If you worked for a company where being late too many times meant you’d get fired, you’d probably do everything in your power to avoid being late.

But what would you do if there were a workaround for this, like a simple phone call?

Would you take the workaround and annoy management, or would you just leave home earlier every morning?

The employee in today’s story decides to make a phone call, and it really does annoy management!

Let’s find out why this works and why it’s so annoying.

Discipline Me for Being 22 Seconds Late Without Notice? Got it! Won’t Happen Again!

This happened several years ago because it was some malicious compliance that lasted for years.

My former employer uses a points-based system to track attendance.

The parts of the policy relevant to this story are:

Tardy with call-in prior to the start of shift: 1/2 point

Tardy with no call: 1 point

Accumulate enough points and you’re fired

Encountering a train at the wrong time could easily make you late.

There’s a set of train tracks crossing the street that leads to this facility.

Occasionally, trains will stop while blocking this crossing.

If you’re caught there in the last few minutes before you’re supposed to clock in, you have a decision to make: wait or go around.

Either way, you might be late.

It’s impossible to know which option will be faster.

Sometimes you’ll decide to go around and then the train clears the crossing and the folks who waited get in before you.

Sometimes you’ll wait and watch through the gaps in the train cars as folks who went around pull in to the parking lot while you’re still idling at a blocked train crossing.

To be clear, “going around” involves taking a lot of secondary county roads as well as a few field access roads (it’s an extremely rural area), so you literally never know what kind of road conditions you’re going to find along the way around.

The roads may even be entirely unusable during the winter months where snow covers them.

On this night, he decided to wait.

One night, during my years on third shift, I was stopped at these tracks and decided to wait.

Eventually the train moved on.

I raced into the parking lot, used my key card to zip through the turnstiles, and ran to the punch clock.

My clock in time was 10:30PM.

He arrived right on time.

They have these biometric punch clocks that read your fingerprint to clock employees in and out.

Sometimes these clocks just will not read your fingerprint.

I got to the punch clock and it said “10:30”. I’m golden.

It doesn’t track seconds.

Then there was another problem.

I entered my employee ID number and placed my finger on the sensor.

Three beeps: failed read.

Tried again. Three beeps.

Tried once more. Three beeps.

Nope, not trying again because by this time the clock was likely to tick over to 10:31 in the middle of reading my finger.

His manager was on his side.

When I got to my assigned work area, I told my team manager what happened.

He said don’t worry about it, he’d manually punch me in.

I should have listened. But I’m a worrier.

He was actually 22 seconds late.

In the morning, when the front office people started showing back up, I went to the attendance office to confirm that my situation was all good.

The office administrator decided to check my “gate time” and use that as the determining factor.

I scanned my key card at 10:30:22 PM.

That’s a tardy, no-call.

One full attendance point to be issued.

He wasn’t about to lose another point.

I reiterated that it was a train stopped on the tracks, completely beyond my control.

She advised me to either leave earlier (and just wait an extra half an hour for my shift to start on the majority of days) or else get a cellphone (I didn’t have one at all back then) to call in with from the road next time.

Well, what I did instead was start calling in absent “just in case something comes up after I leave home but before I arrive at work” in the evenings before leaving for work.

This became a problem.

The first few days the attendance office up front was just bemused.

After weeks, they became annoyed.

After months, they’d apparently complained enough and I finally got told to stop.

During the course of this conversation they revealed that calling in too early before the start of your shift made it extra challenging to make sure the notice gets to the right members of management, because the message is no longer flagged as “new” by the time they’re creating logs for the next shift.

He started calling in from work.

This was great news for me.

From then on, every morning before leaving the premises at the end of my shift, I used one of their phones to call in absent for my next shift that evening.

They tried to write me up for insubordination but the labor union slapped it down, pointing out that the collective bargaining agreement specifies the time we must call in by, but does not specify a time before which call-ins may not be made.

Cue the huge grin across my face.

He knows his team manger was a good guy.

I never forgot that my team manager tried to do me a solid though.

If I was actually going to be late or absent for some reason, I would call that TM’s desk line directly to let them know.

Even long after I finally got a cell phone, I continued doing this; I’d just call-in on my way home, instead of sticking around to use their phones after my shift.

Here’s how upper management reacted…

Found out years and years later from some union reps that upper management never got over this.

Drove them nuts that they got beat at their own game by something so simple.

It didn’t bring the walls crumbling down, but it was a persistent, enduring source of frustration and impotence for them.

And really, knowing you can manage all of that with just a 22 second phone call a day… that’s the kind of thing that gets you out of bed in the evening.

Okay, so let me get this straight.

He would get a point for being late but not for being absent, so he called in every day as if he were going to be absent to avoid getting a point for being late?

Let’s see how Reddit reacted to this story.

This does seem ridiculous.

It was malicious for a very long time!

Another person also loved how long the malicious compliance lasted.

Management needs to do better.

Petty managers create malicious employees.

And then the brass definitely loses.

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.