t know how I’ve gone 40 years of my life not knowing this is annoying?

      This is where directness would be a real kindness to someone who does this. I wish someone would come to me and say “hey the noises are distracting, is it possible to keep it down and sneeze / yawn / get up without making so much noise?”.

      Offhand comments truly are unclear to me — and my office is also chatty so “are you okay” is going to come across as just making conversation.

      1. yawn screamer*

        however I can happily say I’ve never said “toot toot” in front of my coworkers (or friends… or strangers) and audibly farted, so at least there’s that?

      2. Owl*

        I genuinely don’t know how I’ve gone 40 years of my life not knowing this is annoying?

        Me neither!

      3. christine*

        As a yawn-teller, scream-sneezer AND a therapist, this thread is truly delighting me.

        To be fair, I mostly subject my family to this.

        I do also enjoy talking out loud to myself at both work and home, so …

        A bid for attention? Maybe? I definitely do it when I’m alone. It feels good to have your inside world outside, whether or not anyone is listening.

        Just living my full life ;)

      4. Dust Bunny*

        I talk to myself but not around other people.

        My mother, though, cannot even order food without reading the entire menu or phone app aloud. And then she has the nerve to complain about other people “filling the air with needless talk”.

    10. Festively Dressed Earl*

      I still don’t understand exactly what a “scream-yawn” is, but the line “I have found Office Satan” in the update made me yelp-laugh.

    11. iglwif*

      I do this first thing in the morning sometimes, like a big yawn-stretch-yell kinda thing like the dog does, because it’s fun and satisfying.

      I would absolutely not do it in an open office environment !!!

    12. goddessoftransitory*

      My coworker definitely does this for attention. He yawns like a cartoon lion, sighs heavily and repeatedly, and other one man band performances, hoping someone will ask what’s wrong and he can talk their ear off.

  12. SunshineKittens*

    LW2 – Your letter is full of speculations about your coworker. It doesn’t matter if you find the workload fine or if you think that she isn’t managing her time well. I mean, it’s silly to blame her for time mismanagement on a class.
    Not everyone is okay with that amount of work on the weekends. Not everyone can put forth the same energy towards a class. Instead of trying to manage your coworker, just stick to the facts with your boss. Tell them that you cannot do the weekend work alone.

    1. DJ Abbott*

      I think the time management was about the coworker taking the class during busy season. Which I kind of agree with. She could have waited until the busy season was over and then taken the class.

      2. Cat Lady in the Mountains*

        But it’s not reasonable for a coworker or manager to manage what staff does in their free time to this extent. If these events must be staffed, and Coworker isn’t shouldering their fair share of event burden, the conversation (from the manager, not LW) is “the job requirement is that you will staff X events during Y hours.” It doesn’t matter if the reason they don’t want to do it is a class, or planned activities with friends or family, or whatever.

        some of the LW’s language suggests to me that they are more invested in these events than they need to be. “her expectation that we would only be at one day of a two-day event is, to me, a sub-standard job.”//”I feel…like she isn’t committed to the job, and that it’s disrespectful to think a few long event days is unreasonable…” — those are statements of the LW’s values, not necessarily the company’s, manager’s or coworkers. Which is fine, LW is absolutely allowed to feel that way, but it’s not ultimately their problem if the manager doesn’t think these events are that high of a priority to staff. There’s nothing in this letter that indicates the Manager would require the LW to cover all these weekend shifts, if the LW speaks up about it.

        1. 1 Woman Event Crew*

          Yea, that is a good point and I have been thinking a lot about that. I am not her supervisor but I am in the senior position, so it makes sense to me that I would care more. Occasional weekend events are part of our job for outreach – I was clear about that when I interviewed and hired her. Many of the events are optional, but she was the one pushing for more events this year and we mutually agreed to do them.

          To clarify – these are booths at external festivals/community days. If we make a commitment to work an event, I think it is highly unprofessional to back out, and, values aside, we would waste any money we paid to table at the event. And we work in a relatively small community, so if we bail on someone it is usually someone we know or are partnered with. Which, yea, some of that is my values, but it also feels generally unprofessional.

          I realized reading through all of these that, supervisor stepping in or not, the crux is a misalignment with how we value each other as team members. I’m not saying we are best friends, but we get along pretty well and I would never have left her at an event like that. We can certainly talk about doing less events, but I am struggling with how to continue to work with someone that would think this is OK. We’re a 2-person team, how can we work together if the trust and respect is broken?

    2. Sloanicota*

      I agree that OP should try to reframe this as “our current staffing doesn’t work well to cover this many events. We’re not able to keep it up and it’s making us grumpy / pitting us against each other. Something has to change.” Vs, if Coworker would just stop doing things outside of work, she could suck it up like she used to / like I do.

    3. Allonge*

      To be fair, OP and coworker seem to have been left so far to manage the distribution of tasks themselves, so it’s not an unreasonable instinct that they look at coworker for solutions – that seems to be the way things are. Coworker also came to OP about task distribution.

      But yes, manager should be a lot more involved when deciding how long an event is attended and so on, especially if the staffing is limited to OP and coworker.

