Remember the height of the Covid pandemic in 2020?

Those were scary times!

And you better believe that people needed to stay home and isolate if they felt sick.

So that’s why it’s hard to figure out what this nurse’s managers were thinking when they gave her a hard time for taking sick days during the pandemic.

Check out how she handled this situation in the story below.

You can’t pick up extra time because you had too many sick days.

“I’m a nurse at a large hospital. The floor I worked on was selected to be the Covid unit during the first and second waves. More nurses than not were catching Covid.

So whenever I got an inkling of being sick I would call out and get tested. Now if I tested positive then I would get two weeks off without penalty. But I tested negative and returned to work.

Seriously?

I get called into the office and got a verbal warning because I had one too many sick days. I said to my manager “you realize we are in a pandemic right?” She says “yes, I know that but we still have to stick to the original policy.”

When we clock in, there is an electronic message that pops up on the time clock that reads “During the pandemic we need to self monitor ourselves and by clocking in you are declaring that you are fit to work.”

There was no adjustment to the policy even though we were a Covid unit during a pandemic. So I would either have to lie about feeling sick when I clock in, or call out and get in trouble.

Here is where the malicious compliance comes in.

I had always picked up a lot of extra time in a sister department. Not because I needed the extra money but because the hospital was always short staffed.

My manager didn’t like the fact that I picked up extra time the other department. She wanted me to pick up extra time in our department. So she said. “As punishment you can not pick up extra time in the other department for 90 days (the length of my disciplinary period). You should be responsible enough to pick up extra time in your own department.”

Not gonna do it!

As I didn’t need the extra money, I didn’t pick up ANY extra time in that period. I got called almost every day to ask if I could come in because they were short staffed.

One of the reasons they were short staffed was because our sister unit was even more short staffed and the nurses on my unit were getting pulled to go work there. If only more nurses picked up extra time on the other unit…

At the end of the 90 days I was told I could pick up extra time in the sister department again.

She was outta there!

At which point I handed in my two weeks notice and told her I accepted a position at another hospital.

She then tells me that because of my years of service I need to give four weeks notice. I tell her “no, that’s just a courtesy. So I’ll extend the same courtesy I got when I needed to call out sick.””

Here’s what readers had to say about this.

This person weighed in.

Another individual shared their thoughts.

This Reddit user had a lot to say.

Another reader spoke up.

She had enough and finally got out of there!

Thought that was satisfying? Check out what this employee did when their manager refused to pay for their time while they were traveling for business.