Imagine working in a job where you repair equipment. Obviously, these repairs may not fit nicely into an 8-hour work day. Would you be willing to work overtime to complete the job? What if you weren’t getting paid for the overtime?

In this story, one man is in this situation, and he was perfectly fine with working overtime as long as he was getting paid. Then, his boss changed the rules, and the real problems started.

Keep reading for all the details.

I’m not allowed to work overtime? Okay..

I used to repair electronic equipment in the printing industry all over the state (in Australia, this state is bigger than Texas! Lol!) that was vitally time sensitive for the customer.

Can’t tell you how many times they begged me to fix it NOW because they have a hard publishing deadline overnight or within hours or a day (think major daily newspapers, periodical magazines, etc).

I never had problems with this personally and always did whatever it took to get them going again. And I’d submit my time sheets at work (signed off by the customer) to show the overtime worked.

Heck, the customer was paying every penny of the OT.

Goodbye, overtime!

But then, my Service Mangler told me they would no longer pay me for OT worked and I MUST ONLY log time sheets with regular hours.

I told them this would screw the customer.

But he didn’t care and said the order came from “upstairs”.

So that’s what I did.

The customers were furious, and so was the boss.

The customers were livid, but I refused to work past 5 PM or nights or weekends or start early.

If I wasn’t going to get paid, they weren’t going to get service. Boss’s orders.

After a couple of weeks my boss called me in for a disciplinary chat about being a “clock watcher” and that customers were complaining about this.

I told him point blank “no money, no workee” according to company policy HE insisted on – and gave him the date and time and my personal record of his instructions that I made of his orders on the day.

He pointed out why he could not work overtime.

I told him as I told him then that I was personally happy to work overtime if paid, but I CANNOT FALSIFY COMPANY RECORDS by working outside the allocated work hours (including job travel time) and not record the actual time worked. So according to company policy I cannot even volunteer my time after hours.

I was the lead service engineer for that company. So you can be sure the other engineers were watching this very carefully.

Overtime payments were reinstated shortly after.

Taking away overtime pay but accusing employees of being “clock watchers” is just ridiculous. Obviously, they’re not going to work if they’re not getting paid!

Let’s see how Reddit responded to this story.

Management was definitely clueless.

This person is glad he refused to work overtime.

Another person compares it to having work done on your car.

Yeah, right!

Some jobs don’t fit a 9 to 5 schedule.

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