I love the whole concept of being able to make up work if a person has an appointment or some kind of event that can’t miss.

Flexibility is good!

But some people approach it differently than others.

Check out what happened in this person’s workplace…

Working hours.

“I guess I have a short story from the opposite angle…I was the manager and the malicious compliance person was one of the guys on my team.

This was 10+ years ago and we were working at a software technology startup. It was a small company with only around 10 employees and I led the software engineering team of around 4 employees.

We hired a software engineer and he seemed good but there were a few red flags. We would go out to lunch and he would always order at least a few beers.

Hmmm…

We didn’t have any explicit rules against drinking alcohol during lunch so I just let it slide since it didn’t seem to affect his work in the afternoon.

And then the guy started disappearing early in the afternoon. Hours were somewhat flexible but most people would get into the office at around 9 am or so and leave at around 5 pm or so.

For a standard 40 hour work week (taking time off for lunch), it seemed relatively normal for most people and we had never had a problem with work hours in the past.

But this guy would usually disappear at around 3 or 4 in the afternoon and was coming in at around 9 or 10 am.

I’m actually not really a stickler when it comes to enforcement of work hours and I believe that as long as you get your work done you should be ok but as a startup there was always stuff to do and there was always a backlog of things to develop, etc.

As a small team we didn’t have much redundancy so guys would have questions for each other throughout the day, etc. It really did stand out as well because since there were only 10 people in the company the office space was pretty small, his absence was noticed by the CEO and other employees, etc.

What was really going on here?

I asked him about his frequent early departures and he just said that he had personal things to take care of sometimes like doctor appointments, dentist appointments, DMV to do something, etc…just random errands.

I told him that it’s all good and while we aren’t tracking time by the minute or anything like that, we generally expect people to work roughly 40 hours/wk and hopefully that’s not too unreasonable.

I suggested that maybe if he has an appoint so needs to leave say 1 hour early, he can also choose to come in an hour earlier on that day or he can choose to work a little later (like an extra hour) on another day to roughly make it up.

He made some comments about how he’s never worked at a company so strict before when it comes to work hours and that all of the other places where he worked never had an issue, etc.

Here we go again…

And sure enough, the next day when I came into the office I was told that when the office manager came to unlock and open the office, he said that the guy had been waiting at the front door since 4 am sitting there in the staircase because he was told that he needs to come in early if he’s going to leave early and since he was planning to leave at lunch he came in 5 hours early…

He gave notice shortly after that saying how unreasonable and strict we are…and he was gone a few weeks later.

Maybe I was in the wrong here but still seemed a bit odd at the time. FWIW, the whole come in a little early if you need to leave early thing seems to work even in my current companies, etc.”

Check out what folks said about this on Reddit.

This reader shared a story.

Another individual spoke up.

This reader chimed in.

Another individual shared their thoughts.

And this Reddit user had a lot to say.

That’s not what they meant…

If you liked that story, read this one about grandparents who set up a college fund for their grandkid because his parents won’t, but then his parents want to use the money to cover sibling’s medical expenses.