Wondering if colleague did this on purpose

Your meeting, your responsibility. You should have been aware that it was midday and gone to greet them. Either that or leave specific instructions that reception advise you as soon as they arrived. This is your fault, stop blaming the junior.

You should have met them yourself if the meeting was so important.
if your previous meeting with the senior consultant was in danger of over running you should have explained the situation to them, and asked to continue another time.

I agree, I don't know why people on this thread are so adamant to say the OP is to blame when she's clearly stated how her office works, there's no reason she would do it any other way than how it normally is done

Really odd they left so quickly.

In future, I'd brief colleagues - all of them - that you have a meeting and should you for any chance not be visible they this is where you'll be.

And I hope you get to the bottom of it.

What other damaging behaviour has this colleague done?

I don’t understand why she didn’t call you, why they didn’t call you, and why you couldn’t get hold of them for half an hour. Absolutely bizarre.

In which case the junior is being made a scap goat. It seems that because of where she sits she is expected to meet random guests and try and find out where they should be despite no information being provided.

Yes the junior may be making a point which is either communicate with her at the very least or if too squeamish to communicate at that level make sure a member of the team, who has been told, waits in reception for the meeting,

My goodness, she’s not a dog that you say needs reigning in. The OP definitely needs to have a word with her, but in reality it’s the OP who messed up by not being ready to meet and greet her client. If I was the office junior I probably would to just as annoyed for having to do all the running around the building, whilst probably having other more important work to do.

The chair of the meeting didn’t appear until 10 mins after the scheduled start time. No one hides away in a room with door closed when they are expecting site visitors

Sorry OP. I'm in a senior role in a large company and if I'd been trying to get a meeting since July and someone pulled me into a meeting I'd say at the start 'I need to be finished af 11.50'. Expecting your visitors to wait until you've finished (even though you said you didn't know they had arrived) is disrespectful. I'd also say that if the team they are from is so busy it has taken months to meet, I'd be going to their part of the office/site. I'd also say that your meeting with them is a low priority for them so anything you do needs to be on their terms not yours....

I suspect the junior colleague is fed up with everyone expecting her to play reception for visitors and you shouldn't have expected her to help you.

I don’t think she does sound incompetent as she’s NOT a receptionist. She may do perfectly well at the job she’s actually paid to do,

You didn’t even inform her that you were in the office that day, let alone having visitors, so yeah I can see it just going “oh Willo doesn’t work Fridays”. Could she have done more - yes probably, but you’ve put all the barriers in the way - not telling her you were coming, being tucked away in the out of the way office, not being around at the start time, not reconfirming arrangements with your guests etc.

Obviously this woman sounds incompetent but I don’t understand why you would run meetings back to back, without at least a 10 minute buffer to stretch your legs, have a comfort break, and mentally prepare for the next one? Plus accommodating any over run, especially if you know this senior consultant couldn’t easily be ‘wrapped up’ at bang on 12.

I think two things can both be true at once:

This junior person who rotates through the department could have done more to attempt to track OP down
and
OP was the one who was responsible for this very important (to her) meeting and failed to take several key and obvious steps to prevent confusion and enable the more junior person to help OP

Being senior should mean additional accountability and a focus on setting more junior team members up for success. But based on this thread OP's reaction is to throw the admin under the bus and ignore her her own role.

Maybe OP has been disingenuous and it’s normal for the people she was meeting to pop in to her office but if not internal people from another location who don’t normally visit aren’t the same as a colleague popping in from the office one floor down. And maybe the normal process at her office is for the admin people who sit near the entrance to be informed of visitors in advance and of changes to people’s schedules, etc. and to not know what to do if they aren’t Or maybe it’s process to only direct visitors to rooms they ask for and otherwise assume the visitor is just chancing it.

But it sounds like the normal process, while not documented specifically in the job descriptions, is for the admin staff there to act like receptionists when it comes to visitors and facilitate them meeting the person they’re supposed to meet. And I wouldn’t expect someone in that role to need to be told any of the details suggested by the previous poster in order to say something like “That’s odd, OP isn’t normally in on Fridays, but could you just wait there a moment and I’ll see what’s going on.”

