Imagine being a manager who is paid hourly. If you were told to go to work in the middle of the night and stay there until repairmen arrived, would you do it, or would you refuse?

In this story, one manager is in that exact situation, and he decides it would be a pretty easy way to earn overtime. Apparently, the boss didn’t do the math!

Keep reading for the whole story.

Do nothing all night for a ton of OT? Yep, why not?

Little bit of backstory, I worked at the time in an oil change place. They had recently moved managers from salaried to hourly (because some managers in different cities were just lying and not going to work while getting the same cheque every payday), and I warned them that if anything, my pay was gonna go way up because I’m here a lot more than 40 hours a week.

They were good with that, they said.

Well one night I get a call at 7 pm (2 hrs after close) from one of my guys who was in the shop after hours without permission, and crashed into a bay door (like a garage door, all auto shops have at least a few).

He got fired, that’s not the MC at all, just setup.

Time to take a closer look.

So I came in and investigated.

The most relevant fact here was that he bent the door so there was a maybe 4 inch by 4 inch gap. A housecat could have squeezed through.

I called our door repair guys immediately, they said their folks were on an emergency after hours call already, to somewhere 5 hours away, they could be there in the morning.

I said ok, since this wasn’t a danger. The door was in a place not visible from the street, you’d have to be behind our building looking for this kind of this to find it.

It seemed safe enough for one night.

Alarn still sets, motion detectors still work. Anyone that broke in through this metal door with a 4″ gap would have needed tools, and was gonna get in even without the gap.

We don’t even keep more than a hundred bucks cash around, and anything expensive to steal was equipment bolted to the floor.

Deal with it tomorrow, right?

The boss disagreed.

Obviously, no.

Called my boss to fill him in and he said to call the door guys.

I told him I did already and tried to explain their situation.

He interrupted and told me in super rude and loud words (this jerk DID NOT like being called after work or having to do any work ever) just to call them and not bother him again about it. Then texted me to rudely say that I better damned well stay there until they arrive and finish the repair.

Complying was pretty easy money.

So, since I was single, had no plans, and was now paid hourly,(I clocked in the instant I arrived initially), I decided this sounded like easy money. Pulled up two comfy office chairs to make a bed/couch, watched youtube and did assorted internet scrolling, slept at normal times pretty comfortably all the way to 8 AM.

They showed up around 9 and fixed the problem pretty quickly. I was already on my regularly scheduled 8-5 shift that day, which I finished.

So now let’s do the math.

That overnight waiting? 7pm-8am, 13 hours. All OT at time and a half. Then my normal shift. 9 hours, all at time and a half. So 22 hours * 1.5= 33 hours of pay for doing my normal shift + internet scrolling and napping that was barely even an inconvenience.

The screenshot was vital.

My boss sees it come payday and tries to give me a yelling over email for trying to rip off the company, cc-ing all the big bosses, HR, Payroll, etc.

I reply to all, explain the situation, include the text screenshot.

Suddenly I’m not the one getting yelled at anymore and I got every bit of that OT pay 🙂

That was certainly an easy way to earn some overtime pay!

Let’s see how Reddit responded to this story.

Here’s a story about a retail store.

The text was vital!

Another person loved the story.

I doubt it.

One small request can end up costing quite a bit!

If you liked that story, check out this post about an oblivious CEO who tells a web developer to “act his wage”… and it results in 30% of the workforce being laid off.