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So. What a jerk. This! Call in sick, OP. I havent read all the comments, but this makes me truly ill. To be fair, I was already angry on your behalf before reading this letter. But really, call in sick. One of the victims was paralyzed instead of dying and there was a lot of stuff about how tragic this was, implications that it was worse than death Not much fun when youre a physically disabled teenager being forced to attend this event. Call out sick. I totally relate to the letter writer. Intruding boss never asked detailed questions again. Your boss is being waaaay too cavalier, he should recognize the possibility of one of his employees having already lived through a mass shooting, had family members affected in a mass shooting, or experienced shooting drills in school, even if hes not a huge mental health fanatic. And I absolutely think you should do the same. A good excuse to tell your boss not to work on the weekends is an excuse that is socially acceptable and relatable. If its that sort of training day, it would be way more involved the typical quick drill or watch Run/Hide/Fight theyd be going over all the logistics, what processes to set up to prevent it, etc. Cant see any problem with that. We didnt have ours as often, and the threat seemed a little more distant, but some of those early ones were poorly handledand (given what weve read about the boss in question) I think letter writers office one sounds like it has the potential to be as well. Ive seen it enough years that I opted to just skip past the video in this years training module. Works a treat every. Take this as the valuable information about him that it is and think about how long youre willing to work for someone who is totally okay with causing you this kind of harm. Something tells me the response on the other end of the phone wont be get well soon.. This includes a family event, religious obligations, volunteer work, having a side hustle, or simply needing to rest. Anyone can offer this training, and who knows the background of the trainer, if theyve informed and/or worked with law enforcement to plan and schedule the exercise, or if they have any background in the psychological impacts of active shooter situations, simulated or not (doubtful). I didnt have notice of this one, and I think the most disturbing thing was that my kids have been conditioned to just accept that someone trying to kill you is a situation they should prepare for. This training is insufficient for that goal but its not worthless. And I am of the generation that didnt have mass events constantly, Im 51. An avian flu outbreak was even the disaster they had to simulate! What I really want is to skip it entirely but if I can, how do I explain this request/decision to my boss without disclosing my mental health struggles, explaining (in vain) the anxiety I feel about this training, or looking like the only person not tough enough to participate (as the only woman in my department)? Thank you! Some people believe working on the weekends is bad for your productivity. What interests me is this is a mass shooting drill, not an active shooter drill. Yes. I was in a lockdown at a conference at a university. If youre a party person, in your teens or early twenties, a party at Davids is news that will stir a lot of excitement. Use the same contact for this.). A year or so before COVID, our state decided to mandate active-shooter drills for schools. Well,we got one for you too. No one is filling the hallways with smoke and heating door knobs during a fire drill. Please keep me in mind for the next book club party!" The Fine Print: When you say that you miss your partner, the hostess could reply with a suggestion to bring them along. I agree that I dont think active shooter trainings are all that helpful, and I may be zeroing in too much on the wrong thing here, but telling you all to wear comfortable clothing is ridiculous. In my 20s and 30s would have loved to have got a job living in NYC and generous vacation leave meant i used to visit multiple times a year. The only way to conquer your fear is to face it. Just call in sick that day. She realized after they should not have made those jokes where I could hear them (though I understand you sometimes need dark humor to deflect your own discomfort). You have a family emergency. I know you said your boss is normally nice, but hes being a bonehead, insensitive jerk about this if he doesnt allow you to quietly bow out. For example, if you have more than three unexcused absences in a row, or more than six unexcused absences in a year, you could face disciplinary action. But the other options could be better in some situations. I would go with calling in sick the day of the drill. But that was just about 30 minutes, not anything we had to actually do. My blood boils thinking about it. Its just telling the kids that if a lockdown gets announced, then we lock this door, hide here, be quiet, the door handle will get tried by the headteacher, and this is the announcement that its over. My work has a (pretty upsetting) active shooter training video they play at new employee orientation. Dark humor and gallows humor is very common in my family and we sometimes get horrified looks from the comments we make (like joking about a 2-for-1 euthanasia special when we were dealing with an elderly family pet and my elderly grandmother going through health issues at the same time). September 10, 2020. 