A System Outage Severed Her Queue—Only for Her Boss to Demand Unpaid Overtime Recovery
Shutterstock
Imaging working from home. Would you expect to get paid extra if you work overtime, or would you figure that overtime isn’t really a thing when you’re working from home?
It shouldn’t matter where you’re working. Working overtime remotely is still working overtime.
But the boss in this story didn’t feel that way, so the employee came up with a plan to humor the boss without actually working overtime.
Keep reading to see how the story plays out.
Make me stay at work for an extra hour? I’ll sleep through it
I worked Customer Support from home at my last job, we did not get paid overtime “because it is from home” or some other bs.
One day, at the last 50+ min of my shift, my connection dropped for long enough to kick me out of the VPN the company uses. I could not connect again to that VPN due to a technical issue, but I still had internet.
I reported this to my boss, so that she would let me go for the day and I could just stay for an hour more the next one.
But the boss had a different plan.
My boss instructed me to stay, cause I was logged into the systems,and could help out in other areas that was not talking to the clients.
She told me that despite me staying till the end of my shift and helping out, I would still have to do overtime the next day (because my task for the day was to contact customers, not help out in other areas).
I could not work my task, but I was forced to stay and work on other tasks. AND on top of that I would have to work overtime another day?
Basically, I would not get paid for the hour I did work (cause it was not logged), nor for the other hour (cause it was logged as overtime which was unpaid). No, thank you.
She had a plan.
Cue my petty revenge/malicious compliance.
I finished off my shift that day at a bit later than 5pm. However, my boss reported officially that I had worked until 4pm due to a technical issue, and logged an hour of overtime for me for another shift.
What she did not realise was that the other shift had a different task (not contact customers, but do internal work on tickets and such). This work is not as heavily monitored (by the minute) as the one with customers.
So, the morning of my overtime shift, I logged into the system and fell blissfuly back asleep for an hour.
She knew she wouldn’t get fired.
My productivity for the day went significantly down, as they track that, but I was logged and “working on some really tough internal cases”.
No one could say anything.
I was one of their best workers, the only one on my team that was fast and competent, whose productivity was great (heck they had promoted me because of it – with a 4% rise in salary which is an absolute joke here as average is 15-25%).
So, they lost more money by trying to cheat me out of 2 working hours tbh. And they lost my respect, as I ended up quitting a month later.
Quitting sounds like the right thing to do. It’s awful that the company didn’t pay for overtime.
Let’s see how Reddit responded.
Shenanigans is a fun word.
Sign up to get our BEST stories of the week straight to your inbox.
Another person is glad she quit.
Here’s some praise for unions.
If you enjoyed this story, check out this post about a delivery driver who tried warning his boss the truck needed new brakes and tires, only to find his truck sidelined during their busiest season.
This is a good question.
I wouldn’t want to work for a company where you’re expected to work overtime for free. That’s completely unreasonable.
The issue was a technical one. It’s not like OP was slacking off. She shouldn’t have been expected to work overtime at all.
Quitting was definitely the right thing to do.
Enjoyed this story?
Sign up to get our BEST stories of the week straight to your inbox.
