my mom answered my phone and yelled at my boss, staff grumbling about sales team’s “perks,” and more

by Alison Green on February 28, 2025

It’s four answers to four questions. Here we go…

1. My mom answered my phone and told off my boss

I was very sick with Covid and my mom had to come take care of me. She already knew issues that I’d been having with my boss; he’s a jerk. I learned later that he called to ask a question that he could have easily found the answer himself. My mother answered the phone and yelled at him because he does a lot of abusive things and keeps us working on days off, even vacation, not to mention when people are very sick. He is the type who can dish out the punishment or rude comments but cant handle it when you do it back even the slightest. Anyway, she told me what she had done.

Once I returned to work, I was written up and told my mother is not to answer my phone when anyone from the company calls because they chip in $50 a month for the phone. This is not their phone. Does this warrant a write-up? Do they have the right to say my mother cannot answer my phone?

No, this doesn’t warrant a write-up. If you call someone’s personal phone, you risk someone else answering it and conducting themselves differently than an employee would. But there’s no official arbiter of what you can and can’t be written up for; there’s only common sense, and your boss clearly doesn’t have it.

The question about whether they can say your mom can’t answer company calls on your phone when they pay part of the bill … eh, probably. If they consider that your work phone, then sure, they can say you’re the only one who can answer it (hell, in a lot of states they could say that without paying any of the bill). It’s a dumb response from them, though.

But also, your mom should stay out of your work life and not tell your boss off on your behalf! I get the impulse, but she doesn’t have the standing to do that and she ended up causing problems for you at work.

At the same time, though, I kind of love her for defending her sick kid. Is she up for telling off other people’s bosses too? She’d probably be in demand.

2. Staff is grumbling about sales team’s “perks”

I manage a team of salesmen who call on very large customers. Typically we are responsible for signing 5-10 contracts that generate a lot of meaningful revenue for the company. Because of the size of these contracts and the nature of our customers, we attend a lot of off-hours events to host our customers — things like dinners, concerts, and professional sporting events. As a manager, I try to be flexible with people’s schedules to accommodate all the hours they end up working outside of the normal 9-5. However, I’m running into problems with other departments complaining about my team’s availability or implying that we are more focused on partying than working. This typically happens when they want to connect with someone on my team but that person is using comp time; for example, they had a 7pm dinner the day before so I don’t have them come into work till 10 am but production wants to meet right at 9 am.

I understand why there might be a perception issue to say, “Oh, John is coming in late on Monday because he has to spend all Sunday at the suite of an NFL game,” but these events truly are a work day for us. Attending with a customer and trying to have a meaningful business conversation can be a pretty high pressure and stressful thing! We might have a beer at the game but it’s much more about making sure the customer has a great time then it is about actually enjoying the venue. Typically my team has to provide a recap of any conversations that they had and how contract negotiations are advancing. It’s also not fair to expect them to spend a weekend day or a weeknight working and then go back to a regular schedule.

My boss understands this but when I’ve tried explaining it to other departments (typically run by people at my level but without sales experience) I’ve had varying degrees of success. I’ve also set up a couple times a week like Monday afternoons, where I can guarantee that my whole team is working at the same time so these departments can schedule meetings. That has helped manage the scheduling issue that we are having, but it’s made the grumbling worse because they feel like we are being unreasonable. Is there a good way that I can explain to my peers outside of sales that we aren’t being divas, we just have a weird work schedule?

Can you stop describing the specifics of what they were doing when they were working off-hours and instead just say “he had to work all day Sunday” or “he worked until very late last night”? If you mention dinners and games, people are going to focus on that to the exclusion of the “work” part.

You might also try talking with the other managers one-on-one about the pattern and ask for their help in figuring out how to resolve it; sometimes when people are enlisted in solving a problem that they themselves are part of it, they start to get it more. And you could say, “While the events can seem like fun ones, that’s still time that my team has to be ‘on’; they can’t relax, they need to be focused on the client, and that’s time that they can’t be with their family or friends or handling household responsibilities. Since we can’t ask people to spend all their waking hours furthering the company’s business interests and they need to have time off as well, what would you suggest?”

But some of this is just a perpetual issue between sales and non-sales people, so your measure of success shouldn’t be “there is zero grumbling about this.”