5) Dont take drill too seriously. Its a big box store, just a series of giant open rooms! Also want to say: I hear that there are differences between younger folks experience and us middle aged people who grew up prior to mass school shootings being so frequent. And weve had a former employee fired for making death threats, who did come back to cause trouble at least once, who would know where all the exits are if he was going to do something worse, I also have been dealing with bomb threats and shooter drills since middle school. Youre very charitable in your interpretation of dark humor, for me thats a line that shouldnt be crossed. I know you said you dont want to look like the only person not tough enough to participate, particularly as the only woman on your team. (Funny how this rarely happens when the rental office is open; some hapless security guard has to try to decode the alarm system fault codes and tell the fire department what happened.). We have to let the videos play and take multiple quizzes to get a certificate, but Ive now done them enough that I can let the video play while not really paying attention, and my anxiety has disappeared over the trainings. Thats it. * I am at a loss as to how any sort of effective drill could possibly take that long. excuses to get out of drill weekend https://www.everytown.org/solutions/active-shooter-drills/. Do they work in a higher-risk area or industry? There is not a single f***king thing funny about suggesting you would direct the shooter to kill someone else. Because lets be honest, who does not want to have a hot mug of coffee on the terrace while watching the rain pouring onto the glass of your windows, making a thud sound and yet so calming? Except the trainings are ongoing so new employees can take them and so we keep getting emails. One time my office decided to do an escape room as a team bonding exercise. What are they planning for 7 hours? As someone old enough that I had to worry about this in high school and now I have to see my kid doing active shooter drills, I absolutely think people who did not grow up in a similar situation do not understand how very different it is having lived with it much of our lives. They make you practice barricading doors. Unfortunately, David is your work colleague, and this party is a big deal for him. Im so sorry to hear about the stomach bug you got the day of this drill. If you are in the National Guard, you may be wondering if you can skip a drill weekend. Which brings me to active-shooter training. In last couple of days coming home from work, I see what appears to be potential road rage & it scares me. There are a few reasons why your absences might not be able to be excused. Footage & Music Libraries. How many weekend drills can I miss as a reservist before they - Avvo Just reading the stories in this letter and in the comments has given me nausea. I hope LW is able to realize his insensitivity is plenty of cause for reconsidering her stance on him and using all her effort to pushback on such terrible behavior from him. Sign up to our newsletter, and follow us on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook so you always know where to find us. They used to kind of joke about the fire alarm being pulled and then a school shooting happened where a fire alarm was pulled and kids were shot leaving their classrooms/building. The company policy for RST is that it has be approved 30 days before drill (Aug 5-6). To find out moreabout NTRWandourrecommended tools, you can do thathere. Relax away. Best practice is to allow people to opt out, for any reason. I really hope this changes some day in the US. I know you dont want to do that, being the only woman and all, but I find that sometimes I spend too much effort holding myself together, and an honest reaction sometimes solves the issue. This was a school-sanctioned event!! Combine that with the militarization of police, and these trainings are an abusive nightmare. We have not been told the training is mandatory, but when I asked my boss and expressed some preliminary discomfort, he said we all need to participate. When you miss nine drill weekends in 12 months without contacting your commander or the Navy Operational Support Center to which you report, your commanding officer can declare your . And a quality training, I cannot stress this enough, does not last seven hours. To use this excuse, you need to make a story of how awful that Tinderdate went to be described later to the party host. Culture Being broke sucks and everyone knows it. Seven hours?! Thanks to experiencing a variety of traumatic violence, I tend to escalate immediately to threat elimination mode. Hearing it makes me think well, of course but I might not have thought of that when telling my staff about it. I don't know how it was in the reserves, but in the Nasty Guard you had to make up the time and have a damn good exscuse. And then, afterwards, we got the WORST LECTURE EVER from a crying teacher telling us that if