Company Decided To Change The Swing Shift Hours, So An Employee Decided To Stop Doing All Of The Work He Wasn’t Technically Required To Do
by Jayne Elliott
Change can be hard when you like what you’re used to, especially when the change impacts your sleep schedule.
In today’s story, one employee shares how his boss decided to change the swing shift hours and lied about what the new hours would be.
As a result, the employee decided to get revenge, and he finds the results of his revenge almost difficult to watch.
Let’s see how the story unfolds…
Boss breaks a promise? Welcome to the bare minimum.
I’ve worked in the outbound shipping department of a factory for almost 9 years, having been put into the swing shift since I started.
Let me preface this with the fact that I have always loved swing shift.
Its cooler in the summer once the sun goes down, and in the winter business slows down enough to get extra projects done and keep things moving smoothly and looking nice.
My base job has only really one requirement and that is to load trucks ( which takes about 10 minutes per) clean up my own messes ( which after doing the job for so long only happens when equipment fails) and storing the daily material samples.
There was talk of a change in the shift schedule.
About 6 months ago now, our new boss had started talks of switching our schedule from five 8 hour shifts to four 10 hour shifts.
This change had been thrown around for a long time and the kinks were finally being worked out.
We have 3 shifts changing their schedule, and the hours and days had finally been worked out.
Each shift got called into the boss’s office sometime this previous summer for a vote, a vote we were told had to be unanimous.
Now the hours for our shift weren’t perfect.
Our current shift is 3 pm to 11pm.
Living an hour from work, I have gone to bed at 1 am almost religiously for close to a decade.
It’s time to pick new schedules.
This new schedule handed to us had us working from 3 to 1 am.
With truck loading still closing at 10:30.
We talked it over with the boss, that we would vote yes on this schedule if it was changed to 2pm to midnight.
He agreed and we cast our yes votes.
A couple months pass by to August 30th.
We are asked to pick our schedules and days by seniority.
My current team and myself selected our swing shift positions, with my younger competent coworker staying on this shift only because of the hours we selected and because he wants fridays off instead of a dayshift spot with Mondays off.
His choice based on the fact that we are working 2 to midnight.
The schedule was different than what the boss promised.
We return to our work area and double checks with me those are still the hours, so I call the boss to confirm and to my surprise the boss says “No, the swing shift hours will be 3 pm to 1 am. With truck loading closing at 1030”.
When we confronted the boss the next day in person, he feeds us a bull answer that someone up in the office changed the schedule.
When pressured on this a few weeks later he admits it was him, and still gives us very weak answers on why.
Here’s where my pettiness shines. Sorry it took so long to here.
He decided on a way to get revenge.
Being in the department for almost 9 years I’ve scooped up quite a bit of extra work.
I’ve swept all three floors of our main truck loading area, ( a powdered aggregate loading facility gets dirty) I took over customer lists and stocking orders for the next day in our billing program.
I’ve taken over checking various sump pumps and preventative maintenance on equipment.
Additionally I would take it upon myself to gather up any loose tools I would find floating around and return them to our tool cage.
It sounds petty/stubborn even to me that I would abandon these for a change in bedtime.
I would be performing these tasks no more.
His revenge is having a big impact on the company.
This is all still ongoing but the facility has become almost a disaster zone.
There are piles of material all over the place, the office has almost a half an inch of dust on the floor and most surfaces are coated.
Nobody can find tools since they can’t be bothered to put them away when they use em.
Yet the pinnacle has yet to come.
I still check equipment even if I’m not performing maintenance, and their age is showing.
Most of the machines are coming up on 50 years old, with some being close to 70 and without the regular care are starting to show their age.
It hurts to watch them start to struggle and move slower than they should.
One of the older buildings even flooded over Christmas weekend, and while I cant attribute a broken pipe to my own handiwork, I probably would have caught it early if I was still checking the pumps and heaters in that building on Fridays.
He knows the revenge is going to get worse.
My locker has been cleaned out since the day he told us our votes were cast on a lie.
Which means I have none of my personal tools or any of the tools that were passed to my by the various people who used to perform my jobs.
I made careful steps to not take any tools that were company property, instead placing them in the department tool cages.
Interestingly enough, most of those tools have already disappeared because coworkers carry tools to a job and leave them there to be filled with dirt and grime.
There’s some other messes building, but I know this is long already.
This is still a work in progress.
I’m not sure if I’ll stick around to see how bad it gets.
It sounds like he was going above and beyond at work and stopped as a form of revenge.
It’s too bad the boss lied about the new schedule.
Let’s see how Reddit reacted…
This reader has a prediction of how the company will handle this situation.
Another reader thinks there are two possible long-term outcomes.
This person wonders if the boss notices any of the changes.
This person wonders why he ever went above and beyond at work.
I wonder what he does with all the extra time he must have at work now.
It must be nice to not have so much to do.
If you liked this post, check out this story about an employee who got revenge on a co-worker who kept grading their work suspiciously low.
Categories: STORIES
Tags: · boss, petty revenge, picture, reddit, schedule, swing shift, tools, top
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