Company Insists On An In-Person Meeting. They End Up Paying For 16 Hours Of Work Instead Of A 15 Minute Online Meeting.

The “this meeting could have been an email” joke has been running for some time, now.

With so many people’s work lives migrating online, I imagine this is more true than ever.

OP’s company worked with a warehouse, moving their paper documents into digital ones. They only went to the warehouse at the beginning of their relationship, and since then it has not been necessary.

My company works with a customer that has a factory 2.5h away from us.

We’ve been working with them for years now, and we’ve been at the factory a couple of times at the start of the project.

Everyone at the customer works at that factory, we’re in charge of migrating paper trail to digital documents, for a company that has like 4 warehouses full of paper trail documents.

The solution has been working for sometime.

Then one day, the warehouse wanted an in-person meeting. OP’s boss pushed back, saying he would have to bill them for the extra hours, but they said fine.

Last week, they asked us for a meeting. My boss said “ok, online, whenever you want”, they said that they wanted an in-person one, that we should go to the factory.

My boss didn’t want to, so he said “If we go, I’ll have to bill you for the time”, they said yes.

In the end, the in-person meeting could have been an email (of course), but cost the warehouse company quite a bit of cash.

So Monday morning, my boss and the tech in charge of the process head down there. The meeting lasts exactly 15 minutes. It could have been solved in exactly 2 paragraphs in one email.

Since they are there, tech asks the client to show them the paper trail warehouses and a tour of the factory, they happily comply.

Overall, the meeting that could have been 15 minutes or two emails lasted 5 hours of travel plus 3 hours touring there, plus the food.

Guess who’s getting billed 16h of work and the food for a 15 minutes meeting.

Does Reddit think OP’s company took advantage? Let’s find out!

The top commenter has a protip for readers.

This person says the people billing you are not your friends.

Some business concepts should not be so hard to grasp.

And this commenter thinks the same should apply to working in any office.

And yeah, some people just insist on learning the hard way.

This is pretty typical, I’m afraid.

But I really wish that it wasn’t.