Wondering if colleague did this on purpose

[WilloWhisperer]

Today I had an important meeting arranged which I have been organising since July. In the end I rearranged my schedule to work today (I work for this company and have my own small business where I usually see clients on a Friday so had a lot of logistics to arrange).

The meeting was at 12 and so our senior consultant wanted me to go through some things in the morning. I told our whole team where I would be, asking them to get me when the people I was expecting had arrived.

The layout is a line of offices which are tucked away. The senior consultant and I had the door shut as we were discussing confidential information, furthest away from the entrance. There is a junior colleague who always huffs that she has to show people where these particular rooms are (she is sort of part of our team but in a different capacity)

I came out of the office at 12.10 to see if the people I had a meeting with were here yet. No one had got me so I thought they might be late. After a bit of investigating, she said “I looked around and couldn’t find you, so they left”. She said she asked around. But none of my team saw her come up the corridor. All she had to do was ask my whereabouts and any of them would have known where I was/ to come and get me. They were all working with their doors open.

She has form for doing things “to prove a point” so I’m wondering if she has done this on purpose? I don’t know when I/they am going to be able to rearrange and we will probably lose work because of this.

I think you are trying to pass off your mistake on to someone else.
You should have stood up at 11.50 and said I'm sorry we will have to continue this another time .
And got to the room for the meeting . In a busy hectic office situation you cannot just hope someone passes on a message or finds you.

No she really wasn't.

She spent four months preparing for a meeting. She didn't excuse herself on time from her internal meeting. She didn't delegate the responsibility of greeting the clients to anyone in particular. She is now attempting to blame this fiasco on a junior who works part-time in the office which is making her look even worse.

Not clients. Internal people from a different department in the same building. They just went back to their own floor (one I guess OP couldn’t figure out how to follow them to for some inexplicable reason?)

I'm sure she did follow them to their own office.

Actually from reading the OP's posts........ I wouldn't be surprised if she didn't do that either!

The inexplicable reason being that they work in a different building, which OP has stated more than once.

Omg some one who gets it!

We're not going to agree on this one, but OP's behaviour would have been entirely normal in the offices I've worked at, and presumably in keeping with the customs of her own.

I am so surprised by the number of people who think you are at fault, OP. It is not at all normal to be waiting in reception for people to arrive. It is not at all overstepping to hope that a junior member of staff will make more than a cursory effort to find you.

This whole “it’s not in her job description thing” is bonkers. I am pretty senior. But if someone comes in to see someone else and I happen to be in reception, I absolutely do take them to the meeting. I also do admin tasks when they need to be done, including for more junior staff members if it needs to happen. No it’s not in my job description. So what? We’re a team, we all pitch in. I thought that was normal until the responses to this post!

Your processes sound very disorganised. We would be expected to inform reception the previous day, provide the names of the clients together with their organisations, the name and phone number of the person charged with meeting and greeting (who would have agreed to do this) and the name and mobile number of the organiser together with details of the room booked, so if the meet and greet person is unavailable a receptionist can come to the room to check. You would be expected to be in the room ready to start the meeting on time.

Sorry, so you had a meeting booked for (I assume) 12 -1, they turned up, couldn't find you, left after 10 minutes, then ignored your phone calls for 30 minutes even though they were meant to be in a meeting with you? And they didn't try and ring you? What kind of business are you working for???

And yet, if she'd gone out at 12 (or a minute past) instead of 12 minutes past, she would have been fine. You know, since the meeting was scheduled to start at 12 and not quarter past.

A normal person would have wrapped up the first meeting at five to and said, "I'm sorry, I've got that other meeting at 12 but please do email me if there's anything you think we haven't covered and I'll pick it up as soon as I can."

You wouldn't rely on a junior or your team to find you, you can't delegate your own timekeeping and take people away from their jobs to try to. Plus juniors hate interrupting meetings.

They were expecting to meet you.
They'd made all arrangements with you.
The impression they got was that you were AWOL at the meeting time, whether or not you thought you had made it clear what to do to someone else who was not really beholden to you.
Who will they feel was it who stood them up, you, or apparently the nearest thing to a reception colleague, but not actually a receptionist?

So.......you know she's dodgy and isn't a great team player

Yet knowing this and knowing it was Dodgy Worker who would greet the team you'd been organising to meet SINCE JULY......you waited til 12.10 to start the meeting

And then were horrified that they'd buggered off

How odd 🤔

How very odd 🤣

The same for my office...........but its a huge corporate office with procedures and security in place.

The OP must work for a pretty small outfit and I'm interested to know if random people can just walk in? Who buzzes them in? Presumably security? Or some kind of caretaker? Does security just phone upstairs to whatever extension number they say they are meeting and the visitors have to wait in the lobby until someone comes down to them?

I can’t help noticing you’ve skipped answering whether you bothered to tell this person - arguably the person who needed to know - that you were in the office today, expecting guests, and where to take them when they arrived.

…for this very important meeting that you didn’t appear for until 10 minutes after the scheduled time.

You didn’t need to sit in your office staring into space for 15 minutes or wait by the elevator. Excusing yourself from your prior meeting at 5 ‘till to “go make sure the conference room was ready and you have your materials” and going up front at noon or a minute after check if your guests have arrived is the right choice for an important meeting, however. Part of being senior is helping set tone for he department, so you do need to be proactive, show respect for your colleagues’ time (including the junior ones), and take responsibility for what you should have done better before blaming others.

And even more inappropriate and downright weird to not go looking for them when it’s 12:05.

Why on earth didn't you tell the person whose job it is to 'receive' people that you were expecting guests? Everywhere I've ever worked that's been standard practice - you tell reception who you're expecting and let them know who to contact when they arrive.

This ^

(Although I'm not sure the meeting attendees were in the same building)

And this ^

(We can conclude that the OP never told her because the OP has previously said that this person knows that the OP doesn't work on Fridays so she might have thought it was a mistake thet these people thought they had a meeting with the OP)

Sounds to me like you are determined to blame her for your own failing. Even Senior Partners/CEOs are human beings who can understand you have to leave or take 2 mins to make alternative arrangements.

@AGameOfPatience :

"a) You don't usually work Fridays and I think I'm right in saying that you didn't tell this person - the one you would ordinarily expect to shepherd guests - that, unusually you were in fact in, and where. You only told your team. If so, that is not great planning on your part and this woman is not a mind-reader.

b) You did not alert this person to the fact you were waiting for important clients/colleagues full stop, yet expected her to be available to facilitate their arrival, fetch you, and understand the ramifications of failing to do so. That is also poor planning given that you knew how crucial this meeting was.

c) You failed to extract yourself from your prior meeting on time on the presumption that someone else would keep your appointment and schedule for you. You've unfairly and unwisely decided to rely on nebulous "others" to ensure you link up.

d) You also seem to lack polite assertiveness with your senior consultant from whom you should be able to excuse yourself for your next meeting."

And this ^

And this ^

And again...

This is crazy. You needed to inform the member of staff who does the fetching that you are expecting someone. Even more so as it’s not usually your working day!
(You also come across as thinking yourself very superior to this person. You should treat everyone with respect regardless of their role. You are clearly in the ‘she JUST does admin brigade when actually you know little about her wider role in the company)

Isn't it called projecting?