22:30 work call - completely unacceptable?

[shortbreadconsumer]

I received a work call from someone in my organisation at 22:30 last night. I answered, thinking it was an emergency. The colleague was completely hysterical and impossible to understand. In the end I had no choice but to end the call with 'we can discuss this in the morning.'

This morning I spoke to the persons line manager about it, who said that it was 'unfortunate, but not unreasonable' for this individual to have called me as I had not answered any emails from said colleague over the weekend. They had sent me over 50 emails this weekend. I did not see the emails as seniors within the organisation take an 'if it's urgent, they have my number' approach.

I am more senior than both of of these colleagues and I was 'on call' all weekend as the most senior point of contact in the organisation. However, this was not an issue that required weekend working and, more importantly, it was not an issue that I needed to be consulted on. It was very simple and should have easily been resolved in working hours by this individual alone - her direct line manager would not have needed to input either.

AIBU to think that this was unprofessional and unacceptable from both of them?After no sleep, I've reached that 'was it really that bad' point where I am so sleep deprived that I am not sure whether I am overreacting in my annoyance or not!

You didn't see at any point over the weekend that you had 50 emails blowing up your inbox?

Goodness me, The civil service spunds mighty rigid. I work in the private sector and we don’t have an always on culture but I would notice if one of my team sent me an email over the weekend worried about something and I would respond. Because I care about my team and wouldn’t want one of them worrying about something all weekend.

Then junior staff members need to be supported more with either someone on site or chamging the parameters for what on call means in the particular organisation. Being more approachable during business hours would have easily cleared this up without the OP being disturbed at 10.30.

You do come across as quite unsympathetic to someone who seemed to be suffering with extreme stress or mental health challenges perhaps. A 22.30 non emergency call isn’t ideal of course and the fall out from having to find support for them and contact HR etc, but I assume it’s very much a one off unfortunately circumstance so not entirely sure it warrants a thread, maybe more so a rant to a friend to get it off your chest. Hopefully work are addressing the issues. As a senior manager I’ve had to deal with non work related quite left field challenges at times and I’d generally accept it’s part of the pay grade as a one off.

That's NHS consultant following their on call process.

When I was on call, my responses were "call the police", "call the mental health crisis team", "call and ambulance" or "yep, document what you've done, we can pick it up on Monday".

Please read the Ops updates - she was not on call in the traditional sense and the person wasn't in her team! Read what she has actually posted and you may understand the situation better!

YABVU - feels very passive aggressive not to respond to the emails and to hang up on the colleague who you knew was in a state. Really unfair not to put yourself in your colleague's shoes and appreciate he/she may have thought it was an emergency. I've worked with managers who seemed to relish making more junior staff get stressed. One job in particular nearly the whole of the junior team ended up with bite guards as they all started grinding their teeth due to stress all because of two particularly cruel senior management team members.

You were on call and failed to check your email ?

It also doesn’t help that what the OP’s organisation refers to as “on call” would be “escalation” in most organisations.

But yes, there is a level of seniority where checking messages/mails over the weekend is normally taken for granted.

I'm baffled why people are saying you've been unreasonable!
Having spent many years in a similar situation (on call for technical issues), it's really important that people follow the specified process - this junior colleague didn't do that.
It doesn't matter whether they were panicking or not, THEY DID THE WRONG THING.
If they had followed the specified escalation route, they would have been told the same thing (leave it until the next day) much, much sooner and saved themselves a lot of hassle.
I'm Team OP on this one.

I appreciate that and I have read all her updates. But irrespective of policies and procedures, I would still do what I said above.

Ignoring 50 emails and then hanging up the phone on a distressed colleague seems like horrible behaviour to me

Cancel the cheque!

Having actually read your posts, YANBU at all OP. The colleague didn't follow any contact procedures and overstepped many boundaries to spam you 50x over the weekend, then directly call you at 10.30pm on a bank holiday night over something so minor.

It definitely sounds like she's having a mental health crisis. That is not normal behaviour.

But according to mumsnet everyone with a mental illness should just get a job and get of benefits. You can't have it both ways so get use to it. This is exactly one of my symptoms of my bpd when people ignore me and im panicking

Ops on call process means she doesn't check emails but is on the phone for an emergency once it has been triaged through another member of staff
You came on the thread and failed to check the updates?

Why did you not put this information to begin with??

I was about to say that if someone had emailed you 50 times over the weekend and you hadn't replied to say "it's not urgent, will deal with it when we return", then YABU as this person clearly was bothered by whatever it was.

But you have now just changed the story to say a JUNIOR person should have been checking, this hysterical person emailed the wrong person, and therefore they ended up calling as they hadn't had a reply because they emailed the wrong person. In which case, this hysterical person made a mistake by emailing the wrong person, so thought they were doing the right thing. You were also right to tell them it can wait until the next day.

There seems to be a weird shift to "the employer must be at fault somewhere" even when its clear (on face value at least) they really arent.

Sometimes, employees really are just crap. Someone shouldn't need support or further guidance on how to understand a fairly simple procedure.

I see it on a lot of self indulgent LI posts. A line manager saying something like "my employee threw a glass at a wall in a meeting and then kicked the office gerbil in anger today, instead of giving them the bare bollocked dressing down they deserved i sat with them and took the time to reflect on what I did to make them do this" everyone crawls up the posters arse to commend them, MIND add a post on saying what a wonderful support they are, meanwhile every normal person is reading it like "WTF dude" 🙄

Were you on call at the time when the colleague called

Love how you have waited till page nine of this thread before bustling in to give your future prediction of how it might go, and then started angrily policing it for OP.

Yes you were according to your own post, you should have taken the call, unless of course they were asking how to tie their own shoes figuratively

It was quite a long thread by the time I started reading it.
I'm just sick of peole who don't bother reading - it's frustrating, and ruins a lot of threads.
But I guess we all love doing a bit of policing, and the idiots who don't read (and they're still at it), need someone to bat for them.

What is unreasonable is not being able to read the OP’s update with all the correct information you would need to form an option

I've worked in a similar set up OP and agree this is very strange behaviour. So strange that I'd probably be worried about the colleague rather than annoyed, and I really don't think it will help to go on the warpath. Perhaps she isn't well or something else is going on. Her line manager sounds a bit useless (!).

I get it. The person who called and emailed you should not have done so. You are not open to everyone who wants to call you while you are on call, you are one up the chain of command from the first contact.
So did the incoherent caller call the person they should have called?
If they were not contactable (the first on call contact) they why were they not contactable if they were being paid to be contactable?
It does sound to me as though incoherent person should not have massively emailed you unless A) she had a good reason for thinking that her need was urgent and B) the person she should have contacted was not contactable and in that case she should have phoned you at that point and not bombarded you with emails. Is there any mitigation for Incoherent Person? Are they new? new into the promotion level?

IMO (and I have been in an oncall structure as was my late husband) her line manager was wrong. Incoherent Person needs to be trained/retrained in on call procedures, as does their line manager. If this is a one off, I wouldn't go beyond retraining but I would wonder if somebody who messes up so badly and ends up incoherent is in the right job?

This is the best post on the thread.

I don't think anyone's disputing that the staff member was not acting in accordance with the on-call policy.

The next question is how the OP reacts to that as a senior person in her company. Just being fucked off is a pretty terrible response.

You were “on call”, but you ignored 50 emails from the same person in one weekend because you only take actual calls, not emails

then the person called you having presumably realised you weren’t reading emails

and now you’re angry because the person called you

yabvu