If you have a customer facing job at a business that’s open 24/7, and if you’re the only person working your shift, that basically means you can’t leave until your replacement shows up at work, right? Maybe not.

In today’s story, an employee is in this exact situation, but the boss doesn’t want the employee to clock out late. Does that mean the employee should leave the business unattended or stay until the next employee shows up?

Let’s see how the story plays out…

Clock out exactly at the end of my shift? Okay!

Some context: I work overnights at a well known gym franchise that I will not name.

My typical shift is 10pm-6am.

Usually there is always supposed to be 2 people on night shift together, but lately my coworkers have been calling off a lot, causing me to be in the gym alone all night.

Sam is often late for work.

My coworker, let’s call her Sam, comes in at 6am when I get off.

Here’s the problem, Sam doesn’t usually come in on time, she is usually always 10-15 minutes late.

So onto the problem.

The boss is mad that OP is working past 6am.

Since Sam comes in late, I tend to have to stay clocked in past 6am.

Additionally, since I’m usually alone at night, I can’t get any important tasks done until Sam comes in.

My boss noticed my time cards, and got very upset that I haven’t been clocking out right at 6am.

He made me feel really crappy despite constantly being on the blunt end of all his scheduling messes.

Time for malicious compliance…

So I told him okay. I will leave exactly at 6am.

So that’s what I’ve been doing.

I’ve been leaving the gym entirely unattended until someone gets there, and most of the time, no one does for a while.

The manager doesn’t know how to solve this problem.

So now members are confused.

My manager doesn’t know what to do considering he is the one who scolded me for staying past 6am.

He thought that I would just clock out and stay, off the clock, but why would I do that?

I was not going to take the fall for someone else consistently being late…

He won’t fire me or write me up because this is technically what he wanted.

It seems like the solution would be to fire Sam and hire someone who will show up on time.

Let’s see how Reddit reacted to this story…

This comment is dripping with sarcasm.

The manager needs to address the real problem.

This reader shares how factories solve this problem.

The solution isn’t that hard to figure out.

It’s a bad idea to work for free.

If the boss says to clock out, then it’s time to go home!

Thought that was satisfying? Check out what this employee did when their manager refused to pay for their time while they were traveling for business.