Just about every job out there has an employee manual, even if most people never read them.

What would you do if your boss told you to read the manual and while doing it, you discovered that you weren’t being compensated properly?

That is what the security guard in this story had happen, and it worked out very well for him.

Check it out.

Read the Employee Manual so you don’t look lazy…

I was working in a small hospital as a security guard to help pay my way through college.

I am male with long hair and my boss was a clean cut beefy ex-football player and hated that I was far more intelligent (pre-med) and could handle situations far better than he ever expected me to.

I helped install a security camera system on every entrance and busy hallways to the hospital.

Good use of your time.

Rather than eating meals by myself in the cafeteria I would take my meals to the security office and watch the cameras since I could cover more ground and still eat in peace.

I would do paperwork there and watch the cameras as well.

He came to me one night hoping to catch me slacking.

Wow, what a jerk.

“You know… You look lazy just sitting here so please read the Employee Manual while you are sitting here. You might actually LEARN something!”

So one night I get bored enough to pull down the Employee Manual and read it between my rounds.

Sure enough they weren’t paying us for ‘on-call’ time.

Not only that, they were paying us wrong for when we got called in during our ‘on-call’ hours and any time we got called we were supposed to be paid from the time we were paged until we arrived back home at no less than 1 hour per call and rounded up to the half hour.

Great job letting everyone know!

I promptly photocopied the page, highlighted the section, placed a copy in each security guards messages box, and across the hall on the Human Resources ladies desk.

I even printed off the time sheets and corrected it for proper pay I was owed ($700 or so) from the past 2 years and left copies in HR and my bosses desk.

The next day during my day off I received a call from our secretary saying I needed to come in immediately.

I walked in to the secretary just smiling at me, my supervisor grinning from ear to ear, and my boss mad as hell.

I sat quietly while he berated me about this BS move I had just pulled.

To which I replied, “If I recall you told me to ‘read the Employee Manual so I don’t look lazy’ so I did.’

Come on boss, act professional.

At this point he was threatening me and screaming so loudly he could be hear way down the hallway.

He was threatening to fire me for ‘insubordination’ and a list of other ‘infractions’.

I simply stared at him and said “I think we should talk to Human Resources.”

I stood up and walked across the hall with him screaming at me the whole way as he stood up to follow me.

I knocked on the open door, “Hey Rhonda! Did you get my memo and corrected time sheet?”

She simply smiled and said “I sure did! I’ll cut your check as soon as I can!”

I replied, “And did you catch Larry threatening to fire me for reading the Employee Manual like he told me to?”

“I sure did hun. And you don’t need to worry about your job. You are safe here and if you need to file a complaint we heard everything.”

Oh, I bet he was mad.

I turned around to find Larry fuming and red in the face.

He turned around and walked out of the hospital to go cool off.

Our secretary, my supervisor, and HR all just stood there and broke out laughing.

I looked at our secretary and said, “Could you please log my hour for the time I had to come in for this?”

Best $700 check I ever cashed!

Wow, put his boss in his place and got a nice check, what could be better?

Let’s read some of the comments about this fun story.

Sadly, people like this often just move up.

Very valuable information.

Not sure why he got so emotional about it.

Right, most bosses would be thrilled if the guard was watching the cameras.

He likely just avoided him.

It is hard to understand how some people keep their jobs.

But hey, at least he’s getting paid what he’s owed!

If you enjoyed this story, check out this post about a daughter who invited herself to her parents’ 40th anniversary vacation for all the wrong reasons.