    4. 1 Woman Event Crew*

      Hmm, what do you think I am speculating? My coworker and I have talked about this numerous times, and there wasn’t anything in my original letter that either she hadn’t said verbatim or that we hadn’t discussed. When I interviewed and hired her, I was clear that part of our work is outreach and that means occasional weekend events in the Spring time. If she feels the need to protect her weekend time so much then she shouldn’t have taken the job. The class was also 100% optional and she took the initiative to take it despite both my supervisor and I warning her not to, and both class + travel time were part of her 40 hours/week. On top of our supervisor letting us take off the equivalent event hours before or after the event.

      I spoke with my supervisor about this, and they said all they told her was that we should be more selective about the events that we do next year. Neither my supervisor or I are clear on how she interpreted that as not working a full event day, but we have set up a time to talk about it. Even if/when my supervisor smooths this over, I still feel like our team dynamic is broken and I don’t know how to move forward with my coworker.

  13. bamcheeks*

    I can’t tell whether LW3’s problem is:

    a) Colleague doesn’t want to work full days at the event, but boss says someone has to, so it all gas in me, or
    b) Boss has said it’s fine if we work shorter days / only one day out of two, but I don’t think that’s right, so I’m doing extra to make up for my co-worker doing less.

    If your employer is requiring you to do longer hours to make up for your colleague’s shorter hours, then you should definitely raise with you manager as a problem. But it feels like you might be driving the unfairness by insisting that SOMEONE has to be there all the time, and that all your resentment comes from your co-worker not doing the job the way you would, in which case, this is a you problem. If your employer’s response to your co-worker working shorter hours is a decision not to staff the events fully, that’s on them, not your co-worker.

    The only other case here is if you miss out by not staffing the events fully — for example, if it makes it harder to hit your targets or you lose out I. commission or something, that’s something to discuss with your boss. But with your boss, not your co-worker.

    1. Antigone*

      Yes, this was my thought – this really isn’t a coworker issue, it’s a manager issue. Something’s out of whack or miscommunicated between the LW and their manager. I can see a few options:

      1 – The manager has wildly different expectations for what the two colleagues should be doing.
      2 – The manager expects equal work from both of them but has a different understanding than the LW does about what each of them is doing – for example, how much that class should weigh into the work division, or perhaps not understanding what’s actually happening at events.
      3 – The manager expects equal work from them but has that bar set at what the colleague is doing, and LW is giving themselves a bunch of extra work they don’t actually need to be doing. Which is fine, if going above and beyond is part of their personal value set and how they approach work, but not something they can expect their colleagues to do as well.

      Those are all situations to address with the manager, not the co-worker. It sounds as if the co-worker has appropriately handled her workload concerns by talking first with you and then with the manager. If you don’t like how the results fell out – and I don’t blame you at all if you don’t! – then that’s something for you to take up with your manager, exactly the way your coworker did. This is a management issue to address. (Or to explicitly tell you they won’t be addressing beyond what’s already been done, and then you will have important information about whether you want to stay in this job with these expectations.)

    2. Sloanicota*

      If I’m reading correctly, OP’s boss has already implemented the solution I would ask for, which is better comp time before and after the extra days, so I admit I’m kind of surprised this is SUCH a problem. In my old job I always had to work weekends and extra shifts without getting any of that time back, as we “did not believe in comp time.” That was a fast track to burnout. If you are already getting the Friday before / Monday after off, do you need time and a half off to feel better about it? (I understand why working on a Saturday when your friends and family are available might not feel one-to-one with having a Monday off when nobody is around to hang out with you). Is there more you can do around the edges to make this feel less burdensome for everybody?

    3. MsM*

      I do wonder if OP’s coming from a work background where the culture is such that if an event’s important enough that you’re expected to work it outside of normal hours, it should be treated as The Most Important Thing and you make every effort to clear your schedule for as long as you’re needed.

      1. Allonge*

        Or, maybe, from a culture where you don’t get to choose your own hours if your job includes such events?

        Nowhere I worked would I have just been able to tell my coworker that I don’t wanna any more. That’s a conversation with a manager: both for which events we attend and how staffing works, and about my availability for weekend or outside normal 9-5 tasks.

    4. MCMonkeybean*

      I agree, there is a bit of mention of “I can’t do this myself,” but the bulk of the letter seems to just be thinking the coworker should do more work just because that’s like an arbitrary “right” course of action in OP’s head.

      I think they need to get very clear about what is actually affecting them before talking to the boss. Did you have to work more hours as a result of your coworker doing less? Are there specific tasks you needed to take on up cover for her? Keep the focus on items like that, and on what you’d need to make it all sustainable.

      1. Shan*

        Your first paragraph made me think of my coworker (who honestly is 95% lovely). She always organises volunteer events, charity drives, etc. for the office, and then complains when people don’t participate. But honestly, she sucks the fun out of them because she’s so rigid. And she’ll take on projects, decide other people’s contributions aren’t up to snuff and cut them out, and then afterwards talk about how she did all this work herself. But she didn’t let anyone else help!

        Definitely not saying that’s what the LW is doing – just agreeing that they need to really assess what is bothering them and consider the root.

      2. Humble Schoolmarm*

        I kind of get it, fair vs equitable is a trap that many people fall in to and it is really hard to admit to people in authority (either bosses or advice columnists) that you just can’t do it.

