Managers who obsess over every minute tend to create big problems for themselves more often than not.

What would you do if your supervisor threw a fit because you went one minute over your paid break, even though you were still getting all your work done? Would you argue and push back? Or would you do as you’re told and enjoy the extra pay?

In the following story, an oncology lab worker finds themselves in this very predicament. Here’s how they handled it.

“Lead” supervisor gets mad that coworker and I used our paid break to eat.

I work in a lab that employs a LOT of people nationwide, kind of irrelevant, but whatever. We get a lot of cases from doctors and hospitals all across the country every day to run tests they order.

Due to the high volume of cases we receive daily, we have a significant amount of QC that needs to be completed by the end of the week. If it is not finished by Saturday night, we must implement a weekly rotation to complete it. My actual supervisor said, “We have to stay 4-6 hours OR until everything is done.”

There’s this cynical, old woman who works in my department. She’s a massive pain and sends endless amounts of emails a day, about fixing things that aren’t broken, doing something wrong even though we follow her directions, all while she’s doing none of her own work.

They got most of the work done and decided to take a paid break.

She also happens to be the “lead” of our department, even though she never sees any of us because she’s in the back office, not in the actual lab, and she works third shift.

Today is my rotation. It just so happens to be my birthday weekend (my birthday was Friday), and my coworker who I’m doing rotation with brought breakfast burritos for the two of us.

Thankfully, there wasn’t a lot of work last week, and there was minimal QC to do. After we had stayed for an hour and were 80% done with our work, we took a paid 15-minute break.

Sixteen minutes later, we return to the lab, and she starts yelling at us because we went over our time. She then leaves the lab and calls our manager, who basically says it doesn’t matter since we’re still getting the work done.

The lady ended up costing the clinic more money.

Old Woman comes back and says that we can’t leave until the work is done (even though she’ll be leaving in about an hour) Okay then.

We finish all of our work about 10 minutes after we come back from break. However, since we’re still on the clock, we’re deciding to stay for the entire 6 hours doing mindless work (cleaning already sanitized stations, deleting emails, dusting keyboards, changing pens, etc), which will cost the company about $300 more (bc of OT pay) on our paychecks.

All because we were one minute over.

Like I said, this might not be as exciting as other posts on here, but this is the first time this overworked and underpaid oncology lab worker is doing something like this.

Yikes! She should’ve stayed out of it.

Let’s see what the folks over at Reddit have to say about this.

For this person, they’d choose home over extra pay.

As this reader explains, the overtime will eventually catch up to her.

This workplace sounds terrible!

This person doesn’t like people like that.

They did the right thing! Unfortunately, after the company loses enough money, they’ll catch on and get rid of her.

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.