Boss fires employee over her extra long lunch break and people are divided

We've all stretched our lunch breaks as much as reasonably possible once or twice - using whatever reason we can muster to give ourselves an extra few minutes.

The lift took ages to come, the queue in Pret was wild, the lady at reception was talking your ear off and you couldn't get away.

But one woman's excuse for her extra long lunch break lead to her boss firing her.

Real estate boss Troy Holmes, who is based in Australia, recently took to TikTok to share his 'worst employee story.'

Holmes explained that, back in 2014, he'd hired a personal assistant while working as a real estate agent.

He was really impressed by the woman during her interview and decided to take her on as an employee.

But during her first few weeks on the job, Holmes said things were 'a little bit off.'

"She seemed to not be able to follow instructions," he said. "She seemed to disappear for a few hours at a time."

Mr Holmes got increasingly frustrated at the woman's apparent lack of accountability until one day, things came to a head when she failed to return from her lunch break.

She was given a lunch break for an hour at midday and since it was a busy day, Holmes emphasised how important it was for her to come back on time.

"I said to her, 'just make sure you're back on time'," he said. "She's 15 minutes late back from lunch and I'm like 'okay, we've really got stuff to do'."

This, he says, lead him to give a call - only for her to tell him she had 'fallen over' and 'couldn't get up'.

Holmes races down to her location and when he arrives, he said she simply stood up and got in the car.

According to Holmes, she said: "I tried to get back to work and I started to run and my heart stopped and then I fell over."

He said that moment was 'the last straw' before he decided to fire her.

Some TikTok users took to the comments of the video to share their opinion.

Some agreed with him, as one person wrote: "I would've terminated her too."

Someone else said: "I’ll back you for your leadership decision to let her go, I would’ve too."

While a few shared their own experiences, with one person saying that someone once went off for lunch 'for 3 days' before preceding to come back 'like nothing had happened'.

However, others were a bit more concerned with how he'd dealt with the situation.

One commenter said Holmes needed to have a 'long hard look at himself', while another said he wasn't 'coming off very good' in his video.

To which he replied: "That's fine, maybe I didn't explain it well enough. I'm totally comfortable with how I treated my staff."

Another commenter said: "Look up sudden cardiac arrest, it happened to me."

In response, he further clarified that her 'entire demeanour changed to perfectly fine' when he offered her medical assistance, adding: "She then pretended the whole thing didn't happen."