There’s a big difference between being dedicated to your job and being permanently on standby.

So when a lone maintenance coordinator stopped answering after-hours calls once HR made him hourly, senior leadership learned just how much unpaid labor they’d been relying on.

Keep reading for the full story.

Converted from salary to hourly, best decision ever.

I worked for a mid-size fashion company with around 150 retail stores nationwide as a maintenance and safety coordinator.

Four months into the job, my manager quit, and I picked up everything and was doing fine on my own for years.

This retail worker was carrying a lot of responsibility on his shoulders.

I was the only person in charge of maintaining the stores and the alarm systems in all the stores.

I did get a pay bump, but not a promotion in title.

He learned quickly that he couldn’t lean on managers for support, even when he really needed them.

I put my contact number on every store’s emergency contact list just in case the primary contacts, usually the store managers, didn’t pick up their phones in case of emergencies.

The store managers almost always refused to pick up calls during off hours, so my phone would ring at least two to three times every night.

Usually it wasn’t a big deal, but it was still important these calls went answered.

Ninety-nine percent of the time, the calls were false alarms, usually caused by window break sensors getting tripped by vibration from a big truck passing by or a leaf hitting the window.

I hated it but had to do it because if no one on the emergency contact list picks up the phone, the alarm company automatically calls the police for dispatch.

There are penalties for false alarms, ranging from $50 to $200 per incident after two or three freebies, depending on location.

So one day, he finally started wising up that he should be paid fairly.

In 2017, the Department of Labor passed a law requiring all employees making under a certain amount of money to be converted to hourly so they can earn overtime.

My salary was $800 short of making the cut.

HR was, of course, immediately dismissive.

I brought it up with HR, stating that an hourly schedule would actually interfere with my duties and that an $800 raise would make everything easier.

HR simply said, “Well, that’s too bad, and we can’t do anything about it at the moment.”

Well, okay.

From that point on, he decided to take a very different approach to work.

After that conversation, I put my phone on mute and stopped caring about anything outside of my 9-to-5.

In hindsight, life was actually so much easier and better that way, and I’m not sure why I even wanted to stay on salary.

This would go on to cost the company a pretty penny.

Months went by without any serious issues, except for the penalties for false alarms starting to pile up.

One day, Accounting and Operations brought me into the office asking what those costs were.

I told them what they were, and Operations sent out a memo reminding all store managers that safety is of critical importance and they have to pick up calls from alarm companies.

The people in charge failed to ask the right questions to stop this.

No one bothered asking why there was a surge in these additional costs, and I didn’t care enough to remind them that it was because of me.

A few more months went by, and one morning I woke up to almost 20 missed calls on my cell.

Until one event finally made them wake up to the reality.

Apparently, one of our Florida stores was broken into the night before at around 3 a.m.

The store manager tried to get ahold of me because I was the one in charge of requesting and dispatching vendors for things like emergency board-up.

Everyone and their mother tried to call him to get him to step in.

After an hour of trying to get ahold of me, she eventually started calling everyone up the hierarchy for help.

I had six missed calls from the Senior VP of Operations alone.

Eventually, the Director of Construction was able to get a crew to board up the store, but that was almost three hours later, and everyone was royally ticked.

Now HR gets involved once again.

Unsurprisingly, the second I stepped into the office, I was called into a meeting with all the senior management and HR.

They asked why I was not there to take care of it.

I simply replied, “Because I already clocked out.”

They try to feed him some nonsense, but he’s not having it.

The Senior VP of Operations was obviously not pleased with that answer and said it was my duty and that I needed to be on standby at all times to handle these situations, even during off hours.

To which I stated, “Oh, so I should be on call then. In that case, I’ll have to work with Accounting to get properly compensated for my on-call hours once we have a schedule established.”

The room went silent.

Nothing came out of the rather short meeting.

So when HR meets with him again, he realized the salary life isn’t near as glamorous as he thought.

Later that afternoon, HR called me into the office again asking whether I’d like to become salaried again with a pay bump.

I said I’d take the pay bump but would rather stay hourly, and I walked out.

They didn’t give me the pay bump.

Sometimes work-life balance is more important than a bigger check.

What did Reddit think?

This employer really showed their true colors.

Overtime work can be quite lucrative.

Is it really a cost-saving strategy if they’re just ticking off loyal employees?

Time is just as valuable of a commodity.

Management wanted an on-call hero, but only budgeted for an hourly worker.

If HR wanted more support, they’d have to buckle up and pay for it.

If you liked that post, check out this post about a rude customer who got exactly what they wanted in their pizza.