3. Can I use Discord messages to confirm that my unreliable coworker told me she ignores my emails?

Right now, I am building an argument to my boss to change the workflow of a specific task to address a problem I have with a coworker (Clara). Clara’s supposed to be doing this task on my behalf. (For internal policy reasons, I’m not allowed to do it myself.) However, Clara is not reliable at doing this task. Over the years, I’ve made a thousand tiny adjustments to my work to make it as easy as possible for her, and she often still makes errors, which only affect me and are for some reason my sole responsibility to identify and (tell her to) fix. I’ve been stewing silently about this for years, because I thought I was just being a hater, frankly. But at my next review, I’m going to urge our boss to see if I can be given the authority to just handle this task myself.

Since all of the measures I take to help Clara and make up for her errors are individually very small, I’m compiling documentation to explain everything I’m doing and confirm that, collectively, they consume a lot of my time and energy — much more than just doing it myself. One item I wanted to include was an email from several months ago, where Clara asked me to indicate importance in the subject line of emails to her; I send out a lot of notices to the whole building, so she mostly just ignores messages from me and sometimes misses important ones. However, when I received this email, it made me so blindingly angry — considering everything else I’m already doing — that I trashed it immediately without responding. Now that I’ve decided to talk to our boss about it, it’s gone from the face of the earth.

But I have the annoyed Discord messages I sent to my partner the day-of that confirm that this email once existed. They don’t say anything spicy — essentially, “Clara just straight-up admitted to me that she doesn’t read my emails” with an air of frustration — and nothing rude, hostile, or profane. Do you think it would help or hurt my case to include these? If including them is a bad idea, do you have any alternate suggestions? Even if I had the original email, would it have been too petty to include, anyway? Clara’s otherwise very nice and definitely isn’t acting maliciously, so I still feel insane for actually complaining about this.

Don’t include the message you sent to your partner about it. It’ll come across as petty, and it puts the focus on your frustration more than on Clara’s behavior. It will also seem odd that you’re proactively trying to come up with outside “evidence” that the email existed, when no one has asked for any, and it risks putting a more adversarial lens on the whole thing.

In most reasonably healthy work environments, you could simply tell your manager what was said and assume that you’ll be believed. (If your word isn’t enough, there are bigger problems that would dwarf this anyway.)

4. Manager said we can’t talk to HR without telling him first

Is it legal/ethical for a supervisor to tell their team they cannot go to HR without telling him and letting him set the appointment with HR?

This comes after a coworker went to HR for two reasons (supervisor issues the entire team is having and a request to move departments). Today the team came in and was told that they cannot go to HR about anything without telling him first what it is about and then he will set an appointment with HR if he deems worthy/necessary.

I am thinking it is not illegal, but not exactly ethical and definitely not in the favor of the team as the supervisor will not set up appointments if he wants to hide things and there would retaliation.

While it’s not illegal on its face, it creates legal liability for your company. What if someone wants to report harassment or discrimination from your boss? They have to go through him first and he’ll decide if they get to talk to HR about it or not? What if he decides they can’t?

It’s very unlikely that HR would be okay with this rule if they knew about it (in part because companies need clear and accessible reporting procedures for harassment and discrimination to effectively defend themselves against lawsuits in those areas), so someone should break the rule to tell HR (and when doing that, should point out that they’re doing exactly what they were told they couldn’t and will need HR’s assistance in ensuring they’re not penalized for it).

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  1. Ask a Manager* Post author

    A reminder: We’ve had a recent increase in trolling here, and you can help me by NOT RESPONDING to it. If you engage, you are ensuring that troll will reappear. Instead, please flag the comment for me (just reply with a link, which will send your comment to moderation so I’ll see it).

    A change to previous requests: please don’t reply “reported.” Enough people report these comments that you can trust it will be dealt with. Do not engage at all. Thank you.

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  2. RedinSC*

    I ran the fundraising part of a non profit. I’d often hear some of the same comments as LW2. “Oh, they’re the party people”

    Well, yes, we host events, go to events and work some days up to 14 hours to make sure we have all the money the organization needs in order to fulfill our mission.

    I don’t think this would work in a business operation, but we’d invite our colleagues to events, to help us set up, help us clean up, help us host people. Once folks got more an of idea of how much work went into these things, the comments settled down some.

