Every coin has two sides, as has the viral online controversy between a luxury Khao Yai hotel employee and her boss, who refused her leave to be with her dying mother or to attend her mother’s funeral.

The matter came to light when the employee, “Ploy”, posted a screengrab of her conversation with her boss, identified only as “Phi Kob”, in which the boss refused her request for time off to attend her mother’s funeral. She even demanded that Ploy return to the hotel to resign.

The controversy went national when the Labour minister stepped in, after Thai netizens criticised her boss harshly for being what they described as unfair and unsympathetic.

It ended up with the internal transfer of Phi Kob and the hotel apologised over the matter.

On August 19^th, however, an X (Twitter) user, “I am Little My”, quoted an executive he knew as saying Ploy should have taken the matter to her superiors or human resources, rather post it on social media.

“If Ploy quits her hotel job and applies to my company, I would certainly not recruit her, fearing that she may tell the public about my firm’s internal affairs again,” he said.

Phi Kob did not handle the situation correctly, when she refused Ploy’s requests, but Ploy also mishandled the situation by posting the internal conversation on the social media.

Another X user, “Nakin”, responded that, from Ploy’s point of view, her mother was sick and later died, she had no time to lodge a complaint with upper management.

User “I am Little My” responded saying that he understood the situation and, if he were Ploy, he would have attended the funeral anyway and returned to work after the funeral and filed a complaint about Phi Kob.

Some X users said they wished to hear Phi Kob’s point of view and why she reacted like that.

They said maybe Ploy took too many personal leave days, forcing her colleagues to work on her behalf. So, that may be why Phi Kob did not believe Ploy, although she posted photos of her mother in hospital and, later, of her mother’s funeral.

“There must be something that we do not know that made Phi Kob act like that. It is quite difficult to believe that Phi Kob would be such a heartless person,” one of them wrote.

They agreed that they will probably never know the other side of this coin, as Phi Kob is unlikely to tell her side of the story and the netizens may have already moved on anyway.

by Marisa Chimprabha