Rules are rules until they’re inconvenient for the person who made them, and no one demonstrates that contradiction better than the toxic boss in this story.

An IT employee at a small business was chewed out for taking his lunch 30 minutes late, despite working overtime on a mission-critical issue.

The boss insisted: lunch is 12 to 1, period. Three days later, the entire network crashed at 12:25.

So the employee happily walked away from his computer. After all, he was just following the boss’ orders.

You’ll want to read on to find out how this one ends.

Boss chastised me for a late lunch during a “mission critical outage”, so I clocked out when the whole network went down!

This is my first IT job at a small business, but I have decades of blue collar experience.

I was the first IT person the company ever hired. My associate’s in IT specializing in networking, only a few gen-ed classes away.

My boss kept the platters spinning, but he has no formal training or amateur desire. He wants to offload the tediousness.

One day, an important project demands his attention.

Three days prior, I was trying to get a “mission critical” computer up and running again.

The only computer with the shipping software (and hundreds of packages waiting to ship).

So he tries to make a suggestion, but ended up getting overruled.

I advised an immediate re-image (delete everything and reset to a “known good save”). I had it on deck for just such an occasion.

But I was overridden by the owner, who wanted me to keep Windows in situ and delete/reinstall programs piecemeal and deal with phone support for those programs, because he paid extra for tech support.

His call, I followed orders. I was on the phone for hours and did not leave my post until the job was done.

So he decided to take the break he was entitled to, but his boss wasn’t too happy.

That meant I took my lunch half an hour later. No big deal for me, but when I clocked back in and got back to my desk, my boss was standing there, FUMING, because I took a lunch outside of normal hours.

Apparently, he had broken some rule he didn’t know even existed.

He INSISTED I MUST take my 30 minute lunch from 12–1 as per company policy.

So, today, the whole network goes out at 12:25 and I had not yet taken my lunch. Nothing can ping anything.

My own personal hunches tell me this is because it’s a factory building. There are a lot of high-voltage woodworking machines for factory production level of output, and ALL of the ethernet cables are unshielded. Just my hunch.

But I really can’t do a thing, because my company rents out office space as a subletter. So we are NOT allowed access to the switches and routers.

I have no admin access to the infrastructure.

So he accepted these limitations and adapted, but then the inevitable happened.

So I set up Wireshark to record and a continuous command line ping, and go to lunch.

Boss is standing at my desk when I get back today, and gives me a passive-aggressive, “The network is up, by the way!” But refuses to call me out further.

I had the “I told you so” on deck, though!

Sounds like the boss didn’t know best after all.

If you enjoyed this story, check out this post about an employee who works fast and helps her coworkers, but is met with disapproval from her supervisor because of this practice

What did Reddit have to say?

This boss wasn’t bold enough to say the quiet part out loud.

This user thinks IT is one of the most thankless jobs.

This fellow IT worker shares their experience.

Maybe expectations for IT workers are just way too high.

The boss has now created a situation where his IT guy can’t do the right thing without getting punished for it.

Fix the computer and take a late lunch? Get yelled at.

Follow the lunch policy during a network outage he can’t resolve? Get a passive-aggressive greeting when he returns.

The goalposts move based on whatever makes the boss feel most in control at any given moment, and the IT guy is learning to stop chasing them and start documenting instead.

If you enjoyed this story, check out this post about a team that agreed to work overtime, but then not everyone showed up, leaving the rest holding the bag.