If a person works in certain industries, part of their workday is sometimes spent picking up materials and occasionally making trips to stores to buy things needed to complete a project.

And yes, those hours are still considered “on the clock.”

But some folks apparently haven’t ever received that memo.

Check out what this person had to say about a client who gave them a hard time about something that they thought was just part of the job.

We pay you to…

“My company has been contracted by another company to repair equipment.

This is done in work cells hosted in a building owned and run by the company contracting us, so we need to follow quite a few of their rules.

During pre-operation, we had a skeleton crew setting up work cells, sourcing tools, yada yada yada.

Unfortunately we ran into a situation in which I had to make a run to a hardware store last minute in the middle of the day to avoid some other things running behind.

Apparently this caused a huge problem, as my boss put it.

Our point of contact was up in arms about the fact that I “timed out” (we are paid salary) at 2:45 PM.

This seemed like a pointless argument…

We all got together on the phone and I kindly explained I went to do business related things. My boss deemed that was more than fair and that our point of contact has no reason to be upset.

The next morning when I came in, our point of contact was giving me a further ration of grief in a conversation that went something along the lines of:

POC: “You timed out much earlier than your scheduled off time yesterday. Don’t do that again.”

Me: “We’ve already explained to you that I was doing business and remaining focused on our goal here; to get our work cells setup for our start date.”

POC: “No, you need to take care of those things outside of the time you’re scheduled here.”

Nope!

Me: “That’s not acceptable. I will not allow you to think it’s okay for me to be working “off the clock.” If you’d like, we can open a dialogue on negotiating overtime or supplemental pay.”

POC: “No, we don’t want to do that. We pay you to setup work cells and organize tools only. You don’t do anything else.”

Me: “Great. Please outline that in an email that way I can better communicate that to my team.”

So our point of contact does. Unfortunately our job currently entails much much more. We organize deliveries, we check drivers in, we direct freight and docking, we attend meetings to organize happenings for the week, and on and on.

For two weeks, anytime anything came up, we delegated these tasks to our point of contact; citing their outline of, “you setup work cells and organize tools only.”

This wasn’t going well…

Things fell very far behind.

I think the final straw was when our point of contact told us we needed to get a particular PPE on Friday (not required by us, but required by their guidelines) – our start date for 60 additional people was negotiated for the following Monday.

Again, I told our point of contact that I will not shop for business related things on personal time.

On Monday the 60 new hires arrived. Because they were missing the specific PPE requested last minute, they were technically unable to actually start doing anything, according to their safety standards.

At this point we’re all being paid to do, well, nothing. So I touched base with our point of contact to ask if, now that our negotiated tasks looked different since the transition of the start date, if he’d be so kind as to let me take care of company business on company time.

That way we can get the ball rolling on things. He told me not to do anything at all and that he’d get in touch with my boss.

What a waste of time!

From what I understand, a handful of people got dragged into it, lots of phone calls, lots of upset people, the whole nine yards. This went on for the entire day.

Meanwhile our crew is just choppin’ it up and getting to know one another; mind you, still being paid per the negotiations.

Come Tuesday, essentially the same thing happens. Any inquiries that came my way was met with something like, “our point of contact made the executive decision to outline our specific job duties during our setup period. Despite what we had negotiated, they deemed it necessary to make, in my opinion, arbitrary and baseless decisions on how we should spend our time during our setup period. During the last two weeks they had every opportunity to reconcile any hastily made decisions but chose not to do so.”

That guy was gone!

This morning our point of contact was gone. Apparently their absence has been a complete sigh of relief for many, many, people in the building.

I always figured they just thought they could boss us around because we were the new kids on the block, but I guess he was always a controlling meathead from what others have said.

I don’t exactly know where I stand with my company at this point, but I’m hopeful they’ll see the humor in everything in hindsight.”

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This client really had no clue what he was doing.

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.