      3. umami*

        In reading the LW’s comments, it seems that they believe both people should provide coverage at each event, but I would say that probably isn’t necessary. That is not a great use of resources! I say this as someone who used to oversee a 2-member team for outreach. One of the first things I talked to them about was evenly splitting the events so that both of them weren’t having to work every event weekend. If it’s a major event, then yes, you might need 2 people present. But many, many community events only require one person, or maybe split shifts where one person goes for the first half and sets up, while the second goes for the second half and breaks down. I get that the senior person feels like they should be working consistently as a team, but having 2 people at every event for the entire time is … not sustainable, obviously.

  14. Kella*

    When I was 19, I cut off contact with my parents, and I really didn’t have anyone else that would make a good emergency contact. I remember applying for an apartment and putting my boss down (he was a family friend before being my boss and I had also babysat his kid a number of times so it wasn’t quite as weird as it might seem) and the apartment manager was like “Your emergency contact is your boss????” It was othering and it sucked.

    My only explanation for the coworker OP3 was asking about is perhaps their family situation has fairly recently changed, they hadn’t yet reconciled the necessity of finding new emergency contacts, and they took the stress from the resulting conflict out on HR. That’s pure extrapolation though and ultimately, you need to put down an emergency contact who is someone you would be comfortable with being given details of your emergency.

    1. londonedit*

      Even so, it’s not HR’s fault – they used the emergency contact that the employee had listed as an emergency contact. OK fine, they might not know the ins and outs of the employee’s medical condition, but if someone has a seizure in the middle of the office and is unconscious for several minutes, I and most other people would err on the side of calling an ambulance and getting them to hospital as quickly as possible! And then you’d call their emergency contact to let them know. I suppose you could start that call by saying ‘Hello, I’m Jane and I’m calling from Llamas International. Just to let you know, Sarah was taken ill at work this morning and she’s been taken by ambulance to St Mary’s’ – I would assume the person would then ask what’s happened, and you could then say ‘She had a seizure but she regained consciousness before the ambulance arrived – they’ve taken her in to be checked over’ or whatever. You can always get the important information across without going into gory details. But fundamentally I’d say it’s HR’s responsibility to call someone’s emergency contact in that situation – imagine if they didn’t! And they can only work with the contact numbers they’ve been given by the employee.

      I’m wondering whether the co-worker was just generally embarrassed by the whole situation and looking for someone to lash out at.

    2. RoadLessTraveler*

      I was thinking something similar. Sometimes in life you don’t have a wide range of emergency contact options and you might not be close with them. Even parents. I don’t think that’s on HR. There was no way for them to know that but Alison did provide a way for them to know in future, if that’s possible. Also, it depends on who makes the call and if they read that note in the moment as someone said up thread.

      I don’t think know if having a seizure is private medical information but it was clearly information the woman didn’t want her parents to have. I am two people’s emergency contact at the moment, my mom and my partner. My partner is completely healthy, my mom is not. Generally, I just need to know if death is imminent. After that, I wait for the doctors since they will have the best information. And I love these people but I wouldn’t be mad at their wishes. They are the ones sick, priority for anger goes to them in my opinion. They have to survive this emergency. I will be physically fine. I am just trying to get to the hospital.

      Also, honestly? If you are not close with someone and are their contact or you aren’t on good terms with someone, you usually know that before they get sick. It would be interesting in this case if the parents thought they were close but the daughter didn’t or still didn’t want them to know details of her medical life. Again, these nuances aren’t on HR to fully navigate in an emergency.

    3. Reality.Bites*

      Yes, the idea of “There’s an emergency, just go to the hospital” is like something on a TV show before an ad break. That’s not how people behave in normal life. In normal life the contact asks what happened if they’re not told.

      1. Observer*

        Yes, the idea of “There’s an emergency, just go to the hospital” is like something on a TV show before an ad break.

        Exactly! Because it’s *designed* to build tension and keep you in your seat through the ad break.

        But in real life, normal decent human beings don’t create artificial drama that way.

    4. Eldritch Office Worker*

      I’m sorry you experienced that, though it sounds like maybe you took that comment too personally. If it is something like this, the incident should be a nudge to update their information.

    5. Hyaline*

      I agree that there may well be more to that person’s story and especially their relationship with their parents, but that’s not on the workplace to manage. An emergency occurred, the contacts were notified. If anything, good lesson here not to put anyone down you wouldn’t be ok with actually having called because you’d been taken to the hospital and update those forms regularly.

  15. ElliottRook*

    #5- I would just do it on the clock, and hit the “send” button off the clock, however I needed to make that happen (email the answers to myself, and copy and paste them? Whatever works in your situation)

    1. Mad Scientist*

      I don’t think the problem is the time of day. The problem is they can’t include the time they spend on that task on their timesheet. So no matter what time they do it, they still need to show 8+ hours of other work on their timesheet for that day (or 40+ hours for that week), excluding the self-evaluation.

      1. LW5 here*

        this is exactly the expectation set by that missive. However, I investigated internal tasks and there is one for annual reviews. I figure I’ll use it and play dumb.

  17. sb51*

    For #5, perhaps it’s odd of me but if this is an exempt-but-billable-hours job, I think it’s a little refreshing that they’re open about stuff being off the billable clock. It’s exempt, you can require unpaid overtime.

    (Honestly the one job I did with that setup, in retrospect I wonder if the fact we had basically no management from our managers (just project-specific feedback) was because they weren’t comfortable ever assigning unbillable tasks—proposals for new grants were done off the clock but that was never explicitly stated, it was just explained by insinuation.)