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    1. Kate, short for Bob*

      I can’t get over the OP describing the team as sales*men* rather than people. It makes me wonder what other Jurassic business practices are going on that might contribute to the resentment.

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      1. CraigT*

        Maybe they are salesmen. Maybe they aren’t all men, but this is the accepted term in their industry. I don’t know and neither do you. Either way, their manager is trying to take care of her people. How can that possibly offend you? You’ve invented an issue that is not part of the letter writer’s issue, and chosen to take umbrage. Cut it, and the Jurassic comments, out.

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  3. Broken Nail*

    LW 3: You want to prove something you’re saying is true by… sharing a different time you said it. It just weakens the whole argument and makes you look out of touch with reality.

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    1. Knope Knope Knope*

      I feel like there’s more to this story. I wonder why OP isn’t allowed to handle the task themselves already? I have a senior staff member who insists on doing work I have reassigned to an intern. It’s a task that’s nice to have but it takes time and it’s not that important. I need my senior staffer focused on other things. They keep inserting themselves into the process to “fix” it. In reality, I don’t need it fixed. The “errors” are so minor and inconsequential they are taking every away from much more important work. I wonder if it’s a similar situation where OP is only going to showcase they are focused on the wrong thing.

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      1. Part time lab tech*

        Could be a quality issue, such as quality control and manufacturing having different management and KPIs.

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      2. OP No. 3*

        This is a process I actually handle for everyone else in our subset of the organization. I’m just not allowed to handle my own documents (due to a conflict of interest policy that is unique to our particular subset), so mine are the ONLY ones Clara handles. I find it really frustrating that I’m the only person in our sub-group that has to work this hard to get their papers filed.

        The errors I’m talking about are things that have resulted in my corporate credit card going unpaid on multiple occasions, resulting in fees and cancelations that I had to pay out of pocket and sort out myself so that I could do routine parts of my job.

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        1. Cohort1*

          A simpler version of your situation: when my sister was 18, many years ago, she was employed at Disneyland as a hot dog vendor. She passed out the hot dogs and put the money in the till. One day she decided to have a hot dog for lunch. She put her money in the till and ate her hot dog. She was fired. You can’t sell yourself the product that you sell to everyone else at the park, someone else needs to sell you that hot dog and they put the money in the till. It sounds like you are in what is a similar situation, just a way more elevated operation than a hot dog stand.

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        2. Friends of English Magic*

          For #1, I think my opinion of the sick OP’s mother would depend on how badly she “told off” the boss and about what. If it was limited to the situation at hand (ie, “She’s sick, you need to leave her alone”) that would be pretty understandable, but if it started to get into all the other ways Boss is a jerk (based off things OP had vented about in the past) then that would be crossing a big line.

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  4. MSD*

    I’ve found that people who don’t travel for work usually think that it’s a lot of fun for those who do. Although it sometimes is, for the most part it’s not.

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    1. MK*

      Or worse, when they only have to do it occasionally. One work trip a year and social work events every three months could be fun. Monthly work trips and events every week aren’t.

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    2. Not Tom, Just Petty*

      This reminds me of a reality check I had one time. I was talking about tour dates of my favorite artist with a friend. The tour was hitting four or five cities in my state over one week. The cities are half a day driving apart and the shows were 1-2 days apart. Oh, the crew will have time to see the city and go to X and Y destinations.”
      My friend: “the crew will have time to do laundry, pay bills, not drive and do work for a day.”
      Oh yeah! This isn’t aroad trip vacation!!!

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  5. Abogado Avocado*

    LW#4, I’m a lawyer and, regrettably, it’s idiots like your boss who keep us in business. If I worked for your employer, I would be advising your boss that he absolutely cannot insert himself in any employee’s effort to contact HR due to the great likelihood that his gate-keeping would result in the company failing to meet legal requirements, such as providing ADA accommodations, and FMLA leave, among other duties. I’d also advise him that if he continued to insist on this path, he’d be looking at many hours in remedial management training with an emphasis on reducing the company’s legal liability.

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    2. Zelda*

      A boss forbidding subordinates to speak to HR without boss’s permission is the work equivalent of an outside adult trying to forbid a small child from telling their parents about interactions with the other adult– it’s a flag that you need to go to HR/tell parents right away. Someone who wants to keep those kinds of secrets is up to no good.

