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Apparently I was supposed to start a job today...
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It's kind of hard to be late for a job that you don't have, but this job candidate found themself in that situation when they learned that they were 30 minutes late to a shift that they had been assigned on a schedule for a job that they weren't even sure that they had.
This was a place where they had previously worked, and the manager had told them that they would look at adding them back onto the schedule. With the manager insisting that it was not her responsibility to monitor the schedule, which is a fair point in some situations, but certainly not the core cause of the situation here.
This is why you always get everything in writing. Though even getting things in writing relies on the ability to appeal to some rational higher power. If it's just incompetence and arrogance all the way to the top, there's very little you can do to set the facts straight.
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The image is representative only and does not depict the actual subjects of the story.
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Everyone has had a nightmare about being late to a job, sleeping through an important meeting, or arriving late to a final exam for a class. It's one of those nightmares you'll have repeatedly throughout your life. In the dream, you burst in flustered, everyone in the lecture hall turning to face you as you begin to realize that you studied for the wrong subject. Then you wake up in a cold sweat, and as you wipe your hand across your weary face, you begin to remember that it's 2026 and you haven't been in school for 15+ years.
The workplace environment is great for creating these types of situations, especially in jobs like retail and food service, where schedules change, and managers forget to inform staff, still holding them at fault for not keeping up with changes that they didn't know had happened. Amplified by the fact that job performance is essentially evaluated based on your ability to show up on time.
The uncertainty created by the mismanagement in these roles multiples the stress and feeling of insecurity of coming off unemployment and looking for a job, any job, in a hard job market. While these misunderstandings often stem from poor communication and unclear expectations, they can escalate quickly into stressful conflicts, pushed to a head by the high emotions of workplaces that are chronically understaffed.
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