  18. Defying Gravity*

    #3 – the employer here is legally (and in my view, morally) completely in the clear. Employers ARE prohibited under the ADA from sharing with others medical information they learn about their employees during the course of employment (e.g. through accommodation requests, FMLA requests, or even just basic sharing of details with managers for context.)

    But here, the employer didn’t do that. The employer reported what they had witnessed happen in the workplace – an employee apparently having a seizure – to the emergency contacts. The employer telling others what they SAW happen (employee has seizure, is being taken to hospital) is not the sharing of confidential medical information.

    This may seem like a fine distinction, but it’s a legally important one.

    1. Skytext*

      Exactly what I was coming here to say! Everybody witnessing someone falling down and having a seizure is not protected medical information. If she is seen by a doctor and the doctor diagnosed epilepsy or a brain tumor or something that caused the seizure, then THAT would be protected medical information. Just like if the employee was hit by a car in front of work, if the leg was visibly injured and bleeding, that’s not protected medical information that she has a leg injury. A later xray that found a fracture would be. But things that happen in front of lay people, where they can say “yeah, I saw her faint, or throw up, or have a seizure” is not protected medical info.

  19. J*

    I’m laughing at #1 because I also have a colleague who makes loud sound effects. In my case, she has an office, but she doesn’t close the door ever, so we all get to “enjoy” the wide range of sound effects.

  20. Georgia*

    #2: Is there any way to reduce the number of hours you both need to be at the event? Are you doing these hours ON TOP of your regular work week? If so that does sound rather unsustainable in the long run, even if it is only a few months a year. I used to have a job that had an extremely busy season (70+ hours per week wasn’t unusual) plus we had to rotate being available after hours and that was also very busy. You didn’t get any comp time and were expected to work a full day even if you didn’t sleep. It wouldn’t have been so bad if we didn’t get roped into assisting our coworkers with their after hours and weekend work if they were “busy” (I was never busy enough to get help, but I gave up many hours of my life for this job randomly and without compensation). Several of us pushed back on this ridiculous amount of work and we were gaslit and punished for doing so. The end result was that half the affected staff quit for better jobs without insane hours, leaving the remainder to do ALL the after hours. I have heard down the grapevine that the business did have to pull back on availability for that extra work, but only learned that lesson by doubling everyone’s emergency hours.

    If you can sit down with coworker and your boss and see what ACTUALLY needs to be covered during this time vs what can give you might not find yourself trying to do it alone when your coworker has enough (or a breakdown from stress). It doesn’t sound particularly sustainable as it is.

    1. Cookie Monster*

      The LW does say this: “Overall the job has a great work-life balance but over a 3-4 month season we have 5-6 weekend events with long hours. It’s pretty tiring but our boss gives us time off before or after these events to rest.”

      It’s not clear if the time off before or after the event is the same amount of time worked at the event, but it seems like there’s so effort at balance.

    1. Humble Schoolmarm*

      Yup! Even with students they’re often referred to as valuable evaluation tools, so I guess not everyone spent/spends self evaluation time mulling over how to make yourself look both skilled and humble about it at the same time. I’ve probably spent more time thinking about what the teacher/boss might want to see on a self-evaluation than I have on a regular one!

    2. JustaTech*

      My spouse is in the thick of review season (as a manager) and it is *so much work* for him. And that’s on top of his own self review. He actually said over the weekend that one of his report’s evaluation was much easier to write because that person’s self review was structured in a way that made it easier for my husband to find the info he needed to write the review of that person.
      (Yes, he’s been working weekends and evenings to get all the reviews done, but he’s salaried. Everyone is expected to do their self review during work time and less output is expected of everyone for that week. It’s just that everyone can’t stop all work to do reviews, so managers end up working late to get everything done.)

  22. Resident Catholicville, U.S.A.*

    Last year, I had a situation where I had to call the emergency contact for an employee who was out for a pre-planned medical situation. We needed to reach him about his insurance (which directly impacted his medical situation!) and for whatever reason, he just refused to call us during business hours. We tried to reach him via text, phone calls, and emails. I ended up calling both of his emergency contacts because the first didn’t know how to reach him and the second didn’t either. I was very clear that I didn’t think he was injured or having a medical emergency- I just needed him to call during business hours.

    Turns out, the emergency contacts freaked out and had the police do a wellness check on him. The police broke down his door. He was very mad, but we were very clear that it wasn’t that level of emergency. I still would call the contacts and give the same info- but you can’t control other peoples’ behaviors.

    1. Seashell*

      Was this really an urgent thing? If not, I’d go with sending a letter. If he doesn’t respond after that, it’s sort of his problem.

      Also, did the texts and emails just say “Please call during business hours” or were they more in the line of “Your insurance is getting cancelled/change – if you don’t call, you may be stuck with a lot of charges”?

      1. Resident Catholicville, U.S.A.*

        It wasn’t urgent, but by the time we called his emergency contacts, multiple weeks had gone by, multiple lines of communication were tried, and it had become time sensitive (not urgent, but we really needed to get the info).

        The communications all said that he needed to call to provide us info- it wasn’t the sort of thing that could be taken by email (not that he ever replied to one!) because the questions were a lot of flow chart type things- if the answer is A, then we ask question 1. If the answer is B, we ask question 2. Since he was our employee, he certainly knew our hours and when we could be reached- it wasn’t like we were telling him to leave voicemails at odd hours. And the voicemails were all things like, “I was told to call and I don’t know why.” Which…call during business hours and talk to a human- you’ll find out!

