Hey, if you’re just a working stiff like most of us are, you gotta do what you gotta do to make money and pay the bills, right?

You’re darn right!

That’s what this person did and they took to Reddit to talk about it.

Read on and find out what happened!

You want me to lie about my hours so I don’t go into overtime? Okay.

“I work in theatre, doing front of house/customer service work. So that means I typically do a lot of odd hours, with evenings and weekends.

At my former job, they only wanted to pay me hourly (despite asking for salary numerous times, and honestly, it would have benefited them more than me). On average, my weekdays would run from 2:00 – 10:00, as I had my managerial/admin work I had to do during the day, which I couldn’t always do during shows and events.

Sometimes, you gotta put in extra hours.

I tried to schedule things so I wouldn’t go into overtime, but every once in a while, it happened. Shows run long, people like to stay and chat. Rental events don’t know their timings well and really mess up the time. It happens, just part of the job.

So it would be pretty common for me to finish with 8.5 or 9 hour days. And since I was paid hourly, that meant overtime.

Eventually, my boss and the Executive Director talked to me about why I so often went into overtime, and why did I come in early when I knew I’d be staying late.

Well, it’s pretty obvious…

I outlined that unless I couldn’t, I would schedule my days to try and have some leeway to avoid daily overtime, but it wasn’t always possible and they should understand that. Especially my boss, as she had my position at one point before I started.

While they did acknowledge that point, they didn’t want to constantly pay for a little bit of overtime. Their solution was for me to adjust the hours on my time sheet on a day I worked over 8 hours, and just take what would have been overtime and put it on a different day.

Hmmm…

In other words, abuse labour laws so they wouldn’t have to pay me an extra 9 or so dollars for the half hour of daily overtime.

I was unimpressed, but I was already looking for a new job, so I decided to play ball. Because I knew I could still make my point with some Malicious Compliance.

Thankfully that first week, there were events I knew would likely run long. And they didn’t disappoint. I ended up have to spread 6.5 hours of work over 2 days.

One of which I came in after 5:00, but I ended up putting on my schedule that I came in at 2:00. Still the same hours worked, just spread out to avoid the daily OT.

Well of course when time sheets were checked over, this was noticed that there were two days I charged for being in the office when I wasn’t by our accountant.

When she asked what the situation was, I explained that I did what was requested. I took the daily OT hours and moved them to days I wasn’t going into OT.

Thankfully the accountant and I were pretty close, so she just rolled her eyes at the stupidity of it all, and went to talk to my boss and the ED about it.

The cherry on top of it all?

Because I still claimed the same amount of hours, I still went into weekly overtime, which ended up meant I got more money, because the weekly hours all came in one lump, rather than being spread out over the daily hours. (4 hours at 1.5 hours and 2.5 at double hours, rather than the 6.5 all at time and a half).

Oddly enough for the last couple months I worked at that mess of a theatre, they didn’t really harp on me about daily overtime anymore.”

And here’s what folks had to say on Reddit.

This person weighed in.

Another individual shared their thoughts.

This Reddit user spoke up.

Another reader shared a story.

That worked out for them in the end!

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