I’m a recent graduate and work for a huge public insurance company; I am in my first year of a rotation program within the corporate accounting and finance department. There is an event for people in this program, starting with a two hour happy hour today after work and an all day event tomorrow from 8-5:30 (normal work hours 9-5). The DiSC assessment is involved so I know this is to scout for upper management potential in employees. I have a puppy and take public transportation, so I RSVP’d no because my dog would be alone for over 11 hours tomorrow. I blamed my sister working a lot but in reality I didn’t want to come in by 8 am I’d have to get up so much earlier. Turns out because I RSVPd no, upper management reached out to my manager to poke around, assuming I wasn’t able to go because of work responsibilities. I get a teams message from my boss saying in the future to let them know if I can’t attend events so they can work something out, because and I quote “the senior management team takes time out of their day to put these events together and participation is strongly encouraged.” Well make it inside of work hours then. I already spend 50% of my time awake during the week working, and they want to steal even more of my time so they can judge my potential value. Definitely pissed me off.