Man Livid After Covering His Co-Worker's Shift For A 'Family Emergency' Only To Find Out She Went To A Concert Instead
She ratted herself out, and he has every right to be angry.
Sergei Domashenko | Shutterstock Working in restaurants comes with all kinds of deeply annoying, often infuriating pitfalls, and chief among them is the absurd policies and procedures for taking a day off. Unlike most jobs where you just simply pull from a bank of PTO, restaurant workers (and those in many other service industries) are forced to get their shifts covered.
This means begging your co-workers to fill in for you, and if they're unable or unwilling, you're often just out of luck entirely. Which means you often have to resort to subterfuge in order to, you know, do anything with your life besides work. But this, of course, has the knock-on effect of shifting your problems onto others. One restaurant worker on Reddit found out he was roped into this kind of situation, and now he's furious.
A server is livid after finding out his co-worker faked a family emergency to go to a concert.
I worked in restaurants for 10 years, and I'm sorry to admit I have done this. Grandmothers falling down, roommates having to go to the hospital, "food poisoning." The lies were myriad and effective! Fortunately for me, though, I mostly worked in restaurants that were reasonable about these things. If push truly came to shove, the management would figure something out, so only very rarely was I forced to actually make these "emergencies" a co-worker's problem.
Not so in most restaurants, however. So when this man's co-worker Jessica approached him on a Saturday, alarmed about a "family emergency" and desperate for him to take her shift, he agreed, despite having long-set plans with his girlfriend that night. "[She] seemed really upset and said it was urgent, so I agreed," he wrote in his Reddit post. The next morning, he found out the truth.
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After a 'brutal' shift, he saw that his co-worker had actually gone to a Harry Styles concert.
The man described the shift he picked up as "brutal," especially because he had already been scheduled for the lunch shift, meaning he worked a double, a common practice in restaurants that can result in a day lasting 12 hours or more.
So imagine the rage that coursed through his exhausted body the next morning when he was scrolling Instagram and came across Jessica's Story to find that "she was at a Harry Styles concert with her friends, posting videos and clearly having a great time."
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Furious, he confronted her on Monday, but she insisted she needed to "destress" after her family emergency, which turned out to be a fight between her parents. When he protested that that doesn't count as an emergency, she said he was being "unsympathetic."
Their co-workers began taking sides, and soon enough, it got back to management, who made Jessica pay him back for the shift, presumably by giving him a night off in kind. But now a narrative has taken hold that he's a "snitch," and he wonders if he took things too far.
The man worried he was too harsh, but it's her own fault she got caught.
This guy sounds like an empathetic sort, and the uproar over this drama has him reconsidering how he handled it. Which is understandable given that what actually underpins all this is the ridiculous time-off policies in restaurants. I don't know what the alternative is, but I do know from experience that this shift-coverage process often doesn't work. People should be able to go see Harry Styles at the last minute! That's what life is for!
But the crux of the matter is very simple, and also very stupid: None of this would have been an issue if ol' girl had just stayed the heck off Instagram! Like, what did you think would happen, ma'am? Did you graduate from the Coldplay Affair Couple School of Incompetent Subterfuge or something?
All of which is to say, by broadcasting her night out on Instagram, she made him pretty much the opposite of a snitch, and she has absolutely nobody to blame but herself. The fact that she manipulated another person into taking on her problems makes that even more so.
She also has now tanked a relationship with a good, empathetic co-worker who was willing to help her out, which is probably the dumbest part of all. And as for his other co-worker's taking her side? Well, as another Redditor put it, "they can line up to be her next victims." Good luck with that.
John Sundholm is a writer, editor, and video personality with 20 years of experience in media and entertainment. He covers culture, mental health, and human interest topics.
