One Minute Past The End Of Their Paid Break Was Enough For A Coworker To Start Yelling And Get The Manager Involved
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Everyone has probably had the experience of working with a really annoying coworker, and hopefully everyone has also had the experience of working with a really wonderful coworker. In this story, we hear about both on the same day.
A lab worker was working overtime to finish up some work, and a thoughtful coworker brought in a treat for them to enjoy on their break. That was fine, but then the annoying coworker decided to really overreact when they returned to the lab just one minute late.
Keep reading to find out what they decided to do about it.
“Lead” supervisor gets mad that coworker and I used our paid break to eat.
I work in a lab that employs a LOT of people nationwide, kind of irrelevant but whatever. We get a lot of cases from doctors and hospitals all across the country everyday to run tests they order.
Because of the sheet amount of cases we get daily we have a lot of QC that needs to be done by the end of the week, and if it doesn’t get done by Saturday night, we have to do a rotation every week to finish it.
My actual supervisor said “we have to stay 4-6 hours OR until everything is done”.
One coworker sounds particularly annoying.
There’s this cynical, old woman who works in my department.
She’s a massive pain in our butt and sends endless amounts of emails a day, about fixing things that aren’t broken, doing something wrong even though we follow her directions, all while she’s doing none of her own work.
She also happens to be the “lead” of our department even though she never sees any of us because she’s in the back office, not in the actual lab, she works third shift.
Another coworker sounds particularly nice.
Today is my rotation.
It just so happens to be my birthday weekend (my birthday was Friday) and my coworker who I’m doing the rotation with brought breakfast burritos for the two of us.
Thankfully there wasn’t a lot of work last week and there was minimal QC to do.
After we stayed for an hour and were 80% done with our work we took a paid 15 minute break.
The annoying coworker was more annoying than ever.
16 minutes later we come back into the lab and she starts yelling at us because we went over our time, and she leaves the lab and calls our manager who basically said it doesn’t matter since we’re still getting the work done.
Old Woman comes back and says that we can’t leave until the work is done (even though she’ll be leaving in about an hour)
Okay then.
We finish all of our work about 10 minutes after we came back from break, but since we’re still on the clock we’re deciding to stay for the entire 6 hours doing mindless work (cleaning already sanitized stations, deleting emails, dusting keyboards, changinf pens, etc) which will cost the company about $300 more (bc of OT pay) on our paychecks. All because we were one minute over.
If all their work is done, why don’t they just go home? I don’t understand.
Let’s see how Reddit responded.
This person likes the malicious compliance.
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Someone who used to work in a lab weighs in.
Another person makes a good point.
This is what I’m thinking too.
I don’t think this is really going to hurt the annoying woman at all. It’s not like she has to pay the overtime out of her pocket. All they’re doing is wasting time at work when they could leave since they’re done. If they really want the extra money, then awesome, but if they’d rather leave, they’re only hurting themselves here.
It would’ve been better if they came up with a way to do something that would actually annoy the old woman, or if they caught her doing something wrong and turned the tables by complaining to the manager about her.
At least they’re getting paid overtime.
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