Hi everyone,

As of today I’m on 2 weeks annual leave however I’ve just logged onto my work laptop to submit a leave request for a medical appointment that came through today and I’ve been copied into an email (along with around 7 other people) about a word document that’s not been kept up to date. It is usually my responsibility however I was under the impression someone else from a different team was covering this whilst they were on restricted duties due to injury but they thought they were only covering for a month so low and behold no one has done anything with it for around a month and a half. The tone of the email is pretty much that I’ve deliberately not done part of my job for an extended period of time which 100% isn’t the case.

I should add that the document not being up to date obviously isn’t ideal and I will be apologising about this but isn’t detrimental to the running of the company and it could be brought up to date quite easily in a few hours so other than someone having to spend a little time on it, there’s no major crisis that have occurred because of it thankfully (it’s basically a record of meeting dates/durations that have taken place- all information can be found elsewhere but on different systems so they like to have a log of it all in one place)

There’s been meetings put in with managers about it according to said email thread so I’m already anticipating getting pulled about this when I return. My problem is I always struggle to get my point across coherently as I get anxious and end up crying when getting told off which is absolutely ridiculous for a grown woman but I feel sick now and my annual leave is pretty much ruined because I’m going to stress about it so much. I suffer from anxiety and depression anyway which doesn’t help and hate the thought of my colleagues having to do extra stuff due to my mistake (and that they think I’m lazy or deliberately skiving off jobs or whatever!) If anyone has got any tips for dealing with getting told off at work I’m all ears 😥