Work one AIBU

[Covidbegone]

So I was asked to help out with a project months ago, but in the final stages, the editing down and smartening up stages. The people I’m helping have a reputation for being late to hand work in. The original lady who was liaising with them left her post before they got it to her. When she left she apologised to me and explained how long she’d been waiting and they were notorious for this.

Anyway new liaison lady comes on board. She gives them a deadline to work to. I go to her and explain that the deadline she has provided is in the middle of the Easter hols and I’ll be off as I have young kids. I ask if I can have the work a few days before as they will literally need the work on my return from A/L not leaving me any time to actually help out. This still leaves them a good few weeks to do the work. Anyway they complain they have not enough time. I advise them I can still help if they give me a day or 2 prior to leave.

A/L time arrives. I go on leave, no sign of the work. I return to work this week only to discover in the interim that the liaison lady has taken the job to my colleague who also has young children and is on A/L. My colleague however has done the work. I understand that that is her choice, however I feel completely undermined. It makes me look bad that I’m not willing to give up A/L for work, which tbf I’m not in this instance (they were given months and months to get something to me). I imagine that my colleague perhaps does not know the full story of repeated requests for work to be handed in by the original lady or myself. With all that in mind, would I be unreasonable to raise this with her? I just feel so undermined

To answer a few points;

@therewereroses I did give a f* which is why I asked repeatedly for the work to be given a few days earlier.

Liaison lady 1 had requested the work be done by February (a target that team missed) as a consequence the presentation was moved to April. I chased in between for the work.

Liaison lady 2 then set them a deadline without asking if it fitted into my work schedule. When I mentioned (in March) that the dates didn’t work I requested just a few days earlier so I would have time to fit them in. Given they had already had 3 months, that didn’t seem unreasonable.

I book my leave well in advance as I have to be conscious of school holidays and don’t like leaving people in difficult positions.

You were being difficult though, as you weren’t prepared to give up your annual leave.

Nonsense GreenWillow.

OP was under no obligation to give up her annual leave. She was not being difficult.

I think a lot of people forget that employers can dictate the dates of all annual leave, and indeed cancel AL that has already been booked.

Not in my workplace (public sector).

(Sometimes I do wish it weren't the case, as a manager!)

Gosh, you sound hard work and childish.
Stand your ground and get on with your work. If the environment doesn't work for you, change job.

You will find colleagues who clock watch, colleagues who are happy to do over-time and sacrifice their weekends.

You are being completely ridiculous to want to complain. You should be grateful that someone else did the work so you didn't have to, and if you are so protective of your work, then YOU should have done it.

You can't have it both ways, the world cannot stop because you decided to book annual leave. It should be standard that someone else is available when an employee is on leave anyway.

You’re all over the place here. She’s perfectly entitled to do the work during her hols if she wishes. I do work during my hols. We all have different views on it, some are happy to some are not,

They could not meet your earlier deadline. Irrelevant of how reasonable you felt making the deadline earlier it wasn’t acceptable to them. This is their right.

You chose not to work in your hols, again your right, so they found someone else who was able to step in. Their right.

No one has done anything wrong and you’ve no right to be pissed off because your colleague chose to work in her vacation.

Oh and complaining is going to make you look even worse. If I was your manager I’d be cringing inside out listening to you. You cannot dictate everyone works round your schedule. And complain if they don’t.

I can see your frustration but I don't thi k you've been undermined or should you pick it up with your colleague who did the work. Whilst your personal circumstances may look the same, clearly they aren't as she was prepared and able to do some work while she was supposed to be on leave. That's her personal choice and yours. You are not obligated to work on annual leave, and neither is she. I often work whwn on annual leave as I like to feel in control and my employer would never expect me to. If I agree to that's fine, and I take the time back another time, or I don't. It really depends.

So sorry, didn’t rtft fully!

I think it’s only an undermining situation if OPs colleague ‘muscled in’ to do the work. Maybe it was dumped on them and they were given an ‘emotional bullying’ about the importance of it and the consequences of it not being completed and you’re the only one available to do the work to the point the colleague felt unable to refuse.

It sounds like Liaison lady 2 knew you weren't available to meet the new deadline when she took over and acted accordingly to make sure someone else could do the work. I don't see how you can be grumpy about it – she was the new person in charge and she decided to impose a deadline as she saw fit. It's not her fault, or your colleague's, that you weren't available. Deadlines move all the time.

@thebillyotea

Gosh, you sound hard work and childish. Stand your ground and get on with your work. If the environment doesn't work for you, change job.

You will find colleagues who clock watch, colleagues who are happy to do over-time and sacrifice their weekends.

You are being completely ridiculous to want to complain. You should be grateful that someone else did the work so you didn't have to, and if you are so protective of your work, then YOU should have done it.

You can't have it both ways, the world cannot stop because you decided to book annual leave. It should be standard that someone else is available when an employee is on leave anyway.

Pay no attention to this nonsense OP.

I think OP is BU. But that doesn't make her hard work or childish. She had leave booked, she made sure her colleagues knew, she suggested an alternative. There's nothing else she could have or should have done.

Why the name-calling?

The only way she is BU is being bothered that another colleague did the work.

he had leave booked, she made sure her colleagues knew, she suggested an alternative. There's nothing else she could have or should have done.

well, quite, but throwing a tantrum because her leave was taken into account, respected and someone else did the job is not professional.

So pay no attention to the ones who try to comfort you in your unreasonable attitude, back in the real world it's you who will suffer the consequences if you complain or raise the issue. Not the smug random poster on an internet forum who thinks it's funny to wind people up.

The only way she is BU is being bothered that another colleague did the work.

