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The policy is you can only work from home when it benefits the company, not you.
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As a middle manager in a corporate hellscape, one of my few joys in life is setting logic traps for HR and making them choose between admitting company policy is bullshit or directly instructing me to violate labor laws.
if it’s the latter, just get it in writing.
That’s the goal.
Theres something enormously satisfying about asking the question “And are you willing to give me that in writing?”
Then watching them squirm as something in their brain goes full Ackbar “ITS A TRAP!”
I’m not allowed to work from home and it seriously pisses me off. Whenever I complain about this to my boss, she always gives me shit like “you’re a school bus driver”.
They’ll hire remote drivers from India soon enough.
I’ve traveled in India - there’s no way that would produce anything but piles of dead children. My money’s on being replaced by AI first.
The same AI that was doing those Amazon go stores?
Our boss was freaking out over people sometimes doing some private calls during work hours and at a certain point absolutely forbade it. So yeah, people would just end the call at 17:00 sharp and switch off the work phone. It took one week before that rule was rescinded.
This reminds me of a work-to-rule or a “White Strike.” It turns out that every company, even those that supposedly operate off of “unskilled” labor, utterly rely on employees making a ton of judgment calls and often working outside their job description. When employees start working to the letter of their job description, the whole operation quickly grinds to a halt.
“Other duties as assigned” is a bitch.
This is when “could you please send that request on writing via e-mail” becomes really useful.
That’s what gets struck in a white strike.
If it’s literally in your job description, as it has been in my last several positions, does it qualify?
If everyone does it then it works.
Sure. It means they can ask you to do other things that aren’t explicitly written in the original job description. But every time they tell you to do something beyond it, you just start doing THAT exactly to the letter of the request.
Teamwork makes the dream work.
God, I hate how often my CEO says this
Man we had someone in the army do this. Army doctrine is either outdated or very accessible to the poor, I don’t fuckin know, but you aren’t required to have a phone.
So this one weird junior Joe just decided he didn’t need a phone. Got rid of it, and as a result never got the information he needed on army shit. I loved him for it, and by the law he was in the right. Can’t tell him to get a phone.
Unfortunately I was his team lead, and every time my chain of command decided to put out bullshit last minute information over text I had to tell them to suck it and pvt NoPhone wouldn’t be at their surprise formation.
Sometimes for important stuff I would have to drive to the barracks and knock on homies door to let him know there’s surprise inspections or piss tests and shit.
The workplace should operate entirely without external communication. It worked since the dawn of man, and it should continue to work until the end of man if we want any semblance of work-life balance.
If I had to guess, the reason for the lack of a phone requirement is that, if the army required everyone to have phones, the army would need to pay for them, too. I’m sure the army loves spending money on things like that.
As retired Army, this is freakin’ phenomenal. I hope that dude is doing well today.
Doing home health was kinda instructive for me in this regard.
The only time you go to the office is to turn stuff in, do inservices/continuing education, or similar. But originally I would answer calls at weird hours because a patient would need coverage, otherwise they wouldn’t be calling.
And then the management spent way too much money buying into some Disney corporate policy thing (literally, they paid money to Disney for the program) that changed a ton of rules in bullshit ways that made no sense for home health.
So, the next time they called, I didn’t answer. Or the time after that, or the time after that. And, when you’re one of three men working for a company that’s partially reliant physical strength to be able to do the work needed for some patients, this alarmed my supervisor. She requested a meeting, and I went in. Mandatory meetings were paid though!
At the meeting, it was expressed that answering calls was part of my job. So I asked id I was being paid to sit at home and wait for calls. No, I wasn’t “on call”. So, you want me on call? No, just to answer when we call you. That’s being on call, and we’re supposed to get paid for that. No, this is different, we just want you to be available when someone calls out for a difficult patient. Soooo, you want me on call.
This went in circles for a while before I switched gears and directly said that answering calls when not on duty was not in place when I was hired, and that the employee handbook specified that being on call was considered a shift, and would be paid as such, and that maybe I should have been on call any of the dozens of times I did wake my ass up from sleep after workout two or three jobs in the first place, and that I never got paid a dime for doing so, so that was the end of it for me.
The response was that they couldn’t stay operating if they paid everyone for being on call instead of us “supporting the company”. My response was that maybe they could have if they hadn’t shelled out for the Disney crap, or if the previous administrator hadn’t been screwing around and embezzling, and that maybe it was time the company supported us.
Not surprisingly, I was one of several employees “let go to streamline services” a few weeks later, right before the company folded entirely.
So, you don’t even have to have an office job to get treated like shit! Isn’t that a relief? Isn’t it?
The response was that they couldn’t stay operating if they paid everyone for being on call instead of us “supporting the company”.
That’s the heart of the matter. They wanted you to support the company, without the company supporting you.
