My work has a rule where at the end of the day, everybody has to walk out together for safety reasons, so if someone has, say, lost their car keys, it does delay everybody. But if it's more than a couple minutes, the next-highest-ranking person volunteers to stay as the second person, and sends everyone else home. And a stuck zipper shouldn't even cause that, unless she was like, trapped inside the coat and couldn't move her arms, or it was so cold it would be literally dangerous to walk to the car with an open coat. The most likely explanation is that she could have gone to her car and fixed it later, but that this kind of solution just doesn't occur to these people.
(I had a manager who would make everybody wait after clocking out every day while she used the bathroom because 'she had a long drive home'. It simply did not occur to her that this was not a suitable solution to that problem.)
It seems like there's an unusually long list of things where the manager being a bit off her game disproportionately inconveniences everybody else. That's stuff you can fix in the interests of general office efficiency without becoming her assistant. The advice about getting copies of the keys is a good start. One person losing their parking ticket shouldn't delay the whole line for half an hour, either - either there's something wrong with how the garage is managed, or she was deliberately delaying everything because she didn't want to pay the fine. Deal with it and move them along!
no subject
My work has a rule where at the end of the day, everybody has to walk out together for safety reasons, so if someone has, say, lost their car keys, it does delay everybody. But if it's more than a couple minutes, the next-highest-ranking person volunteers to stay as the second person, and sends everyone else home. And a stuck zipper shouldn't even cause that, unless she was like, trapped inside the coat and couldn't move her arms, or it was so cold it would be literally dangerous to walk to the car with an open coat. The most likely explanation is that she could have gone to her car and fixed it later, but that this kind of solution just doesn't occur to these people.
(I had a manager who would make everybody wait after clocking out every day while she used the bathroom because 'she had a long drive home'. It simply did not occur to her that this was not a suitable solution to that problem.)
It seems like there's an unusually long list of things where the manager being a bit off her game disproportionately inconveniences everybody else. That's stuff you can fix in the interests of general office efficiency without becoming her assistant. The advice about getting copies of the keys is a good start. One person losing their parking ticket shouldn't delay the whole line for half an hour, either - either there's something wrong with how the garage is managed, or she was deliberately delaying everything because she didn't want to pay the fine. Deal with it and move them along!