Woman Calls In Sick To Work But Gets Scheduled For A 'Discussion' 10 Minutes Later — 'We're Gonna Box Up Your Belongings'
She's considering seeking legal advice for disability discrimination.
TikTok “I think I’m about to get fired,” said Mickey in her TikTok post about corporate life. “I’ve been having some issues with this company for quite a while.”
She explained that she called in sick to the office, due to a migraine, yet told her supervisor she could log on later if she felt up to it.
Mickey called in sick, then got scheduled for a ‘discussion’ 10 minutes later, which led her to believe she was getting fired.
“I hate working at this company,” she confessed. “I knew I was going to get fired eventually.”
“They are not willing to work with my accommodation whatsoever,” she explained. “I have some mental issues that they are refusing to help with.”
She mentioned that she’s considered seeking legal advice because she’s at such a loss for how to navigate the situation. “I really do believe I’m about to get fired. And if I do, I’m going to go off on them. My heart is pounding right now.”
While she was fired, she didn’t go off on them as she said she would. She sat quietly and accepted the news, and later noted that she felt so downtrodden that she couldn’t fight back.
She posted a five-minute video in which she recorded the meeting with her boss and the HR department, noting that “her gut was right” when she saw that HR was on the call.
At one point, she captioned the video with the statement, “I have asked for an accommodation for my mental health for months and they refused to give it to me.”
“Because I was fighting so hard they then started telling me my work was not up to par which was a complete lie,” she explained. “They needed a reason to fire me and they knew they couldn’t fire me for anything to do with my accommodation, so they decided to make it seem like I was doing a bad job.”
On the call, the HR representative followed up on “some performance issues” they’d previously discussed. The representative stated they had “reviewed several phone calls and emails… and have come across several that are very alarming, and don’t uphold to the values of providing great customer service that we strive for within our department.”
The HR representative stated that Mickey was “unreliable” and that they “couldn’t trust that [she] could take care of the customer in the manner that we need to take care of the customers.”
“As of today, we’re going to part ways,” the HR representative stated, proving Mickey's instincts were correct.
The representative went on to explain that Mickey’s belongings at the office would be boxed up, and she could pick them up at a later date.
“With the snow coming tomorrow, we’re not going to encourage anybody to get out,” she explained, making an apparently performative attempt at caring for the employee.
As for her detached reaction, Mickey wrote, “I didn’t have it in me to fight for this job anymore because of how much they broke me.” She captioned the scene, explaining that “the HR rep speaking has totally disgusted me on how she views mental health and taking care of employees and their accommodations.”
“I have never been so disrespected and discriminated against my entire life,” Mickey stated.
After being told she had to clock out immediately, Mickey was also told that she could keep her benefits until the end of the month, which only panned out to six days. Mickey posted a follow-up video in which she answered questions about what type of accommodations she was requesting.
She explained that she has “a lot of mental health problems that don’t affect my everyday life.”
“They can sometimes,” she clarified. “I wake up with panic attacks, sometimes. To be honest, they were triggered a lot by this job.” Mickey said that she has anxiety and depression, and a few other mental health struggles she declined to share on TikTok.
“All I was asking for was to work from home on certain days when I would have what they liked to call 'a flare up.' The more that this job started to break me down, the more that they would happen.”
She further explained that her request was a reasonable accommodation because there were people who worked the same position as her who work from home full time.
“Because they wouldn’t let me do it, it was disability discrimination,” Mickey stated.
It's important to note that 16% of the world has some form of disability, yet the stigma against disabilities is still very strong, despite advocates working toward change. The company forced Mickey into taking PTO whenever she had a panic attack instead of allowing her to work from home, which led to her missing work.
Mickey said that she felt like she was “gaslit into believing that [she] couldn’t do her job.”
The company asked her to have paperwork filled out by a doctor, yet when she returned with signed paperwork from her therapist, she was told it would have to be done by her primary care provider, who doesn’t manage her mental health. It’s almost as if the company was setting Mickey up to fail.
HR didn’t accept her doctor’s paperwork, and then, in the following weeks, wrote Mickey up twice for "bad work performance."
“I feel in my heart they realized they couldn’t fire me for my mental health and the accommodations I was asking for, so they had to go after something else.” She goes on to say that she didn’t fight getting fired because she’d been expecting the situation to arise.
“I come from an HR background,” Mickey said, “And I am appalled by some of the things that HR has said to me.”
“This job has taken everything out of me,” she stated. She then said that she’s been applying to other jobs for the past two months, out of concern that she was going to get fired from her current position.
“I’ve been trying hard to leave this company for a while because I knew they weren’t going to help me.”
As for her work performance, Mickey said, “I am so p-ssed that they made it out to seem like I was doing a bad job.”
“I tried. And the fact is, I knew I couldn’t win with these people,” she explained. “I was willing to work with them. They were not willing to help me.”
Mickey claimed that she recorded the meeting for “her own safety,” because she plans to seek legal guidance. She offered up her gratitude for her followers, some of whom mentioned that their workplaces are hiring.
While by the end of her post, Mickey seemed resigned to the company not having been a good fit for her, she acknowledged that “no one ever wants to get fired.”
“I know I have a disability,” she said finally. “But if you give me a chance… I will give you everything I have.”
Alexandra Blogier is a writer on YourTango's news and entertainment team. She covers celebrity gossip, pop culture analysis and all things to do with the entertainment industry.