He Was Told The Company Wouldn’t Compensate Him For Weekend Travel, But That Policy Turned Into An Unexpected Mini-Vacation Before The Trip
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Companies sometimes spend far more money trying to avoid paying employees for their time.
One worker was expected to travel across the country before Monday without receiving weekend pay.
Rather than donate his Sunday, he asked whether the company would approve a much earlier flight instead.
Keep reading to see how that simple question created a pretty sweet setup.
I’ll take the free mini vacation for $0, Alex.
“I took a position within my company that required a cross country relocation from the west coast to the east coast along with a change in corporate divisions.
I knew as part of this deal I’d have to return to the west coast once or twice a year, a total of maybe six to eight days a year, to handle some integration things.
It was time for a new adventure!
So, I packed up, left family and friends and get happily settled in at the new job. A few months go by before the topic of a return trip to the west coast pops up in a meeting.
The guy that organizes our release schedules has pulled some dates out of his *** for the trip; it’s a Monday to Thursday. We coordinate with the customer and carve all this into granite.
Let me take a quick detour here. The guy who maintains our schedule is Dean. Dean is paid a princely sum to maintain an MS Project schedule and do a couple other simple things.
Hmmm…
Dean doesn’t seem willing to use the MS Project feature that allows you to import holidays into your schedule so he once picked some arbitrary dates for a couple hardware techs to do work over what turned out to be Thanksgiving.
It happens that this division of Mondo Corp doesn’t pay us to travel on weekends and Dean has me meeting the customer on Monday morning.
I bring it up in our next staff meeting to confirm that, indeed, unlike my old division, they won’t pay for weekend travel.
This was a bunch of malarkey!
My manager says nope, no pay for weekend travel. I’m not happy I have to donate half a day on Sunday to the company. I have a little epiphany. I ask if Friday travel is authorized.
My manager says, “Sure, why not?”
I ask again, “I can fly back to the west coast on Friday morning, get a rental car, stay three extra nights, and Mondo Corp will pay!?”
The answer is still yes.
Well, that worked out in the end!
I spent the weekend revisiting my favorite eating haunts, visiting family, visiting friends, and in general having a good time; all paid for by Mondo Corp.
I get to work Monday morning with a nice tan and a bit of a hangover.”
Check out what Reddit users had to say about this.
This person weighed in.
Another individual shared their thoughts.
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This Reddit user spoke up.
Another individual shared their thoughts.
If you enjoyed this story, check out this post about a deli counter employee who tells a customer they’ve gone too far when they want them to do their shopping.
And this reader had a lot to say.
This employee flew west on Friday after his company refused to pay for Sunday travel but approved extra hotel nights and rental car costs.
He spent the paid weekend visiting family, seeing friends, and enjoying favorite restaurants before starting work Monday morning.
The company avoided half a day’s wages by funding an entire getaway.
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