    2. Workerbee*

      Very odd pack of people, the employee AND his emergency contacts. You couldn’t have been more clear!

  23. Gustavo*

    1: the thing is, it’s possible that she can control the yawn sounds but it’s even more likely that it’s involuntary. There is also a strong possibility this person is neurodivergent if they are generally just making more noise than others. Some of us make more noise without realizing it either due to stimming we don’t notice or we just aren’t as aware how loud we are. Personally I’d prefer someone tell me directly and gently that it bothers them because I hate the idea of bothering someone and not even knowing about it. I can at least try to be more aware (some I may still not be able to change, like I’m a loud sneezer and I cannot help it). I know not everyone would respond well so that’s a tricky situation for sure!
    2: I’m confused initially by the part about you finding it unfair she expressed that the work unbalanced but you then worked with her to make it so. Indicating to me that she was doing more than you initially perhaps? I do 100% agree you shouldn’t have to do more than your half, even if that means some of the event isn’t covered that was your supervisors decision to allow and isn’t your problem. But I do wonder if your take on the situation is very skewed based on that first part, and you aren’t taking on nearly the lions share you think you are.

    1. JB (not in Houston)*

      Re OP#2, I’m confused about that too, but the OP did also say that they thought the coworker’s feelings of the situation was unfair. So I’m wondering if the OP meant that they did not agree that the event hours weren’t evenly balanced, but she nevertheless worked with the coworker to make the hours more the way the coworker wanted. That would make sense if the coworker is counting her class time as work time or thinks the work should be balanced so as to give her a lighter work schedule to accomodate the class.

    2. Hobbit Trail*

      re: LW1 – I am perusing the comments because I too have a front facing receptionist in my office who is loud all the time..mostly yawns but some coughing. I have spoken to her directly about it but she just gives me a blank look and a minimum of three excuses why she’s being loud. For instance, I have politely asked her to cover her mouth when coughing and she will with her shirt pulled up to cover her face if she thinks I am around. But she doesn’t realize the entire office can hear when she coughs openmouthed – in her desk area, in the kitchen, and in the restroom. I suspect neurodivergence and tried the polite direct approach. She took it as criticism and now stays away from me and will not speak to me. It’s not personal from me…more of a shock that someone thinks coughing open mouthed anywhere is okay. As you say, it’s a tricky situation.

  24. I see you Doris Burke*

    Without any additional context, couldn’t #5 just mean “get it done when you can, just complete by August 1”?

  25. Amy*

    I think the employee is projecting or shifting their anger/frustration/feelings onto their employer. I’d say the root of it is something else- they hadn’t told their parents about a medical condition, their parents are critical of their employment, etc.

    1. vacationaddict*

      I think this is probably the issue. I called an emergency contact when we had to call EMTs for someone. They were extremely angry when they came to in the ER and their parents were there. I was kind but firm that this was our practice and I would do it again–if they didn’t want their parents to know when their heart stopped at work, then they needed to update their emergency contact info. I shut it down fast, and the employee continued to work for us. They did not update their contact info.

  26. Old Lady*

    Emergency contact: If it’s enough of an emergency for a hospital visit IMHO the contacts should be called so they can go to the hospital. In some cases it might be very critical for the medical staff to know of preexisting conditions and medications the patient is taking.

    Not that anyone cares: Our neighbor across the street was found unconscious in her home and the first thing the EMTs asked was do we know of any medications? Now that spouse and I are up there in age I keep a list of both our meds (and dosages) on my cell phone. If needed I can just open up the note and show the doctor what meds we take. Especially since we travel overseas we could be in unfamiliar hospital away from usual doctors.

  27. Workerbee*

    OP #5, even if that phrasing does mean “off the clock”, it doesn’t mean you have to adhere.

    OldJob had a quarterly mandatory-enrichment day where you were expected to read a mound of materials in preparation. It was expected you’d do this on your own time, which very much meant in the evenings. Bah. I completed 100% of these readings on my own _work_ time.

  28. The Formatting Queen*

    I like to say that my cube neighbor “works out loud.” She’s always doing these big sighs, or laughing under her breath, or muttering at whatever email she’s reading, or sniffling and loudly blowing her nose, or coughing, or… any number of distracting things. (Okay – admittedly I will occasionally talk to my computer (usually Microsoft Word specifically) if it’s misbehaving or I can’t figure something out, but not on a regular, ongoing basis.) I always breathe a sigh of relief when her usual start time comes and goes and she’s not in the office yet, cause it means she’s WFH that day and I can have blessed silence.

    She’s also a manager who takes a crapload of calls on speaker at her desk. I think her boss has talked her about that (after I complained to mine) and it has reduced, but it’s still obnoxious. I’ll often loudly give my opinion during those calls because if she’s gonna make me listen to it, I’m gonna put my two cents in.

    1. Joana*

      Unless the culture is for the office to be mostly silent, I think I’d personally be fine with someone just occasionally speaking out loud at their computer as long as it was either in a normal or quiet tone; just up and yelling at Microsoft Word every time it does something to defy you would be a little much.

