Woman Accused Of 'Abandoning' Her Two 20-Something Colleagues Who Missed Their Flight Home
Since when is it a manager's job to get two adults to the airport on time?
DIProduction | Shutterstock If you are an adult who holds a full-time job that includes travel, whose responsibility is it to get you to the airport on time for a work trip? If that question seems absolutely absurd, strap in, this story is a doozy. A manager has actually been accused of abandoning two young colleagues, who, get this, she doesn't even manage, because they missed their flight on a recent work trip.
It's become almost fashionable to stereotype Gen Z'ers as ill-prepared and ill-suited to the working world. From the "Gen Z stare" to an alleged resistance to feedback, complaints about 20-somethings in the workplace are myriad, and often overblown. But one woman's recent experience seems to be a perfect storm of Gen Z workplace stereotypes, and it created an incident that was patently absurd, but nearly as ridiculous as the fallout that ensued afterward.
A woman was accused of 'abandoning' her Gen Z colleagues when they missed their flight.
It all began when she was sent to Nashville to accept an award for her Director-level work with a specific client. She explained in a recently deleted Reddit post that her company sent a 25-year-old employee and a 21-year-old intern along because they thought it would be a good networking and skill-building experience for them.
The trip was very short, just a single night, and it went wrong from the very beginning. For starters, one of the young colleagues didn't know anything about navigating an airport. All her toiletries were the wrong size, and she didn't have a Real ID. As a result, the security delays made them nearly miss their flight out.
Things didn't go much better once they landed. From inappropriate attire to drinking too much to ineffective communication, the two 20-somethings seemed wholly unsuited to the task at hand. But it was nothing compared to what went down the day they left, when they missed their flight home because they decided to go sightseeing.
The director ended up in trouble with management and her co-worker's mom when they missed their flight.
They had mere hours between the end of the event and their flight, but the two 20-somethings decided to spend them at the Country Music Hall of Fame. It proved to be a huge mistake: They got stuck in traffic and ended up missing the flight.
The director did everything she could to manage the situation, including sending out a slew of texts and phone calls that went unanswered. Having had enough of their antics and not having a job description that included "babysitter," she got on the flight and went home. And boy did she pay for it.
The women had no idea what to do when they missed their flight, and she landed to tons of frantic texts and calls, including from one of the women's mothers, who was furious she'd "abandoned" her daughter at the Nashville airport.
Then texts started arriving from other high-level staff at the company demanding to know what was going on. Finally, a notification popped up for a meeting that had been called for Monday morning with her boss and other leaders, including people from the C-suite, because of the debacle that ensued.
An HR professional urged her to go into the meeting with guns blazing to protect her career.
It is obviously plainly ridiculous on its face that she is being blamed for any of this, and as she pointed out in her post, a man would likely never be blamed for not staying back and mothering two grown adults in this situation. But an HR professional in the comments made an important point: These women being as incompetent as they are suggests they likely leveraged connections in high places to land their positions, and those same connections could easily destroy this woman's career, regardless of how absurd this situation is.
"Your attitude going into this meeting needs to be 'I was saddled with two liabilities to the company in this trip and their employability with this firm needs review,'" the HR commenter wrote. They then urged the Director to spill the beans on how unprofessionally they conducted themselves.
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"You have done absolutely nothing wrong and you need to hold that line as firmly as possible," they went on to say. "You have to steer the conversation away from you and back to them any and every time. Control the room as if your job depends on it because it might."
They also pointed out that the one worker's mother, in particular, is potentially dangerous. "If that upset mom is someone's sister, they're going to be out for blood," they pointedly said, and they're absolutely right. "HR is not your friend," as the saying goes, and if there's one thing we should have learned by now, it's that companies rarely care about their employees as much as they do about money and reputation.
A few years back, this ridiculous situation would have been shrugged off as "learning the hard way," but that bird seems to have flown quite some time ago, replaced by a system where having your mom call and yell at your boss is normalized, and "accountability" is oppression unless it's being applied to older people. There's only one way to fight back under those ludicrous conditions: Control the narrative and beat them at their own game.
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.
