Maternity leave is sacred. You’re busy rearing a child, and that happens to take up a lot of your life. You don’t always have time to stop and answer an email. And your team should know this. They should know to respect the boundaries of your leave and not bother you with stuff that can easily wait until you get back. But that doesn’t stop some people from doing way too much. Some folks just want to make everyone else suffer so they can feel a little bit better about themselves. That’s what happened in this story. 

An employee was on maternity leave and understandably didn’t check her email. She was on leave, after all. And when she came back to do the difficult work of sorting through all her emails, she made sure to catch up on training that had come up when she was gone. The problem was that her company didn’t believe her. They thought she was slacking on her duties and did their best to make her feel bad about it even after her boss had defended her.