45-minutes before closing, VP demands employees cannot clock out until ALL emails are answered, employee maliciously complies: ‘I had 46 unread emails… Only 2 were actual client questions.’

Author image for Elna McHilderson
Elna McHilderson • Managing Editor
Jun 14, 2025 10:00 AM EDT

Sometimes upper management just thinks they know everything simply because they are upper management. It has nothing to do with experience or rational thinking. They just have this ego power trip thing that makes them think that their word is gold and if they thought of it, it must be the best way to do things. More times than not, however, it is quite the opposite. You see, a lot of upper management doesn't actually do the work that their employees do, so they don't really have the best grasp on what actually needs to be done irl. 

 

And yet, here we are again, hearing about another manager implementing some asinine rule that just shows he has now idea what actually is going on in the company. To make things even worse, he waited until less than an hour was left of the work day to tell everyone they had to do this tedious task in order to clock out. Like, wow. Just simply wow.  

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  • If you have a work email, then you now the amount of emails you get flooded with on a daily that are really useless. You do not need to reply, you do not need to even read them. And yet, this manager thought it was important that every single one of those emails got answered, with less than an hour left of work… So, he got what he asked for, I guess.

  • Cheezburger Image 10517050112
    via Unsplash+ (and John)

    The image does not depict the actual subjects of the story. Subjects are models.

  • A few years ago, I worked at a very image-obsessed company. The VP was all about "grindset" and pushing 10-hour workdays for salaried folks.
    via Fine-Relationship261
  • One Friday, he dropped a bombshell in our team chat at 5:12 PM: "No one leaves until ALL client emails are answered. We want to show responsiveness."
    via Fine-Relationship261
  • I had 46 unread emails. 38 were cc'd to me, 5 were newsletter-type stuff, and 3 were out-of- office auto-replies. Two were actual client questions. I answered those two immediately.
    via Fine-Relationship261
  • Then I replied to every other email with variations of: "Thank you for including me. Please let me know if action is needed."
    via Fine-Relationship261
  • "Received. Let me know if follow-up is required." "Thanks for the update. No further action on my end."
    via Fine-Relationship261
  • Took about 45 minutes of copy-paste bliss. At 6:04, I pinged the VP: "All emails replied to. Leaving for the weekend." The kicker? Monday morning, he got flooded with "What was that pointless reply from [me]?" and tried to scold me. I
    via Fine-Relationship261
  • forwarded his "answer ALL emails" message and just said, "Just doing what was asked." He never sent that kind of message again.
    via Fine-Relationship261
  • Cheezburger Image 10517052672
    via Unsplash+ (and Windows)

    The image does not depict the actual subjects of the story. Subjects are models.

  • Magdovus Why is it that VPs seem particularly clueless? HI, anyone with "vice" in the job title, not that I'm thinking of anyone in particular...
    via Magdovus
  • MfrBVa He had read an article, guaranteed, that recommended that strategy. Our CEO came back from rich-guy meetings with stupid sh like that all the time.
    via MfrBVa
  • FreudianNip-Slip Reading the word "grindset" in the second sentence gave me such a visceral twinge of disgust. Woof
    via FreudianNip-Slip
  • Qxg6 A manager once ask me to provide them weekly status report of what I did during the week. One of the tasks I included in the status report was "write weekly status report". I don't know why they fired me. I was just doing what they told me to do.
    via Qxg6
  • Bee_9965 What a dum-dum. If every employee did that, just a few emails would bring the company to its knees - all you would be doing is replying to all the replies you just received, then replying to those replies, then so on and so on.
    via Bee_9965

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