Breakfasting workers get back at their authoritative boss by working scheduled hours: ' You have to be here at your desks at that time'

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Brad Dickson • Managing Editor
Mar 13, 2024 10:00 AM EDT

Managing is something that is best done in a careful and calculated manner with lots of planning and moving pieces over a measured period of time; not with emotionally fueled outbursts and snap decisions intended to assert your authority or to beat your subordinates into submission. Yet, still, there are plenty of people (and plenty of managers) out there who have something to prove, a chip on their shoulder, or just lack emotional maturity. This creates even more situations where workers are the targets of their superior's emotional decision-making.

In this case, this manager blew his top after he was embarrassed to find that his team wasn't present in the office when he went to pull someone into a morning meeting. The thing is, if he had planned ahead or paid attention he would have known that his team frequently took more relaxed morning meetings at the cafe down the street, giving the overworked team time to decompress from their busy roles and plan the next necessary steps in a more casual environment. 

The boss's outburst led to a confrontation with the team which, in turn, led to him making a dramatic decree that workers were to spend their contracted hours at their desks. The noticeably upset team complied, giving up on the hours of unpaid overtime that they had been working and crashing productivity, leading to their boss silently backing down.

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  • 01
    ரட் "The team was furious."
    via Annie Spratt
  • 02
    Posted by u/mdlapla Workers stage a coup against the manager Circa 2005, I switched jobs. The new job came with an awesome perk: 3 months working in Spain (I lived back then in Argentina) all expenses paid, earning my salary plus an extremely generous per diem. For me, it was awesome, it meant that I would get pretty much the salary of a year in 3 months, plus the opportunity to visit Europe and travel for the first time.
    via u/mdlapla
  • 03
    The caveat was that the project was a nightmare. The consulting company that hired me had won a really big bank project and overpromised, we had to finish the project in a really impossible timeframe, that's why I was going there, it was kind of an "all hands on deck" situation. When I arrived there, working hours were ridiculous. 9am was the starting time, and we rarely left before 11pm, sometimes even being there till 1 or 2 in the morning.
    via u/mdlapla
  • 04
    I had no problem with that, I was living in a hotel, the only people I knew in the city were in the project as well so we bonded over the situation. My colleagues were also really supportive, they made a point that I wasn't going to work on weekend, and told me that "we work our off monday to thursday, but on friday afternoon, you're going straight to the airport, you have to take on the opportunity to get to know Europe, we'll get by".
    via u/mdlapla
  • 05
    The problem, as usual in this situation, was the project manager. We used to call him Sauron. He was a manager that took pride in saying "I started working in this company, I met my wife because of this company, I got married because of this company, I got divorced because of this company, I live because of this company". He was middle management, so... yeah. Since hours were really long, and pretty much everyone was exhausted from the night before, the tech team (minus Sauron) used to stroll do
    via u/mdlapla
  • 06
    One day, Sauron and I had a meeting with the client, in the office. While I was there, client said to Sauron "BTW, I'm gonna need this and that for this afternoon" and Sauron said "OK, I'll go down to the bullpen and ask someone for that, be right back, just keep on with the meeting and I'll join when I get back". But he never came back. The meeting finished with me and the client, and Sauron never came back.
    via u/mdlapla
  • 07
    After the client left, 2 hours later, I went down and found that nobody was in the bullpen. Not a single soul. Not Sauron, nor the team. And then, I heard screaming from one of the meeting rooms. I opened the door and found the whole team shouting at Sauron and Sauron shouting back. Sauron was furious because the team was at the cafe, the team was furious because he had no right to be angry about that since everybody worked an insane amount of overtime with no complaints.
    via u/mdlapla
  • 08
    And Sauron said: "I don't care. You're hired to start your work at 9am, you have to be here at your desks at that time. That's what we're paying you bums for". One of the team leaders, seeing that this was going nowhere, said OK and ended the meeting. Sauron pretty much disappeared all day having meetings and such.
    via u/mdlapla
  • 09
    And then, at 7pm, we all left. Since Sauron asked us to work the hours they were paying us to work, we finished the shift and left. And we did that the next day. And the next one as well. We did it for a whole week. Sauron missed a couple of milestones and got an earful by the client and his bosses. Sauron realised his screw up, he became docile and never complained about anything else, not the cafe meetings and not even aobut the seldom longer-than-usual lunch.
    via u/mdlapla
  • 10
    We did work a lot more hours than what he was paying us for, but the environment became more relaxed and Sauron made a point of trying to be at the bullpen the shortest time possible. TLDR: At a project working an insane amount of overtime, the boss complains about people doing a relaxed cafe-breakfast-start- of-day meeting, so the whole project stops doing overtime until the boss stops complaining and basically disappears. PS: I know that Sauron got away with what he wanted, we just wanted him
    via u/mdlapla
  • 11
    Equivalent-Salary357 · 5 hr. ago I got divorced because of this company Uhh, OK. That's impressive. /s I think working unpaid overtime should be avoided, but on occasion I've done it too. I get it, your team had it's own way of working that 'worked' for them/you. Vote Reply Share
    via u/mdlapla
  • 12
    Crimeislegal 8 hr. ago What a doormat team. MC that consists of not doing free labor. Vote Vote Reply Share Helpful Hour1984. 7 hr. ago They still did free labor, just not as much. ●●● Vote Reply Share mdlapla OP 8 hr. ago Have you ever worked IT Consulting? Free labor is not only expected, is budgeted and planned around it. Glad I'm out of it. ●●● Reply Share
    via u/mdlapla

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