We are a small company. We operate the HQ office with less than a handful of people and have sales reps in different areas. All in all, company employee list is under 20. Company does very well for itself and boss is an older man (80's) who lives alone and still manages to own several expensive vehicles, but only only keeps about 3 of them on rotation. I digress.
As most of our employees aren't local, we set a Thursday lunch at a fairly fancy restaurant (that boss chose himself), and had 4 people flying in for a day or two to attend the sales meeting in the morning and then the whole office lunch in the afternoon.
One rep had a parent pass away and ended up having to be out of the country for a couple of months. On Tuesday another rep (the one that lives most local) tell boss she's got the flu and doesn't look like she'll be able to attend.
Boss calls mid-morning Wednesday and says if 2 people can't make it to the sales meeting it's kind of pointless and told me to cancel the meeting AND THE LUNCH that would have included 6 additional people. I had to call 3 people a couple hours before their flights and tell them not to come. One was already here.
That afternoon we discuss his holiday card list and he chose to leave off employees because he “already sent them a thanksgiving card”.
We canceled last year's meeting and lunch the week of, as well. I still haven't met some reps after working here almost 2 years.
I'll tell you what, though – it was a solid push to brush up my resume and rage apply to some better paying places.