HR Created A Ridiculous Overtime Policy, So They Ended Up Taking Fridays Completely Off And Won Overtime Back

Don’t you just love it when a boss tells you to do something that you know if gonna backfire and blow up in their face?

It can be very satisfying for some workers!

And the person who wrote this story on Reddit’s “Malicious Compliance” page was only following the rules!

They started by saying that their boss was very clear about the overtime rules.

“So this is how the discussion with my boss began back when I did support.

‘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 off any overtime worked during the week on Fridays.

You cannot do any overtime work on Fridays.

You cannot negotiate this, we’ve been over it a million times. I am not interested in discussion.’

But this job was gonna force some OT on employees.

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 was not happy having to pay – so they insisted we “take time off on the Friday instead”.

And the OT was going to pile up whether management liked it or not.

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.

One week well into the project the migration at night takes almost 7 hours, I’m at work the following 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.

A 30-minute workday sounds pretty good!

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.

So all they could do was follow the rules!

I spent my 30 minutes 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.”

Now it’s time to see what readers thought about this.

One reader was not impressed with this policy.

Another Reddit user agreed and said Fridays are usually when all the **** goes down!

This individual said this is the company’s fault because they’re cheap.

Another person is a fan of the four-day workweek.

And this reader made a sarcastic AND accurate comment.

Don’t set the policy if you don’t want workers to abide by it.

As simple as that!