update: boss wants us to do early-morning and evening meetings so he can attend from his vacation

by Alison Green on October 10, 2024

Remember the letter-writer whose boss wanted them to do early-morning and evening meetings so he could attend from his vacation? Here’s the update.

My question was posted a couple months after I wrote in, toward the end of my boss’s “vacation,” but I ended up doing some of what was recommended. The particular issue I wrote about, the outside of work hours meetings, ended up not being a big issue but my boss’s vacation led to all sorts of other ridiculousness.

My boss left for his vacation without a specific plan in place for our meetings and we only ended up having meetings twice, once each during the first two weeks. After his first request for a call, I brought up to the rest of the group that this would be challenging for me, and another colleague with kids said he also had a hard stop at 5 pm. We reported back that we couldn’t do after 5, but could do a 4 or 4:30 pm meeting, which my boss agreed to. I think early on in the trip he was jet lagged but as he adjusted he wasn’t as keen on getting up so early in the morning. He never ended up suggesting a 7 am meeting time, so I guess he wasn’t keen on staying up late either.

The last I heard about having any meetings was when he emailed me asking, “Do we have a video call planned this week?” I understood this as a request to set up a meeting. However, since he wasn’t direct about it, I just replied “No, I haven’t heard any plans for this week.” I heard nothing back.

Some of the commenters picked up on the part of the letter where I said I would feel bad about not attending meetings, not that I was worried about other consequences. My role was pretty critical to the group and my boss is non-confrontational so I wasn’t at all worried about being fired. I could have just said no to the meetings and I might have gotten a mildly worded email suggesting I try to join. I know I shouldn’t have felt bad but I would have, and it would’ve added an extra layer of stress that didn’t need to be there.

What became the real problem is the barrage of emails he’d send us each day, often treating everything as urgent whether or not it really was. This included responses on issues he didn’t have the context on because he wasn’t at our meetings (and that we were able to handle without him just fine) and sending the same request separately to multiple people if they didn’t get back fast enough, which once led to three people repeating the same task. What he lacked in management skills was just made worse when he was managing from his vacation.

There were multiple deadlines during his vacation that he didn’t adequately plan for or keep us informed about, which resulted in a lot of last-minute urgent requests to get things done. I knew of one deadline that would come up while he was gone, so before he left I emailed asking if he needed me to do anything to take care of it. I got no response, so I assumed it was handled. Then, the day of the deadline, the person outside our group who was submitting the project contacted me requesting documents, saying that she’d contacted my boss and hadn’t heard back. Since they were due that day and my boss was asleep on the other side of the planet, I had to scramble to get them done as best I could without all of the context. After all that, he finally replied with “no thank you” but a complaint about how I’d worded something. I replied asking how we should be handling things like this while he’s on vacation so this doesn’t happen again, and he just said we all need to make sure nothing falls through the cracks, just like when he’s not on vacation. Unhelpful.

It might make more sense to learn that we are academia-adjacent, doing research but also selling the product. My boss runs the group like an absent-minded professor, only caring about the research he finds interesting and dropping the ball on all of the other work and management the position requires.

It turned out part of the reason for his trip, and the reason he was so inconveniently located for meeting times, was that he was teaching a class overseas on the topic of our research. One of the most problematic things that came up was that he sent a coworker URGENT requests for material that ended up just being for the class he was teaching. My coworker obliged but I was once again upset on principle because this was not part of our jobs at all. Sure enough, instead of being well rested when he returned, he seemed overworked from teaching a class on top of keeping up with his normal work. He confirmed that he worked every day of his leave.

The commenters had some wild speculations about why my boss was taking vacation at all if he was just going to be working. I eventually learned that he was trying to do a financial trick to save the group a bit of money. Apparently the money to cover his salary on vacation days came from a different pot than his regular salary, because the vacation money had already been paid for, in a sense? He hates the part of his job where he has to actually fund the group, so he was eager to save some cash, or I suppose not incur extra costs by letting paid vacation go to waste.

