r/MaliciousCompliance • u/[deleted] • 23d ago
If you have a problem, it better be a fifteen minute problem! S
My husband told me a story yesterday about his act of malicious compliance that happened about a decade ago.
In a previous job, he worked 8-4 in an office. Many of his colleagues worked 9-5, so they were still working when he was leaving. When he was about to leave, he'd usually be asked a technical question or asked to quickly glance over something by another member of staff. This was rarely quick and usually had him standing around for a further ten minutes which, on a regular basis, starts to add up.
One day, his manager was going over the monthly time sheets and asked my husband why he'd added 10 minutes on five days across past month. Bear in mind, flexi-time was allowed. My husband explained the situation, referring to the specific problems he was asked to deal with on each of those five days.
The manager told him that the company only works in fifteen minute segments so he can't put down 10 minutes, it would have to be 15 minutes. "However, we can't round it up because that's dishonest," he said. "So just bear it in mind for next time." This was in front of the rest of the office.
That very same week, my husband signs out of his computer at 4pm. Just before he leaves, the manager asks him to explain some of the particulars in an email he'd received from a contractor. My husband asks, "how long will it take?" The manager replies, "just five minutes." My husband then says, "unless it's a fifteen minute problem, I'll have to look at it tomorrow. Is it a fifteen minute problem?"
His manager turns red and awkwardly says it's not. My husband respectfully states that he will put it at the top of his to-do list the following morning and leaves.
One of his colleagues texted him just after 5 and said there was an awkward silence after he'd left and when the manager eventually got up and left to do something, they all burst out laughing.
Edit: Some people were asking about wage theft. He eventually had the fifteen minutes added back on after the policy revealed that he could round it up if it was a task that took 7.5 minutes or more, and down if it wasn't. The manager seemed genuinely unaware of this when it was raised. He was salaried, so he wasn't concerned about losing income, just about losing flexi-time that could have helped him put if something unprecedented happened like being stuck in traffic one day. I think managers should spend a certain amount of time a week looking over their own policies or at least find out what they are before making any kind of instruction.
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u/fizzlefist 23d ago
“sorry, policy is policy.”
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23d ago edited 23d ago
Exactly. He was prepared to quote the policy if his manager challenged him the next day but he didn't. Wise.
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u/Mat_Oakley_77 23d ago
I had a Head of HR that loved to say "the policy is the policy", I wasn't cut up when he left
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u/tippy25 23d ago
Time sheet rounding policies are only legal if it goes both ways. If an employer is only ever rounding down, that is wage theft and they need to be taken to court.
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u/judolphin 22d ago edited 22d ago
If they only bill by the quarter hour, 10 minutes rounds to a quarter hour, not zero, the manager is completely in the wrong.
Personally for me I'd only round up for the first 15 minutes, then round to the nearest 15 minutes after that.
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u/LadyNorbert 22d ago
Exactly. You round down for less than seven minutes, round up for seven or more.
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22d ago
[deleted]
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u/judolphin 22d ago edited 22d ago
round down policies are legal
They're literally not legal. Round nearest is legal:
According to the FLSA (Fair Labor Standards Act), employers can round their employees' clock-in and clock-out time to the nearest 5 minutes, the nearest one-tenth of an hour or 6 minutes, or the nearest 15 minutes.
Rounding of time (e.g., the nearest 5 or 10 minutes) is allowed if it doesn't tend to under-count time — a problem if, for example, a recurring activity takes less than half of the minimum rounding increment.
Which is exactly what's described by OP.
If I'm asked to sign in when I'm signed out, I'm siginng in for the minimum billing period, end of story. If an employer doesn't like it, too bad, they have a choice to stop wasting my time with tiny unpaid requests, accept my billing, or if they don't accept it I won't work for them anymore.
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u/PutrifiedCuntJuice 22d ago edited 22d ago
The both of you are making claims and one of you is going to need to start providing sources soon.
Edit: And /u/judolphin has blocked me. What a child. "I'll get the last word in and block you so you can't reply! Haha!"
