Bosses micromanaging their employees and making their lives unnecessarily harder for no reason is becoming a trope.

In this man’s case, everything was fine until his boss demanded that he stay late, even though he had absolutely nothing left to do at the office.

So he stayed as he requested, but not as he expected.

Let’s read the story.

boss demands overtime pay for zero work?? Okay!!

So, this happened a while back, but the memory still brings a smirk to my face whenever I think about it.

I used to work for a company where the boss had this habit of demanding that we stay late, even when there was absolutely no work left to be done.

It was one of those toxic environments where productivity was measured by the hours you spent at your desk rather than the actual output of your work.

He knew how the place worked and that there was no use arguing against it.

One day, after wrapping up all my tasks well before the end of the day, my boss came over and told me that I needed to stay late because “that’s just how things are done around here.”

Mind you, there was literally nothing left for me to do.

Now, instead of arguing or trying to reason with him, I decided to play along with his ridiculous demand for overtime pay.

I nodded, grabbed a book I had been meaning to read, and settled back into my chair.

Time to “work”!

For the next two hours, I sat at my desk, flipping through pages, occasionally pretending to jot down notes, and looking as busy as possible.

At the end of those two hours, my boss came by to check on me, expecting to see me toiling away at some imaginary task.

Instead, he found me reading a novel.

Uh-oh. How dare he?

He looked puzzled and asked, “What are you doing?”

With a straight face, I replied, “Well, you asked me to stay late, so I figured I might as well put in some overtime. This book has been on my reading list for a while.”

Needless to say, my boss was speechless.

Staying late doesn’t automatically mean working late, right?

He couldn’t really argue with me since he had asked me to stay late, and I was technically still on the clock.

From that day forward, he never asked me to stay late unless there was actual work to be done.

Malicious compliance at its finest.

His boss asked him to stay, and he did.

Let’s see what Reddit has to say about this.

A reader shares their experience.

A similar story.

Thanks for the time off!

Why not grind a bit?

Another reader chimes in.

At least this person recognizes it.

Now he has some scheduled reading time.

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.