Imagine working at a company for quite awhile, and you’re really doing an amazing job. You’re even doing work that technically isn’t part of your job. Every day you go above and beyond.

If you were offered a promotion with more responsibilities but a pathetic salary in return for the additional work, would you take it, or would you refuse?

In this story, one employee was in that situation, and he turned down the promotion. His employer retaliated by telling him not to work overtime, so he retaliated by doing his actual job, nothing more, nothing less. Instead of going above and beyond, he did the bare minimum.

Keep reading to see how the story plays out.

Take away my OT? Ok!

I was offered a bad salary and promotion to a job I was already doing (through increased responsibility by being a good employee with great job performance).

I turned it down.

I wasn’t allowed to negotiate either, which I still did. Forget that rule.

The counter offer was still far less than median which was the lowest I would go as I did a good job.

The employer retaliated.

It doesn’t look good when employees refuse promotions and near every manager in the company knows me. I’m the supply guy after all.

So they tried taking my OT away. They had to be gunning after my pride in performance and not wanting to be fired.

To note, I live a simple life and don’t care for the money but my friends in the company are in similar positions and have families and need the money. I can get another job easy enough that pays enough for me to live off of.

I turned it down because its not a lot of money to a big company and don’t want to fuel mistreatment of it’s employees, my friends.

He decided to change how he spent his time at work.

I complied with no more OT but I told them I needed the OT to do a good job. As a supply guy for a large company, I order millions of dollars of supplies throughout the year. I didn’t have time to negotiate big orders anymore.

HR didn’t care and my director boss didn’t think I’d let my job performance drop.

I started doing bare minimum within my HR provided copy and paste job description and only 8 hour days.

I sucked!!!! I did the role above my job title to begin with but they would never acknowledge this or they’d have to pay me for it.

His boss couldn’t even complain.

So now I was spending $20,000+ more a month than I used to. Boss knew but what could he do? He messed up.

I’m the only person in the company with knowledge that can only be gained through experience to do the job. I’m also critical to many operations.

This is small figures to a large company and it’s not like my boss and HR would tell people they messed up in my handling. He also spent the personnel budget on hiring his friend to be a director, so I heard later.

So I stuck around until I had trained a replacement since I didn’t want to leave on a bad note since my great friends I made in the company are the managers I worked with daily for years. So then I left.

When he left, a lot of people had questions.

It’d be a bad story if this is was all.

When I left, a lot of people were curious why. My friends, near every manager, weren’t afraid to talk as my boss wasn’t their boss.

Without going into detail, I’m popular in my company for lower level workers. I’ve saved the day a few times and do all I can to make their job easier.

Due to other complaints with HR and poor pay, me leaving fueled their discontent further to a noticeable performance level. This prompted an unofficial investigation by other directors.

It sounds like there were some positive changes.

Our COO was the likely core of the problem. He hired my boss, his friend, and had a say in the HR directors hiring. Other directors soon drove them out as it’s hard to like a job when your employees and coworkers hate you.

The HR director still works there and causes problems but she no longer has a say in pay levels. A few managers and good employees got raises. There’s still a lack of base pay though if you ask me.

Overall, I like to think I had a key role to play as I knew a few directors on a personal level.

Here’s what he’s up to now.

I’m back at college after dropping out the first time for medical reasons, and still talk to my friends at the company regularly.

For belief this isn’t made up since I’m not entirely detached from society, this isn’t your regular big company.

It grew rapidly in the last 5 years and many directors were promoted up and still busy fighting the “corporate” mindset take over from what I hear.

Doing his job and nothing but his job was the best way to handle it. It’s annoying when bosses expect you to do a higher level job without the promotion or raise to match.

If you enjoyed this story, check out this post about a woman who volunteered to help promote a church event for free, then was surprised to find she had to still pay admission to get in.

Let’s see how Reddit responded to this story.

This is a good question.

Someone who used to be in the navy weighs in.

Another supply guy shares his experience.

I assume because he’s not spending as much time negotiating with suppliers.

You get what you pay for, and that includes employees. If you don’t pay your employees a fair salary, don’t expect them to go above and beyond. That’s basically the lesson of this story.

If you enjoyed this story, check out this post about a person who spent nearly 3 decades climbing the ladder at work only to be fired in a meeting that lasted less than a minute.