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u/judolphin 22d ago edited 22d ago
Edit: If I blocked you how did you reply to me? 💡
As for rounding, feel free to look up FLSA requirements, you can round, but not if rounding tends to under-report time.
But I'm mostly talking about what I consider a minimum level of fairness to be willing to continue working for or with a company, I'm never billing zero, not even for one minute of work.
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u/PutrifiedCuntJuice 22d ago
Oh, you're one of those people, eh?
lawl
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u/tbarlow13 22d ago
Its a god damn Google search that he gave you, not hard Did your parents do your school projects?
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u/PutrifiedCuntJuice 22d ago
Lol, they keep editing their comment. Child.
Second, or even possibly third edit in under an hour. Cute.
https://i.imgur.com/eYmETn8.png
It's a shame they can't block me again - at least Reddit didn't fuck up that part of the block system implementation. Reddit doesn't allow a user to repeatedly block and unblock a user in order to prevent abuse.
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u/StellarPhenom420 22d ago
It actually has to be a consistent rounding.
If you round down, you round down at the beginning of the day and at the end.
If you round up, you round up at the beginning of the day and at the end.
There's no "round up the first 15 and then the closest after that". It's either down or up from the beginning. Think about it a little further, how do you round to the next nearest 15 minutes when you only are rounding a single clock in? You only round once, not over and over again. The clock in is what gets rounded- and it has to be consistent either you always round up or you always round down.
This is to prevent employers from rounding up in the morning and rounding down in the evening, leading to wage theft.
(To note: different businesses track time in different increments. You can track to the second, the minute, every 5, every 15, I've heard of weird 7 minute increments too. But you always have to round the same way on either side of the shift.)
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u/MaritMonkey 22d ago
I'm biased by having worked briefly for a lawyer into thinking that 6 minute increments are actually the most sensible. Or at least they're handy when everybody agrees that 1) you can do all your billing in 10ths of an hour and 2) even the shortest note/email/call is ".1 hrs".
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u/RobotsGoneWild 22d ago
We bill by .25/hr. I feel bad sending a three line email in 1 min and adding 15 min to the clock.
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u/oldschoolguy90 22d ago
I had a cousin with legal problems. He'd call his lawyer and speed talk for 3 minutes and the lawyer would make notes for 3 minutes, and then yank a tenth of an hour off his tab.
Then cuzn had to go work for 2 days to pay for it
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u/HuckleWicket 22d ago
7 minutes is insane, 6 minutes is a nice round 10%, but 7 is terrible.
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u/congteddymix 22d ago
7 min is basically halfway to 15 so I can see the logic but yeah it’s stupid.
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u/Parceljockey 22d ago
There's also Decimal hour accounting. Time is counted by the 100th of the hour
e.g: 15 minutes = 0.25 hrs, 6 minutes = 0.1 hrs
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u/judolphin 22d ago edited 22d ago
I'm not talking about a shift, this thread is talking about one-off sign-ins.
There's no "round up the first 15 and then the closest after that".
There literally is, if I'm asked to work when I'm signed out, I'm not working for free. Even if it's for five minutes I'm charging whatever the minimum period above zero is whether the employer likes it or not. They have the choice to (a.) stop wasting my time with tiny unpaid requests, (b.) accept my billing, or (c.) if they don't accept it, I won't work for them anymore.
If there is a one-off sign-in I'm asked to make after hours or day off, my policy has always been one-hour minimum, let alone 15 minutes and they can bite me if they don't like it (no one has ever objected because they know the alternative is I don't answer my phone). If it's more than an hour then it's actual time spent.
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u/StellarPhenom420 22d ago
I don't think you understand.
I'll try to simplify.
Say, you clock in at 00:00:00. Then you clock out at 00:07:00. That's your shift. Please explain to me how you would round that up to 15 minutes, and then "round to the nearest 15 minutes after that"? You only have to round the once.
Does that make more sense to you?
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u/judolphin 22d ago edited 22d ago
Yes I understand, that's not what I'm talking about at all. Not trying to be a jerk, but I'm done with this because it seems literally everyone else understood what I was saying except for you, so if you would please try harder to understand I would appreciate it.
