When Crystal Reynolds Fisher texted her boss that she would not be able to come to work while her son clung to life support, the response that came back shocked her.
“That isn’t how we do things, so I’ll accept that you’re quitting,” said her boss at a local PS Food Mart branch in Michigan.
The mother texted the manager, Dawn, 48 hours ahead of her scheduled shift to let her know her 18-year-old son’s condition has worsened. He had been transported to a University of Michigan hospital, where he was placed on life support due to complications after a bacterial infection.
Distraught, Fisher decided to share the messages on social media, captioning the screenshots, “So my son is on life support and I tell my boss 48 hours before I am to work again that I will not be able to work until my son is off life support and this is what she tells me!”
https://www.facebook.com/crystal.fisher.583/posts/1958947490804482
Fisher’s Facebook friends inundated the post with comments, wishing her son a fast recovery and expressing disbelief of her boss’s crass behavior.
“This can NOT be a real conversation and a real human being,” a Facebook user wrote.
“What the hell is wrong with her? Doesn’t she not have kids?????? I’m so sorry,” another said.
But the exchange was only the latest in Fisher’s boss’s hostile attitude. Several days earlier, when Fisher’s daughter called Dawn to say her brother has flailed with a 104-degree fever and her mother could not come to work after suffering panic attacks, the boss snapped that Fisher should have been the one phoning her.
The incident reached the corporate offices of Folk Oil Company, the owner of PS Food Mart, where top executives sided with Fisher, assuring her she could take as many days off as she needed.
In a statement, publicized by the CBS News , the company said it has fired Fisher’s manager.
“We’d like to follow up on the issue brought to our attention recently regarding how an employee time off request was handled by one of our managers,” the statement posted on Facebook reads. “We investigated and have found that the situation was handled improperly and without the compassion that we value as a company. For that, we are very sorry.”
“My concern is when my son does wake up and when he does open his eyes, he sees mommy there,” Fisher said, grateful to her employer.
Fisher also started a GoFundMe campaign to help ease the financial strain her son’s condition is causing on the family. On the page she says she is a single mother of three children, whose father had passed away.