Some people seem to thrive on cutting it as close as possible to meeting a deadline or showing up on time.

Other people, like to give themselves plenty of time for projects, traffic, and anything else where there could be unexpected delays because they find rushing stressful.

In today’s story, this employee finds rushing stressful, so they always leave for work extra early. This usually works out well, but when it’s still not enough time, they’ve devised a way that they still don’t have to rush.

Read the whole story to see what they do.

Same penalty for being 6 minutes late as for being 3 hours late? Ok boss.

I have always been the kind of person to arrive at work/events early.

I hate the stress of running late, so I always allow more than enough travel time on my commute to avoid lateness.

I always stopped for a coffee first thing on my morning commute to work.

It was a half-hour drive to work on the highway, so I liked to sip my coffee and listen to tunes to relax before work.

Even though it’s only a half-hour commute, I would leave for work an hour before my start time just in case there were any unexpected delays.

But one day, that extra half hour wasn’t enough extra time.

One particular day there’s a massive jam on the highway.

Now normally I get to work 20-30 minutes early because of the extra travel time.

But this traffic jam was bad enough that it still made 6 minutes late for work.

Supervisor starts giving me nonsense for coming in late but having a coffee, publicly calling me out in front of the other employees.

“Hey everyone, look at Icy! His morning coffee is more important to him than respecting his coworkers!”

No amount of “I bought the coffee before I knew there was a traffic jam” would get him to stop hassling me. He wrote me up for being late.

The supervisor could’ve let the one off incident go.

Now, my company had a policy that less than 5 minutes late is ok, but 5+ minutes late means a potential write-up.

Doesn’t matter if it’s 5 minute and 30 seconds or 2 hours late, the punishment was the same.

However, supervisors were given leeway on this and were encouraged not to penalize people unless they were consistently late.

I was almost never late, almost always early, but my supervisor decided to punish me anyway.

Next time there was a bad traffic jam, OP decided not to rush.

So fast forward a couple of weeks, another delay, and looks like I’m going to arrive at work about 15 minutes late.

So, knowing that I’m going to get written up no matter what, I pulled off the highway, found a nice little restaurant, and had a leisurely 2-hour breakfast.

Showed up at work 2.5 hours late, and got the same write up I would have done if I had been 15 minutes late, but at least I also go to relax and eat bacon.

He still does this occasionally.

I still showed up at work early 99% of the time, but every now and then there might be a delay that would mean I’d be 6 minutes late, or 10 or 15.

Rather than take the penalty for a lousy couple of minutes, each time I’d extend the late time a couple of hours and have a nice, relaxing breakfast.

If you’re going to be reprimanded for being late, you might as well be really, really late and enjoy the extra time.

Let’s see how Reddit reacted to this story.

This person shares a story about being late for class.

For this person, it was better not to show up at all.

What’s the point of a write up anyway?

This person shares what they do when they’re running late.

Why rush to the office if you’re just going to be written up?

Get that coffee, bro.

If you liked this post, check out this story about an employee who got revenge on a co-worker who kept grading their work suspiciously low.