It’s a well-known fact that you have to keep an eye on employers these days, because everyone is pretty much out for themselves.

Even in 2014, OP’s employer was up to something when they requested that all employees fax in their timesheet in order to be paid on time.

I worked for an agency which supplied staff to the railways on an temporary basis.

They were very old fashioned and as part of our employment contract they stated that our hand-completed time sheets had to be faxed by 7:00pm on the Thursday for us to be paid on the Friday.

If they didn’t, their pay would be delayed for a week.

Time sheets that were emailed even before 7:00pm would result in wages not being paid until the following Friday.

Obviously they chose the most inconvenient way as it was 2014 and nobody had a fax machine, so that they were able to legally retain our wages in their account for an extra week.

OP realized his printer at home had a special feature…

But my printer at home had a fax machine built in that I never used 😉

So after my first week, I plugged in my printer to the phone line, faxed my time sheet to the agency and waited.

When he still didn’t get paid, he made sure to let his employer know.

The next day, I still hadn’t been paid.

So I phoned them and asked why I hadn’t been paid but the response was explained in a dull voice by somebody who had obviously repeated the same sentence so many times that it had lost all meaning to her.

“As explained in your contract, only time sheets that have been faxed to us are paid the next day. If you’ve emailed it, your wages will be paid the following week”.

“But I did fax it!”

They got it corrected and now he faxes everyone’s timesheets every week.

She gathered her thoughts for a moment before replying ”Oh… err ok? Which number did you fax it to?”

So I gave her the number I faxed it to which was correct.

”Um… ok.. I’ll just place you on hold”

She came back on the phone a couple of minutes later.

”Ok, yes we’ve got it. Sorry, I can’t remember the last time somebody actually faxed their timesheet to us! I’ll get that paid now.”

As you can imagine, I told my colleagues the following day and from then on, they all gave their timesheets to me to fax when I got home so they got paid on-time.

At the time I wondered if they’d drop the silly fax vs email rule but it continued and so every week I’d fax in half a dozen timesheets to them.

Score one for the little guy.

Some people just don’t want to give up the ghost.

Luckily the tech people had us covered.

10 years later, some folks are still holding on.

Apparently, causing a hassle is just fun.

I mean honestly.

This was quite the racket.

I’m glad OP decided to help out his fellow employees, too.

If you liked that post, check out this post about a rude customer who got exactly what they wanted in their pizza.