The people who should me steering the ship often would never accept a position at the helm, and then we are left with people serving up platitudes about why they deserve free labour.
Only thing you left out is when they say, “it doesnt come with additional pay but it will look good on your resume!”.
A previous job of mine wanted people in my team to volunteer for being on call overnight for a week at a time.
No-one did, so they forced us. I emailed all managers involved including HR I said that I would like to opt-out for various reasons like family, mental and physical health, and also that the pay was in no way adequate for what they wanted. Again they pushed, so I replied with I’ll do it but would be unavailable most afternoons and evenings with my kids and things they have on. That I also won’t be able to answer after going to sleep because I take my mental health very seriously and need quality sleep to function.
So the first night I slept peacefully as I normally do as I have my phone set to go to DND automatically. I got called in because I didn’t answer a call that came in last night, I asked when it was, about midnight, and said well that’s because I was asleep.
Go to the next 2 mangers up, say the same thing and they say that I need to answer. I explain the email stating that I would be unable to answer calls at many times including when asleep and how no-one replied with that being a problem. One of the managers was like, wait up, you flagged this; yup; can you send me the email chain; yup. Got removed and told I wouldn’t need to worry about doing it anymore.
It found a new job shortly after that.
Sounds like a 3rd world ultra capitalist creepy story. I grew up in center right 3rd world (Brazil) and that would make it a truthful but funny snectode.
Now I’m in center center 1st world (Australia) and we’ve got passed a law a few months ago to not bother employee for bullshit.
I though why did we fn need a law for that, then your story reminds me.
Yeah great law, really put the breaks on my old boss. He would email and call at like 10pm at night about shit.
Now I work for myself and can’t get away from my boss haba
Keep telling the DBAs that my company outsourced a big chunk of their tech stack to that its against company policy to work all the way on the other side of the planet, but they refuse to show up to the office.
Incoming employment terms amendment:
You can work from home but only to answer us when we contact you. You must answer our contact and must report to the location if requested. If you can do something cheaper (for us the company) and faster (for us the company) then that is the only time you may perform a work duty at home.
It’s EU law that if you have to be standby to pick up the phone and go on location at a moment’s notice, those are working hours and need to be paid in full. Most companies are pretty careful to not put it anywhere in the contracts or house rules that you have to be on stand-by, but just verbally keep pushing for it. If they keep pushing, push back with asking for the written rules.
You must answer our contact
“I cannot answer the company contact after hours because for every call I get after hours that isn’t a company contact, following an order from work to monitor those on the chance of a company contact itself represents ‘working from home’ which the company forbids. I cannot violate the previously stated company policy.”
*ammmendment
I’m on hybrid, but my entire team is all over the world, so I’m just as alone in the office as at home. The only difference is that in the office I’m bound by the train schedule, so I can’t take out of hours calls. My coworkers and manager keep petitioning HR to let me work from home full time.
How do they keep track of you if you’re alone in the office? I’m just curious.
We have access cards to unlock the office doors; this is tracked. Everyone is required to be in the office for a certain amount of days per month, and a monthly report is always generated. I found when the fewest people are coming (nobody on my floor), and that’s when I come in, given that my entire team are digital nomads, so I’d communicate with them via Slack anyway.
Damn that sucks. It’s so arbitrary.
Should be the standard anyway. Reading email and texts from work, or responding to calls, is work. Unless your contact specifies on-call hours, you should ignore your boss outside of working hours. If they really want you to respond they can pay you overtime.
Places that specify on call time also tell you not to check stuff when you’re not at work or supposed to be on call though, because that’s expensive for them. And if they tell you to check something they just put you into on call pay.
Big “thathappened” energy
Like when your mother and I conceived you.
No one believed I was your father.
…because I wasn’t.
It’s hilarious the reaction you’re getting. I love this story and someone out there has surely done similar but this is a fiction. I think you’re being downvoted because people really really want it to be true.
Do you have proof that this is fiction? I don’t think so. There’s no proof that it isn’t either, sure, but this sub is mainly just for laughs and the story doesn’t require being true for it to be funny.
Coming into threads and posting stuff like that is like going into malls at Christmas just to tell kids that santa isn’t real. (Or worse, since you don’t even know if you’re right in this case).
Noticeable that you seemed to have taken that comment personally, which is odd–not the intention. In any case, it sounds like a repeat of AITH on Reddit where people would post a lot of fiction and pass it off as real.
That happened
I did it.
best thing that ever happened. now I get to wfh and I still refuse to answer calls from my boss after hours.
if it’s important have opsgenie call me, that way I can report I responded to 200 calls over the last year because some dumbass tripped over an Ethernet cable and my boss refuses to push the issue with infrastructure.
it’s a win win. I get yearly raises, he gets to keep his mouth shut and not “rock the boat”.
Did what?
your mom.
wtf do you think?
Fuck
, judging from the other comments.
