I got a "verbal warning" at work on Monday. About my attendance record. If you know me personally, you would know that I am not the type of employee to get into any kind of trouble. I've been in this current position for about five months now. Previously, I was with the same company, but a different department.
My company has an attendance policy that goes like this: every time you are out sick, you get an "occurrence". You can be out five days in a row and that is one occurrence. If you're out sick one day, come back to work for one day, start feeling bad again and miss another day, that counts as two occurrences. Make sense?
Once you get 4 occurrences in a 12 month rolling period, you are given a verbal warning. At 5, you get written counseling, 6 a probationary warning, and at 7 you can be terminated.
Since I have started my new job, I've had 4 occurrences. Two of those were related to the surgery I just had. I took a sick day, then used up vacation days, and then another sick day when I couldn't come in to work as soon as I thought I would be able to. Another one of those occurrences was for a day that I had cramps and just couldn't go in to work. I'm not sure what the other was, but it might have been a day I took off to go to a funeral.
My boss has no problem with my absences. However, HER boss is a huge stickler for the rules. When they saw my number of occurrences, they looked at my attendance history at my old job. All combined, in the past 12 months, I've had 10 occurrences. Gulp. I would say half of those were period related. A couple were mental health days, because honestly, I hated my job. My job combined with all of the infertility stuff started my anxiety which is why I see a therapist once a month and why I'm on medication. There were some days that I just could not get myself out of the bed to go to work.
My boss came by my desk and warned me that there was going to be a meeting to discuss my attendance. They wanted to write me up, but she convinced them to only give me a verbal warning. I was pissed when I heard that. Yes, I've missed a lot of days, but all of my work gets done on time. I'm a good employee.
My current boss had no idea about all of our infertility history. She knew I had problems with cramps, hence the surgery a few weeks ago.
So I went into the meeting prepared to tell them everything. When they asked about my recent absences, I explained that I have endometriosis which causes very painful periods. I just had surgery to hopefully correct it and clear up those problems. When they asked about my absences over the past year, I just laid it on the table. My boss had no idea so I felt like I kind of blindsided her, but I just came out with it and said that we had been going through infertility treatments which are very involved. I explained how hard it is to work full-time while going through an IVF cycle. I had a doctor's excuse for everything and it wasn't my intention to appear to be a slacker or a bad employee.
She then asked why I didn't use FMLA for those previous absences. I said that I had thought about it, but we were doing fertility treatments. If they worked, I wanted to save my FMLA for later when I would be off with a baby. (Our company has no maternity policy at all. All we have is FMLA. No paid leave. I would want to be home with a new baby as long as I could). My old boss was fine with this and I never had an issue about absences, so it was kind of a shock to have to go to this meeting.
She recommended that should I continue to have issues with endometriosis in the future, I need to apply for intermittent FMLA so that I won't have "problems" like this in the future. As I said before, I was pretty pissed after this meeting. Mad that I am obviously not abusing the system, but being seen as a bad employee. Mad that I was forced to share my infertility history with them. Not that I really care, but it was nice to work with people who didn't think of me as "that girl who wasted all that money on IVF". I didn't have to worry about what people thought of me. If they secretly pitied me, or thought I was an idiot to spend so much money on something that didn't work.
I went home that night and took a x.ana.x. My anxiety has been so good lately, but this brought it out in full force. I think I went to sleep at 8:00 that night.
Yesterday when I got to work I started drafting an email to my boss. I'm in a dilemma now. If I get sick and can't make it in to work, I will be written up, which will be in my permanent HR file. I will not allow that to happen, which means if I get sick, my ass is at work. Even if I have the flu. And I'll be breathing on my boss's boss to make sure she knows I'm at work and not accruing anymore occurrences. This is what I emailed my boss about. (Who has been great by the way). I didn't put it in those terms, but I did explain that I am now in a dilemma. I asked if it would be possible for me to get remote access so that if something happens, I can work from home. She replied that at this point, I'm not quite up to speed enough to be able to work independently from home (which is true). It will probably take me a year to fully master this job to be able to do all of the work on my own. We are supposed to discuss this next week after the long weekend (yay for bank holidays).
