A reader writes:

My friend and I shared a paddock in which we kept our horses. She did the morning feeds and I did the afternoon feeds. One morning, when my friend was feeding up, she discovered that my 29-year-old mare was colicing (basically a stomach upset; horses can’t throw up so if there is a blockage or something making them sick, it causes a lot of problems) and because it looked serious she called the vet. The vet refused to do more than administer painkillers and a few other drugs to make her comfortable without an owner present, so my friend tried to call me. (Colic surgery, which the vet felt she needed, can run into the tens of thousands of dollars and is pretty hard on the horse, which is why the vet refused to risk running up a bill like that on an older horse without the okay from the owner.)

My workplace doesn’t allow phones in the sheds, and when my friend couldn’t get through to me, she called my workplace. My friend explained how dire the situation was and my manager told her he would let me know immediately. Except that he didn’t. I didn’t find out until morning smoko and I found the missed calls on my phone. Unfortunately, in the three hours between my friend calling and my hearing of it, my horse’s heart rate had shot over 120 beats per minute. That 120 mark is used as an indicator that recovery is very unlikely, and I made the choice to have her put down.

I asked my manager why he hadn’t let me know what was going on and he said he was going to let me know at lunch time (approximately five hours after the call came) and I could leave then. I said the horse had died and he said I could leave.

The kicker in all of this? That morning, my manager had me hosing walkways because he “didn’t have anything else for me to do.” So I’m pretty angry that he didn’t let me know when the call came through (and let me deal with it) but what I am angriest about is that he said he would let me know what was going on straight away and then didn’t. My friend had to deal with a dying horse, my vet was in a horrible position, and my poor mare suffered unnecessarily. Knowing that I wasn’t contactable would have changed the situation with the vet, who stated that she would have put her down much earlier than she did.

I have no idea why he didn’t let me know. I pretty much booked it out of there when he said I could leave, as I was struggling to keep it together. Best guess is that he didn’t think it was important, forgot, couldn’t be bothered coming to find me (even though I was in the section of the site his office is based in), or thought that it would be fine to wait although my friend was pretty insistent on the phone. Maybe he just didn’t care. I just wish he hadn’t said he would let me know.

I’m angry, devastated, and struggling to overcome my feeling of resentment towards the manager, as well as my own guilt. While I understand that to him she was just a horse, she was my life. I’d got her for my 15th birthday (she was also 15) and she was my anchor.

Our industry (which is animal-based) runs 365 days of the year, and I’ve worked every hour of overtime, every holiday, every weekend, and every other gap he has needed me to work. I’ve worked shifts solo which normally require two or three people because he couldn’t get anyone else. I’ve never taken a day of sick leave in the three years I’ve been with my company. I’ve never been late. I needed half an hour to talk with the vet and make a plan. I would have happily worked through my breaks if it meant I’d been able to sort it out quickly.

I still carry out everything that is asked of me but my (previously high) quality of work has dropped, I don’t want to do additional overtime and now my manager and his manager want to talk. I have no idea what to say. Somehow I think “I hold you responsible for some of my horse’s suffering and now she’s died, all the money I earn doing overtime to help you out is pretty much no incentive because I spent it all on her” is not the line to go with. “I hate you” is also probably not the way to go. Help?

Oh my goodness, I’m so sorry. How awful.

At best, your manager was careless in a way that had terrible consequences. At worst, he’s a callous jerk. From knowing him, you probably know which of those is more correct.

Would it help to explain to him what you’ve explained here? You could say, “When you told my friend that you’d give me the message immediately, she and the vet acted on what you said. They didn’t take emergency measures with the horse because they assumed I’d be getting in contact right away. The situation was dire and because I didn’t know about the call until hours after you told them you’d tell me, it meant that my horse had hours of unnecessary suffering.”

If your manager has any decency at all, he will be horrified and will apologize profusely. That won’t change what happened, of course, but it’s possible that the ensuing conversation will give you some understanding of what he was thinking and, as a result, some measure of peace that you don’t currently have (in your relationship with him and about the situation in general).

It’s also possible that it won’t make you feel better at all. If that’s the case, then at some point you’ll have to decide if there’s a way to be reasonably happy continuing to work with him, or whether your peace of mind would be better served somewhere else. I wouldn’t decide that right away though — I’d sit with this for a bit and let yourself figure it out without any time pressure.

And if your manager and his manager want to talk about the change in your commitment to your job since this happened, it’s reasonable to say, “I’m pretty devastated by what happened. I hope that my long track record of high performance here will give me some room to work through this.”