      But constant noises and always taking calls on speaker phone? To the gallows! /j

      1. The Formatting Queen*

        Honestly since she’s a department head with around 6 direct reports, she should have her own office and then none of this would be an issue. She books a conference room for all day every Tuesday to do her weekly 1:1’s. There are even empty offices just down the hall and she says HR still turned her down when she asked to move into one. Her boss (an SVP) supports her so I can’t figure out what the deal is.

      2. I Have RBF*

        Way back when I had a shared office, I had an officemate who got bent out of shape when I swore quietly at my computer. I work in IT, we regularly get to deal with balky and uncooperative computers, and I regularly call mine a “fucking piece of shit.”

        1. Academic Physics*

          oh i would be peeved if I were you! I know myself well enough to know i cant code near anyone else, because i reflexively and loudly swear too much, so I can’t imagine being asked to not swear at the tech if that was my entire job.

  29. Mary Smith*

    OP 3: I would want HR to share what happened with my emergency contacts because my emergency contacts could give valuable info that could end up saving my life. Such as “She passed out” “Oh, she’s hypoglycemic, it’s her blood sugar.” Or “She’s acting x” “Oh, she has low blood pressure so do y”

  30. Hyaline*

    LW 2, this line stuck out to me: “Our supervisor, without involving me, told her that not working overtime at events was fine.” Earlier you also said that you were allowed to take time following events to “make up for” the time you spent at the event. Not getting into legal definitions of exempt and nonexempt and comp time and overtime and etc here but–could the issue come down to how your coworker interpreted “not working overtime”? That is–you’re still supposed to fairly and evenly split working the event, but *she should take equivalent time off the following week/surrounding the event* rather than clocking overtime in a 40 hours a week sense?

    The answer still boils down to “talk to your boss” but I’m wondering if there are some miscommunications or differing perspectives on how this is supposed to work and how everyone is expecting work time to be balanced that may be complicating matters.

  31. LW5 here*

    I’m 100% positive this is not a typo of “on” instead of “in” and that the intention is to prioritize billable work during business hours by requiring unbillable work like self-evals to be done outside of those at the expense of an individual’s home life / leisure time. If it had been a typo, I’d think it would have been corrected by now, as this was in an all company email to 500+ people.

    1. JB (not in Houston)*

      Yes, I assumed you were aware of your work culture enough to know if it most likely what they were saying, and since you say you work somewhere that has billable work, then, yeah, this doesn’t surprise me.

    2. Dust Bunny*

      I think it’s also possible that it should have been “in” but whoever wrote it doesn’t know the difference, or didn’t think it was important enough to fix. It’s not like there aren’t plenty of grown, professional adults out there who bungle spelling and grammar on a regular basis.

      1. Mad Scientist*

        Like JB said above, let’s trust LW5 that she knows her work environment well enough to understand that the phrasing was intentional and understand what HR meant by it. The purpose of their letter was not to debate whether or not this was a typo, it was to ask for guidance on navigating the expectation that self-evals should be done as unpaid overtime.

        It’s disappointing how many comments are ignoring the spirit of the question and instead insisting that LW5 was misunderstanding the instructions they were given by HR and/or that HR made a typo.

    3. Mad Scientist*

      Thanks LW5! I was surprised by how many comments were sure it was a typo. For those of us who have worked in this type of environment, where billable hours are everything, it was clear what they meant.

      1. LW5 here*

        Yeah, I know what they meant! I’m just squicked out by it. I really wanted to ask if the compensation increase is commensurate to the effort spent on a self-eval on my own time, but, that’s probably not advisable.

      1. LW5 here*

        I didn’t. My tenure is barely a year, I don’t think this is something I can use capital on by making waves. I’ve decided I’m just going to do it during my work day as I do any other work. I have a % billable to hit and over time I am above it. We’ll see.

        1. Penthesilea*

          Seems like a reasonable next step, especially if you’re meeting your billable goal. I think this kind of format really disincentivizes people from thoughtfully participating in the evaluation process (even managers, in my experience), but that seems to be the accepted approach in most places where billable hours are king.

  32. DramaQ*

    I thought the point of emergency contacts was to contact them and tell them what the emergency is? Who calls and says “Employee had an emergency but we can’t talk about it just calling you to let you know!”

    I’d be livid if I was the EC because it tells me absolutely nothing about what is going on or where I need to go to meet my husband. Is this something I can take my time on? Is this something I need to go get the kids so they can be prepared to say goodbye? Is he already dead and I am going to be playing telephone tag until I find out which hospital his body is in?

    When my husband had an incident they called me, told me what was going on and let me talk to the EMTs so I could hear from them and they could inform me where they were taking DH. Since he woke up while I was talking to them I was able to decide which hospital they went to so I had them bring him to my workplace.

    With that information I could then coordinate with my parents the pick up of the kids and let his parents know what was going on.

    Maybe there was some drama between the employee and her parents HR didn’t know about and she decided to blame HR? But if that is the case why did she make her parents her emergency contacts if she didn’t want them contacted?

    Every handbook I have ever read states that they will contact your EC in the event of an emergency. Even medical professionals can override HIPAA if the patient is non-responsive because someone has to make the decisions and that would be whoever is your EC/POA or next of kin.

    Most people have a very poor understanding of how HIPAA works and in what situations it actually applies. This is one of them.

