Nowadays, a lot of business is conducted via email.

I can’t remember the last time I ever saw anyone talk about faxing something.

Oh, wait. This story, this story is the last time I heard a story about faxing, and even when this story took place faxing was outdated.

Travel with me back to 2014 to learn how a company tried to delay paying their employees with a weird timesheet rule.

Check it out.

Employer only paid us on-time if we FAXED our timesheets

This happened about 10 years ago when I was working on the railways near London.

I worked for an agency which supplied staff to the railways on an temporary basis.

They were very old fashioned and as part of our employment contract they stated that our hand-completed time sheets had to be faxed by 7:00pm on the Thursday for us to be paid on the Friday.

Time sheets that were emailed even before 7:00pm would result in wages not being paid until the following Friday.

They probably thought nobody had a fax machine.

Obviously they chose the most inconvenient way as it was 2014 and nobody had a fax machine, so that they were able to legally retain our wages in their account for an extra week.

But my printer at home had a fax machine built in that I never used 😉

So after my first week, I plugged in my printer to the phone line, faxed my time sheet to the agency and waited.

The lady on the phone wasn’t even listening.

The next day, I still hadn’t been paid.

So I phoned them and asked why I hadn’t been paid.

But the response was explained in a dull voice by somebody who had obviously repeated the same sentence so many times that it had lost all meaning to her.

“As explained in your contract, only time sheets that have been faxed to us are paid the next day. If you’ve emailed it, your wages will be paid the following week”.

“But I did fax it!”

She was pretty surprised…and honest!

She gathered her thoughts for a moment before replying ”Oh… err ok? Which number did you fax it to?”

So I gave her the number I faxed it to which was correct.

”Um… ok.. I’ll just place you on hold”

She came back on the phone a couple of minutes later.

”Ok, yes we’ve got it. Sorry, I can’t remember the last time somebody actually faxed their timesheet to us! I’ll get that paid now”

She helped her coworkers too.

As you can imagine, I told my colleagues the following day and from then on, they all gave their timesheets to me to fax when I got home so they got paid on-time.

At the time I wondered if they’d drop the silly fax vs email rule but it continued and so every week I’d fax in half a dozen timesheets to them.

That was a ridiculous rule!

It’s a good thing her printer had a fax machine!

Let’s see how Reddit reacted to this story.

This is ironic.

Apparently fax machines still exist.

Good one!

Now, this is how you get them to change the policy!

This is a ridiculous policy.

But at least they found a way around it.

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.