I recently got offered a new job at a place that has an awesome ethic and it got me thinking about all the BS I’ve put up with from shitty jobs in the past, so I thought I’d share this gem.
Once worked for an online retailer. If you’re in the UK you’ve heard of them, and so has your Gran. I worked in the online merchandising department and in the run up to “peak” (Christmas) I was convinced to work several dozen hours of overtime on the suggestion of paid overtime instead of time in lieu. We never used to have time to use our actual holidays, so time in lieu was useless. Plus I used to get paid double time overtime for everything above 40hours so I jumped at the chance, but being young and dumb didn’t get any of this overtime agreement in writing.
Fast-forward to submitting my time sheet to my manager for December, I have worked about 35 hours overtime so I try to claim it. My manager is meant to approve and send to HR. Nobody says anything. Get my payslip and find zero hours overtime. I query with HR and they say my time sheet had no overtime on it and to ask manager. I ask her and she says she took it off because she never agreed to pay any overtime and she assumed I did the extra work “for the progression”.
I ask her why she didn’t mention it when I submitted overtime she didn’t approve and she just shrugged and smirked. She followed this conversation up with an email saying she had rejected my overtime claim because the department don’t pay overtime “unless by exception”. There was nothing I could do, so I considered it an expensive lesson.
Fast-forward to just before next “peak” and another guy on my team gets a serious infection and is out of the business for several weeks. It’s going to be chaos, and I get offered this same sketchy overtime deal again, and turn it down, forwarding my manager her same email from the year before with the no overtime line. She’s furious.
But not as furious as she was the following week when I handed in my months notice. Delicious.