Their Boss Forced Them to Work Sunday—So They Spent the Entire Day Playing Video Games on Overtime Pay
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Imagine working in a position where your skillset is quite valuable during an emergency like a storm. What would you do if you were called in to work on your day off because there was a small chance that there would be a storm? Would you be okay with that or try to argue your way out of it?
In this story, one worker who is in this situation is almost positive the storm isn’t actually going to happen. She tries to explain to her boss that calling everyone in to work on their day off is a waste of company money, but when he refuses to listen, she decides to make the best of it.
Keep reading for the whole story.
You order to waste company time ? OK, but I’m on OT.
This happened about 2 years ago at a company I no longer work for.
I work in infrastructure, specifically in communications. My job in this particular company was the oversight and maintenance of the network, and I mean the physical network, posts, cables, servers, equipment, etc.
Now, where I live (PR) we get a lot of thunderstorms/rain-storms, and with the territory being almost all rain forest you can imagine that mountainous terrain and storms make for a lot of broken or fallen down cables/posts and landslides.
There was a storm headed their way…maybe.
So on this particular day I was off work (it was a weekend) but there was supposedly a thunderstorm being predicted for my area.
Whenever that happened we where supposed to enter a sort of stand-by where if anything broke down or got damaged, me and my team would have to go on the field immediately and fix it.
I had seen the news and the chances of such storm was at 10% or less (can’t remember exactly but it was stupid low) so low in fact that I was planning on hitting the beach with my son and husband.
Now there are two types of stand-by you either 1) stay home and are “on-call” all day or 2) go by the office, prepare for an emergency and stay there on 12hr shifts waiting for the worst.
The day is not going to go the way she had hoped.
When my boss called that morning I’m thinking he’s gonna ask me to be on-call all day so I’m already telling my husband we can’t go to the beach and such in case I have to go in, but at least we’ll all be home all day and relax.
So imagine my surprise when my boss says it’s gonna be an emergency stand-by and everyone is to report for a 12hr shift.
I tell him the chances of this becoming a major storm where almost null and there was no need to bring everyone in like this.
He responds by saying that his information is different and that it will most likely be bad and he wants everyone in immediately.
The boss refused to change his mind.
I try to convince him one last time by explaining that doing this would mean OT pay for everyone who has to come in on a Sunday (my team alone was Me and 13 other people).
Ofc boss doesn’t care, he says he’ll get it approved by the high-ups and to do as he says.
Cue MC: I call all my guys to tell them that they have to be on site for 12hrs, it’s gonna be OT pay ofc but their Sundays are ruined.
I also tell them to bring stuff to do since we are all most likely gonna be stuck there with nothing to do. I tell them to bring games, snacks and coolers, and even sleeping bags.
It sounds like they had a good time.
My plan was to hang out with my team all day and get paid double to do so. I even said to go all out with it and if anything happened it was on me.
By the time I get to the office some of the guys have already arrived and are setting up the office TV with a Playstation5, coffee is on the pot, and one of the guys is already napping in a sleeping bag on a corner.
Throughout the 12hrs we played Monopoly, PS5, Dominoes, cards, chess, we talked, we joked, we took turns sleeping and we cooked a big meal for all of us and just basically enjoyed ourselves.
Around the 10 hr mark it had only drizzled a little for about 30 minutes and my boss decided to call off the stand-by. (Later I learned that he got his ear chewed off for making us go in in the first place)
Here’s how overtime pay works.
Now when a stand-by gets called off, per union rule, if it’s been at least half of the total hours we get paid in full. Meaning my boss had 6 hours to call off the stand-by so he didn’t have to pay for all 12, it had been 10.
So the boss calls, asks what we are doing and I straight up tell him “Nothing, just here waiting”
He is ofc furious, he tells me that the emergency was now over and we could all leave.
But OP had another suggestion.
I explain that since he had to pay for the full shift and we were already here, wouldn’t it be best if we just stayed ? JIC ? It’s only 2 more hrs after all.
He says no, so we all pack up all our stuff and head home.
At the end we did absolutely nothing but hang out for 10 hrs, and my boss had to figure out how he was gonna explain OT pay for 14 people on a sunny day.
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Suffice it to say he got chewed off so bad that he quit the following week.
Except for the fact that these workers didn’t get to spend the day with their families, it sounds like they had a pretty good time. Getting paid to play video games with your coworkers doesn’t sound so bad.
Let’s see how Reddit responded to this story.
This would’ve been funny!
Yeah, he probably didn’t really quit.
Seriously! Where is he getting his information?
If you enjoyed this story, check out this post about a client who regretted paying for a cross-country flight after the IT specialist just flipped a breaker.
Another person points out the benefits of a union.
It may not have been the day any of them had planned on having, but at the end of it, they made some extra money without doing any actual work. It wasn’t a total loss except for the boss who made a really bad decision.
She tried to warn him, but he wouldn’t listen.
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