I only learned about this because he tried to pull it again later. About a month after returning, he had a planned surgery and was encouraged to go on FMLA until he was able to work again. Well, he wouldn’t let a surgery get in the way of being able to work all the time so he was back at our virtual meeting the very next day and even went to work for our in person days the following week when he had told us he wouldn’t be able to drive for several weeks. A week after the surgery, he sent us an email saying he was going on FMLA for his surgery so he wouldn’t be allowed to go into the office but we could still keep meeting if we kept it on the down-low. This was even more concerning to me than his vacation because there are legal rules around FMLA and I wondered if I was even allowed to communicate with him during his leave.

Our HR was competent enough to put an end to this by noticing that he was still working (I’m guessing by watching his email or computer activity) and saying he needed to stop or go off of FMLA. Unfortunately they communicated this poorly, by telling our group admin that she had to pass along the message. I heard from her that HR told her to threaten to fire him if he didn’t stop working and said if they had to, they would threaten to fire our team if we communicated with him during his leave (or, they would tell our admin to threaten to fire us). This is when I learned that his reason for trying to take all this leave is to save money, as the FMLA pay would also have come from a different bucket than our group’s direct funds. My boss was incensed, especially because it was going to take a few days for him to get a doctor’s approval to go off FMLA and he couldn’t be bothered to take even a few days off. He never stopped working, but I assume he ended the FMLA because I didn’t hear any more about it. If his plan had gone through, he would have been on some form of leave for five months out of a seven-month period, all the while working every single day anyway. Bizarre.

For this and a host of other issues, I started looking for a new job around the time I wrote to AAM. It took over half a year and some disappointments along the way, but I ended up getting a new position that is a better fit for my experience and a 15% raise! On top of that, the new company ran the interview process really well by AAM standards with lots of timely communication and transparency, so I have a good feeling about how things will be run at the new job.

I’d previously been surprised reading through AAM updates at how many people say they left the job they had written in about, but now I see that when you’re writing about one specific weird situation, there are probably a bunch of other issues going on that we don’t hear about.

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    1. goddessoftransitory*

      Just reading that exhausted me! It sounded like a juggling contest being held during an earthquake.

  3. Timothy*

    > I’d previously been surprised reading through AAM updates at how many people say they left the job they had written in about, but now I see that when you’re writing about one specific weird situation, there are probably a bunch of other issues going on that we don’t hear about.

    Exactly.

  4. JustKnope*

    Sending the admin to explain that the boss was violating FMLA laws was a BONKERS bad choice by HR!

    1. Lady Lessa*

      I agree, but think that “Bonkers” is a bit mild for HR’s actions.

      I’d want to consign them to Denebian slime pits.

    2. Pastor Petty Labelle*

      Then threatening to fire the TEAM for communicating with him. How about threatening to fire the boss for misusing FMLA?

      So glad you got out of there OP. Boss wasn’t the only banana crackers in the buffet of that job.

      1. Dawn*

        I think the most egregious part of that is actually that they did threaten to fire the boss – but informed the admin that she would be the one carrying that message to him.

        “HR told her (the admin) to threaten to fire him if he didn’t stop working.”

        Um, excuse me, that’s your job!

      2. Snow Globe*

        I read that as HR merely asked the Admin to tell the boss he needed to stop working or get off FMLA, but the Admin exaggerated and said they threatened to fire the boss.

        1. Hamster dance*

          Yeah but it was still still HR’s job to tell the boss that. The admin shouldn’t have been the one passing alone any messages.

  5. Observer*

    LW now I see that when you’re writing about one specific weird situation, there are probably a bunch of other issues going on that we don’t hear about.

    This is sooooo true. Most often when something this ridiculous is going on, it’s the tip of an iceberg of dysfunction.

    1. Paint N Drip*

      Personal opinion: if you’re at the point of writing into an advice columnist about your job, you’re a half-step away from job searching, which is just a half-step away from leaving your job

      1. Slow Gin Lizz*

        When I wrote in, I was already job searching and of course I am now not at the job I wrote in about.

    2. smirkette*

      +1

      Back when I was still employed, I told my therapist that my boss didn’t quite meet all the criteria for being verbally abusive. She said, “‘Not quite’ and having to double-check in the first place is not a good sign.” And now after six months of trauma therapy, I’m finally getting myself back together. (EMDR has been very helpful for me in case anyone’s looking for a new modality.)

