Shutterstock

Would you be willing to answer your phone if it was about a work related issue during non-working hours like nights and weekends, or would you consider that working overtime?

In this story, one man is kind of in this situation. He gets notifications on his phone if there is an error that needs to be fixed, and he fixes those issues even on nights and weekends.

He gets pretty annoyed that his boss isn’t paying him overtime for this after hours work, but his boss claims he doesn’t need to pay him overtime because he’s not on-call.

That gives the employee an idea, and the next weekend, he turns off his phone.

Keep reading for the dramatic ending to this story!

This is Not On-call or Overtime Work? Okay!

I was a programmer working to build up a new department, where I was the only staff member other than my manager.

My manager would talk to clients and I did everything else.

I had about 40 clients with websites getting information from 80ish satellite-communication sensor arrays with up-to-the-minute updates on those web pages (which I also built).

I built a whole monitoring system to text or email me if there was an issue.

OP ended up working a lot on nights and weekends.

As more clients came online, the notifications of systems being unresponsive or missing data retrieval windows became more frequent, and I had to often log in after hours to fix things.

I was mostly doing this because I cared about my work and I knew we were still ironing out issues.

When I would fix things after hours my manager was very stingy, and told me unless it was more than an hour of work at once I should not get paid for that time.

I told him that it was getting to be a lot of little intervals in the evenings and weekends, and I should be paid to be on-call.

Enough is enough!

He refused to discuss on-call, and even the few times he did get some of the evening time paid out it was my regular hourly rate – no extra pay for overtime.

I also found out a few months later that I was paid over $10k less than the sales people selling the services I created.

So, I confront my manager about the on-call and overtime again. I tell him that my time outside of work is being significantly affected by these after-hours issues (and waking me and my partner up in the middle of the night), and that he needs to pay me to do on-call.

I had done this for over a year now, with literally no breaks.

His manager claims he’s not on-call.

“Well, it’s not really on-call.” He says.

“If something breaks in the evening, if I’m watching for it and then fixing it, what is that?” I ask calmly.

“You just… occasionally see if things are working and fix them if they’re broken, but that is not on-call. That’s just caring about your job while we get things working. We’re not paying you for after-hours work.” He says.

“Okay. I understand.”

He decided not to answer his phone on the weekend.

That weekend, I turn off my phone, since I am not on-call.

A system that my system relied on goes down, and all of the data flow stops. Everything comes crashing down.

I turn on my phone Monday morning, and my phone tries to process over 1,100 text notifications and even more emails, and freezes.

I get to work and my managers phone is ringing off the hook and I can hear clients yelling at him on the phone.

I love how he responded to this manager!

He’s red like a tomato and freaking out.

He demands to know what happened and why it has not been fixed yet.

I reply: “I don’t know. I wasn’t on-call.” And I walk out of his office to leave him with the angry clients.

I quit a month later.

You’re either on-call or you’re not! He handled that well!

Let’s see how Reddit responded to this story.

This person loved the story.

Here’s some helpful info.

Maybe it’s not too late!

If you enjoyed this post, check out this story about an employee who decided to push back against time micromanagement.

I wonder how the department survived after OP quit!

It would be even more satisfying if he happened to be able to get backpay for all the overtime he worked. It sounds illegal for the boss not to pay him for working on nights and weekends.

The boss really should’ve just agreed to pay him overtime. It would’ve prevented so much chaos.

Some bosses don’t understand the problem until it becomes their problem.