'Sorry, can't come in today': Employee Calls in Absent for 11 Years After Getting Disciplined for Arriving 22 Seconds Late

Author image for Eleonora Bader
Eleonora Bader
Mar 7, 2024 2:00 PM EST

Why are micromanagers allowed to manage people, systems, or anything at all? Who put them in charge? They need to be fired, asap.

One employee was fed up with their strict office administrator who wrote them up for being 22 seconds late without notice. Suddenly I feel better about my own managers… 22 seconds? Is that a joke? Apparently not.

The reason that this employee was late was because a stopped train was literally blocking their car in a rural area on their way to work. As soon as they got to work, they immediately told their manager, who was okay with it. But another manager, the one who was in charge of the attendance system, was not. This called for malicious compliance… Scroll down to read what happened, and then check out this woman who showed up at her daughter's workplace in tears after she hadn't answered her calls, and then proceeded to tell her to put a 'tracker on her phone' so she would know where she was at all times. Overprotective much?

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  • 01
    "I was written up for being 22 seconds late..."
    via Canva
  • 02
    Discipline Me for Being 22 Seconds Late Without Notice? Got it! Won't Happen Again!
    via u/ChiefSteward
  • 03
    This happened several years ago because it was some malicious compliance that lasted for years. My former employer uses a points-based system to track attendance. The parts of the policy relevant to this story are: Tardy with call-in prior to the start of shift: 1/2 point
    via u/ChiefSteward
  • 04
    Tardy with no call: 1 point Accumulate enough points and you're fired There's a set of train tracks crossing the street that leads to this facility. Occasionally, trains will stop while blocking this crossing. If you're caught there in the last few minutes before you're supposed to clock in, you have a decision to make: wait or go around. Either way, you might be late. Sometimes you'll decide to go around and then the train clears the crossing and the folks who waited get in
    via u/ChiefSteward
  • 05
    before you. Sometimes you'll wait and watch through the gaps in the train cars as folks who went around pull in to the parking lot while you're still idling at a blocked train crossing. To be clear, "going around" involves taking a lot of secondary county roads as well as a few field access roads (it's an extremely rural area), so you literally never know what kind of road conditions you're going to find along the way around. The roads may even be entirely unusable during the winter months where
    via u/ChiefSteward
  • 06
    One night, during my years on third shift, I was stopped at these tracks and decided to wait. Eventually the train moved on. I raced into the parking lot, used my key card to zip through the turnstiles, and ran to the punch clock. My clock in time was 10:30PM. They have these biometric punch clocks that read your fingerprint to clock employees in and out. Sometimes these clocks just will not read your fingerprint. I got to the punch clock and it said
    via u/ChiefSteward
  • 07
    "10:30". I'm golden. It doesn't track seconds. I entered my employee ID number and placed my finger on the sensor. Three beeps: failed read. Tried again. Three beeps. Tried once more. Three beeps. Nope, not trying again because by this time the clock was likely to tick over to 10:31 in the middle of reading my finger. When I got to my assigned work area, I told my team manager what happened. He said don't worry about it, he'd manually punch me in.
    via u/ChiefSteward
  • 08
    I should have listened. But I'm a worrier. In the morning, when the front office people started showing back up, I went to the attendance office to confirm that my situation was all good. The office administrator decided to check my "gate time", and use that as the determining factor. I scanned my key card at 10:30:22 PM. That's a tardy, no-call. One full attendance point to be issued. I reiterated that it was a train stopped on the tracks, completely beyond my control. She
    via u/ChiefSteward
  • 09
    advised me to either leave earlier (and just wait an extra half an hour for my shift to start on the majority of days) or else get a cellphone (I didn't have one at all back then) to call in with from the road next time. Well, what I did instead was start calling in absent "just in case something comes up after I leave home but before I arrive at work" in the evenings before leaving for work. The first few days the attendance office up front was just bemused. After
    via u/ChiefSteward
  • 10
    weeks, they became annoyed. After months, they'd apparently complained enough and I finally got told to stop. During the course of this conversation they revealed that calling in too early before the start of your shift made it extra challenging to make sure the notice gets to the right members of management, because the message is no longer flagged as "new" by the time they're creating logs for the next shift.
    via u/ChiefSteward
  • 11
    This was great news for me. From then on, every morning before leaving the premises at the end of my shift, I used one of their phones to call in absent for my next shift that evening. They tried to write me up for insubordination but the labor union slapped it down, pointing out that the collective bargaining agreement specifies the time we must call in by, but does not specify a time before which call-ins may not be made. Cue the huge grin across my face.