      This former boss? An academic who had never worked outside of academia. My previous job was also in academia, and never, ever again. Some academics are lovely people of course, but there are so very many petty tyrants out there. An old mentor (also an academic, but had transitioned out) once told me that “the battles are so fierce because the stakes are so low,” and that has saved my composure on too many occasions.

  6. DrSalty*

    Ah “academia adjacent,” all the nonsense makes perfect sense now. Some PIs are truly terrible. Anyway, glad you got a better job!!!

    3. Feral Humanist*

      I know so many delightful faculty members, but (in my experience) somewhere between a third and a quarter of them are completely off their rockers and could never function outside academia, where bad behavior gets a pass as long as someone continues to publish (and often even if they don’t, because tenure). Sadly, the delightful ones are sometimes driven out altogether by the others.

      1. Union Rep*

        That fraction can’t actually function within academia either, they just rely on their colleagues to accommodate them. I don’t think the proportion’s that different than other industries but the weirdness is…weirder…with faculty. Luckily I represent them but don’t report to them!

        1. smirkette*

          And to the support staff all while treating us like servants. People who can’t (or won’t) figure out how to make a PDF, set up a meeting in Outlook, add a link to an email—even when you send them illustrated step-by-step instructions, a brief how-to video, and walk them through it.

          2. JustaTech*

            How many tenured professors does it take to submit an expense report?
            The world will never know!

            (Because they just harass someone who reports to them into doing it, even if expense reports are 100% not their job.)

      2. Star Trek Nutcase*

        IME at a large research university, if the faculty brings enough prestige and research dollars, he is given free range to do whatever including breaking even big regs. And if a faculty member also has partial ownership of a product (not unusual), his behavior is even worse for staff and graduate students due to time demands and divided priorities.

        I know many think academia is unique, but having also spent many years in the private and government sectors, it’s not so unique. Any time grand bosses decide to ignore egregious behavior because their priority isn’t what’s best long term and have blinders on, there’s a potential shitstorm coming – maybe next year or 5 years, but it comes.

      3. Selina Luna*

        I think academia has a significant “star player” problem. The people who have an idea that is “so brilliant” or “revolutionary” or whatever that they get away with other significant issues, from insubordination toward deans and admin to not actually doing their jobs after a decade or so, to being complete tyrants. In some awful circumstances, they even get away with being predators because they’re just too important to someone.

    4. DinoGirl*

      Totally agree. That he was using the team for research for another job?? I thought the ending would be helpful was let go …he should have been, HR was asleep at the wheel here.

  7. Goldenrod*

    So glad to hear to you got something better – congrats, LW!

    Just wanted to comment on a few details, namely this:
    “…sending the same request separately to multiple people if they didn’t get back fast enough, which once led to three people repeating the same task.”

    I’ve been on the receiving end of this before and it is CRAY-ZEE MAKING.

    Also, this:
    “It might make more sense to learn that we are academia-adjacent…My boss runs the group like an absent-minded professor, only caring about the research he finds interesting and dropping the ball on all of the other work and management the position requires.”

    YES, this is classic behavior of “managers” in academia. I’ve worked in academic offices and seen this many times – academics who take on additional management roles but have little to no interest in actually managing or doing anything administrative. They want the extra pay/status but don’t seem to understand that they are supposed to EARN this…

    Anyway, congrats again, LW!

    1. Venus*

      I worked in a similar place where we got good at sharing our requests and deciding amongst ourselves who should do the work because clearly the manager wasn’t able to do any coordination. Thankfully that was a short-term project.

    2. Paint N Drip*

      Re the multiple requests for one thing – crazymaking indeed!!
      I brought up this issue about a year ago with my current boss and coworkers in a roundtable meeting, since boss will send everyone a separate email at varying times with varying directives or none at all. Multiple times per week I felt that I was doing a task/project that someone else had already started, or completed, or that the scope had been redefined, etc. – as the sole FT worker, the bulk of this stuff was falling to me. I was told that we should all (read: Me. I should.) accommodate that this was boss’ preferred management/communication…

  8. Zombeyonce*

    I feel bad for people like this boss who appear to have no life outside of their work, but only until they foist the problems this creates onto others.

