Please tell me if this would seriously irritate you and if you would take this further.
I have been in my job for around 5 years working for a larger organisation but in a remote office with just myself and my senior colleague. He is divorced with two children, 1 at senior school and 1 finishing primary shortly. His arrangement with his ex wife is that he has them one night in the week and alternate weekends. However, he has never bothered to organise child care for the part of the day between school collection and finishing work, we finish at 5:30. As such, since I have been working with this man, he’s upped and left at 2:30 leaving me to do both our jobs which generally means on his early finish days, I’m stuck in the office until at least an hour past my finish time as there’s too much that has to be done before the day can be considered finished with reporting sales etc.
I’ll add that our more senior bosses etc are not aware at all of the frequency of his school runs as we are generally left to it. He did organise and pay for his younger child to attend after school club when his former wife went back to work full time, but only on her set days with the children and didn’t think to put them in for his days, so he is aware of the availability of childcare. He often claims to be “working from home” etc, but he seldom even reads his emails, is regularly in the car with bad signal or clearly doing other things with the children screaming and shouting in the background and talks to me horribly when I can’t assist him with something as I’m already snowed under due to his lack of attendance. To put into context our jobs are very reliant on real time information, think commodities and finance so being at a computer screen is required for the job. He also cancels meetings or doesn’t attend them etc if they don’t fit in with his pick up times.
Am I allowed to think this is grossly unfair? He’s a man of more than fair means, would be earning well over £150k plus bonuses, two children at private school and a large house, so it isn’t like he can’t afford some child care he just chooses not to and expects his colleagues to pick up the pieces of his choices. His ex wife has now returned to part time work and lives very close to the school so they would be able to walk to her home and wait for him to finish, as they would have parental supervision but this doesn’t happen even though it would cost nothing at all. I feel that if I was in the same position and running off to collect my children, I’d be put on a 32 hour week and paid accordingly like other mothers within the company have been, yet he’s on his full salary but only doing 80% of the working week. I’ll also point out that I earn around 75% less than he does, yet get calls constantly from him when I’m on annual leave or sick but that’s for another thread.
so what do you think? Am I just being bitter and should let it drop? Or would you be bringing this pattern of behaviour to the attention of those higher up?
YABU - this is normal and I should just put up with it
YANBU - this is out of order, report it to your HR department