Some companies have really weird rules about overtime. For example, in this story, the overtime worked is made up for on Friday by leaving work early.

This isn’t a very good approach, and it really backfired for the boss in this story.

Yet, all the employee did was what he was told to do!

Let’s see how it all plays out.

Don’t want to pay overtime, but wants overtime.

I’ve spoken to you many times about the rules on this project, so we do not need to go over this again:

1. You must take any overtime worked during the week on the Friday.
2. You cannot do overtime on the Friday.
3. You cannot negotiate this, we’ve been over it a million times. I am not interested in discussion.

So this is how the discussion with my boss began back when I did support.

It was almost impossible not to work overtime.

To give context this was a two year plan of migrating remote sites.

It wasn’t particularly complicated but in order to make things smoother we’d suggested migrating most of their data overnight. This would occur a couple of hours of overtime each week which the company were not happy having to pay – so they insisted we “take time off on the Friday instead”.

The problem was that two hours could easily jump to 4 or 5 if there was a complicated server setup and a lot of data.

These were old legacy systems with terrible connections, you had to babysit them and there was zero documentation.

He worked a lot of overtime.

One week well into the project the migration at night takes almost 7 hours, I’m in work the follow day (Tuesday) and I’m exhausted having had about 3 hours sleep.

I’m refused the day off as “it must be Friday”.

By Friday I have recovered and I’m looking forward to my 30 minute working day at this point.

He did as he was told.

I roll in, there’s been a ransomware incident at the previous weeks site. The I’m told to go there and help handle it.

So I do.

I spent my 30minutes driving to site, call up my boss “Hi Boss, just clocking off as it’s a Friday to take my hours back. Can you send X out here now as it looks like a right mess, see you on Monday.”

They quickly organised overtime payments for the remaining 23 weeks the project had to run.

FYI I did get told off on the Monday for my attitude but there was nothing they could do about it.

He was just following orders! Well played!

Let’s see how Reddit reacted to this story.

It does sound like a pretty stupid policy.

This person calls the management cheap.

Who had the attitude problem?

This is true.

A four day work week might be the answer.

Management really didn’t think this policy through very well.

If you liked that story, check out this post about a group of employees who got together and why working from home was a good financial decision.