A New Mexico woman has shared the horrifying text messages she received from her supervisor after she was called out of work because her sister was lying unconscious in the hospital.
Hillary Zinks received a nightmare phone call last month that her sister had been hospitalised and was declared brain dead, so she immediately drove to Las Vegas to be by her bedside.
But when she informed her supervisor at the restaurant where she works that she wouldn’t be at her next shift, and explained the sad nature of her situation, the supervisor criticised her for giving such little notice, telling her that her fellow workers would have an extremely hard shift because she was missing.
Enraged, Hillary told the woman off and even sent her a photograph of her unconscious sister’s middle finger propped up, before learning from the senior manager days later that the supervisor was no longer employed there.
Hillary is a makeup and effects artist in the film industry but also works as a waitress for extra cash.
In November, she got a call while she was working on the set of a TV series, and discovered that her 40-year-old sister Amber was in a coma, brain dead, could die at any moment, in the hospital.
The reaction from her boss at the TV show was precisely what she would have hoped for, and when her boss found out, Hillary was told to go home and do whatever was needed and be with her family, and that there was no job in the world worth missing life over.
Speaking to BuzzFeed, Hillary explained that her sister was totally unresponsive and the nurses were looking for next of kin to make decisions on her behalf if need be.
She said that she was broken-hearted and frozen and that she didn’t even have time to register all of it before deciding to leave to be with her sister.
On her way to Las Vegas to be with her sister, Hillary sent a text to her supervisor at her restaurant job to inform them that she would be missing from her next shift.
She said that their reaction was extremely cruel.
First, Hillary texted to say she wouldn’t be able to make it to her next shift because she had to drive to Nevada because her sister was dying in the hospital there, and she promised to let the supervisor know when she’d be back and even apologised for the inconvenience.
Her supervisor’s response started off kindly enough and said that they did understand and was sorry for what she was experiencing, but then the supervisor’s words turned sour and it said that she was curious as to why Hillary was letting them know only 2 hours before her shift.
Hillary replied that she had to leave at one in the morning, to which her supervisor first reiterated that she had compassion for her situation but was still not pleased about it.
This is an extremely heartbreaking situation, although Hillary using her sister’s finger to show that she was dying and in the hospital was the very last thing that she should have been doing, but then I guess she was so furious that it was the first thing she thought to do to demonstrate that she wasn’t fibbing about her sister dying.
This kind of private stuff should never be made public and because it has been made public it has made Hillary appear worse than the supervisor in some people’s eyes, although Hillary did get her point across, and the supervisor was a monster, and let it be a lesson for other awful bosses that read what went on and learn from it.
When you’re put in a position where you have to choose your job over a dying loved one it’s never a good situation, and when working in a job that won’t give you time off because your loved one is dying in hospital, then is that a job that you really want, but then do you really want to be unemployed either – it’s the devil and the deep blue sea, but we should also be extremely careful when judging other people because you might one day find yourself walking in their shoes.
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