  33. Anon for this*

    HR person here. I’ve had employees get really upset with me when we’ve had to contact their emergency contacts for literal emergencies. The one I’m thinking of involved an employee who passed out in the parking lot by her car, was found by security, and was transported to the hospital for what ended up being a pretty serious health situation that resulted in her being hospitalized/in rehab for several months. She had listed her sister as her emergency contact. We reached out to the sister just to let her know what had happened, but didn’t share any details of her medical condition as we didn’t have them. The employee got extremely upset because apparently she was not on good terms with her sister. Okay, that’s your business, but then don’t list your sister as your emergency contact!

  34. Phony Genius*

    I was just in a doctor’s office and had to fill out the medical contact information, including emergency contact. Below that section there was a checklist of information that I could chose to allow or not allow to be disclosed to the contact. The last check box was “do not give any information to my emergency contact.” Huh? Why include this option? Then the bottom of the page asked for my signature where it said “I hereby give [doctor’s office] permission to contact the person listed above.” I’m not sure why filling out the form isn’t implicit permission.

    1. Boof*

      I can only guess this is basically to use it as “do you know where [phony genius] is, you are listed as an emergency contact and we are trying to get ahold of them urgently. I’m sorry we do not have permission to share details” – like when we see a critical lab value outpatient and are trying to call someone to check on them and/or tell them what to do

    2. MCMonkeybean*

      I think that makes more sense in a doctor’s office where pretty much everything they might say is actually legally protected by HIPAA. Implicit permission is not really sufficient there, you need to sign explicit consent.

      1. doreen*

        Yes – but what is the point of me giving the doctor an emergency contact if I don’t want the doctor to tell them anything? I’m not sure they could even call my emergency contact to say they were trying to get ahold of me – certainly, I always get questions on those forms about whether they can leave a message for me.

        1. MCMonkeybean*

          My point was that if you DO want the doctor to tell them things, they need a document where you have explicitly said so. They have to ask the question because they need you to say yes, it can’t just be implied.

          1. doreen*

            Sorry, I replied to the wrong comment- I agree with you that it needs to be explicit.

  35. MCMonkeybean*

    Is LW4 using “personal days” to mean vacation, or are these the kind of thing that are a handful of extra days for random use on top of vacation?

    If the latter, then I’m kind of feeling the same as about the emergency contact where like… that’s pretty much exactly what these things are for!

    Also, keeping things in perspective is good but you need to sell confidence in an interview! If they have narrowed it down to a few finalists and you go in with the vibe of “there’s a good chance I’m not going to get this so why should I put in this much effort” then you may be creating a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy…

    1. doreen*

      I’ve always had personal days that are separate from vacation – and I still wouldn’t be thrilled about using two of them to travel to an interview. If I don’t use them for an interview, I’l still have them later to use to wait for the plumber or to take a long weekend. What I don’t really understand about ths letter is how the LW expects to interview anywhere without taking any time off – even if they interviewed locally, it would still very likely require taking at least part of a day off.

      1. Capresesalad*

        Letter writer here. I am a teacher, and we don’t get vacation days beyond school breaks. We have some summer programming which is why I’m working now—I did get a fixed time off at the start of the summer! We just get a couple of personal days each year, and you really have to be strategic about when you use your hours or else you will run out before the year ends. That’s why leaving a couple of hours early one day is totally different from losing a full day. Believe me, I love the breaks but it makes things like this difficult! I’ve only ever worked at schools before which means my schedule has lined up better.

    2. Calamity Jane*

      There is not reason in this day and age why an employer cannot do all interviews remotely. This employer is only insisting on an in-person interview to make candidates jump through hoops and-or to screen introverts out of the process. They’re not going to treat you any better once you start remote work. It’s all going to be “policies have changed and you need to come to the office now.”

      1. Nancy*

        No, it’s not to screen out introverts. We can handle going to a site and meeting people in person.

        Travel to the site is going to be part of the job. It is not unreasonable to ask the finalists for an in person interview.

  36. Glenn*

    In the context of the story, it sounds to me like the emergency contact was used in a totally legitimate way, to contact in an actual emergency.

    However, I personally now have a policy of never providing anybody with an “emergency contact”, because (1) I’m not married, (2) there’s nobody else I’m comfortable having all my dirty laundry shared with, and (3) I discovered that my healthcare provider’s official policy is that “emergency contact” means “person to whom we may tell any private information at any time, for any reason or no reason.” (

    1. Glenn*

      Oops, my comment got cut off.

      (I discovered this when they called me to confirm an appointment — a practice I hate; if I make an appointment I’ll keep it, please don’t make me “confirm” it — and when I didn’t pick up, rather than leave a voicemail, they called my emergency contact to confirm the appointment.)

      2. Observer*

        if I make an appointment I’ll keep it, please don’t make me “confirm” it

        Well, that’s nice. But how are they supposed to know that?

      3. Phone Voice*

        As one of the people who calls patients to confirm their appointments, I can tell you that you are rather unusual in your infallible memory. That said, there are good reasons my workflow does not include immediately calling the emergency contact in such a situation.

        1. Hroethvitnir*

          Man, at this stage in Aotearoa (NZ) a vast, vast majority of appointments have automated text confirmations.

          A lot of them hook into your software so if the patient replies “yes” it changes the colour of the appt to confirmed.

          I don’t answer my phone to unknown numbers, and many medical providers have the info hidden, so I’m pretty glad about this.