this was real wed all be dead because of our collective inability to JUST BEHAVE OURSELVES and BE QUIET for half an hour. Its one of the reasons (not the only one, but one nonetheless) I dont teach anymore. (I mean, safety is great, but this person is hilariously the most accident-prone person we all know, and always has a story about falling down the stairs or getting a ticket for speeding on the way to work. Thats what you would be doing. That would be my guess too, but we cant know. Yup. In fact, many units have had to cancel their Drill Weekends due to budget cuts and other constraints. She cant even bear to see guns on tv. You've only watched 16 videos of veterans coming home to their dogs and you promised yourself you'd break 30 tonight. Somehow, the solution is always more guns. Thus, knowing what are some of the acceptable excuses to use so you can tell your boss you are not able to work on the weekends can be useful. Bomb threats were a constant fact of life. Also, your boss is not a nice person. Many of us work in professions where we are obliged to work on the weekend, and there are some benefits to weekend work such as higher pay, and more freedom from your boss. Each time, it has been a targeted shooting. Go somewherea hike, a spa, a museumon that day. Fortunately weather intervened and caused the part of the activity with the anxiety trigger to get canceled, but I absolutely would have called in sick otherwise. I didnt wear makeup one day because I didnt feel like it. Also for people who have been IN mass shootings or have experienced gun violence, these trainings can be very psychologically damaging. Ive had to listen to presentations or watch video training on this throughout my career, and I always thought wouldnt an employee or student who became an active shooter have gone through this training too? But you should definitely follow others advice about skipping the upcoming one- this is just for future years to push for online ALICE training. CLICK HERE to get your copy from Book Depository. Weekend is a great excuse to get out to the movies. Here are some of Survivor of gun violence here. Be on your best behaviour: Another thing you can try doing is being on your best behaviour. Good for you for advocating for yourself. We dont need to be afraid, we need to be prepared. It is usually best to work these issues out with the chain of command or have someone do it for you. You never know when that may be useful. This is a great excuse becauseit instills a sense of panic within the person youre cancelling on. I already know how to do nothing. Since the official communication didnt call it mandatory Im guessing its not deny PTO-level mandatory. I lost a dear friend to a campus shooting and every time another Active Shooter Training email pops up my stomach drops. Just be careful not to cough or sneeze or they could actually suggest a hospital visit. Its all for workplace harmony and best if everyone signs onto it rather than facing the truth. It can absolutely be traumatizing and upsetting as a participant. Plus employers (not mine, fortunately) discourage/forbid their employees from reporting assaults on their person and tell them thats part of the job. I think this is one of those things that is worth burning political capital for- its annoying to be only woman and the only one opting out, but its pretty important to stand up for yourself in this. I would be looking for another job immediately if my boss said that to me. So to me, everyone should have to go thru emergency drills of some sort as our part to reduce our burden on emergency responders. There are contingency plans in our family if we were on a plane during a hijacking. It waits till the last minute to give Soldier's orders which makes employers upset as well as Soldier. and stick to your story. They did this at a local mall. They cant ask to leave them alone at home nor do they. It was on my mind constantly. There was a mass shooting at a supermarket at her college town two years later. Call in sick. Honestly since youre the only woman in the office, if you normally wear makeup just dont the day before or after to confirm the sick story. But seven hours? https://www.shrm.org/resourcesandtools/hr-topics/employee-relations/pages/workplace-shootings-research-.aspx, https://thehill.com/opinion/healthcare/436994-active-shooter-training-fails-because-it-relies-on-fear/, https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/voices/2019/05/23/teachers-active-shooter-trainings-ineffective-stressful-column/3754113002/, https://www.insider.com/young-school-shooters-grew-up-doing-active-shooter-drills-experts-2022-6, https://www.sandyhookpromise.org/blog/advocacy/active-shooter-drills-harmful-or-helpful/. Im likely close to the same age as the LW, and at the risk of making everyone feel ancient, I was born the year Columbine happened. If this were a short (10-20 min) drill, Id say you might be out of luck. - From a Soldier perspective. Your goal should be TO LEARN during the drill, not avoid it. The Drill Army Reserves is not active duty, so you wont be deployed overseas or see combat. That was a good fifty years ago. I was forced to go through an active-shooter training despite protests, and when a group of us were able to push back as a group, I used the word consent a lot. Things have been chaotic and I need a little time to recoop. 