Boss Demands She Cut All Employee Access To Work Over The Weekend, But He Is Furious When He Realizes That Means His Access Is Cut Too

Ryan McCarthy

6 months ago

Anyone working under someone has been on the receiving end of an absolutely ridiculous request.

The type of request that makes you blink twice and read it again, that makes you power down your computer and reload it just to make sure there hasn’t been some kind of mistake.

And you have two options, try to argue what ridiculous consequences carrying out this request would entail, or complying and watching the firestorm rain down around you.

But at this user’s story shows, sometimes your boss only learns how stupid they’re being from seeing the results of their own request!

So when this user cut off all employee access to company systems over the weekend on her boss’ request, he didn’t realize that everyone would be including him!

Check it out!

Boss wants to cut off ALL employees and workers from their email access over the weekend but doesn’t understand the consequences

The story starts with me and my company, I’m a 30-year-old businesswoman who works in an IT service in a bank space.

I’m the girl for everything basically, but I’m a specialist for first level support, administration and backup, sometimes even networking.

Even though I’m not head of my IT department, I’m basically had all the responsibilities of them, but unfortunately my pay grade doesn’t reflect that at all.

I think of the boss of my IT department as kinda lazy if not incompetent, he even brags about getting so much money for basically doing nothing.

And OP said with her boss doing nothing, it was her responsibility to keep everything running.

I have a 40-hour week, but since the whole IT department is my responsibility I need to keep track of the servers and maybe problems that can occur 24/7, this is mostly done via emails.

When the server status gives out a warning or a failure, I will get notified, and then I’m fixing the problem over remote desktop or going to the company itself (even in my free time).

I wouldn’t mind, but I’m not getting paid for this. On the other hand, I’m getting punished when something is going wrong.

OP’s first issue was about something seemingly trivial, but still infuriating: the dress code.

My Bosses Boss wasn’t that much better. Since it was a fancy Bank, everyone should be in a suit the whole time to make it look professional, or for girls a skirt and high heels.

Only problem is when you work in the first level support you need to do a lot of “behind the scenes” work.

Like slipping under the desk to do or repair cable management, doing work on the server rack and doing lots of other activities that makes you dirty.

You can imagine that this wore out my business clothes really, really quickly and not only that, they were so impractical and really made my work harder.

So OP took some liberties with the dress code, much to her

So I changed my clothes to a comfy Hoody and work pants to fit the work I’m doing a bit better.

When my Boss saw me, he was furious, demanded I can’t look like “a poor hobo” inside his bank.

I told him that I demand work clothes for both occasions because they are expensive and gets worn out quickly. He refused, and I wasn’t really happy about this.

But the main problem came when OP’s boss wanted to implement some new rules for working over the weekend…

Someday, my Bosses Boss (head of the whole company) called me. He had a plan.

He wanted to create “quiet hours”, means he didn’t want his employees working on weekends to let them rest properly.

At first glance, you could say : Hey, that’s a nice idea. Yeah…. no, he just didn’t like to pay them for overwork, because he got in some legal trouble with overwork paying in general.

Not only that, some employees have strict deadlines and need the extra time to get work done. To actively ensure nobody can’t work over the weekend, he wanted the following :

“Please make sure NO ONE can access their emails and remote desktop over the weekend, no exceptions!”

OP made sure that this was what her boss wanted…

Since we had a ticket system and be able to attach emails to tickets, I ask him to write and official work task.

This has two reasons. First, I like everything documented. Second, I have something to protect myself if the task I was giving is incorrect. And it’s exactly this that saved me.

So I was in my office desk again, thinking how to get the task done and what implication it will have and then… it was clear to me what it meant!

The email came from my Boss with the Task and indeed he wrote : “for EVERYONE, NO EXCEPTIONS”.

So she put the new standards into place, just like her boss asked!

I was thinking to myself : Should I write them, the implications it would have? After thinking, I thought of how I am treated as a worker and I… decided against it.

I was working immediately at this task and made an automated process to block every access to emails after Friday 6PM to Monday 6AM.

Weekend came, and it was Saturday, and I was relaxed because by cutting down EVERYONE’s emails, this means of course… that I don’t receive any updates on the Servers.

I can’t possibly work on it because my remote access is also cut, of course. I couldn’t forward the updates to my personal email because of strict data protection we had.

But when the boss saw the implications of his system, he was none too happy!

It’s still Saturday, middle of the day, I’m cooking myself and my husband a nice meal and my telephone rings, it’s my Bosses Boss!

He talks with a stressed voice and told me that he can’t access his emails. I needed a second to process this, but I responded.

“That doesn’t surprise me at all, since you ordered me to cut EVERYONE’s email access, without exceptions”.

He was angry, very angry, and told me that this obviously doesn’t count for him. I told him that he specifically told me that they are NO exceptions, and he stated EVERYONE.

When her boss tried to backtrack, OP read his own words back to him!

He then argued that this wasn’t how he phrased it, so I reread him his own email. After that, he was silent for a moment. He noticed his flaw in his logic.

I broke the silence and ask him : “Sir, if you still want access to your emails on the weekend, that’s no problem, please send me a request per email and I work on first thing on Monday.”

A bit angry again, he replied that he wants to have it done immediately, and I calmly explained to him that I can’t do this, since my remote access is also blocked, like he ordered.

He hung up.

That wasn’t the last call she got from her boss, but this time his attitude was very different!

10 minutes later, he calls me again. He asks me calmly if I can fix the problem right now when he pays me for my overwork.

He also wants me to be available at any time (meaning I should receive my emails and be able to remote work) and that this will raise my pay grade by a lot.

I thought that this was the perfect opportunity. I agree to that condition and pay raise, but only when my coworkers and I finally get work clothes. He agreed.

Since then my work situation drastically improved and mostly only because I maliciously complied, well aware of the consequences of the given task.

Good for OP, she got everything she wanted from her job, and it was all because she followed her boss’ orders!

Reddit loved seeing her get the recognition and compensation she so richly deserved, and this user suggested everyone keep the same records that OP did!