Have you ever worked at a company where you were told not to work overtime, but you knew that it would really backfire if you didn’t work overtime? If you were in that situation, would you work overtime anyway, try to explain why this was a bad idea, or comply and let the boss see the consequences?

In this story, one manager at a call center is in this situation. He’s told not to work anymore overtime, so he complies. The boss almost immediately changes his mind and tells him to make up for any overtime hours by taking a long lunch break on Fridays.

Again, he complies, but there’s still a problem. The boss probably never anticipated just how long this manager would be on his lunch break or the chaos that would occur while he was away from the office.

Let’s read all about it.

You want me to work ZERO overtime? Sure thing boss.

I work as a manager in a call center.

I am no where near the phones, and generally do not interact with customers.

Rather I am a knowledge repository for my staff, and handle communication between our team and the client company which we provide support for.

Here’s more context about his job.

We are a technical support team, not a sales or order support, and the devices which we support are very complex consumer electronics.

Most of our support time goes to professional installers, and we rarely speak to customers first hand.

In short, my job is to know our policies like the back of my hand, and to know the products we support better than anyone except the designers that engineered them.

He works a little bit of overtime helping out with online chat.

A secondary part of my job is to coordinate our online chat team, which is generally pretty hands off other than right as the shift ends when I generally jump in to monitor any active chats and make sure they close up quickly.

I don’t want to keep my guys here any longer than necessary.

They like it better and it cuts down on Overtime hours for the entire line of business by a lot.

This means I generally rack up 15-20 min of overtime a day, though some days it can be as little as 0 and others as much as an hour. My direct boss knows all about this and is generally all for it.

But OP is no longer allowed to work overtime.

One day however, the guy who was in charge of all the support teams (we work with many brands) sent out a memo that management should never be getting overtime.

I brought this up with my boss as this would seriously impact my team, who arranged a meeting with the big boss.

Big Boss proceeds to tell my boss that no, I cannot rack up any overtime hours.

Fine. I get out at a reasonable time every day. I have zero issue with this.

He didn’t work overtime, but his staff had to instead.

So the next Monday, I log out right when my shift ends.

Turns out 3 of my guys were there for an extra hour with last minute chats.

Tuesday, nearly the same story. This continues all through the week.

We are bleeding Overtime Hours for support staff, with most of my team getting nearly an hour of OT per day!!!

The Big Boss wondered what happened.

This goes on for a pay period when Big Boss comes back and tells us we were told to reduce OT hours and that we had somehow racked up even more than we had before.

My Boss backed me up and told the Big Boss that no, we were told to reduce Management OT hours, and that I had indeed not racked up any overtime.

Big Boss asks why OT hours increased and I mentioned I stayed to make sure my team had support they needed to get out as early as possible.

Big Boss goes “Well that makes sense, keep doing that, but add any overtime to your Friday Lunch so you don’t rack up overtime.

He was okay with long lunches.

I explain that I can do this, but will still probably get a bit of OT on Fridays since the end of the shift is obviously after lunch.

Again, cool. Long lunches are nice.

This works well for a few weeks. I am making sure I zero out my OT. But I knew it was only a matter of time before they regretted doing any of this.

We were approaching the busy season and getting more and more long chats and calls. I made sure to get Big Boss to email and CC me and my boss this instruction directly.

One week he worked a lot of overtime.

Sure enough, a few weeks later, Monday, I’m there for a whopping hour and 30 min trying to get one guy out the door. Tuesday for an hour, Wednesday for an hour 15, and to top it off, 2 whole hours on Thursday.

It was a TERRIBLE week for the last minute chats.

I tally up my make up time for my lunch. 5 hours and 45 minutes, plus an hour for my normal lunch.

I normally worked 4 hours, 1 hour lunch, then another 4 hours.

He spent almost the whole day at lunch.

So that Friday, I came in and explained the situation to my boss.

He was cool with me working for only 2 hours and 15 min the whole day, because I was doing exactly what the big boss said to do.

So an hour into my shift, I go on my 6 hour and 45 minute lunch.

While I’m enjoying my most of day siesta, the entire line of business is burning down.

It was a crazy day.

Chat is so busy we have people waiting 30 min to speak with someone. Calls are so busy we have 15 calls waiting.

On days like this I normally jump in the queues as I do not need to document every case like our Tier 1s have to, and I’m very good at my job.

I can usually knock out a 15-20 min call for a Tier 1 in 5 minutes or less. I can easily handle 4-5 chats at one time, seriously taking a load off that team.

Now I alone could not save this shift, no way. We were due for a hiring class, and were working on onboarding new tier 1s at the time. But, man does it look bad to the Client when one of your key players is absent all but 2 hours an 15 min of one of the busiest days ever for our LOB.

Everything was fine until Monday.

I get back in, settle down at my desk, right as the rush is clearing up. The damage was already done, and we were manageable for the rest of the day.

Right at the end of my shift, I look and notice that there is no one on a chat, and no queue, so I immediately log out and thank my team for working hard that day.

Then Monday comes. I get to meet with the Client, Big Boss and my Boss for our weekly meeting.

The Client is furious about how on Friday, one our best assets was on a super long lunch break, and Big Boss puts me on the spot and asks why that was.

He knew exactly what to say.

My response was rehearsed.

“According to Company policy established and agreed upon on (date we met with the Big Boss), I am not to accrue overtime hours. Any hours over 8 worked within the work week must be made up during my lunch break on Fridays.”

Big Boss began denying it, when my boss stepped in, and was like, wait, I got an email about this. He pulls up the email Big Boss sent, and shares it on screen in the meeting.

Client is mad, and the Corporate Rep begins ripping Big Boss a new one on the phone.

The corporate rep had his back!

After Ripping into Big Boss, the Corp Rep speaks to me, telling me to accrue as many hours as needed to make sure my job is done, and that if my company wants to retain this line of business, Big Boss is not to interfere with my generally very successful management without consulting them and myself.

Since then Big Boss has continued to try to interfere and change how I run my line, however every time so far, the Corporate Rep has had my back. They are extremely happy with my work, and know I do a great job.

Heck, they even pushed through a large raise for me when Big Boss was blocking my Boss’s attempts to get me more money.

Sometimes decisions that sound good on paper don’t work well in reality.

If you enjoyed this post, check out this story about a hiring manager who is shocked by an applicant’s entitled attitude about working full time.

Let’s see how Reddit responded to this story.

This person would’ve refused to go back to working overtime.

Another person points out the real problem.

Here’s some advice.

Another person points out why the Big Boss doesn’t like overtime.

He complied, and the client wasn’t happy. You’ve gotta keep the client happy! The Big Boss should realize that.

Hopefully, he’s able to work overtime when needed without any drama from now on.