A Tech Support Worker Put In Huge Overtime Hours On Monday, So It Stings That She Has To Wait Until Friday To Get The Time Back
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Imagine working for a company that doesn’t pay you for overtime. Instead, they let you deduct the hours from your workday on Friday so that you don’t work more than 40 hours.
That’s the situation in this story, but the tech support worker worked so much overtime that she hardly needed to work at all on one particular Friday.
She was pretty smart about it, and after she handled it the way she did, management learned their lesson.
Let’s read all about it.
Don’t want to pay overtime, but wants overtime.
I’ve spoken to you many times about the rules on this project, so we do not need to go over this again:
- You must take any overtime worked during the week on the Friday.
- You cannot do overtime on the Friday.
- You cannot negotiate this, we’ve been over it a million times. I am not interested in discussion.
Overtime was basically required.
So this is how the discussion with my boss began back when I did support.
To give context this was a two year plan of migrating remote sites, it wasn’t particularly complicated but in order to make things smoother we’d suggested migrating most of their data overnight, this would occur a couple of hours of overtime each week which the company were not happy having to pay – so they insisted we “take time off on the Friday instead”.
The problem was that two hours could easily jump to 4 or 5 if there was a complicated server setup and a lot of data.
These were old legacy systems with terrible connections, you had to babysit them and there was zero documentation.
This is a lot of overtime in one night!
One week well into the project the migration at night takes almost 7 hours.
I’m in work the follow day (Tuesday) and I’m exhausted having had about 3 hours sleep.
I’m refused the day off as “it must be Friday”.
By Friday I have recovered and I’m looking forward to my 30 minute working day at this point.
Here’s how Friday went.
I roll in, there’s been a ransomware incident at the previous weeks site. The I’m told to go there and help handle it.
So I do.
I spent my 30minutes driving to site, call up my boss “Hi Boss, just clocking off as it’s a Friday to take my hours back. Can you send X out here now as it looks like a right mess, see you on Monday.”
They quickly organised overtime payments for the remaining 23 weeks the project had to run.
FYI I did get told off on the Monday for my attitude but there was nothing they could do about it.
At least OP basically got to enjoy a 3-day weekend!
Let’s see how Reddit responded.
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This person thinks the policy sounds stupid.
Another person thinks she handled it well.
This person doesn’t think OP was the one with the attitude.
Another person learned their lesson.
Some people may not mind getting “paid” for overtime with time off, but it doesn’t always work out best for the employee or the company that way. If they had let her take time off on Tuesday, that would’ve made so much more sense.
I’m glad she didn’t say anything about what time she needed to leave before heading home. That was really smart.
Complying can be the best way to point out a problem.
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