          1. doreen*

            It doesn’t matter what kind of confirmation it is – thereare certain people who get annoyed with anything asking for confirmation , whether it’s a phone call, a text or an email. I think that’s why the new thing is to send me a text a day or two before asking me to answer some questions before my appointment

          2. Freya*

            Yeah, my healthcare providers here in Australia pretty much all text me a day or two prior. All but my physio-led Pilates class ask me to text back YES to confirm and give me a number to call if I need to reschedule (so I don’t need to look it up, I can call without delay). It’s automated via the system they’re using in the backend – the medical care providers I have as bookkeeping clients purchase credits for whichever system they use which are used to pay for the texts, and the patient system is separate from their accounting system so there’s no possibility of me as bookkeeper getting any information I shouldn’t have.

            Even if I forget to text back to confirm, my psychologist assumes I’m going to attend our video call, because we’ve talked about it. If I’m ten minutes late to the appointment, she’ll call me, but she won’t call my emergency contact, because she has a signed thing that says I’ll pay a fee if I ghost on appointments, she’ll just do paperwork while she waits, and we’ll finish at the scheduled time even if I’m late.

        2. Academic Physics*

          Thank you for what you do! You’re invaluable for what you do for ppl like me with a lot of doctor appointments and a medically bad memory.

      4. fhqwhgads*

        It’s completely bizarre for them to call an emergency contact in that context.

  37. SunriseRuby*

    Reading letter #1 made me unreasonably happy because I, too, am a “scream-yawner”, and I’m glad I’m not alone. I only picked up the habit when I started working at home at the start of the COVID years. Still working from home, thank goodness, still making a lot of noise when I yawn. No neighbors have complained, and I do know how to control myself in public.

  38. AnonAnon*

    #4: Over 20 years ago I had a job with very little vacation and to even take one day off you had to give like a month’s notice. I did the phone interview in my car during lunch and made it to the final round which was to be in person. I took a sick day instead.
    I needed to travel and stay overnight for the interview. I drove down the night before and then the morning of the interview, I called and left a message on my boss’s voicemail saying I was sick and couldn’t come to work that day. I said I had a migraine (which I do get) so that when I came back to work the next day it was believable.

    I think I did this twice in my career.

    I got the job.

  39. FunkyMunky*

    #4 – if you have additional sick days on top of vacation days, just use those.

  40. Ann*

    I feel you, letter-writer #1. I’m one of those people who is super-sensitive to sounds and that would drive me up the wall. I have a colleague who regularly yawns — mouth uncovered! — in meetings and one-on-one conversations and I can’t stand it. It’s rude and distracting.

  41. Raida*

    2. My coworker decided to stick me with all our weekend event work

    Talk to your boss.

    Hey, you know how when Jo said she wouldn’t do long hours anymore you gave them all to me? Well, surprise surprise, now I’m getting worn out.

    Or, to be less snarky – I took this job understanding the hours and seasonality. I worked them just fine. I modified them without complaint when Coworker was stressed from too much work when including her class.
    But these are not those hours, and I’m getting worn out working them, so we need a solution.
    Would you like to catch up again in a week, discuss ideas?

  42. Office Manager*

    The sound effects one is something my mom does!! She also dramatically screams if she does something like stubs her toe. When I was growing up the family would just tune it out completely, to the point that if she screamed in another part of the house we wouldn’t notice unless someone was over who was like, “omg is your mom ok?”
    The loud yawns for sure too.

  43. Raida*

    [please complete your self-evaluation form in the Intranet on your own time by August 1.]

    Mmmm, I’d deliberately read this as “in your own time” as in “at your own pace and to your own preferences, provided you hit the Aug1 deadline”

    I’d just give my manager a headsup of when I’m doing it in work time. Just “And then on Wed and Thur I’ve allocated an hour each for the self-eval.”
    If my manager says nothing, fine.
    If they say “That is supposed to be in personal time”
    I’d tell them “It can’t be in personal time, it’s a work task, that’d be illegal [chuckle]. Yeah, I’m sure they meant ‘in your own time’ and not ‘not in work hours’. So, Wed and Thur one hour each should be sufficient, yeah?”

    If they *did* mean “Do this thing that takes hours outside of work” then the simple [chuckle] that has to be a little misunderstanding, otherwise it’d be illegal [wry smile head shake] approach would cover everyone but the most stubbornly-wrong.

  44. The_artist_formerly_known_as_Anon-2*

    #4 – if you want the job, burn the personal day(s).

    This is how the working world WORKS.

  45. Kimberly*

    About Leter 3 – IMO, if you have ongoing medical issues, you should have an emergency plan on file. When I was teaching, everyone on my team, + nurse + admin team had a copy. In my case, that included showing them how to work an epipen, a card with basic medical history, drugs I’ve had unusual/dangerous reactions to, and contact information for my doctor, Sister, and a couple of local 1st cousins.

    I’m touch allergic to peanuts, and have atopic dermatitis. Growing up, my pediatrician had a don’t kill Kimberly letter he sent to all my teachers every year. After starting middle school, I was able to explain that my skin reaction was not self-harming (fairly straight fissures across joints). I am impressed that teachers who did not have me in their class saw what looked to them like cuts, and they were concerned enough to reach out to my parents or the counselor. (This was late 70s)

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