    1. carrot cake*

      “The commenters had some wild speculations about why my boss was taking vacation at all if he was just going to be working. I eventually learned that he was trying to do a financial trick to save the group a bit of money.”

      —

      I don’t see where anyone trying to game payroll buckets deserves an ounce of sympathy.

      1. Nicosloanica*

        I think if this guy is like, the head researcher of a lab, he’s theoretically “saving” money for the rest of the lab, which may be well-intentioned but is not working well at all.

      2. hello*

        Did you miss the part where Zombeyonce said “until they foist the problems this creates onto others”?

        1. carrot cake*

          Nope, sure didn’t. But that wasn’t the part of the message I was responding to; seems you missed that.

          1. Zombeyonce*

            I didn’t say anything about people who try to game the system, only people who have no life outside of work…

  9. Jester*

    I really love my job, but I have never in my life felt the urge to join a work meeting I wasn’t allowed to join for medical reasons. Get a hobby, my guy.

    1. MigraineMonth*

      I went to the first meeting I *was* allowed to join after a surgery, waved at everyone, and then slept the rest of the day. I definitely should have been listening to what my body said the return-to-work timeline should be, not the FMLA paperwork.

    2. Dancing Otter*

      The times I’ve had surgery, I was on strong painkillers the day after. No f’ing way was I fit to participate in work meetings, virtual or not. A “little golden book” was about my mental level.
      What kind of decisions or rational discussion can one make in that state?

    3. Selina Luna*

      I have. I’m a teacher and was on maternity leave during the first 5 weeks of the school year, including the teacher workdays. I hate those meetings, but they also ONLY give important information at those meetings, and they don’t always send an email with the information later.

  10. Nicosloanica*

    My boss constantly works from vacation and it drives me nuts, because she lists me on her out-of-office, meaning when people email her and see she’s out, they follow up with me about the thing they need, which is occasionally urgent – minorly stressful, but whatever, that’s why it’s a job. However, I also know she nearly always monitors her email, meaning there’s a good chance she’s going to respond with either the thing they want, or more context that would be helpful like what files we already have. If I start the task, I’m usually interrupted or reversed after I finish because she weighs in, often without the additional context. It’s actually more work or at least more stress/worse for my morale that way than if she just stopped checking emails. And every time it happens she comes away more convinced that she’s too essential to ever stop doing it.

    2. Jinni*

      I know the French law about emailing on the weekend isn’t perfect, but our (US) culture of work all the time needs something to turn the tide on this.

  11. Not That Kind of Doctor*

    Oh, this revived a dormant memory of a PI who took a 50% sabbatical to save the lab money, because sabbatical salaries came out of the department budget.

    (Did they work on their sabbatical project after the first 2 weeks spent realizing they’d lost all their pipetting mojo? Of course not!)

    1. Strive to Excel*

      Boss seems to have been specifically trying to save money for his group. Presumably FMLA & vacation were paid from different budgets? Rather than from the grant funding this group. I find it weird that vacation would be in a different pool.

      But this only makes sense if boss is not on a traditional salary. I have no knowledge of academia or academia-adjacent paystyles, so no clue how that works.

      1. Paint N Drip*

        I’d guess that vacation fund was paid with grant money, but in the past – so taking the vaca time now doesn’t “cost money” the way salary does. Payroll and benefits accounting usually means that if Dr. Harebrain earns 4 hours of vacation time per pay period, THAT pay period pulls $X salary that goes to employee, $Y FICA/etc that goes to the gov, and $Z vacation to the employee bank.

      2. Governmint Condition*

        It may kinda-sorta work in a similar fashion to how government money works. My agency gets most of its money through federal reimbursements. These reimbursements are for specific projects, and only for hours worked on that project. Any other time spent, such as vacation, sick leave, training courses, etc. comes from our very limited state money. So we are encouraged to charge as much time as possible to federal projects.

    2. Insert Pun Here*

      Academics in certain disciplines are expected to get grants to cover their own salaries and the salaries of their employees, basically. The grant is for a fixed amount of money. But it sounds like in this case, the institution, not the grant, pays salaries for folks on certain kinds of leave. So money that was originally budgeted for salaries can instead be repurposed for additional equipment, staff, etc.

    3. Orv*

      I think the context is this is a faculty member at a university. Faculty pay comes from different sources depending on what they’re doing, especially if they have research grants.

