When you wake up feeling under the weather, nothing sounds worse than getting dressed, trudging to work, and putting on your customer service facade all while feeling miserable. That’s why Mish, a server at a restaurant, called out sick when she woke up with a stomach bug. However, she was stunned when her boss decided to show up at her house uninvited to offer her a ride to work.
Mish called out sick and woke up from a nap to find her boss standing at the foot of her bed.
In a TikTok video, Mish explained that she previously worked at a restaurant located about 15 minutes from her house. At the time, she was living with a roommate and his bedroom was on the first floor while hers was on the second. One morning, she woke up feeling awful and realized that she had a stomach bug.
Deciding to call out of work, Mish called her boss and spoke to him on the phone. She explained to him that she wasn’t feeling well and the conversation was pretty short with him confirming that he was fine with her staying home.
“I tell my roommate, ‘I’m really sick. I’m gonna go back to bed and go to sleep,'” Mish recalled. Her roommate decided to go outside so he could play his guitar without disrupting her sleep. Since he was only in the backyard, he left their door unlocked.
However, her boss apparently took the unlocked door as an invitation. After pulling into their driveway, he claimed to have knocked on their door. When he got no response, he noticed the door was unlocked and let himself in.
“He claims he said my name a few times, walked around, didn’t see or hear me, so he went upstairs,” Mish continued. “That’s when I woke up and he’s standing at the foot of my bed, kind of waving at me.”
Her boss claimed he’d come over to offer her a ride to work.
When Mish got bearings, her boss began explaining that while he knew she already called out sick, he figured that maybe she just didn’t want to drive herself to work. He suggested that he could drive her himself.
“At that point, I woke up. I literally thought I was having a fever dream,” she recalled. “When I finally came to, I’m like, ‘What are you doing? This is not okay. You need to get out of my room. I’m not coming into work.'”
At that, her boss left her house.
Her boss’s actions were incredibly inappropriate and disrespectful.
Not only was Mish’s boss showing up at her house and letting himself in an invasion of privacy, but an employee has a right to their personal life. If they call out sick, that should be respected. There is a clear boundary that exists between a boss and their employee, and this boss violated it one hundred times over.
His actions are even worse when considering how frequently employees fear taking sick days at work. According to a 2023 survey, nearly 65% of workers said they experience “stress, anxiety, guilt or fear” when requesting sick time from their employer. One in four workers said they have been either pressured or explicitly asked to work while they’ve been sick.
It’s a highly unprofessional and truly shocking act to walk into an employee’s home and enter their bedroom while they’re sleeping.
Sick leave exists for a reason — to allow employees to recover from illness without risking their health or spreading illness to others in the workplace. By showing up at her house unannounced, it’s clear that Mish’s boss had no regard for her, the other employees at the restaurant, or the patrons who would’ve unknowingly risked getting sick had Mish come into work that day.
Nia Tipton is a Chicago-based entertainment, news, and lifestyle writer whose work delves into modern-day issues and experiences.