Imagine working for a supervisor who is really picky about rules. For example, if you were one minute late getting back from a break, she would get really upset. Would you roll your eyes or try to get revenge?

In this story, two coworkers are in this situation, and they decide to rebel by doing some extra work.

Keep reading for all the details.

“Lead” supervisor gets mad that coworker and I used our paid break to eat.

I work in a lab that employs a LOT of people nationwide, kind of irrelevant but whatever. We get a lot of cases from doctors and hospitals all across the country everyday to run tests they order.

Because of the sheet amount of cases we get daily we have a lot of QC that needs to be done by the end of the week, and if it doesn’t get done by Saturday night, we have to do a rotation every week to finish it.

My actual supervisor said “we have to stay 4-6 hours OR until everything is done”.

Their lead sounds really annoying.

There’s this cynical, old woman who works in my department.

She’s a massive pain in our side and sends endless amounts of emails a day, about fixing things that aren’t broken, doing something wrong even though we follow her directions, all while she’s doing none of her own work.

She also happens to be the “lead” of our department even though she never sees any of us because she’s in the back office, not in the actual lab, she works third shift.

This coworker sounds really thoughtful.

Today is my rotation. It just so happens to be my birthday weekend (my birthday was Friday) and my coworker who I’m doing the rotation with brought breakfast burritos for the two of us.

Thankfully there wasn’t a lot of work last week and there was minimal QC to do.

After we stayed for an hour and were 80% done with our work we took a paid 15 minute break.

16 minutes later we come back into the lab and she starts yelling at us because we went over our time, and she leaves the lab and calls our manager who basically said it doesn’t matter since we’re still getting the work done.

But that wasn’t good enough for the annoying lady.

Old Woman comes back and says that we can’t leave until the work is done (even though she’ll be leaving in about an hour)

Okay then.

We finish all of our work about 10 minutes after we came back from break, but since we’re still on the clock we’re deciding to stay for the entire 6 hours doing mindless work (cleaning already sanitized stations, deleting emails, dusting keyboards, changing pens, etc) which will cost the company about $300 more (bc of OT pay) on our paychecks.

All because we were one minute over.

So, is the malicious part getting 6 hours of overtime to do mindless work that didn’t really need to be done? She said to leave when the work was done. Since it only took 10 minutes, they should’ve left after 10 minutes. That would prove a point.

Let’s see how Reddit responded to this story.

Someone who used to work in a lab weighs in.

This person has a question.

Another person shares their experience with lunch breaks.

Always get it in writing.

This is a good observation.

“Happy Birthday” would’ve been nicer than “get back to work.”

If you liked this post, check out this story about an employee who got revenge on a co-worker who kept grading their work suspiciously low.