A Good Employee Never Sleeps, Silly

I worked for an office for a couple of years. My start time was 9:00 am and I left at 5:00 pm, Monday through Friday. Our office had a messaging system kind of like Skype on our computers where we could instant-message each other. We could only see these instant messages when we were logged into our work computers during our work hours.

One day, I came into work at 9:00 am and saw this message.

Boss: “I need you to work on getting those letters sent out. They are urgent.”

The message was sent at 3:00 am. About fifteen minutes later:

Boss: “[My Name], did you get the letters sent out?”

About five minutes after I clocked in, the boss sent me this instant message.

Boss: “[My Name], did you get those letters sent out? I told you they were urgent.”

Me: “No, I just got here and saw your messages that were sent to me at three o’clock this morning.”

Boss: “Oh, well, then work on this now if you can.”

I am not an on-call employee. I don’t know why he would message me in the middle of the night knowing we can only see the messages when we are logged into our work computer. And this was not the first time he had done that; he had also sent me instant messages around midnight before saying that he needed work completed right away. 

I suppose he thinks that we stay up all night in front of our computers, checking our messages.