    4. Dawn*

      Academia and research. It sounds like the “boss” – and I use that term very loosely here – had to raise the funds to pay his team’s salaries (almost certainly through grants,) including his own. But when he took vacation it came out of a pool of, say, institutional vacation time funds. FMLA likewise wasn’t coming from the research budget he had to fundraise, because that budget is earmarked for the research work his department is doing. The thing about grant money is that it usually comes with very specific conditions on how it is to be used.

      But yes it’s all very confusing, academia and research are wild.

    5. shrambo*

      Boss’s salary and work-related activities were funded by a specific pot of money. Boss didn’t like doing the work required to obtain funding (possibly it involved something like applying for grants), so he came up with a way to get his paycheck from alternative sources like PTO and FMLA, allowing the official research money to stretch further.

    6. Hush42*

      My guess is because unused PTO, from an accounting standpoint, is considered a liability and is typically accrued on the books throughout the year. Essentially the cost of his already accrued PTO has already been covered in his budget for the year, especially if he’s been rolling it over, but his salary is an ongoing expense. They would still be paying him his salary but they would also be reducing the liability from his PTO at the same time, technically having a $0 “effect” on those books and potentially his budget.

      Also need to note that it’s been many years since I took accounting classes and I am only accounting adjacent in my position so I might not have this quite right.

    7. Can’t think of anything clever*

      My sister works ft in a retail setting. Corporate will tell them they have x hours for pt people. During school breaks the ft people take lots of time off because pt hours to cover for a ft come out of a different pot. So the hs and college students who want more hours can get them. Weird but as I read this I figured it was their industry’s variation.

    8. Mgguy*

      Others have said similar, but this is just my best guess-

      Often times in academia, the school/university may pay a relative pittance as your base salary+benefits, and you can(depending on the school “can” may mean “expected to”) apply for and be awarded grants that cover salary. You can pay your own salary and pay the salaries of others working for you on grant funding, and depending on exactly how it’s structured you may be able to allocate your salary some months as 100% grant funded.

      It sounds like any PTO the PI has in this case may be paid out the university’s general fund or some other pot, so if they take PTO while they are supposedly grant funded, that’s money that is not grant funded so is money that wouldn’t be paid out of the grant.

      Any time I’ve applied for or worked with grant, the proposal always includes a detailed budget and salaries are one of those things. I’d think accounting would get twisted up in knots if you took money meant for salaries and bought supplies/equipment or something else with it, but it could be that the PI doing this gives them money to cover a PT employee(or maybe additional grad student or undergrad researcher) or maybe covers OT for hourly staff that wasn’t already budgeted. Unfortunately too, a lot of PIs can work their employees to death, and I’ve personally witnessed(but not experienced, thankfully) pressure to “fudge” time cards to at least minimize if not eliminate OT. I remember PIs too at the R1 where I worked for several years going round and round with HR adamantly refusing to classify techs as exempt(which is the proper call under FLSA-I think the most recent guidelines even specifically say that lab techs are never exempt) for this.

      Academic financials can get complicated, and I’m glad I’m out of the R1 grind(and never was a PI) and don’t have to deal with them in a big way anymore. I’m working on a grant application now, but my budget for my own salary in it(if it’s awarded…) basically is to pay myself some extra over the summer to work part-time on the project, as well as pay an undergrad to work with me. For a big research group with multiple grants and multiple grant-funded employees, that gets a lot more complicated.

  13. Strive to Excel*

    Is this boss a relative of the OP who wrote in upset that they were hauling heavy equipment and turning down pizza when the company asked them to keep costs down?

  14. Falling Diphthong*

    When you’re writing about one specific weird situation, there are probably a bunch of other issues going on that we don’t hear about.
    If only Bob would stop tap dancing on my desk while yodeling and flinging powdered creamer, things would be fine…. Okay, Bob went on leave after falling mid yodel, and apparently he was distracting me from a whole bunch of other problems.

    That third from last paragraph is wild.

  15. Dawn*

    I think in at least a plurality of situations, if not a majority, if you’re concerned enough about a work situation to write to an internet advice column, the best answer is probably that it’s time to move on.

    I’m glad that you’re somewhere far less bananapants now.

