• Basic Glitch@sh.itjust.works
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    5 hours ago

    I had a coworker that went MIA for like a month. We were waiting on him to send us some things for a project, but nobody knew where he went or could get in touch with him. One day out of the blue he messaged us to apologize, and let us know he’d experienced a mental breakdown, become suicidal, and had been hospitalized the whole time.

    I was off that day (but of course still connected to work 🙄) and in the middle of replying to his message when a friend of mine came over to go get some lunch. She asked why I seemed kinda of shaken up, and I just gave her a quick rundown and said I needed to finish replying to him before we left.

    Her response kinda threw me into this whole other state of shock, bc she literally just scoffed and said “Ugh I hate when people do that! You still have responsibilities, how hard is it to just send an email saying you’ll be out?”

    This is somebody I generally consider a good person, but this really made me look at her in a different way. She legit thought that somehow this guy, who literally had a break from reality and had nearly been driven to the point of suicide bc of how stressed and overwhelmed he was, was somehow in the wrong for not putting all that aside and thinking about his responsibilities to work.

    How selfish of him/s

    As if, despite the words “break from reality” and “suicide,” she still somehow believed that he could have realistically been expected to just snap back into work mode momentarily

    Like as he’s in the middle of fashioning a noose or loading a gun to stick in his own mouth, he was supposed to stop and go “Wait, before I do this, I really should reply to all those emails.”

    • AlexLost@lemmy.world
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      3 hours ago

      Some people have “,work responsibilities” brain and can’t turn it off. When I go home at night, work gets left behind. They can’t pay me enough to take it home with me. My boss, burns the candle at both ends to make sure everything is perfect, and we still deal with chaos, because that’s life. Leave work at work.

    • DNS@discuss.online
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      3 hours ago

      I did IT for a major Tool Manufacturer in the US and this scenario actually happened to me, being the person who went under a mental breakdown.

      Same shit my co-workers said to another member on the team, except in her case she chose to be with her children instead of sacrifice her parental time for shareholder profits. I knew when I took my PTO+sick days that my team would said the same behind my back.

      It astonishes me that the majority of Americans are OK with this type of work life.