Holiday weekends often inspire a mass exodus from corporate offices, with everyone eager to use up PTO.

But one clever employee saw the empty building as an opportunity to get paid for doing nothing — and they sure as heck took it.

Read on for the full story!

Day after Thanksgiving fun.

Everyone in my office (17 employees) at the facility I work at signs PTO and takes the day after Thanksgiving off every year.

Everybody.

So when their boss noticed he hadn’t put in a request, they were puzzled.

This year, my boss approached me and said, “I noticed you haven’t submitted your PTO request to me yet. You better get that in.”

I’m not taking PTO on Friday.

The boss is flabbergasted, and tries to push him to take the day.

“But… but… there won’t be anyone here! There will be nothing for you to do!”

…

And?

“Well… everyone takes the day after Thanksgiving off. You know, to have a long weekend.”

But after some probing, the boss backs off.

Am I required to take it off and use my PTO? Is it mandatory company policy that I be forced to burn my accrued Personal Time Off?

“Well… no. But… well… there won’t be any work for you.”

…and he walked away.

The employee knew exactly what they were doing.

Tomorrow, I will be the ONLY person in my facility (besides Security and two IT monitors on premises for emergency computer maintenance) in the building.

Since I will be getting paid, but there will be NO WORK available, I plan on getting some really good reading in (“technical manuals,” of course) with a nice LOOOONG lunch break.

They’ve already got their day planned out.

The very FIRST thing I will likely have to do at 5 a.m. is lay under my desk and closely inspect the wiring until break time at 9 a.m.

It’s going to be such a rough day, but I think I can probably manage without any supervision for 10 hours.

There’s nothing better than getting paid for kicking back and relaxing!

What did Reddit think?

This commenter would take an easy day of work over PTO any day!

But sometimes an unattended office day doesn’t go as planned.

But for others, the positives outweighed the negatives.

Lots of good times were had on such days.

This story is enough to inspire just about any employee to follow the same playbook!

There were no meetings, no emails, and definitely no regrets.

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.