Imagine having a horrible commute to work where you would most likely be stuck in bumper to bumper traffic. Would you rather leave for work early enough that you’d miss traffic and arrive for work an hour early, or get stuck in traffic but arrive at your job on time?

In this story, one employee preferred the first option, but the manager didn’t seem to understand.

Keep reading to see how the story plays out.

Boss wasn’t happy with me taking a small break every day

Backstory: I’ve worked at my current company for around 3 years now and it’s fair to say I’ve earned a reputation of a hard working employee.

I would typically get in an hour early (hated sitting in traffic every day) and leave around 10 minutes after my day was supposed to end.

Since it was my choice to come in early I had no problem staying until when everyone else did.

A small break shouldn’t be a big deal when OP is actually working an hour of overtime.

One difference however was that I would take a small 10-15 minute break an hour or two into the working day to grab breakfast

After some recent changes in management however my new boss had a discussion about the break that I was taking and he told me that I must be working during my contracted hours.

Time to stop working for free.

So, around 2 weeks ago I stopped coming in early.

I got into work 1 minute before I was meant to start, took every minute of my lunch break and finished as soon as the clock ticked over to 5pm.

A few days into the changes a lot of upper management noticed the changes and I suspect they’ve spoken with my manager to find out why I’ve changed.

Safe to say that my company now probably loses out on 7-8 hours of unpaid overtime every week now, all because my manager didn’t like me taking a 10 minute break.

This isn’t really malicious. The boss never asked this employee to work overtime for free. Working the scheduled hours is the right thing to do. However, I get not wanting to be stuck in traffic.

Let’s see how Reddit responded to this story.

This person did something similar.

Here’s a suggestion about what to do before work.

I bet the boss didn’t even know OP was working overtime.

An employer weighs in.

Working overtime for free is a bad idea.

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.