Busywork is annoying, but worse than that is having to look busy just to keep up appearances.

This is what this man’s boss asked of him when he noticed he was leaving early, but he found a way to maliciously comply.

Read the story and see how things played out.

“People” don’t understand why you’re leaving early

I was working for a small-ish company, about 60 employees across several locations. IT support for both hardware (laptops, phones) and software.

When I was hired (just under 9 years ago) it was verbally agreed that instead of clocking any callouts as overtime, I would just take the time in lieu.

But this would end up benefiting the company more than him.

Callouts were always minimal and there were never any issues with me taking the time here and there to make up for it.

Any calls in the middle of the night were quickly resolved, and I had no problem getting back to sleep.

Appointments in the middle of the day were fine because of the additional hours from whenever…

This worked well for almost my entire time there.

I also ALWAYS started early, just depending on when I left the house, got into the office, got my coffee – could have been anywhere between 5 and 30 minutes because I would leave the house earlier so as not to wake the family if school was off that day.

He was happy to do it. But then things changed.

I didn’t care at that point. It never bothered me.

They got free time from me, but again I DID NOT CARE because honestly what else did I have to do?

It was a great job until it wasn’t.

One weekend, I was working on some hardware maintenance (cleaning up wiring, ethernet, plugs, installing a new UPS) that took me the better part of Sunday to complete (6-8 hours).

This was understood, approved in advance and appreciated.

He kept giving his all.

The following week I decided to start burning those extra hours up.

I still came in early (as I had done for years), but started leaving an hour early from my regular end time every day if nothing was going on.

This is important – if something needed done, I got it done. I was reachable via email until early evening, and phone pretty much 24/7.

This particular week was slow, so I had nothing going on. I left an hour early for the first 4 days.

But his boss saw it differently.

On Friday, my boss comes to me and gently says “people notice that you’ve been leaving early this week, I’d like you to make sure you stay in your office until the scheduled end of day in case someone needs you.”

I explained to him that I was burning up lieu days and he just reiterated that “it looks bad to others”.

Seriously? You can’t tell the “others” that I work my 40 hours a week, just not at the same time as them? Fine.

Cue the malicious compliance.

He immediately made changes.

I immediately submitted 4 hours of overtime for the hours that I didn’t take in lieu.

I still showed up at the office at whatever time I got there, but did not start ANY work until 8 am. If asked, I would say “sure, 8 am start time”.

If I got called outside of office hours, depending on how long I spent on the issue, I logged it as overtime.

User calls me at 7 pm to ask a question? I answer him in 30 seconds… one hour OT.

His boss took notice.

When my boss then started to ask “how come you’re submitting all of this overtime?”

I responded with a simple “some people don’t understand or like me taking lieu time, so I need to claim it as overtime since I am at my desk from 8-4.”

Because I wasn’t available at his beck and call, it ended up costing them more money.

They lost a great employee.

95% of my job could be done from home because of full remote access, but that stupid old school mentality means that people in the office need to see you at your desk all day long.

I left the company very shortly after that for a much better paying job with full work from home.

Know your worth.

Caring more about appearances than reality is how a lot of companies lose good employees.

Let’s see what Reddit has to say about this.

A reader shares their thoughts.

This commenter shares their POV.

Good one.

Someone shares a similar experience.

Food for thought.

Another reader chimes in.

What his boss wanted was the equivalent of walking around with a clipboard just to look busy.

A too-common tale.

Thought that was satisfying? Check out what this employee did when their manager refused to pay for their time while they were traveling for business.