Imagine working for a company that has more than one office, but you’re assigned to work at the office that is much further from where you live than the other office. Would you explain the situation to your boss and ask to be transferred, or would you simply deal with the extra long commute?

In this story, an expense report is exactly what’s needed in order for an employee to get what they really want, and the timing couldn’t be more perfect!

Keep reading for all the details.

You want all my expenses submitted? Even the ones that I know I won’t get reimbursed for?

This was over a decade ago at the height of the recession. I was working an hourly contract job (as in not an employee) in construction management for a small company with two offices, one in NYC and one out a few hours in New Jersey.

I lived in Queens, so I had been hoping to base myself out of the NYC office, but the work there was drying up and I needed the job so I was commuting 2 hours each way every day.

A supervisor claimed OP wasn’t filling out the expense reports correctly.

If any of you live in that area you’ll know that I was basically spending $50 a day just on parkway, turnpike and bridge tolls.

I did this commute for 6 months.

One day I found myself in the NYC office to help handle some project work and one of the supervisors chastised me for not filing my expense reports with all items.

I told him that as an hourly contractor, I wasn’t entitled to the commute costs, but he was having none of it. ‘Write it all down. We’ll sort it out on the other side.’

Who that ‘we’ was supposed to be was unclear considering we were too small to have full-time accountants or HR.

The expenses really added up.

So next month I painstakingly added in every single receipt for my commute, some snacks I bought the onsite workers, and even threw in one for $0.76 for a couple brad nails I had gotten for some corner flooring piece.

The owner was a really nice guy but wasn’t involved much in the day to day. He was a show up at 10am and leave at 4pm kind of Owner.

He saw my expense report which was around $1800 dollars for the month.

When he asked me about it, I told him that most of the costs were from my commute to New Jersey, even though I was mostly doing office work which could be done from anywhere, and that the supervisor told me to put everything in and someone else would sort it out.

The owner had a suggestion.

He realized there wasn’t anyone to sort it out and didn’t know that my hourly contract didn’t qualify me for expenses and instead asked if I could work in the NYC office from then on and drive to sites only when necessary.

Great!

Now my commute was just a 15 minute bus ride.

Switching offices saved OP’s job.

This was October. In November the company unceremoniously shut down the New Jersey office and laid everyone off. We transferred all projects to the New York office.

Since I was based out of NYC I wasn’t laid off with the rest of the team.

I stayed there until I found a slightly better paying contract job in a slightly more related field to my studies.

Maybe the supervisor made that suggestion in order to try to help OP, knowing that the owner would notice. It was pretty amazing timing considering it sounds like OP would’ve been out of a job if it weren’t for switching offices.

Let’s see how Reddit responded to this story.

I completely agree with this theory.

Another person agrees that many managers try to escalate the situation to someone who can make a change.

This person shares a similar theory.

A manager weighs in.

Pointing out the problem to the right person is the only way to get it solved.

If you liked that post, check out this post about a woman who tracked down a contractor who tried to vanish without a trace.