r/IsThisUnprofessional

my company observes the 4th today since it lands on a Saturday this year, so everyone is off. i worked anyway. nobody asked me to, i'm not getting paid extra, i just like working when it's dead quiet and a random Friday in July genuinely means less to me than a calm Monday. (i would trade every long weekend for a random Thursday in October, fight me.)

i wasn't making a statement. cleared some backlog, sent maybe five emails, answered a couple slack things that were sitting there. nothing urgent, no "please respond" - just normal boring volume.

around 10am my boss replies to one of them in the team channel "love the dedication 🔥"

and that's when it stopped being my quiet day lol. by noon i've got a DM from a coworker. extremely polite, which somehow makes it worse. "not trying to start anything, but working today makes it harder for the rest of us to actually unplug. schedule send exists for a reason." apparently a couple other people feel the same way.

i didn't ask for the shoutout. i didn't ask anyone to reply. i didn't do anything to anybody, i just did my job on a day i was allowed to be doing whatever i wanted. if slack notifications on your day off stress you out, mute slack. that is a you problem and i'm tired of pretending it's a me problem.

can someone tell me who's actually out of line here? me for working where people could see it, my boss for turning it into a gold star, or my coworker for telling me what to do with my own day off?

so this happened yesterday and i still don't fully get it. there's a guy on my team, younger than me, and when he sends me stuff on teams i'll usually just hit the thumbs up react. like "got it, no notes, we're good." that's what it means to me. i've been doing it for years and nobody's ever said a word.

then yesterday he sends a longer one, few paragraphs, walking me through how he set something up. i read the whole thing, it was fine, i thumbs up'd it. a couple hours later he catches me in the kitchen and goes "hey, not a big deal, but the thumbs up kind of feels like you're brushing me off?" and i just stood there. because in my head a thumbs up is the opposite of brushing someone off. it's me telling you i read it, i'm good, you don't need to do anything else.

apparently to him, and he says "most people his age," a bare thumbs up reads as cold. like the texting version of an eye roll. i'm almost 35. i have used a thumbs up to mean thumbs up my entire adult life but now i'm sitting here wondering if i've been low key insulting people for years and nobody bothered to tell me.

part of me thinks he's got a point, his message took effort and maybe it deserved actual words back. part of me thinks if a thumbs up sends you spiraling that's not really mine to manage.

so which is it? is it unprofessional to react instead of reply, or is reading a thumbs up as an insult a reach?

so i have a thing where i genuinely cannot relax on a weekend. it's not a brag it's honestly closer to a problem, if i'm sitting around doing nothing by Saturday afternoon i get this itch and end up opening my laptop just to clear stuff out. nobody tells me to. nobody's waiting on any of it. i just can't leave it sitting there.

so this weekend i went through and cleaned up a doc thats been bugging me for like a month and knocked out a pile of little things in my queue that nobody was chasing me for. felt kind of nice logging on Monday with a clear plate for once instead of the usual pileup.

then in the team channel someone goes "lol were you ON all weekend?? you trying to make the rest of us look bad" and a few people hit the laugh react on it. and yeah it was framed as a joke but it pretty clearly wasn't just a joke.

i said something like "haha no just had time..." and moved on but its been sitting in my head the whole day. because half of me is like its my weekend, its my own time, im not telling a single other person they have to do anything, so how is what i do on a saturday anyone else's business. but then the other half of me kind of sees it. like if i'm the one visibly online on a Saturday clearing things out then maybe that just quietly becomes what "keeping up" looks like for everyone even though i swear thats not what i'm trying to do. and for the record i make the least money on this team so its not even like i'm doing it to get ahead or get noticed, my brain just doesn't have an off button.

so idk. am i actually in the wrong here for just working my own weekend the way i want to? or is he out of line for turning it into a whole thing in the channel in front of everyone? i can't tell if i'm the problem or if he is.

Either my coworker is the single worst scheduler alive, or hes doing this on purpose. Because the only open slot on his calendar is somehow always my lunch hour.

It's the fifth time this month. The meeting drops dead on 12 to 1, i push back but it's the same line every time - "sorry man, only slot i could find." And yeah fine, calendars get packed, sometimes there really isnt another gap, i know. But its every single time. And its always MY lunch that eats it, never his 9am, never his 4pm, never his lunch. Wild how the one free hour on the whole calendar is always the exact one im supposed to be eating in.

So now if i decline im the difficult one right. On paper he tried, lunch was all that was left, im the guy throwing a fit over a sandwich. But i didnt take this job to skip lunch every week so his afternoon lines up clean.

Maybe im being soft and blocking your own lunch on the calendar is just basic adult stuff i shouldve been doing this whole time. Or maybe "it was the only slot" is the exact thing a guy says when he knows full well what hes doing and is betting youll be too polite to call it.

Is this clueless or calculated?

i hadn't talked to this guy since undergrad. we were friends but it had been 3+ years with no contact. then out of nowhere - "hey man we should grab coffee and catch up, would love to hear what you've been up to."

we were good friends back in school so why not. i drove 40 minutes out to see him.

we did maybe 6 minutes of real catching up. hows life, what are you doing now, the usual. then it turned.. "so what's your team using for [x] these days?" and before i'd even finished answering he's pulling up a deck on his phone.

he's an account exec now. the whole thing was actually just a pitch. he wanted an intro to whoever owns that decision where i work lol. the coffee, the "would love to hear what you've been up to" - all of it was just the wrapper around a meeting he knew i probably wouldn't have said yes to if he'd asked me straight.

now on paper i guess he did nothing wrong. he was friendly and he bought the coffee. if i say anything i'm suddenly the guy who thinks he's too important to hear an old friend out. so i'm kind of just annoyed about a thing i cant even point at cleanly.

but i gave up a whole afternoon and 40 minutes each way because i thought someone i used to know actually wanted to see me. and he didnt. he wanted a sales meeting, and he knew "sales meeting" wouldn't get the yes, so he called it catching up instead.

is this just networking and i'm being whiny? or is dressing a pitch up as "let's reconnect" a genuinely crappy thing to do to someone?

at this point i honestly cant tell if i'm more annoyed at him for the move, or at myself for driving out there.

ok so someone started a collection for our boss's birthday and the "suggested" amount is $40. there's like 12 of us so that makes for a pretty nice gift. and this person makes the most money out of all of us.

i don't have anything against her.. shes fine. but i make the least on the team and i'm supposed to hand over 40 dollars to a woman who signs off on whether i get a raise. it just doesn't feel right. and although it's framed as optional, the email had everyone's name on it already so if i'm the one blank it's gonna be obvious.

i floated the idea of just doing a card and got crickets lol so now i think everyone thinks i look cheap.

am i wrong here? is chipping in for the boss a normal thing everyone does and i'm being weird about it? or is this kind of messed up?