22-year-old retail employee gets her friend and coworker fired when her friend lies to their manager about a "family emergency" to go to a party and tells the manager she will cover their shift: 'My manager called me and asked me why I wasn't at work'

Brad Dickson • Managing Editor

Nov 6, 2025 12:00 PM EST

When friendship meets workplace responsibility, one retail worker learns that loyalty has limits and actions have consequences

There are certain times in life when you can't support or be responsible for someone, no matter how close you are to them. At a point, people are responsible for the consequences of their own choices, and you can't always pick up the pieces for them.

This is something that makes working relationships so difficult. On the one hand, when you allow yourself to form a personal relationship with someone at work, you have a responsibility to maintain and honor it, but ultimately, you must remain professional. When that coworker you've developed a relationship with torpedoes their career or standing at work and expects you to ride the sinking ship with them, you need to recognize that they have made their choice, and now you need to make yours.

When this 22-year-old retail employee had planned a weekend trip with her boyfriend to visit family, her friend and coworker called asking if she could cover them so that they could go to a party. When the employee declined to cover for her friend since she already had plans, the friend lied to their manager, claiming that they had a family emergency. They told the manager that the employee said she would cover for her.

At this point, you're probably wondering why the coworker didn't just omit the topic of coverage. An emergency is an emergency and you don't need coverage, having covereage planned for the "emergency" really raises suspicious as to how emergent that emergency is.

But this was an attempt to strong-arm her "friend" into covering for her. We've all probably had coworkers like this, that coworker who always wants their shifts covered for various reasons that are always urgent, yet when it comes time for them to return the favor, they always refuse. Simply put, their "wants" are more important than those of other people, so they'll always do the thing that they want to do. In this case, the coworker wanted to go to this party and noting was going to stop her.

So when the manager called, asking the employee to come in because the coworker had said she would, she decided she wasn't going to get involved and let the bus they had metaphorically thrown themself under run them right over. The coworker later accused her of this, of "throwing them under the bus." But really, the coworker just lay down in front of it, and she didn't lie down next to them.

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"AITA for getting my friend fired from her job?"

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_{The image is representative only and does not depict the actual subjects of the story.}