Sometimes driving is the worst way to get to work.

Imagine choosing to take public transportation to work instead of fighting traffic in your car.

What would you do if your company was willing to reimburse you to park in the parking garage but not willing to reimburse you for what it cost to take the train even though that was less than the price of parking?

The employee in today’s story has a clever plan!

Let’s see what it is.

Company will only reimburse parking, not transit? alright then.

A few years ago, I was working in Downtown Los Angeles, but living in San Diego.

For those of you who don’t know, that’s over 175-mile per day commute.

I wasn’t about to put my car through that, and so I took the train every morning to Union Station, then backtracked via Subway to the jobsite.

Wouldn’t it be nice to take the train for free?

The cost of the Amtrak weekly pass was basically the same price of gas, but I thought I’d try to get that extra $3.50/d from the subway covered since I wasn’t using the “parking reimbursement” in my contract.

The $17.50 per week wasn’t going to bankrupt me, but I figured I’d try.

Came to the boss and asked, basically, “Since I’m not driving to work and getting reimbursed for parking at $10, could I submit my subway receipts at $3.50 and get that covered?”

And was told to pound sand.

This was a clever work around!

Now, the way the reimbursement worked was that you pulled a parking slip when you got to work and paid it at the end of the day.

Then, on mondays, you would submit all 5 parking slips from the previous week, and the $50 would be added to your paycheck (untaxed, obviously).

So, every day from then on, when I took the train into work, I just walked into the parking structure and pulled a ticket.

I didn’t have a vehicle and so I didn’t need to worry about paying for the ticket to leave, but the contractor didn’t know that.

They didn’t have access to the system (which is why they didn’t validate everyone’s parking and skip the middle man) and as far as they knew, I was just driving in like everyone else.

Talk about perfect malicious compliance, and she got back a lot more money than she paid for the train!

Win win!

Let’s see how Reddit reacted to this story.

She should’ve shared this hack with coworkers.

That is a really long commute.

Moving would’ve made sense.

The drive to downtown LA really is a nightmare.

It always feels good when you can beat the system!

Stick it to the man!

If you liked that post, check out this one about an employee that got revenge on HR when they refused to reimburse his travel.