2. 3. . BUPERS Instruction 1001.39F. You say hes a nice guy, but I dont think any of my coworkers wondered why I never went to the storeroom again, nobody certainly said anything to me if they did. You can also request a leave of absence for personal or medical reasons. Wed also be delighted if you shared this article and joined us on social media too! Even if that number never shows up. If your unit is one of the many that has had to cancel its Drill Weekend, dont despair! People in hiding should expect to be there for hours. 4) Events start to fade, we dont want to be known by that one day, we can slack off on training. Im sorry about your boss, OP. Theres probably a very long, very poorly formatted slide deck theyll go over for at least several hours. That sounds ridiculously triggering and excessive for anyone, let alone someone with anxiety. The vultures swoop in when a shooting takes place, pretending to offer support as they build their trauma resumes and then move on to profit from death, offering lockdown training and recovery services. Just FYI, likely the accommodation would be You dont have to complete the training, but then you have to work in an admin role/non-direct care role. He looked at me with a big grin on his face and said " I got sick,too! 3. My mom worked for a large company and has to deal with several (not at her location, thankfully, but as HR she had to deal with the aftermath). What do you think of attending college while on Active Duty, Marginal 1059 while attending Drill Sergeant School. Dear god I have done this too. So,they understand that all you need to do is stay in bed (and watch a movie you just bought). (And get a pizza delivered to your address. Because then a bad guy could find them. I had a panic attack, because I couldnt remember where the nearest light switch was, and because the space was such a labyrinth I couldnt see any of the emergency exit signs. Even though I knew exactly what was happening, my hands were shaking so much that I couldnt lock my door. Asking not to be contrary but because Im genuinely curious what you mean by this comment. Somake a call and tell them how your place is flooded with water and you need to fix itas soon as possible. Read More 10 Reasons Why You Should Work From Home Today!Continue. You dont even have to do it well! I think midterms and finals are possible reasons for an early dismissal the last day of drill if nothing important is going on. Im aware of the exits on campus, and my personal area is chock full of hiding spaces. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 34% of people work on the weekend. We remembered the event very differently. Might as well live to the fullest. You mean before that 9am brunch? You may not even know who the person is, but as long as your friends are going, youre good to go. Thats ridiculous! I worked here for over 6 months before I finally found a colleague who knew the phone extension for security I couldnt find the security phone number anywhere, and no one else seemed to know either (I wanted to commit the number to memory for emergencies). Don't be caught in an argument with someone, be calm and friendly with everyone. My sons had fire drills, but no active shooter drills. Im so sorry this is the world were living in. If you miss your drill weekend without contacting the Reserve unit and securing permission in advance, you incur an unexcused absence. So I can see the value of having people exposed to, and not react to, something like a helicopter or other distraction. they understand that all you need to do is stay in bed (and watch a movie you just bought). If you are deemed unfit for duty, you will be sent home. Work from home dont only give you the benefit of only flexible working time and let you sleep a little later than normal. No matter how frequent people use it,this one never gets old. But the elderly retired people didnt evacuate, even the ones who can do stairs. Id call in sick the day before as well better cover story. I cant see how this should take more than half an hour or so at most. For many units, one of these traditions is Drill Weekend. Drill Weekend is a chance for soldiers to get away from the daily grind and focus on training. Therefore, an entire weekend can add up to four unexcused absences. The kind of situation that can easily develop really complex emergencies that take skilled professionals to safely respond. And if my boss gave me grief about it Id jump straight to calling a lawyer. The timeline itself would be enough for me to push back. What's a Good Excuse To Tell Your Boss Not to Work on the Weekends? Are there many gossipers in your work place? Career success is just inches from your hands. Attend events and functions, volunteer for leadership positions, and just generally be a positive presence within your unit. Im so sorry for what you went through, Doc of the Town. If you are in the National Guard or Reserves, you may be required to participate in drill weekends. This is typically one weekend a month, plus two weeks during the summer. Sadly, its not a very exclusive club. This article may