I don’t know if you were addressing the specific case mentioned, but if someone has a softball game they want to go to, and they say they have a medical procedure to take care of, that could easily be grounds for termination.
Best answer I can think of is to unionize and negotiate a CA that includes shift trade rights. Short term, I don’t think there’s much you can do if the company wants to be a dick.
“Thank you friend” is impolite? Maybe it’s informal, but I think that’s a great solution to the problem. I can’t imagine anyone having a problem with that except maybe an aggro asshole.
That’s exactly what it was. But the sheer odds of them settling on my house the same day as I worked a game a fair distance away at a park that happened to be in their path to their new home? Pretty fucking high.
I’m getting ready to umpire a ballgame when I’m like 20. Come out of the room five minutes before game time, and both teams have gone sprinting to the dugouts because this massive swarm of wasps (bees? Maybe bees… it was over 20 years ago) came buzzing right over the field the game was supposed to be on. Heading southeast. Partner and I nope back into the room for a while.
Anyways. The insects continue on doing whatever wasp- (or bee-) like activities they were doing and we play the game.
Game goes well. I get changed and go home. Home is somewhere between 5-10 km southeast of the ballpark.
As I park and get out I notice that the family is freaking out. Swarm of wasps (or bees) had just buzzed their way over from the northwest and taken up residence in one of the walls of our carport.
I also enjoy the follow-up, “but the day is not yet over.” (This is a Star Trek reference, but “today is a good day to die” was written into Klingon culture by one of the writers who was a student of Native American history.)
Points for creative thinking, but I would prefer not to get fired and have to seek redress through the courts.