I think the poster means Sheshard work and childish as she wants to complain, drag the woman who did the work in and thinks she looks bad becayse her colleague did the work and she’s pissed off about it,

Sometimes work is unpredictable to be fair, or in this case, a straight cock up of planning.
I agree with this.
I think the thing that jumps out to me isn't that the manager got someone else to complete the task, as that's totally reasonable. It's that the expectation was for employees to drop their annual leave because of poor management/poor workload completion elsewhere.

By the OP's colleague either working in her annual leave or changing it last minute, it starts to reinforce a cultural norm that isn't good. I can't help but wonder if organisational culture is one of the reasons the OP feels undermined.
In a place with a healthy workplace culture and an expectation of reasonable flexibility, it would seem unusual for something like this to have prompted the OP's response.

@EarringsandLipstick

I think a lot of people forget that employers can dictate the dates of all annual leave, and indeed cancel AL that has already been booked.

Not in my workplace (public sector).

(Sometimes I do wish it weren't the case, as a manager!)

With respect, all your post does is confirm the fact the public sector is nothing at all like the real world.

Under the Working Time Regs, AL can be cancelled by the employer, as long as the same amount of notice is given as the length of the AL.

OP can either keep her annual leave and be shown up by another colleague as happened here, or she has the choice to do a bit of work (maybe from home?) while she’s on AL.

She can’t have it both ways. This idea that OP and her colleague should somehow have colluded not to do the work during the Easter break, to prove a point is just laughable.

You sound like a stroppy teen who doesn't quite understand why she's pissed off, but she is, so she'll strop if she wants to!!

What the responses I’m getting appear to show is that people seem to believe that it’s ok to forgo leave, which well being wise is worrying

'Worrying'. Worry about yourself and stop pretending you give a crap about anyone else's wellbeing.

You'd be considered a right Idiot if you make a big fuss about your colleague doing this piece of work. Just do the work you're paid to do and keep your beak out of other people's choices.

I'm sure if you needed a job done, anything from a haircut to a wall built, you'd expect it to be done when you needed it. If your kitchen fitter or child's tutor couldn't do what you wanted I bet you'd find someone who could. That's life. Being an employee doesn't mean you can opt out of that. Your employer didn't force you give up your holiday but they found a way of getting the project in on time.
YABU

You didn't take ownership of the project deadline. That's where you fell down. If you took pride in your work, you would move mountains to ensure an important project deadline was met. Oh yes, you complained and requested that contributions were submitted to you earlier to fit with your AL. That was not granted. You then left it! You should have said, look, I'm not going to meet this deadline, can someone else take it on? But no, you did nothing.

You're overthinking this way too much. The work was done and you can bet nobody else involved is still chewing over it days/weeks later.

Also, nobody will be mega impressed by the other woman giving up her leave (except maybe thebillyotea who, it seems, has issues). Most will think she's a sucker or she has poor boundaries.

Liaison lady 2 then set them a deadline without asking if it fitted into my work schedule.

No one has said that you should have given up your annual leave but some posters have difficulties to understand posts, so come up with nonsense.

I have never given up on my booked leave and don't intend to start anytime soon!

You are unreasonable because you sound miffed that you are not as important as you thought you were, and that if you are not available, someone else can easily take over. Why do you think deadlines have to fit around YOU? It's bonkers.

I'm afraid that, having worked in very deadline driven environments, I'm with Green Willow and others on this.

As for the public sector employee, yikes. I wouldn't be announcing that! Most of us have no such luxuries but it explains why you can't get through to a public service ever

To be a team player, particularly if your job is compiling other work, you need to understand the demands on the other teams' time too. You say that you were just editing. The other teams were probably compiling specialist work which was time consuming. When I worked on Bids, you had to liaise with 5 different departments to compile a bid (oil & gas industry which is heavily regulated and has no room for mistakes). Part of the skill of the job was cajoling other departments into submitting work earlier than they ordinarily would. If that meant bringing it to their manager and saying, look, these are the Bids the engineers are working on, this one needs to be submitted in 5 days, it's worth 52 million, can you ask the team to juggle their work so that this gets to me in 3 days? If they said no, you went to the Head of Engineering and if they said no, then the Head of Bids and the Head of Engineering had a bit of a war until the CEO said look - prioritise this. That's how you get work done and that's how to be a team player. Stressful? Fuck yes. You have to know when to escalate things further up if your pleading wasn't working.

@user1636853246842157

She can’t have it both ways. This idea that OP and her colleague should somehow have colluded not to do the work during the Easter break, to prove a point is just laughable.

OP can either keep her annual leave and be shown up by another colleague as happened here, or she has the choice to do a bit of work (maybe from home?) while she’s on AL.

But as an employer you state you want to have it both ways. So why do you find it objectionable in others?

You want to reserve and exercise the right to cancel/dictate when staff use their annual leave under the law, but you don't want to obey the law that requires staff to have a minimum time per annum on rest without undertaking work - which means that they cannot be working whilst on annual leave, they are either working or using annual leave.

So you're a hypocrite and a law-breaking employer. Nice.

User, you're talking through your arse there.

@GreenWillow I’m relieved I don’t work for you.

I have quite a unique job where work gets thrown at me from all angles. If they stopped my A/L to meet deadlines, I’d never be allowed time off. The problem is there aren’t enough of my job type in this organisation which is an issue that has been raised time and time again (not by me).

I like the fact that the team that missed their deadline by 2 months appear to have no accountability in any of this, however at a drop of a hat I’m supposed to ditch my plans and fit in

The colleague may have cancelled her AL to take at another time or she could have gratefully opted for the opportunity to take on a new project as it was time critical and her work on it would have been appreciated and noted.

Presumably she had indicated she was flexible and could work if needs be. You had not. Their deadline was more important than you doing it.