When you become available to your employers at all hours of the day, regardless of whether or not you are technically working, you are essentially giving them permission to disregard your boundaries.
Of course, any decent manager would elect not to bother employees after hours unless it was an absolute emergency. It should not be entirely on the employee to establish boundaries when they should be common sense. However, far too many bosses have forgotten the meaning of common sense and respect for other people's time, so there inevitability comes a time when those messages need to be sent.
For this author, she was essentially set up to fail on a series of projects after being reprimanded for needing to miss work. The reason? She had a serious medical emergency and needed to be admitted into the hospital. Instead of giving her time to ease back into a regular work flow, the employee was punished and forced to take on a series of responsibilities within an unrealistic time frame.
It got to the point where she was overwhelmed and worked into a tizzy at 3:00 in the morning. After a discussion with her spouse, she made a decision that might seem impulsive to some but was really reflective of what she needed to do a long time ago…
Image is representative only and does not depict the actual subjects of the story.
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