Imagine working for a company with a no overtime policy. Would you be willing to work overtime anyway if it were an urgent situation, or would you refuse because rules are rules and why work if you probably won’t get paid for it?

In this story, all the employees in a company are told they are not allowed to work overtime unless they have prior authorization from the company president. As luck would have it, there’s an urgent after hours issue that needs to be fixed when the company president happens to be on vacation.

An employee is asked to work overtime anyway. He refuses but comes into work on Monday prepared for any backlash he might face.

Keep reading for the whole story.

No Overtime – No exceptions!

I work in IT and worked with one client for years and years looking after their various networks.

Normally it’s a 9-5 kind of job, but if something goes wrong after hours it can become a real emergency for them quickly.

The manager had a crazy request.

One day the manager came down to visit our small team at this client’s office.

We were told they renegotiated the contact and took a 5% cut on the job. So they asked if we would all take a 5% pay cut as well.

No. No one accepted that and we were ready to walk if they tried to push it.

The next week we were told there was to be zero overtime without prior authorization of the company president himself and there are no exceptions to this iron-clad rule. They had us repeat the new policy back to them and e-mailed it to us.

He knew this was a bad idea.

The only thing I said to them was “This is going to end poorly”.

Two days later the core router that connects all the different parts of the big data center failed at 9:00 p.m.

Our manager called my cell phone and said to jump in my car because the data center was down.

I told him that I don’t have authorization from the company president who had apparently gone camping for the long weekend with his family and was out of contact. I told him sorry. I can’t do any work as it hasn’t been authorized.

He refused to work unauthorized overtime.

He tried to say how he’s authorizing it.

I told him he specifically told us just earlier this week it has to be from the company president, and there are no exceptions. If he can get a hold of the president, then give me a call back.

He was mad.

The client was mad as they were told I refused to help. He left an angry voicemail for the president about me.

He had proof that he wasn’t supposed to work overtime.

They did get it fixed when the manager drove himself to the data center at in the wee hours of the morning to pull the bad circuit board.

The next business day first thing in the morning the manager, the client’s CIO and our company president were waiting for me to come in and told me to come in to the meeting room.

It went as expected with raised voices, accusations and many “final warnings” until I pulled out the e-mail and gave it to the clients CIO to read.

It took him 10 seconds to read, and then the CIO asked me to head back to my desk and carry on with my day.

Things changed quickly after that.

I never heard what was said in the room after I left. But there was a new directive that afternoon that overtime work no longer must have prior authorization.

I worked another two years there before I left for a better job. But to this day if there is rule with “No exceptions”, I relate this exact story and ask them to rethink what they are about to tell us.

“No exceptions” definitely sounds too strict. It’s good that OP didn’t go into work anyway so that everyone could realize how ridiculous the no overtime policy was.

If you enjoyed this story, check out this story about an employee who followed bad orders, then ruined their manager’s career for good measure.

Let’s see how Reddit reacted to this story.

You know it was serious when the manager goes into work to fix it!

This is true.

One person shares an employment contract they liked.

This person would’ve handled it differently.

There’s a saying that rules are meant to be broken, but if that’s the case, maybe these rules shouldn’t be rules in the first place. You can’t tell employees they have to follow a specific rule and then reprimand them for following it. That’s crazy!

As far as the last comment, OP really shouldn’t have even answered the phone. Even answering the phone after hours about work would technically be working overtime. They’re lucky he didn’t try to charge them for that time.

If this story proves anything it’s that refusing to ignore the rules might be exactly what causes them to change.