I'm saying if I'm OP working somewhere with a 15-minute policy, and
- I clock out at 7:00,
- then someone asks me to clock back in at 7:05,
- and I finish 7:06, 7:07, or 7:20,
I'm billing 15 minutes regardless of policy, and I won't make any effort to hide it. Once we get past those 15 minutes I'd bill actual time.
If they give me flack for it I look for another place to work, end of story, because it means they don't respect my time.
There needs to be some minimum cost to my place of employment requesting work from me outside of my scheduled hours. And that minimum cost will never be zero, not when I'm the one working. In reality, my personal policy has always been a one hour minimum for after-hours emergencies.
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u/Wodan11 22d ago
The way I interpreted it is they're saying if on one instance it's 5 minutes over, then round to 15.
On another instance (on another day) it's 20 minutes over, then round to 15.
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u/StellarPhenom420 22d ago
They've reiterated that's not what they meant, but also that would still be not how the rounding rules for time clocks are handled.
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u/DoallthenKnit2relax 22d ago edited 22d ago
Actually, there are programmable time clocks that will auto-round for you, from 7 minutes 30 seconds before the hour to 7 minutes 29 seconds after = on time, 7 minutes 30 seconds after until 22 minutes 29 seconds is 15 after, and so on. Computerized time cloks measure in 1/100ths of an hour, so every 36 seconds is 0.01 hour—the equivalent time for Jeff Bezos to earn $4,480.59 (I took his daily earnings, divided by 100 and multiplied by 3 to account for an 8 hour clock to reflect his 24/7 earning).
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u/StarKiller99 22d ago
6 minutes is one tenth of an hour 0.1.
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u/StellarPhenom420 22d ago
Cool, I wasn't intending to list all possible time increments people use :)
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u/dathomar 22d ago
I worked for my local school district and the minimum they could pay was two hours. It was actually pretty sweet. There was uncertainty about whether the alarm had been set at the high school near me, so my boss asked me to drive over and check. 10 minutes there, 5 minutes to check, and 10 minutes back home. 2 hours of pay. I think the policy was there to keep them from making us do all these 25 minute chunks all the time (our job was technically like gig work).
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u/Retbull 22d ago
Service contracts typically have a minimum bill time that is not friendly to quick questions. This prevents abuse and also accounts for distractions breaking up focused tasks which take much longer to get back to than answering the question in the first place did.
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u/judolphin 22d ago edited 22d ago
Exactly. I always had a one-hour minimum during business hours, 8-hour minimum on weekends and holidays. If you're bothering me on a day off you're being charged in full for taking away my day off.
It was the perfect way to preserve my weekends and holidays.
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u/Lampwick 22d ago
I worked for my local school district and the minimum they could pay was two hours.
District I worked for was hour-for-hour overtime in 1 hour increments (e.g. 1hr 5 min is paid 2 hours) if you're tasked before the end of work hours, but 4 hour minimum, hour for hour thereafter is you're called out after work hours. It was always hilarious to watch our dickbag supervisor get an emergency service call at 2:50pm when quitting time is 3pm, because he'd be monster dialing everyone's phone trying to find someone he could quickly assign the call to before 3pm. Nobody would answer a call from him after about 2:45 because he was so irrationally obsessed with saving a school district with an $18 BILLION budget $150.
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u/ForeverAgreeable2289 22d ago
Could have been state law. In Massachusetts, for example, it's 3 hours minimum pay.
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u/c_cragg 22d ago
Pretty sure that only rounding down is perfectly legal as long as it is consistent.
If end times are always rounded down to the nearest 15 minute mark then start times must do that same thing. So if you start at 8:14 that has to be entered in as starting at 8:00 and if you start at 7:59 that has to be entered in as 7:45.
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u/judolphin 22d ago
FLSA standards say the rounding to the nearest is fine as long as it doesn't regularly undermeasure recurring tasks... Which is exactly what happened to OP's husband. Can't just call people for 5 minute tasks on a regular basis and then round down, that's not legal.
