Imagine having a boss who won’t let you take a break unless you ask him first if you can take a break. What would you do if you were working the night shift when the boss wasn’t there and he wouldn’t answer his phone?

Would you take a break, or would you keep working?

In this story, one shift supervisor is in this exact situation, and he decides to comply in a really annoying way.

Let’s see how the story plays out.

Boss said we needed permission from him to take a break during our shift…

Many moons ago, I worked at a residential treatment center doing direct care with teens.

While in most jobs breaks are a built in and guaranteed part of the work day, this was not the case here.

We had compliance concerns around mandatory staff to client ratios and this often made it difficult, sometimes impossible to get a break during your shift.

That being said most of us working the line had a pretty good system worked out for trying to get folks a break. If we happened to notice that all of the kids and staff were present on the unit at the same time we’d have someone take a break and then hold off on moving on with programming until they had returned.

There’s a new person in charge.

After working there for approximately 2 years the guy who ran the residential unit was let go for stealing from the clients (real nice guy).

At this point they hired a new guy to take over. He had not worked at our agency before, he had not ever done direct care himself before, but he did have experience in administrative positions in agencies similar to ours.

He came in as most administrators do that have no experience of the job and thought he knew best about everything.

The boss came up with a new rule, but he didn’t think it through very well.

Pretty quickly he became concerned that we were taking advantage of taking breaks throughout the day (which could not have been further from the truth, again most days you were lucky if you got 1 break at all, and that includes while working double shifts). So he came up with the plan that in order to take a break you needed his permission.

During the day time when he was present at the unit this was not a huge deal as you could simply walk over and ask him.

This immediately became a problem however for staff working evening, overnight and weekend shifts who would need to call him to get permission.

This system is clearly not working.

Anywho I’m someone who is always up for following the rules, so during my first shift (I was shift supervisor and therefore responsible for the other staff working during my shifts) I asked everyone to please do as he had asked.

By the end of that first shift not one person had gotten a break.

Each time we had an opportunity ratio wise we’d give him a call… which he wouldn’t answer.

By the time he called back 30 minutes to an hour later, the opportunity was gone.

The boss wasn’t willing to admit defeat.

When I showed up the next day I explained to him what had happened the previous evening and asked him to reconsider.

He refused.

So, I did what any logical person would do… I told my staff to call him when they wanted a break, and if he didn’t answer they were to call again and again until we reached him.

He got a lot of calls that night.

He probably received upwards of 40 phone calls that shift (I should note, of which he answered none).

Sadly this did not result in any of us getting a break that night, but by the time I showed up for my shift the next day we had an email from him letting us know that we no longer needed to call him and get his permission for breaks.

It’s really not a very good rule to have to call the boss to ask if you can take a break if the boss never answers his phone.

Let’s see how Reddit reacted to this story.

You would think it would be required that employees would have to take breaks.

Another person had a similar boss.

Yet another person’s boss is too picky about breaks.

This person had a similar job.

Someone who lived in a residential treatment center weighs in.

The boss didn’t realize what he was asking.

If you liked that story, check out this post about an oblivious CEO who tells a web developer to “act his wage”… and it results in 30% of the workforce being laid off.