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  6. Bilateralrope*

    #4: It’s very telling that your supervisor didn’t mention this rule until after someone had gone to HR with complaints about him.

    If your HR is competent, they will not be happy when they learn about this. It’s the kind of thing that should make them realize that they need to protect the company from this supervisor.

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  7. PanDaMonium*

    3: Don’t “stew silently for years”. If you have a half-decent boss just tell them when you’re having an issue with a coworker affecting your work. If you don’t then that’s your real problem, not Clara.

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    1. Ellis Bell*

      This is why I think Clara is the red herring; the real cause of OP’s frustration is being made to feel they need proof before being listened to. I read this as OP has been communicating with their boss throughout, but has been instructed to just identify issues and tackle them with Clara even though OP has no authority over her. It sounds like Clara’s performance is being managed with the same lack of urgency being shown when OP says they need to be listened to and supported. This is what happens when managers put their feet up and instruct the little people to sort it out amongst themselves.

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    2. bel*

      Yes. Been there, done that. Try having a very frank conversation with your boss. If your boss ignores you or doesn’t support you, that’s the real problem.

      PS: Fingers crossed, Clara wins the lottery and quits and you don’t see her again.

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    3. OP No. 3*

      I’ve only recently come to the conclusion that any of this was an actual problem worth discussing, versus me just being petty about small annoyances. The last time I brought up Clara letting me down like this, our boss’s answer was to tell us both to be more attentive. In context, I thought that was fair, but (based on my experiences since then) I think I took it to heart way more than Clara did. But I haven’t brought it up since, because my thought was that I would probably get a similar answer while also coming across as whining about a perfectly reasonable directive. Only recently have I come to the realization that it was reasonable for me to be frustrated with Clara at all–which you’re right, IS a me problem, lol.

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  8. Perks*

    I honestly thought the complaint was going to be my sales folks get to go to ballgames, nice restaurants, etc on the company dime and others complain because they don’t. That’s the form of this I’ve encountered before, one that some of my companies have addressed by having periodic company wide outings at a sporting event or recreational venue and by sharing out extra free tickets left by vendors so a wider swath of employees get to participate. The difference is these events are seen as perks even if expected as part of the job; while some flexibility in other hours is generally given, it doesn’t go beyond the flexibility other employees would get in terms of being able to start their workday at whatever time makes sense for them. If there isn’t a scheduled meeting on their calendar at 9am they shouldn’t be dinged for not being available at 9am.

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  9. Jasmine Clark*

    LW1, it would be great if you could come back in the future and update us! Your mom should not have done what she did, but to be fair, your boss totally deserved it and I’m sure his feelings were very hurt, lol. I hope you can soon find a better job with a kindhearted boss!

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    1. Cody Edwards*

      I can. That’s just the begining. There been other questionable write ups. I sent a story in several years ago about my boss convincing hotel staff to open. my room to see if I was there. Because I didn’t answer the phone while training a newhire. I mean, he c ould have called the store I was working at.
      Shoot it’s been. a hard ride to handle. 10 plus years and it ended this February 4tth.
      I’ll make this bullet pointing.
      2022 company deducts 150 a month for chosibg to not get vaccinated and hide it in a medical charge, no record of it.
      I grumble about it multiple times eventually quitting. They convince me to have a zoom meeting. Here they tear me down and write me up. No where does it mention I had quit.
      Later in year I educatrr myself about salary threshold.
      Jan 2023 in a text I inquire with my boss what my classificationis or please direct me.
      He doesn’t says it’s for people with an education, then says don’t go to HR. I’d have a target on back and get fired. So I dont.
      hip replacement surgery #2 August 2023
      Sept 14tg 2023 I get a return to work 20 lb restruction. He tells me he doesn’t have work for me convinces ne to go right back and get a new one with 40 lb restriction. This cancels my medical leave claim I paid for. Back to work full time. within 18 days.. fast forward 1 month.
      There was a harrasment complaint apparently. My boss was handling it and said I’m good, work said I was good. Ultimately I really was. There was a write up and I asked if this was an admission of guilt. They shrugged it off as nothing.
      April 2024 switch us to hourly.We work uncompensated OT.
      Sept 2024 someone blows whistle. HR contacts each person to investigate. Whem called I see this as an oppertunity to inquire about the salary thresold. Ultimately they paid the OR and salary. Roughly 40,000.
      I let HR know he told me not to inquire and anout several other things that are bad.
      December 2024 attempt to get me for harrasing a newhire. Fortunately she would only text and I was able to prove my innocence.
      January 2024 trained 3 people and kept one. On a timesheet I wrote onky part time and long distance. I had another store this guy could wotk at much closer and him and I discussed it. I didnt want to trsh his rep so they wouldnt challenge me hiring him later. This was a thursday.
      We can come and be my boss.Come up with a plan for me to get the rest of my hours because they’d been scheduled.For about thirty two hours about the previous month. Also tells me to take it easy just ho to store up north and keep it a short day but claim 8 to get 40 for week.