I agree OP needed to inform admin she was in and expecting visitors. All sounds very disorganised.

This might be true in some circumstances. But OP doesn't usually work at this company on Fridays and these were internal people not clients. That combined with this person not actually being a receptionist changes the balance IMO. OP was really remiss in not communicating with this rotating admin or just arranging a specific meeting space that these visitors could ask to be directed to instead of expecting them to stand around while someone with no advanced warning went and tracked OP down.

Someone coming by from another department and asking for OP and the admin saying "OP doesn't work on Fridays actually" is not particularly unreasonable.

If you had a very important meeting at 12pm that you'd spent months organising, then why on earth did you let a previous meeting go on until 10 minutes into this meeting!

You should have been ready to greet the attendees at about 11.50.

I don't think you can blame anyone else in this situation...

This sort of thing isn’t a bad thing to do if it fits with other aspects of the office (like what hours people keep), because it can make it quicker to get hold of you when your guests turn up and make the process smoother for everyone.

But no one should need to have been told that sort of thing to do their best to facilitate visitors to an office getting to see the person they’re supposed to.

@WilloWhisperer can you just answer the question you are seemingly avoiding… Did you tell this woman you had a meeting and the guests would be arriving and to come and find you or send them to a conference room/office?

YES or NO??

This is really crucial to whether you are unreasonable or not.

She didn't do well (the junior person). But, if this meeting was so important you should have informed your immediate team AND the junior huffy person "who is sort if part if the team but not really" you were expecting X at noon, and you would be in Y room. You also should've pre-empted the senior consultant running on and on by telling him at the start of the meeting you would be stopping at 11.50am to go meet your guests. Alarm on phone and off to reception.

It is weird the clients left so quickly and does sound possible the junior has sent them away/said you weren't in. No doubt you will find out on Monday. I'd delay reporting her until I found out what exactly had happened at the encounter. If she's done something deliberately malicious she deserves a written warning. If it's the case you didn't explicitly tell her and the client simply left feeling insulted, ghat's on you.

Sounds like these clients were looking for an excuse to ditch the meeting. Sorry OP.

What information and instructions did you leave with your junior colleague? Even a quick I’m expecting xyz at 12. I’m going into a meeting with SC now so ping me on Teams when they arrive. I’ve got room 1.2 booked so take them there please.

Did you do any of that type of thing?

OP they left because they were told you were not there as you don't work Fridays. The junior told them this and it was the truth as far as she was aware - because YOU failed to inform her otherwise.

Did you tell this woman that you were actually on site, contrary to your usual schedule?
Did you tell her that you had important meeting delegates arriving for a noon meeting with you?
Did you tell her where you could be found, not in your usual office or in the planned meeting room?
Did you tell the person you were talking to past the time the meeting was meant to start that you had a scheduling clash?

OP you are very conveniently forgetting to respond to posts asking you specific questions eg why you didn't prepare for the visitors by a) excusing yourself at 11.55am b) delegate the responsibility of greeting the visitors to a specific person c) the distance they travelled to see you d) why they left so quickly without attempting to phone you e) why you didn't politely approach the junior floating admin to explain that you were in the office on your usual day off because you came in specifically to meet the visitors and ask for her help when they arrived f) failing that why you didn't ask whoever buzzed them into the building to ring your mobile so you would know immediately that they were there.

If you are generally so disorganised, I'm not surprised it took four months to arrange a meeting.

Usher them where?

The junior person apparently didn't have any knowledge of the meeting, where the meeting was taking place, or that OP was in on this Friday in contrast to her usual 4 day schedule. OP was away from her own desk (and phone) and in behind a closed door at the end of an out of the way hallway.

OP couldn't be bothered to communicate the most basic information to this person to enable them to help her out with her meeting, and yet now that things have gone wrong suddenly it's all this admin's fault.