Imagine being reprimanded for arriving late for a course, but the lecturer is also late, so you didn’t really miss anything.

Would you brush it off or start taking the hours of the course a little bit too seriously?

In this story, two men are in this situation, and they choose the second approach. They literally have nothing to lose.

Let’s see how it works out.

Half day at 10:15? Don’t expect us to stay a minute after 5

This is my father’s story, not mine. My father and his friend were doing a course, which required them to adhere to some corporate standards.

A little background – both of them already had well-paying jobs, they were just doing this course for enhancing knowledge and not for any other gain.

The course was divided into phases, and this particular one was for 18 days.

Sometimes traffic is unavoidable.

You were only allowed 1 leave, and if you took more than that, you had to redo the entire thing.

Our city was around 2 hours away from the course centre and they travelled daily to and fro, to attend it.

They mostly tried to be early, but this one day, there was unusually high traffic, and they were much delayed. As a result, they were around 10-15 minutes late.

When they reached the location at around 10:15, they were informed by the Course Supervisor(CS) that they would be marked absent for the half day.

This would be very frustrating!

They both protested, stating their reason for lateness, and also that the class had not even started.

But their appeals were dismissed.

The irony? The lecturer himself was delayed by traffic, and the class didn’t begin until well after 11.

They were both frustrated for having a half day marked absent for no reason.

They literally made a stand.

So at 5 that day, they stood up in the middle of the ongoing lecture, packed their bags and started leaving the class.

The lecturer was confused, and the course supervisor was enraged. He asked them what were they doing.

They replied “following the protocol. If we are expected to arrive exactly at 10, we should be able to leave at 5 too.”

Apparently, the Course Supervisor wasn’t prepared for someone to follow their own rules to the letter.

The warnings didn’t bother them.

The CS began shouting at them that you can’t leave before the lecture ends, I will mark you absent for the full day, etc but they just left.

They got calls from the CS and other persons threatening to remove them from the course.

As I said, my father already had a job so he wasn’t much bothered by the threats and same with his friend.

They went next day at exactly 10, ignored the CS and his warnings, and left at 5 that day too.

Gotta love when others follow your lead!

The other students began following their example and left at 5 too, which led to the Institute paying extra to the lecturers as they had to invite them the next day as well to continue the class.

There isn’t much more to it as the course was only for 18 days and they both passed with flying colours.

Playing by the rules really worked in their favor, and the threats ended up being empty threats. No harm done.

Let’s see how Reddit reacted to this story.

Here’s our new word of the day…”jobsworth.”

Here’s another rant about being late.

This is sadly true sometimes.

It doesn’t always make sense.

Following the rules can definitely be malicious!

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.