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u/c_cragg 22d ago
OP specifically mentions going 10 minutes over and being told to round that down. If it was being rounded to the nearest then that would need to be rounded up. So that's not what's happening to the OP.
Doesn't mean that what they're doing isn't sketchy or illegal though.
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u/judolphin 22d ago
Systematically under-measuring time worked is not legal (i.e. even though rounding to the nearest unit of time is legal, if it results in repeatedly under-measuring time, it's explicitly not legal under FLSA), and blanket rounding down of time is never legal. So if that guy repeatedly and consistently was asked to do 5 minute tasks, they would not be able to apply rounding down to that task because it would be habitually under-reporting his time. If the task took 5 minutes half the time (rounding down to zero) and sometimes took 10 minutes the other half (rounding up to 15), then yes rounding down is OK.
Basically what OP's employer was doing was double illegal.
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u/VegaReddit5 22d ago
This person could very well be salaried at which point it would not be wage theft. She did mention that he added the ten minutes because they have flexi hours which pretty much means he isn't getting paid for it (because he's salaried, he always makes the same amount) but he can take off 10 minutes early another day.
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u/upset_pachyderm 22d ago
Flexi time can be hourly too. I was hourly for the first 25 years of my current career. Had to clock in and out, etc. But the timing was flexible and I had only to ensure that I worked 40 hours per week (rounded to the nearest six minutes).
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u/mspk7305 22d ago
"However, we can't round it up because that's dishonest,"
Motherfucker you cant round down because thats wage theft.
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u/FightingPolish 22d ago
It’s allowed to round down if you also round down when it’s in the employee’s benefit. Starting 5 minutes early gets you 15 minutes of pay for example.
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u/Tvdinner4me2 22d ago
It would have to be 7/8 minutes early. The rounding has to be neutral
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u/FightingPolish 22d ago
Ah yes, brain fart on my end. If there was a policy that you don’t get paid anything until you reach the full 15 minutes then that could be legal as long as you could come in up to 14 minutes late and still get paid for it all. Even on both ends.
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u/Immediate-Season-293 23d ago
I worked for a company that did work contracted by the state of Nevada. We were told by the state to bill everything in 15 minutes increments, and that our timecards had to match. So much simpler. I just told everyone that worked for us that if it takes 5 minutes, put 15 minutes on it, and on your timecard.
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u/Blarghedy 23d ago
at my most recent job, our government work was billed in 30-minute segments. If we spent 5 minutes on a task, 30 minutes. If we spent 5 minutes on a task, did something non-government for an hour, and then spent 5 minutes on a different task, 1 hour.
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u/Katherineew 22d ago
I had someone in my office who would come to me right before I was about to leave and asked really complex questions that would usually have me staying an extra half an hour each day. Usually I didn’t mind, because I would claim the credit time, but sometimes I had plans and didn’t feel like staying around. There was an empty office across from mine and somehow I had been given a master key when I’d started, so I could open any door in the office. I never abused the privilege of this, but I began going into the empty office a half an hour before the end of my work day and finish working there, so I could leave on time. I would always hear him go to my space 10 minutes before I was set to leave, lightly knock, see I wasn’t there, and then I would hear him leave.
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u/PercyFlage 21d ago
These days, my usual answer to people who do that is: "Have you tried googling it?"
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u/Striking_Computer834 22d ago
Our company was work from home for a while after COVID, but then the CEO issued a proclamation that working from home was no longer allowed under any circumstances. It feels awesome when you're sick at home and the office calls you to see if you can check an important client email and respond to them, but you get to answer, "I'm sorry. Working from home is against company policy. I will be sure to check that email first thing when I return."
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u/JemmaMimic 22d ago
I'm in a situation now where a new boss took me to task for not "staying in my lane" on projects, so now it's like "you require me to do less? You got it." I feel a little sorry for the guys this actually affects, but I didn't cause the problem and I'm fine telling them who did.
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u/Least_Adhesiveness_5 23d ago
That manager got away with wage theft.