contain affiliate links. Im so sorry. For anyone to work in a position where they may have to do non-violent restraint and not have hands-on training in a controlled environment is INCREDIBLY dangerous and would open your facility to a huge amount of liability, both civilly and criminally. With Katrina, it was a mix of local ordinances & state laws which essentially banned communications on specific frequencies. But its a good skill to have that will serve you well in your career. Ive always thought stomach flu was the best excuse. Take the day off. The LW said this drill was being run by law enforcement. You're Sick 2. Cookie Notice In college, we watched Run/Hide/Fight training videos and we all glanced at the massive glass windows in the classroom to the hallway. Can I skip this seven-hour training? I dont see whats gained by including all the waiting/hiding time. The trainings have been optional. There is an entire industry built around mass shootings. I have mild to moderate claustrophobia, and theres absolutely no way Id ever participate in an escape room. Scaring the sh*t out of people isnt helpful. A training session with law enforcement might be okay if it was structured like a q&a or generally sought to give information rather than simply a mocked up experience. Getting excused from Drill? : r/army - reddit.com Even if it doesnt, she would still have to face a conversation about it the next time she shows up to work, so it doesnt help the problem any. You're going to an important family event 2. Total wild west time no supervision by an expert or law enforcement. Weve talked about where to run to and how to get the heck away from our building as fast as possible more than once. I think state law might require us to do x number a year. Even if it isnt, its going to take a while,and you may not be able to make it up. I escaped HS 2 years before columbine was 8.5 mo preggo during SandyHook. But I totally have done it when I wasnt feeling great. So it just doesnt arise as a thought in the way that, say, the possibility of sexual harassment or sexual violence is always part of my situational awareness. You need to see that your fear is that a single instance will make you one of the people he isnt nice to, and that is terrifying. If youre lucky or skilled enough to have made it to the finals, theres no reason why you should have to miss out because of work. And sad no, more angry, I think that you had to go to such lengths to get excused from that training. excuses to get out of drill weekend As a result of that experience and the PTSD that it caused, my elder kid takes a sick day any time there is an event or training or other triggering occurrence at work. The training process can take awhile, so dont expect to be an expert overnight. Because Labor Day is around the corner and we're all thinking about that coveted three-day weekend, we thought we'd come up with a list of the Top 10 Excuses to Get Out of Work, brought to you by Bloodsucking Bastards, a comedy/horror film featuring the one office you'd like to work in even less than your own. If you have one disgruntled employee in your midst, that person now knows there will be a seven-hour interval in which everyone will be expecting what they think is a simulation of gun violence. Not because she is a cold person (quite the opposite) but because its as common in the States as hearing about a traffic accident in Australia. Can confirm, this works well. But theres no reason why you cannot ask in advance for a weekend where youre not rostered on. But I mostly just want to call OP out. But its hard, if not impossible to learn anything when in the throes of a panic attack or PTSD symptoms. A.C is the editor-in-chief & career development expert who writes about real-world career advice on job search, interviews, career success, and hiring the right people for the team. But in terms of living vs. surviving, it doesnt affect me at all in the way LW described. This goes on your permanent military record and can affect your career negatively. To enhance the dramatic effect, you can fill up your voice with tears and can have a catharsis you were longing for. Just type I got a call from my father in the morning today, and he is here in town for some work business. Same. Every person is different, and in the LW case I would agree she has done active shooter drills, so her choice to do something to avoid and additional drill of this type (talk to mgmt or call sick, I have my opinion but irrelevant to her choice). You are sick. (They literally had us hiding in our offices while the public was still in our spaces creating a safety hazard while doing safety training!) Its much, much better. 3. Either, they will be worried, or angry, or blatantly say 'no' to your suggestions of going away. This is especially true if you have school-aged children. Wed sooner head for somewhere in Europe or Australia (where we have no ties) first. Its a little trickier because youve already told him youd rather not attend, but if this is the easiest of the options for you, you can do it. (And imo no child should be doing in-depth active shooter training beyond heres the exit route, heres how to lock the door, but Im not a parent and I know this stuff is tough.).