    via u/ChiefSteward
  • 12
    I never forgot that my team manager tried to do me a solid though. If I was actually going to be late or absent for some reason, I would call that TM's desk line directly to let them know. Even long after I finally got a cell phone, I continued doing this; I'd just call-in on my way home, instead of sticking around to use their phones after my shift. Found out years and years later from some union reps that upper management never got over this. Drove them nuts
    via u/ChiefSteward
  • 13
    that they got beat at their own game by something so simple. It didn't bring the walls crumbling down, but it was a persistent, enduring source of frustration and impotence for them. And really, knowing you can manage all of that with just a 22 second phone call a day... that's the kind of thing that gets you out of bed in the evening. TL;DR: I got full discipline for being 22 seconds late without calling in to give notice due to a stopped train blocking access to the workplace. So for the
    via u/ChiefSteward
  • 14
    next 11 years, I called in absent from work every single day "just in case", then still showed up on time every time, creating a little bit of extra work for the person who decided to discipline me in the first place. EDIT: Probably the number one observation I'm seeing is that I should have just sucked it up and left for work earlier. I've commented this a couple times already, but so nobody has to dig for it: I usually left so early that I got to work before the
    via u/ChiefSteward
  • 15
    20 minutes prior to the start of our shifts that we were allowed to clock in. This stopped train event was a rare and unpredictable exception, but the crossing was regularly blocked for a few to several minutes by a moving train. Not to mention all the other random stuff that could come up on your way to work.
    via u/ChiefSteward
  • 16
    mcflemmer 2 yr. ago What kind of workplace issues discipline for someone clocking in 22 seconds late ↑ 7.4k Reply Share luke310712 yr. ago edited 2 yr. ago A line manager at a factory I worked at tried to write me up for not arriving 10 minutes before my shift before. Definitely would have happily wrote me up if I was 10 seconds late to my shift too.
    via u/ChiefSteward
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    I was given the excuse of "That way we know you're here and ready to go as soon as it ticks over 1400" or something along those lines. Suffice to say, I did not turn up ten minutes early, ever, and never actually got written up. Despite this conversation happening multiple times over the span of a few months usually concluding quite abruptly when I asked if I was going to be paid for that ten minutes, or alternatively allowed out ten minutes earlier to "Ensure I was outside the factory at 2200 a
    via u/ChiefSteward
  • 18
    AdrianaStarfish - 2 yr. ago Not only was it malicious, it was continuously malicious which elevates it into the ,glorious' category. That was a very satisfying read, thank you for that! ↑ 1.7k Reply Share
    via u/ChiefSteward
  • 19
    grumblyoldman - 2 yr. ago Being maliciously compliant one time because the office dweebs are being petty that day? fun. Being maliciously compliant for years after even when they beg you to stop but aren't able to punish you for it? Priceless. 1.1k Reply Share
    via u/ChiefSteward
  • 20
    OP1KenOP 2 yr. ago I don't understand this kind of petty behaviour from employers, the outcome is usually that your staff will apply the bare minimum effort during work time and will never work a second longer than they have to, even if something is on fire. It's one of the hallmarks of incompetent management. 358 Reply Share
    via u/ChiefSteward
  • 21
    Cfwydirk 2 yr. ago Unless the number of times a person is tardy is once per week, (22 seconds are you kidding!) it would be nearly impossible to fire a union member. Beside the union steward there is a union business agent and a union labor attorney to defend the member in a arbitration hearing. Good on you for making them.....uncomfortable! 223 Reply Share
    via u/ChiefSteward
  • 22
    ChiefSteward OP • 2 yr. ago Absenteeism was actually our number one cause for termination. The whole system has its own Article, not just a Section, in the CBA. We enforced the language, but people just played the game and lost constantly. Reply Share 134
    via u/ChiefSteward
  • 23
    Seefufiat 2 yr. ago I work for a job that allows a 288 second grace period (4.8 minutes). I had a super who would harass me over my time even if I was in the grace period, so I made sure that I was never exactly on time. She hated it. ↑ 195 + Reply Share
    via u/ChiefSteward
  • 24
    FlyingGoatling - 2 yr. ago I assume if you called in, but arrived on time, you were awarded 0 points? Seems kind of a key detail that wasn't immediately obvious to me, at least. 170 Reply Share ChiefSteward OP - 2 yr. ago Yeah, showing up on time, as I virtually always did, rendered the whole thing unnecessary. Reply Share 173
    via u/ChiefSteward

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train tracks absent clock in micromanager employee workplace stories reddit attendance facility policy attendance report write up rural road discipline malicious compliance reddit train
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