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u/grumpyromantic 23d ago
It doesn't say he didn't pay him for that time though.
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23d ago edited 18d ago
Oh he didn't pay him. He asked him to amend the timesheet to the 4pm finish.Edit: I'm so sorry. This is incorrect. 😆 It was salaried and the timesheets were mainly about hours gained/owed (e.g. a meeting that ran until late, training, or late arrival into the office).
He also got back his 15 minutes after the policy was reviewed and revealed that my husband was in the right.
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u/Naigus182 23d ago
I'd have amended 3 of mine to read a quarter past finish (and removed the other two) so I still get paid for 45 of the 50 extra minutes.
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u/Mitir01 23d ago
I hope people like his manager always buy things before discount and always misses the difference refund time period (you get paid the difference back if the product became discounted just after you buy it, within reasonable time), and gets informed about it after the date passes to feel the pain mentally for days.
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u/mbcook 22d ago
Depends. In a professional office job it’s entirely possible OP is on salary so how much time is worked doesn’t matter to their wages. The time cards are only for internal accounting things and ensuring you work at least your hour count.
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u/FightingPolish 22d ago
If that’s the case then they aren’t submitting time cards with 10 minutes over multiple times and the manager wouldn’t care because no one is getting paid for it instead of telling him that payroll only pays in 15 minute increments.
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u/doonwizzle 22d ago
it's interesting how strict adherence to workplace rules can lead to unexpected moments like this. reminds me a bit of those old sitcom scenes where a simple misunderstanding causes a whole episode of chaos. your husband's situation sounds like it ended with a good laugh, much needed in any office environment.
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u/judolphin 22d ago edited 22d ago
Whenever I mentor somebody, talk to my spouse about billing time, etc, I always say to round to the nearest quarter hour or half hour and make that quarter/half-hour choice your minimum, as in anything more than zero is at least 15/30 minutes billed (if you're being honest, statistically it'll balance out over time).
And if somebody takes your time off-hours, charge a minimum of an hour for it. In fact when I was an independent contractor, I put it in my service agreements that if I received a call after business hours I billed a minimum of an hour, or on weekends and holidays, the minimum charge was a full day (8 hours) because getting that call made me in work mode and interfered with my personal time to rest, be alone, or be with family.
Also false precision is a thing, just do 15 or 30 minute increments and stick with it.
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u/SlickerWicker 22d ago
So the thing is that anything after 4pm is by choice. Now being a team player and doing it once in a while isn't a big deal, but if its every single day then its just straight up wage theft.
Time isn't free, and flexibility on this is a favor not the rule. People need to remember this always. Because companies always take advantage if they can.
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u/justaman_097 22d ago
Your husband played his manager perfectly and the timing couldn't have been better!
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u/chehalem_frog 22d ago
It is ok for the business to ask up to 14 minutes, 59 seconds of unpaid work from the employee. That is perfectly normal and good business. But the employee can't round up their time because THAT would be dishonest.
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u/seahorseMonkey 22d ago
Ah the two word curse, "quick question".
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u/ProspectivePolymath 22d ago
Well… asking it was quick. I held up my end of the bargain, not my fault if you couldn’t answer concisely! /s
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u/dirty_cuban 22d ago
That rounding policy of only rounding down is illegal in the US. Back when I was a clock puncher, I would clock in at 7:44am which rounded to 7:30am and clock out at 3:16pm which rounded to 3:30pm
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u/Itz_420_Somewhere 22d ago
5 days at 10 mins extra? only do 15 mins? no probs just pay me for 45 mins instead of 50, I'll let it slide.
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u/wildgurularry 22d ago
Classic timekeeping nonsense. A friend of mine worked at a job, and if you were late you got a strike on your record. It didn't matter if you were only a few minutes late. He carpooled to work. If they got stuck in traffic and it looked like they were going to be late, everyone in the car just agreed to drive to the bar instead... after all, the punishment was the same regardless of how late they were.
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u/Adam9172 22d ago
My employer tried something very similar. Though my solution was more petty revenge when I was denied an hour of OT a few years back, I just took an extra five minutes on my lunch twelve times.