  16. Blueberry Grumpmuffin*

    Jeez louise, reading this was an absolute headache; I can’t imagine going through the events firsthand. I’m glad you found a better opportunity, LW!

  19. LL*

    When you say “admin” do you mean an administrative assistant? Or like a high-level administrator? because if it’s the first, what in the world was your HR thinking?

    1. Ama*

      When I was a 25 year old admin in academia and my boss was fired, HR told me that I couldn’t tell anyone who called for him that he was fired but just to say he “left.” My boss had been at the university for over a decade and had held a senior leadership position – NO ONE believed he “just left” and so 25 year old me found herself stuck with lots of very senior people getting frustrated with her. So I have no problem believing HR delegated all that to an admin of any level.

      1. UghHigherEdu*

        I work at a well-known university and something similar just happened with two senior administrators. They were both fired after lots of shenanigans. My spouse knows most of the details, but not everything. Everyone at my spouse’s department was told to simply say “[So and so] has left the University” if asked about the administrators. Recently, some important people showed up for meetings with one or both of the fired administrators, only to be told that they had “left.” So, yeah, this kind of thing definitely happens.

        1. Seal*

          Seconded. Having spent my entire career in academia, none of this surprises me. The public university I work at now has a clause in university policy that allow senior administrators to be terminated with or without cause, so long as they are given a certain amount of notice. When this policy is invoked, what usually happens is the administrator given a few hours to clean out their office and then paid for the notice period. Those with tenure go back to the teaching faculty, the rest just go. Unless there’s an obvious reason the person was terminated, the official word is that they left or resigned, which sends the rumor mill into overtime.

          What’s so frustrating about this is that no one EVER abruptly quits a senior administration jobs without notice or explanation, so EVERYONE knows when an administrator is forced out. Telling staff, especially admin assistant, to just say an administrator just left is ridiculous. In one recent incident, a new-to-the-university administrator quickly became notorious for bullying their staff and disparaging their work. The associate administrator, who was great at their job and had a sterling reputation on campus, was one of their main targets. When the administrator realized that bullying wasn’t getting their associate to leave, they used the policy to terminate them, then told the rest of the staff to say they resigned. Everyone knew it wasn’t true, refused to say otherwise, and started updating their resumes.

          Academia is weird.

  20. Adds*

    Ugh. This reminds me of my day-gig “boss”

    He went on vacation, refused to do a sit-down with the two of us in the office before he left, and insisted on handling (read: micromanaging) EVERYTHING himself like he wasn’t in a different time zone halfway across the country. Then he was mad that people kept calling him on his vacation because it was bothering him so he quit answering phone calls or texts. Finally, he refused to give us any autonomy to actually do our jobs and keep the entire business from grinding to a halt, on a payday no less and became angry when we made decisions without him (like paying people for their work) because he was unreachable after refusing to answer calls.

    And now he owes me 3 months of pay (and counting since I don’t envision him settling up any time soon) and I’m realizing how much I immensely dislike that gig and also him.
    (For context that explains the pay issue, I’m a miscategorized employee and being paid as a contractor)

  21. Bill and Heather's Excellent Adventure*

    Not just bananapants, the full banana suit. Congrats on getting out of there and finding a better paid job.

  23. CommanderBanana*

    I despise working for people like this and I feel sorry for them. What a sad way to live your life.

    I like my job, I work hard, I work a lot, but I also don’t need to convince myself that the workplace will fall apart without me.

  24. Hamster dance*

    Ah Labster. We meet again.

    (I don’t actually know that this is Labster and I know we’re not supposed to guess or name and shame anyway. I would just not be surprised if it was Labster).

  25. Hroethvitnir*

    Oof. Thank you so much for updating!

    It REALLY tracks that it’s research, sigh. Constantly scrounging for grants *does* suck, but that’s your core job, bro.

    1. RC*

      *nods in soft money and now hating my job with the fire of a thousand suns, but feeling unqualified to do anything else*

  27. Jam Today*

    I’m hung up on the part where he was taking a paid position on his “vacation” and demanding that your coworker *build the curriculum* for that position on your organization’s dime, and for which your coworker was (obviously, since he thought he was doing the work for his own company) compensated separately.

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