She told me that she wished she had known about this (the IVF) beforehand so that she could have mitigated this problem with her boss. But really, how would I have told her that? It's so random. By the way, I'm barren and can't have children. We've spent $25,000 on IVF in the past two years and have nothing to show for it. Aren't you glad I told you?
So that's where it stands right now. I have a feeling that if for some reason I have to miss work in the future she'll just let me stay home without "officially" being sick. She said in her email back to me that she is all for flexible scheduling in order to get the job done. I don't think that will ever be her official policy though.
It just sucks. I'm a good employee dammit, but I'm being made to feel like I'm not.
The funny thing is, I have learned so much from my old shitty job. I would have dreaded a meeting like this before. I wasn't thrilled about it this time, but I wasn't nervous going into it. I knew I hadn't done anything wrong. Or maybe it's just the meds giving me courage. :)
6 comments:
So very unfair! Just one more thing about infertility that affects so much more than just our ability to have kids. Bah.
Sending lots of healthy vibes your way. <3
So crappy that you can't take the time you need for your health (physical AND emotional). Not that my company has a great absence policy either. :p We get eight sick days a year, three of which can be used as "personal obligation days" for lengthy appointments, waiting for the plumber, etc. If you miss more than three days in a row, you are required to produce a doctor's note. For longer absences due to more serious health issues, there is short and long-term disability with income protection for a certain length of time -- but that involves doctors and monitoring and the whole idea, of course, is to get you back to work as quickly as possible.
It really does depend so much on your boss, doesn't it?
Fuck the man. ARGH.
In all seriousness, though, I'm not sure if you remember this, but I went through something similar when I was going through my IVF cycle. I tried to keep it on the DL, and requested time off based on the approximate dates of my protocol, and just explained that I was undergoing a medical procedure. No further detail. But, as IVF cycles are wont to do, the dates changed because I responded too quickly on stims, and my ER and ET were moved up a day. This meant that I had to "call out" and I had NEVER ONCE missed a day of work, other than for planned vacation. Even though I had clearly done my best to ensure that my workload was covered, that would have been two "occurrences" for me, and that's all I get for the rolling calendar year before I, too, received demerits in my file. SOOO, I pulled the pity card, threw my IF story on the table to my manager, and she was unfeeling and unsympathetic, and I was told I had to pursue FMLA if I wanted those 2 occurrences removed/rectified. And that's what I ended up having to do. Not before she accidentally sent an email to MY ENTIRE DEPARTMENT about IVF/FMLA instead of to HR. No shit. I am not kidding.
So, long story for a quick point: these people are fucking douches, and they have no idea how these kind of "rules" really play out for people who are hardworking and honest...and who need help building their families.
I'm sorry you're having to deal with this. It's unfair, and I feel like it's almost sort of re-traumatizing, you know?
I'm so sorry that this is more added stress to your already stressful situation. They just don't understand. Hopefully now that they know the situation, maybe they will be more understanding? I sure hope so!
I'm so sorry this happened. It makes me hate infertility more than I already do! I'm appalled at the lack of empathy.
I was in your boss's position a few years ago. I hadn't started TTC and knew absolutely nothing about IF. I had an employee who was struggling through it and it was a physical and emotional roller coaster for her. We made arrangements so that her attendance records weren't affected.
Now that I unfortunately know all about IF, I understand what she was going through.
I understand that rules are rules, but sometimes we have to make concessions and I'm disgusted that the big boss couldn't do that.
It doesn't seem right to me that you should be forced to tell your work about the details of your medical records. I thought that there were laws to protect health privacy. I understand that people want to know details, but seriously there are certain things that are none of their damn business. Make sure that you read up about FMLA - i haven't done the research myself, but it was explained to me that your health benefits are protected only for 12 weeks, and that every time you use it, if only for a day, you use up that entire week of health benefit protection.
I am so sorry that you have to deal with such an unsupportive work place. :(
Post a Comment