u/Resident-Bobcat-7692

i had put in for a week off months in advance. approved and everything. i was on day three of a camping trip with my buddies. we're out in the middle of nowhere at a lake, no cell service for most of it but i had a small pocket of signal at the campsite.

i get a text from my manager saying there's a mandatory team meeting in 20 minutes and everyone has to attend no exceptions. i text back and say i'm on approved vacation. she replies with a screenshot of some policy about mandatory training and says if i don't attend it'll be marked as a no show and flagged on my record.

cool. fine. whatever.

so i connect from my phone using the tiny bit of signal i have. camera off mic off just sitting there. five minutes in she calls me out by name and says cameras need to be on for attendance verification. says if my camera isn't on she can't confirm i was there.

alright then.

i flip my camera on. i'm sitting in a camping chair shirtless, sunburned, beer in hand, lake in the background. one of my buddies walks behind me carrying a cooler and yells something i can't repeat here. the whole meeting goes silent.
my manager stutters and says maybe we can make an exception for today. i said no no you said cameras on for verification so here i am. verified.

she moved on real quick. the rest of the team was dying in the chat. one guy messaged me privately saying that was the greatest thing he'd ever seen on a work call.

never got scheduled for a meeting on my days off again. put in my two weeks about a month later anyway.

AITA?

i've tried all the usual tricks. blocking calendars, automating stuff, scripting boring tasks. but the one thing that actually keeps me safe is just being boring.

not like a top performer boring. i mean i show up to every meeting on time, i turn stuff in on the deadline but never early, i don't volunteer for anything extra, and i never miss a standup. i'm just there. every day. doing my thing. nothing special.

what i figured out is that managers don't come looking for you when you're boring. they come looking when you're inconsistent. like if you crush it one week and then disappear the next week that's when people start asking questions. but the guy who just does okay work every single week? nobody even thinks about him.

i used to stress about not being noticed but not being noticed is literally the whole point. you want to be the person nobody remembers when stuff goes wrong and nobody remembers when stuff goes right either. just fine. just there. just whatever.

that's it. that's the whole thing. be forgettable on purpose.

i spent most of my early twenties doing exactly what everyone told me to do which was relax, explore, don't take life too seriously and enjoy the ride. i traveled, changed my major twice, took a gap year that turned into almost two and generally treated that whole period like it was consequence free.

​

i'm 31 now and i'm still untangling some of those decisions. not in a catastrophic way but in a slow grinding way where i look at people my age who were more intentional earlier and i can see the gap and it's not nothing.

​

my sister just turned 22 and she's been talking about taking time off before committing to anything because she doesn't want to lock herself into a path she ends up hating and i completely understand that feeling because i felt exactly the same way.

​

two weeks ago she asked for my honest opinion and i gave it to her. i told her that the idea that your twenties are just for exploring is advice that sounds wise but often comes from people who either got lucky or are remembering it differently than it actually was. i told her that being intentional now doesn't mean suffering through a joyless decade it just means making calculated moves while you still have the most energy and the fewest obligations you'll ever have.

​

she got mad and said i was projecting my own regrets onto her and that everyone's path is different and i was being prescriptive about something deeply personal.

​

and honestly she has a point about the projection part. i know i was speaking from a place of personal frustration as much as genuine advice and i probably didn't frame it as carefully as i could have.

​

but i also think someone needed to say it and she did ask me directly.

​

AITA for being that honest when she asked?