Imagine working for a manager who is awesome and understands that it’s sometimes very important for you to work overtime. If that manager quit and you got a new manager who didn’t allow you to work overtime, would you leave even if your job wasn’t finished, or would you argue that you need to be allowed to work overtime?

In this story, one maintenance worker at a fast food restaurant is in this situation, and he decides to leave work after working exactly 40 hours. Keep reading to see how the story plays out.

No overtime, no problem

I work maintenance for a fast food restaurant and when I started working maintenance I had a verbal agreement with the general manager that she would retroactively approve all my overtime because we were only allowed to have 2 maintenance people and 1 of them was the owners son who didn’t do his job and we couldn’t fire him.

Things were fine the entire time she worked there and our store often scored the best of all the owners stores during inspections.

But all good things must come to an end…

Eventually that GM quit and on day 1 her replacement told me she would no longer approve my overtime.

I had her send that to me in writing and from then on as soon as I hit 40 hours I would stop showing up for the week and turn off the work phone which often happened 3-4 days into the week.

Now our store was opened 70 years ago so things break often.

There were a lot of problems.

The first week the walk in broke but I was already at 40 hours so I didn’t know until 3 days later so we had to waste all our frozen product, and the next week the fryers stopped heating so we couldn’t make most of the stuff on our menu.

Then we had a surprise health inspection and the store got red tagged.

That was the final straw. Owner was going to fire me but after he talked to the old gm and I showed him the email from the new gm he fired her and my original agreement with the old gm is now part of the terms of my employment.

I’m glad he didn’t get fired. Getting it in writing was very important.

Let’s see how Reddit responded to this story.

This person knows overtime can’t always be avoided.

Someone who worked in a similar role weighs in.

Here’s a message to managers.

It does seem like this is often the case.

Someone in a similar position vents about their working conditions.

A lot of things must break.

If you want to avoid paying overtime, you have to hire more employees.

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.