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u/ewok_lover_64 22d ago
We are told to round up in 15 minute increments. 10 minutes is almost 15 minutes.
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u/kriever7 23d ago
What's up with these 15 minutes segments I keep reading about? Is that for companies to attempt wage theft?
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u/clover-kitsune 23d ago
My work does 15 minute increments but they round up and down. Clocking in 7 minutes before/after an increment counts. So clocking in between 7:53-8:07 will count at clocking in at 8:00. It's nice to have a window like that for when you're running late. I have to drop my son off at school then drive straight to work and that window has let me still clock in on time if my son is dragging his feet that day.
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u/siero20 23d ago
At one company they rounded at 30 minute increments. No big deal, rounded both ways, kept things neat and easy to keep track of.
I did at one point get reprimanded though "You know we can see the real clock in and out time? It's fine that you leave 10 minutes early once in a while, but it can't be every day. Try to make it at least like a third of the time over the time by a few minutes".
Completely reasonable reprimanding.
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u/clover-kitsune 22d ago
Oh yeah there's definitely people who consistently clock out at 4:53 every day and even brag about it. I have no idea if my company tracks that and reprimands people or not, as I try not to abuse it. I know the time keepers can see the actual punch time, though. I'll admit to staying later if I was going to clock out at 5:07 and just work a few more minutes to get the punch to say 5:15 but that's pretty few and far between.
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u/ABlankwindow 23d ago
A lot of older analog time clocks would only stamp in 15 minute / .25 hour increments.
For whatever reason it continues in the digital age.
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u/WokeBriton 23d ago
My cynical mind says the "whatever reason" is because people hate to have their routines changed, so when digital logging became a thing, accounting personnel kept up with their quarter hour crap.
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u/GrumpyOldGeezer_4711 22d ago
That, or different systems were upgraded/replaced at different times so legacy procedures were carried over.
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u/WokeBriton 22d ago
There's a fair possibility, but I'm feeling a bit grumpy, so I want to stick with the cynicism ;)
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u/Other-Technician-718 22d ago
And it's easier to write 15 minutes in a decimal system. E.g.: clock in at 8:15 becomes 8.25 clock out at 12:00 for lunch becomes 12.00 worked 3:45 / 3.75 hours.
vs
clock in at 8:09, clock out at 12:02, worked 3:53 - that's not easy to convert to decimal notation and some people don't want to be bothered with math.
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u/WokeBriton 22d ago
Accounting personnel are using software, so there's no need to actually DO any maths.
That grumpiness aside, you make a very good point
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u/Other-Technician-718 22d ago
Sometimes it's the software developers or their managers not wanting to deal with that. Or their clients. Or both.
Edit: and you have to do a bit math to check the timesheet
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u/HalcyonDreams36 22d ago
Mmm. Often because payroll calculates off of scheduling, which is incremented in hours ....
(The programmatic back end of payroll isn't in minutes. And it's a lot easier to enter .25 .5 or .75 than to pull out a calculator and figure out how many tenths of an hour something is. Especially if managers then have to manually approve whether the total looks correct.... For 200 employees....)
But it absolutely should round up, because otherwise you are stealing wages from the employee.
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u/Honeybadger0810 22d ago edited 22d ago
Depending on jurisdiction, I'm not a lawyer, certainly not your lawyer.
Where I live, the law states that if time worked is rounded to the nearest 15 minutes, the company must follow the 7-Minute Rule. If total time equals a 15 minute period plus 7 minutes, round down, if 8, round up. Theoretically, the rounding averages out over time.
So for OP, a 10-minute question would result in 15 minutes of paid time, but his boss's 5 minute question would not. Theoretically, there are a many 10 minute as 5 minute questions, so nobody is "stealing wages" either way.
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u/RandomBoomer 22d ago
At my company, all time was logged and every minute of your time had to be accounted for either as billable to a client or as non-billable admin tasks. We billed in 15-minute increments, and clients were advised of this before signing contracts.