      Sunday morning, the day of the plan.He calls and says what’s the plan. After 2 other calls as I getting ready .. I dont answer and call him once driving. he asks me.What’s the plan?
      And there was a mix up he wasn’t counting in some of the hours that I had worked and told me to just use some sick time to get my forty hours and send an email to hor asking them to apply it to that.
      Tuesday Feb 4th terminated for falsified a document, wouldn’t listen to any explanation. I was polite and said. Well thanks for the experience I’ve gained working for you. I guess we’re done I’ll log off now. This was on zoom.
      Im thinking it was retaliation. Afterall my boss said I’d have an X on my back and get fired. That’s what happened OR maybe partly I was costing them too much for medical. I forgot to add Jan 2025 I hurt shoulder at work. claim denied 2 weeks later fired.
      Thinking about this logically as if it were someone else and no emotions attached. I feel like this is a lawsuit. I was with them from Sept 2014 to Feb 2025. Just dumped. I have a duplex I’m renting Ineeded extra space to store all the demo kits, we have a high turnover due to low pay. I could go on and on. Thoughts? Sorry for typos.

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  10. Martin Blackwood*

    #2 – Yeah be less specific. But at the same time, pay attention to the reasons people need to book time with your sales reps. I’m in production, though theres a coordinator layer between me and sales. It’s possible that, while maaaybe their question could wait for monday afternoon, then that eats up buffer time in case some machine goes down, someone gets food poisoning, etc. Depending on what production’s doing, sourcing materials, scheduling machine time, etc as soon as possible makes their lives way less hectic. So if you could sit in on some of those meetings, talk to the people who need to meet with the sales reps the most, and try and find some patterns.

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    1. Disappointed With the Staff*

      IME companies where sales *isn’t* connected with production have many other problems. But connecting production to the sales side is also useful, if somewhat more difficult.

      Threatening engineers with having to do sales is often effective. “oh yes we’d love to have you on the booth at the conference in {popular holiday destination}. You’ll do three 14 hour days mostly talking to people then fly home”. I found booth work for a one day conference to be ample. Or just get the factory staff out helping set up for a trade show, that’ll learn ’em.

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      1. andy*

        I dunno, as an engineer these are not threat and you just goof off most of the time in the trade show. They are long day, but an engineer on it is neither under pressure nor under stress. You are away from the family and your engineering duties wait for you, so then you are can get really overworked while sales people pressure you to be fast.

        But, the trade show itself is not exactly punishment and is more of sought for fun change of pace.

        Maybe if you stopped thinking about engineers in pure stereotypes and started to listen to concerns they have when they ask for meetings and answers, the relationships in company would be better. They are not asking for meetings because they would enjoy those meetings that much, they need something they are not getting.

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        1. Texan in exile on her phone*

          I have never gotten to work a trade show where I did nothing but goof off. I was on my feet all day answering questions and being nice and then I had to go out to dinner with customers after. It was exhausting and I hated it. Oh – and our shows were on the weekend and I got neither OT nor comp time.

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  12. Saturday*

    For #3, “I send out a lot of notices to the whole building, so she mostly just ignores messages from me and sometimes misses important ones” – are the notices things that you need to tell everyone about but that are only relevant to some people some of the time? I ask because I get a lot of FYI messages from certain emails, and I do often skip over them because most of the time they don’t pertain to me. I can kind of see why she might want your other emails to be marked important. But the bottom line is… it sounds like it would be more efficient and better all around if you could just do this task yourself, so maybe you can just focus on that in your message to your boss.

