When employers throw roadblocks in your way when it comes to getting paid on time, the best course of action is to try to outsmart them!

In this story, a worker talked about how they found a clever workaround when their company dragged its feet on paying them and their co-workers in an orderly fashion.

Let’s take a look!

Employer only paid us on-time if we FAXED our timesheets.

This happened about 10 years ago when I was working on the railways near London.

I worked for an agency which supplied staff to the railways on an temporary basis.

They were very old fashioned and as part of our employment contract they stated that our hand-completed time sheets had to be faxed by 7:00 pm on the Thursday for us to be paid on the Friday.

Time sheets that were emailed even before 7:00 pm would result in wages not being paid until the following Friday.

This was pretty dumb…

Obviously they chose the most inconvenient way as it was 2014 and nobody had a fax machine, so that they were able to legally retain our wages in their account for an extra week.

But my printer at home had a fax machine built in that I never used. So after my first week, I plugged in my printer to the phone line, faxed my time sheet to the agency and waited.

The next day, I still hadn’t been paid.

They clearly didn’t expect anyone to actually fax it.

So I phoned them and asked why I hadn’t been paid but the response was explained in a dull voice by somebody who had obviously repeated the same sentence so many times that it had lost all meaning to her.

“As explained in your contract, only time sheets that have been faxed to us are paid the next day. If you’ve emailed it, your wages will be paid the following week”.

“But I did fax it!”

She gathered her thoughts for a moment before replying ”Oh… err ok? Which number did you fax it to?”

Problem solved.

So I gave her the number I faxed it to which was correct.

”Um… ok.. I’ll just place you on hold”

She came back on the phone a couple of minutes later.

”Ok, yes we’ve got it. Sorry, I can’t remember the last time somebody actually faxed their timesheet to us! I’ll get that paid now”

This worked out well!

As you can imagine, I told my colleagues the following day and from then on, they all gave their timesheets to me to fax when I got home so they got paid on-time.

At the time I wondered if they’d drop the silly fax vs email rule but it continued and so every week I’d fax in half a dozen timesheets to them.”

Reddit users spoke up.

This person had a lot to say.

Another reader shared their thoughts.

This Reddit user spoke up.

Another individual weighed in.

You gotta love this kind of malicious compliance!

If you liked that post, check out this post about a woman who tracked down a contractor who tried to vanish without a trace.