He Only Works A Few Saturday Hours, Yet His Director Is Convinced It’s A Full Day
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If you worked for a company that had a policy that you could work as much or as little overtime as you liked on Saturdays, would you take them up on it? What if the rule changed so that you had to work a full day of overtime if you chose to work on Saturday? Would you take them up on it?
In this story, one employee works for a company where Saturday overtime is optional, and they can work a few hours or all day. It’s really up to them.
Unfortunately, one director at the company makes an assumption that leads to an angry customer, so the overtime rule changes.
Let’s read all about it.
Full day OT only?
Many years ago, I worked as an engineer repairing retail customer PCs.
Our team was small and there was often times when the amount of PCs needing repair was more than the team could get through during normal hours.
In these circumstances, we were allowed voluntary overtime on Saturday and would get time+half for it.
The rules for the OT were flexible, we could start when we wanted and finish when we wanted, and would get paid for each full 60mins we were clocked in for.
It was actually pretty convenient for OP to work a few hours of overtime on Saturdays.
Back then my girlfriend (Now wife) used to work until 2pm on a Saturday, so I would go in for 9:30am and leave at 1:30pm, giving me plenty of time to pick her up.
This worked out great for everyone.
However, the company structure was a little strange, with the front facing customer service under the management of one Director and the back of house (including my team) under the management of another and they despised each other, constantly trying to cause each other problems.
And of course, the workers were always caught in the middle.
One Saturday was a little bit different.
One fateful Saturday, I was working and noticed the front facing Director walk up, see that I was there and move on without saying anything.
I didn’t think anything of it and a short while later left at 1:30 as normal.
I got in as normal on Monday, to find I had a meeting request from my Director.
Confused, I attended the meeting and found both my Director and the front Director also there.
Here’s why OP was called to this meeting.
Turns out, the front Director had arranged for a customer to bring in their PC for an urgent repair on Saturday, having confirmed I was there to fix it.
On-the-spot repairs were very rare, reserved for only the most problematic or highest spending customers.
Me not being there to look at it had caused the customer to have a meltdown in the shop in front of many other customers.
Of course, the front Director took the opportunity to bring this up with the MD to get one up on my Director, leading to the Monday meeting, where she was out for my blood.
The overtime rules changed.
Luckily, as the overtime rules for our department were clear and I followed them, there was no direct action taken against me, with my Director supporting me.
However, one thing that did come from this was that we lost our flexible overtime.
From that point on, if we wanted to do OT on a Saturday, we must be there for the whole day.
As I wasn’t willing to lose my entire Saturday, overtime stopped.
There were major consequences.
It took less than a month for the departments backlog to hit over 100 units.
Our target was to have <15 at the end of each day.
I’d originally wondered why my Director didn’t put up a fight when the new rule was set, but it didn’t take long to see the number of Customer service complaints and call waiting times skyrocket.
All of which was the front Directors responsibility.
The rules changed again.
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Not long after, my Director approached me smiling, to let me know that the front Director had gone to the MD, first to try to force us to do OT and when that failed, beg for the new rule to be removed.
So the next Saturday, I was back earning a little extra cash and that Director didn’t try to screw around with our hours again.
It’s great when complying with stupid rules makes management realize they messed up.
Let’s see how Reddit responded to this story.
This person loves how this story played out.
Another person points out how poorly the director “verified” that OP was there.
It’s impossible to do a task you didn’t know someone promised you would do.
OP’s director definitely won this round!
That sounds really annoying! I’m glad the overtime policy was eventually changed back. It sounds like OP had a great setup of working while his wife was at work.
The director really needed to talk to OP instead of assuming his presence meant he’d be there all day.
This entire problem could’ve been avoided with a little communication.
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