Originally Posted by
Narrow Seat
He was on vacation in New York City. The boss was already angry about him flying back home just a day before a set of very important meetings.
He got a flight to Los Angeles today and is currently driving home there later today but he is likely fired. (His boss thought he did not try hard enough to make it back to California and thought all the news stories were media hype.
Ouch. Definitely feel sorry for him and the situation. Regardless of what his boss thought about 'media hype', sounds like your friend was already 'on notice' that his boss was not happy with his definitely risky plans that had no margin for error, and thus had an expectation of some consequences if he didn't make it back (I can't speak to the proportionality of the consequence not knowing the specifics).
Originally Posted by
EXP100
In general would still consider the boss something that starts with the letter "d." My caveat would be the overall performance of this guy and whether this had happened before. Yes, if there was an important meeting he should have made arrangements to be home a day before but not a "firable offense" in my opinion. Not to mention there are these online tools called Teams, Zoom, and Webex.
Yeah, probably not the kind of boss I'd like to have, but hard to know if termination is reasonable or over-reaction, we don't know the gravity of failure to attend the 'very important' meetings. Multi-million-dollar deal lost? Merger fell through? Company's existence on the line? Criminal charges? Who knows. And perhaps the nature of the business and/or meeting requires an in-person aspect that simply cannot be done via remote tools. Again we just don't know.