Company Had A Strict No Overtime Policy And An Employee Almost Got Fired For Following It, But Then He Handed Over The Proof

Ashley Ashbee

3 months ago

Pexels/Reddit

A lot of policies make zero sense.

They’re not devised by people who actually understands the work, the clientele or the technical stuff.

Check out this example of a power trip with serious consequences.

No Overtime – No exceptions!

I work in IT and worked with one client for years and years looking after their various networks.

Normally it’s a 9-5 kind of job, but if something goes wrong after hours it can become a real emergency for them quickly.

One day, the manager came down to visit our small team at this client’s office.

We were told they renegotiated the contact and took a 5% cut on the job. So they asked if we would all take a 5% pay cut as well.

No. No one accepted that and we were ready to walk if they tried to push it.

So some changes were made.

The next week we were told there was to be zero overtime without prior authorization of the company president himself and there are no exceptions to this iron-clad rule.

They had us repeat the new policy back to them and e-mailed it to us.

The only thing I said to them was “This is going to end poorly.”

Two days later the core router that connects all the different parts of the big data center failed at 9:00 p.m.

Our manager called my cell phone and said to jump in my car because the data center was down.

I told him that I don’t have authorization from the company president who had apparently gone camping for the long weekend with his family and was out of contact.

I told him sorry. I can’t do any work as it hasn’t been authorized.

He tried to say how he’s authorizing it.

I told him he specifically told us just earlier this week it has to be from the company president, and there are no exceptions.

If he can get a hold of the president, then give me a call back.

It looked like he was going to get fired…

He was mad.

The client was mad as they were told I refused to help. He left an angry voicemail for the president about me.

They did get it fixed when the manager drove himself to the data center at in the wee hours of the morning to pull the bad circuit board.

The next business day first thing in the morning the manager, the client’s CIO and our company president were waiting for me to come in and told me to come in to the meeting room.

It went as expected with raised voices, accusations and many “final warnings” until I pulled out the e-mail and gave it to the client’s CIO to read.

It took him 10 seconds to read, and then the CIO asked me to head back to my desk and carry on with my day. I never heard what was said in the room after I left.

But there was a new directive that afternoon that overtime work no longer must have prior authorization.

I worked another two years there before I left for a better job.

But to this day if there is rule with “No exceptions,” I relate this exact story and ask them to rethink what they are about to tell us.

Here is what people are saying.

Yet they never learn.