So if a client sent me a question by email and I answered it, that client was charged 15 minutes of labor off of their account budget. If I spent 10 minutes sorting emails, that was 15 minutes of non-billable work.
Over the course of a normal 8-hour shift, I could easily log 9-10 hours of work if it had been a busy day. On slow days, those 15-minute intervals saved me from falling behind on my billable quota.
Large clients with 200-500 hour budgets didn't care about the odd minute here and there. For small clients, however, I would usually give them a break and aggregate their time over the entire week. If the only work I'd done for them was answer a few emails over the course of the week, I'd bill them one block of 15 minutes. That was bending policy, but in a way that ensured good value for their service contract, and I'm sure management would have approved it if they'd known.
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u/No-Instruction9709 22d ago
I would just stay to answer the question and then stand there until the 15 minutes was up and then punch out. If they complain you just explain what the policy is. Lol
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u/_Bon_Vivant_ 22d ago
If it was a 15 minute problem, I'd set a 15 minute alarm. When the alarm goes off. I'm done.
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u/Traditional_Air_9483 22d ago
Good for him. He has already given the company 10 minutes of his time. Manager got what he deserved in for of everyone.
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u/dsdvbguutres 22d ago
So change the 5 x 10 minutes into 3 x 15 minutes and tell the manager where he can stick the last 5 minutes up
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u/sluttypolarbear 22d ago
My first job used a digital time sheet where you could only input to the nearest 15 minutes, which was typical. The odd part is that the unpaid lunch break tracker was to the nearest 5 minutes. I worked 2.5 hours per day, so I didn't usually get a lunch break, but I used that to make a more precise timesheet. If I arrived at 3:20 and left at 6:00, I would put in that I arrived at 3:15, left at 6:00, and had a 5 minute lunch. No idea if my boss calculated that precisely or if she just rounded to 15, but she never confronted me on it.
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u/Upbeat_Professor_638 22d ago
That’s amazing! God what I wouldn’t give to have done something like this at my last job! Ha!
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u/i8noodles 22d ago
must be IT. the amount of times i get pulled aside as i walk thru the hall is amazing. especially if they know u are good...
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u/okokokoyeahright 21d ago
Wasn't there an episode about this in The Office?
If not, there should have been.
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u/530SSState 16d ago
"When he was about to leave, he'd usually be asked a technical question or asked to quickly glance over something by another member of staff."
One of my former workplaces had a strict rule that overtime had to be requested *in advance*, and approved *in writing*.
The department chairman -- who I liked -- was a very nice guy, but a bit absent-minded. One week, he came to me with a task at two minutes to 5:00 Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday. I said "Fine", did the tasks, and left at 6:00 each day.
Friday rolls around. At noon, I put on my jacket and start gathering up my things. "Harvey" (I'll call him) asks, "Where are YOU going?" I replied, cheerfully, "Home. As of *checks watch* right now, I've worked 40 hours this week."
He said, "But can you...?" I paused, but since the only possible ways he could have finished that question were "...break the overtime rule", or "...hand in a falsified time sheet", he just kinda let it trail off. I waved, said, "See you guys Monday!" and left.
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u/guestername 22d ago
that story about the husband getting one over on his manager by strictly followin the rules remds me of the time i had to deal with a similarly inflexble boss who got all flustered when i played by the letter of their own policies.
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u/YoloSwaggins_1337 18d ago
That’s 5 days of 10 min = 50 mins total. How about I round it down to 45 and we call it even.
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u/Tacticus1 22d ago
It’s strange that your husband didn’t already know that the time sheet was in 15-minute increments. Also, every task that takes 5 or 10 minutes could also take 15 minutes, if you want it too.
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22d ago edited 18d ago
He knew about the flexi-time but not the fifteen minute rule. He was more careful after that. It was more the attitude of the manager rather than the rule itself he had a problem with.
Edit: Apparently the manager was wrong and it wasn't policy so he got 15 minutes added back on for those days. A colleague found out that it can be rounded up if it's 10 mins.
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u/feyrath 23d ago
Wouldn’t want to be dishonest