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    1. OP No. 3*

      You’re right that a lot of my messages don’t have anything to do with her; but I also receive similarly broad messages from her and our other direct coworkers that I still quickly open, just to make sure. Again, it’s a really petty thing on its own (and a request I wouldn’t even mind that much usually) that really bothers me in the broader context of things I already have to do to make sure she does this particular task.

      My concern is that I’ve asked once or twice before to take this on (without mentioning any of my greivances with Clara), with no luck. It’s possible that my grandboss just won’t budge on it, but I want to make a strong case for why it’s causing difficulties for me to NOT be authorized to handle this task myself. But you’re right, that my personal offense at this email subject line request is probably not as relevant as it feels in my heart lol.

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  13. andy*

    Do the other teams get answers and support they need? In companies I worked for, sales were selling stuff we did not made yet. When there were not sufficiently available to tell us what it is exactly they promised, massive issues happened few months down the line. Mostly caused by customer not getting what was promised.

    You focus on availability afternoon Monday, bit maybe there is reason other teams complain. Or ineffectivies caused by these delays. No one schedules meetings with sales for fun. It is not exactly pleasant or seeked situation. Mostly because they tend not to care about other teams. They want more contact with you, because company needs to function.

    Solution can be more written info. More proactive communication. Maybe even more time overall dedicated to giving other teams what they need.

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  14. Cordelia*

    LW3, I’ve got to be honest – I often skim or ignore emails that are sent from a particular dept where I work, because they are to the equivalent of “the whole building” and are rarely relevant to me. If there is something that this team specifically require from me, they do indicate that in the subject line – I assume they know that these all-office emails are often not read. I don’t think it’s unreasonable for Clara to ask you to indicate priority level in her emails to you. Being “blindingly angry” about this is an overreaction.
    Definitely don’t include a Discord message to your partner as “evidence”, that would be very odd and unprofessional, and make it more likely that your bosses dismiss your concerns as a personality clash, or a “you” problem.

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  15. Amy*

    I’m a sales person with a pretty heavy travel and weekend / after-hours entertainment schedule.

    While it’s important to not burn out your sales team, I’ve never worked at a company where the focus was on making up personal time on exactly the next day. For example, if we entertained on Sunday and there was an important 9am meeting on Monday, we’d almost certainly attend the 9am meeting. But then maybe take a half day Tuesday or Friday. Or have taken it the Friday beforehand.

    Maybe people are out drinking until 2am and it’s too difficult. But otherwise, I’d look holistically at the week and plan around both important meetings, travel and my own wants. The flexibility doesn’t need to be within 24 hours and anyone who can handle complex sales negotiations can usually figure it out themselves as long as their company’s internal meeting schedule isn’t unreasonable.

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  16. Friends of English Magic*

    For #1, I think my opinion of the sick OP’s mother would depend on how badly she “told off” the boss and about what. If it was limited to the situation at hand (ie, “She’s sick, you need to leave her alone”) that would be pretty understandable, but if it started to get into all the other ways Boss is a jerk (based off things OP had vented about in the past) then that would be crossing a big line.

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  17. Disgusted of Tunbridge Wells*

    For LW4, some military organisations used to have that policy but have now set up independent reporting channels. Saying that a private must complain to their non-commissioned officers about bullying usually works if the bully is another private (or someone in another unit), but is absurd when it’s their own NCOs that are the bullies.
    Even when that policy was in place, there were several approachable NCOs (perhaps even some commissioned officers), not just one ‘supervisor’ gatekeeping complaints.
    If the military knows that your supervisor’s policy is counterproductive, I’m sure that your company will as well.

    One other thing. Is there any precedent within your company or in a similar business that a supervisor can declare that you “cannot go to HR about anything without telling him first what it is about and then he will set an appointment with HR if he deems worthy/necessary”?
    If there is, I’m worried.
    If there isn’t, I can imagine HR and maybe upper management piling on to this supervisor.

    Personally, I think that a manager saying that you are not allowed to contact HR is grounds for you to complain to HR, as advised here.

    Reply ↓

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