Weathering power trips in the office can be more challenging than any assignment that comes your way.

When a new boss tried to bulldoze over a seasoned contractor, he underestimated just how expensive that decision would be.

Read on for the full story!

Did you read my contract?

John was an IT contractor for a company.

When he got the gig, they initially dangled the contract-to-employee carrot but never followed through.

Luckily, he had a strong contract set in place that seemed to be respected.

So after five years, he was still a contractor.

His contract had provisions for annual increases, overtime, weekend and holiday rates, on-call, and fixed time off.

But one day, that all changed.

All was well until he got a new boss.

We’ll call him Richard.

Richard set about marking his territory and crapping on everything.

He decided that John was going to become the permanent on-call person.

So when the new boss tries to change everything up, John gives him a warning.

He sent an email to that effect, to which John replied, “Sure — you have read my contract, right?”

But the new boss decided to not listen.

Richard fired back a not-nice email explaining that John wasn’t getting out of this — he was on-call immediately, and that was that.

On-call response time was 30 minutes from notification to being in the office.

So John complied and started racking up a hefty invoice.

At the end of the month, John submitted his monthly invoice — for 672 hours.

That included 160 hours at regular rate, 80 hours at time and a half, 240 hours at double time, and 192 hours at weekend overtime rate — triple time.

Instead of the normal bill of about 190 hours (with overtime, equal to 205 hours pay), this bill was for over 1,300 hours worth of pay once you multiplied out the overtime.

Obviously, the new boss was irate.

The fallout?

Richard fired John, who was the only guy working on a particular project that was 90% complete.

John enjoyed his 30-day paid termination vacation.

But the new boss was about to get his behind handed to him by the CEO.

The CEO called John to find out the status of the big project and found out that nobody was working on it.

Richard found a new job.

John was rehired with a bump in pay, and he never had to pull on-call again.

What started as a power play ended up becoming a payroll nightmare!

What did Reddit have to say?

Always leave a paper trail, people!

This commenter wants to know the result of this 672-hour invoice.

Just how much money was this legendary invoice worth?

This user’s imagination is running wild.

Nothing like getting a promotion and the last laugh!

In the end, the contract held stronger than the manager’s ego.

If you liked that story, check out this post about an oblivious CEO who tells a web developer to “act his wage”… and it results in 30% of the workforce being laid off.