Imagine being on your way to your car just after closing time when a customer runs up to you in the parking lot and tries to beg you to reopen. Would you be willing to help them out, or would you refuse and leave?

In this story, one adult education employee is in this exact situation. She just closed the office for the day when a woman pulled into the parking lot and claimed it’ll just take “a minute.”

Keep reading to see how she handles the situation.

“Can’t you just re-open the office for a MINUTE? You’re not even inside your car yet!”

Years ago, I worked in a city-run adult education program, which had its main office in a portable classroom behind an elementary school.

So, for once in my working life I had the perk of being able to park literally right outside the office door, instead of a parking garage or the like.

The downside to this, of course, is that when our students came or left, they could also easily see where I parked.

She was there all by herself at closing time.

While there were a large number of instructors (for both ESL and various high school completion programs), they were mostly scattered at different schools and other places around the city, so there were only a handful of us in the office itself.

On one particular day, I ended up closing alone.

I had a supervisor who was almost never around and the secretary had left early for an appointment.

That was no problem. Luckily it was a relatively quiet afternoon.

She almost made it to her car without any issues.

A few minutes after four p.m., I turned off the lights, locked all the doors and headed out to my car – which, as mentioned above, was parked literally just a few yards outside the front door.

Suddenly, a car comes hurriedly into the lot. The driver comes up beside me, rolls the window down and asks me if the office is closed.

“Yes, sorry,” I told the woman. “We close at 4 every day. But we’ll be open again tomorrow morning at 8.”

The woman refused to accept this.

The driver was full of excuses.

“Well, but I work all day, and there’s no way I can get here between those hours…and you’re just outside! Can’t you please open up the office again? I promise, what I need will take just a minute!”

Yeah, we’ve all heard the “minute” line before. It never is.

And hey, while I’m totally sympathetic to having to deal with offices’ specific hours (I’ve been living with serious chronic illness for many years, so I’m no stranger to doctors whose last visit of the day is 3:15 or whatever, and you have to finagle stuff at your workplace in order to make it happen. But guess what? The hours are the hours, and it’s not the lowest staff member’s responsibility to stay overtime without compensation for you.

As the woman was not backing down (and I was absolutely not even going to entertain this ridiculousness), I just repeated that no, we are CLOSED, and she can either come back tomorrow or else call the supervisor.

It wasn’t worth arguing about it.

As I was standing right outside my car, I was lucky. After I reiterated the NO, I just got inside and drove away,

I could have tried to “reason” with this woman, asking her if she would be willing to stay late at her own workplace for free, but life had already taught me by that point that you can’t reason with people like that. She’ll try to “justify” it by saying it’s just this one little minute, what’s the big deal, etc.

Sometimes you just have to shut it down.

She made the right decision to just leave instead of trying to reason with the woman. Closed means closed, no exceptions.

Let’s see how Reddit responded to this story.

This person also knows better than to fall for excuses like “it’ll only take a minute.”

A teacher shares their experience.

Exactly. It won’t just be a minute.

“No” means “no.”

Closing time doesn’t require an explanation.

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.