Imagine working for a company where overtime is mandatory. Would you be happy to work as much overtime as possible, or would you prefer to have more free time?

In this story, one employee is in this situation, and he’d rather have more free time. He can’t get out of working the overtime, but he finds another loophole that works in his favor, this is, until his manager notices.

Keep reading for all the details.

Mandatory overtime

A few years back I was working for a work truck manufacturing company. I really enjoyed the work I was doing and I was good at it.

Unfortunately, this place had, and still does have, a reputation as a “revolving door” due to the disposable view they have of their techs.

We were referred to as “a heartbeat and tools” at one point by the GM.

This sounds like a big problem.

The turnover led to a severe imbalance in experienced vs inexperienced workforce and it was compounded by their answer to production slow downs.

They fired the bottom 20% every winter, and would hire new techs with zero experience and mandatory overtime every summer.

The latter is the point of my story.

OP is NOT a fan of overtime.

I have always stood by the adage “I work to live. I don’t live to work,” meaning I don’t care for overtime.

I budgeted my life to be able to turn down OT when offered.

I’m a team player and will always do my part when needed. However, this pattern of seasonal forced overtime was starting to wear thin.

There are almost always big changes when a company changes hands.

At one point the company was bought out by a large corporation and some of our HR policies changed.

One change was overtime being calculated on a daily basis instead of weekly.

Another change was having 10 unpaid personal days with no reason or notice required to use them.

Of course the average underpaid tech living paycheck to paycheck would never use an unpaid personal day. The company knew that and it was strictly for PR. They could claim that employees had personal days even though they never intended for us to use them.

OP did some math and came to a big realization.

It didn’t take long for me to realize that with a forced 9.5 hour day (if they worked us 10 they would be required to give us another paid break) and OT calculated daily, I could call in on Fridays and use my unpaid personal day but still come out ahead.

32 regular hours plus 6 OT hours equals the equivalent of 41 regular hours.

I decided I had enough and I was going to enjoy 10, 3-day weekends for my summer.

The manager noticed.

After my third Friday off I was called into my manager’s office.

My manager, his manager and the HR director were waiting for me.

I was confronted about taking three Fridays off in a row and they demanded an explanation or excuse as to why I was taking them off.

I calmly referred to our employee handbook which explains that no excuse or reason is required for personal days.

I like the HR director in this story.

They asked how I could afford to use these unpaid personal days?

I had nothing to hide, so I explained the math, much to their surprise.

I was then lectured by management who told me I was abusing the system and I needed to stop or else.

The HR director immediately corrected them and told management there was nothing they could do because I was not breaking any rules.

OP stood his ground.

At that point I was pretty heated.

I told them “I’m one of your top performers and I know it. If I am disciplined or fired I will assume it’s because of this meeting and I will seek legal counsel. I have not broken any rules and you should be grateful I haven’t pointed out this loophole to the other techs.”

I got one more Friday off before mandatory OT was discontinued.

The manager did not get his way.

I found out later that the general manager was reprimanded when he tried taking the issue to corporate.

They found out he was forcing OT which was against the corporate policy.

The following year the 10 unpaid days were turned into two extra vacation days.

Management really shouldn’t make policies they don’t the employees to take advantage of. The manager is in this story learned that the hard way.

Let’s see how Reddit responded to this story.

This person has a good question.

A four-day weekend would’ve been even better!

He didn’t have to give them details.

Another person would’ve shared the loophole.

The more vacation days, the better!

If you liked that post, check out this one about an employee that got revenge on HR when they refused to reimburse his travel.