Being a few minutes late for work seems like it should be more of a big deal than being a few minutes early for work. Isn’t being early a good thing?

Not everyone seems to think so, like the coworker we meet in this story, but he’s about to find out the hard way that being on time actually creates a lot of problems.

Let’s read the whole story to see what’s going on.

They wanted me to be “precisely on time”.. so I did.

This occurred while I was still in apprenticeship at my current workplace, a few years ago.

It was never really commented on by management but was internal within my department.

We have an electronic time stamping system to log our work hours.

When we arrive/start work, we stamp in and when we leave, we stamp out.

The logged time is then uploaded at the end of the month and our monthly worked overtime is calculated.

Here’s how they usually started the work day.

At the time my daily habit was: If my shift started at 12.30, I’d leave home at 12.00 and be at work roughly 12:15 or 12:20, depending on traffic (In really bad cases it can be 12:25).

Now It’s relevant to know that for every hour there are timespans in which 2 people have to be present at work at all times. from 12.00 to 12:15, 12.30 to 12.45, 13.00 to 13.15 and so on.

So the employee could only leave his position when his replacement, in work clothes, was present and logged.

That’s why I was oftentimes quite early.

If I arrived at, say, 12.20 I’d immediately log in, change into my work clothes, and while I did that the colleague I replace could change clothes and go home since I’d be ready at 12.30 at least.

One colleague didn’t like this routine.

Now, there was one colleague who did NOT like that, mainly because I’d collect overtime for that, even though other colleagues could take that time off their schedule.

So he told me to be “logged in precisely on time”, at 12.30, though he wanted me to already be in my work clothes before logging in.

Since we aren’t allowed to wear our work clothes outside of work, including the work commute, he wanted me to be early at work to change my clothes, to send a colleague off so they could change their clothes (while still logged in) and leave for home, while myself only collecting the time my shift is.

So I did pretty much that.

Someone else would still get paid overtime.

I’d be at work at 12:25, if I was early I’d sit in my car in the parking lot and wait.

Then at 12.25 would go in, change my clothes and stamp in, which could take more than 5 minutes to do. and because I wasn’t early enough, my replacement could not leave early and would make overtime they didn’t want.

Of course most colleagues didn’t mind that, nobody cares about staying 10 minutes longer, but a certain colleague did ABSOLUTELY not like that.

This created more problems.

This entire thing then ended up backfiring on him, when I didn’t make enough work hours, since he also demanded I log out when I’m done with work early in the evenings.

So with each week my time account would shrink and shrink, they’d have me work additional days, but they could not do that all the time because as an apprentice I wasn’t allowed to work more than 5 days a week, which I already regularly did.

They also could not let me work additional hours per day because as an apprentice I wasn’t legally allowed to work more than 8 hours per day either.

Management noticed the change.

So of course at some point the department Management asked questions on “why I’m constantly missing hours”, on “why the apprentice is working weekends too often” and “why he is making 9 or 10 hour shifts”..

After a month, he stopped complaining about me being early, and ever since then things have worked flawlessly until corona hit.

If it isn’t broke, don’t fix it, and if you do “fix” it, it might actually break.

That seems to be what happened here.

Let’s see how Reddit reacted to this story.

This person asks a good question.

Another person shares a similar story.

Perhaps this employee should clock in even earlier!

This person barely clocks in on time.

Being early is not a bad thing.

But you don’t want to give anything away for free.

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.