An employee followed their company’s strict no-overtime policy after their boss assigned them a project just 13 minutes before the end of their workday. The employee, who goes by plaintextcoder on Reddit, shared the incident in the subreddit r/MaliciousCompliance. According to the post, the employee’s boss became frustrated when they did not finish the assignment before leaving work.
At the employee’s office, workers were not allowed to work overtime. Employees who stayed past 5 p.m., when their shifts ended, could receive a write-up, potentially putting their jobs at risk.
However, the boss assigned the employee a last-minute project at 4:47 p.m. Although the no-overtime policy applied to the employee, the boss still expected the assignment to be completed before the end of the workday.
The employee began working on the project but could not finish it before 5 p.m. According to the post, the boss was frustrated and questioned why the employee did not stay later to complete the task.
The employee explained that staying past 5 p.m. could result in disciplinary action and that they were not willing to risk their job by violating the company’s policy.
The post prompted Redditors to share their own experiences with workplace policies and difficult managers.
Redditors Share Their Own Workplace Experiences
“Oh yeah. Recently, our employer sent a memo that we need to take every single case sent our way. Every. Single. One. Our capacity is at 110%, nearing 120% right now, and we're nowhere close to gaining the right to refuse cases for the moment. So… we're losing in efficiency, contractors are overworked, and parts of our own contracts aren't duly completed,” one user wrote about their working environment.
“I had a boss who would do this to me. Sure, drop a stack of bug reports on me at 4:45 p.m. on a Friday, no problem. That stopped quickly, because without fail, I would find a bigger problem causing the small problem the user had reported. And the bigger problem was for the upper database management team. Which meant my boss and the two guys making 6 figures weren't going home at 5, but I was,” another commenter added.
Other Redditors questioned why the boss did not authorize overtime so the employee could finish the project. Several commenters said they had encountered workplaces where overtime was prohibited or where employees were expected to complete additional work without extra pay.
The Daily Dot was unable to independently verify the events described in the Reddit post. The details in this article are based solely on plaintextcoder’s account and the workplace experiences shared by commenters.
