'[He's] rocking the boat': Temp manager meddles with the payroll system by forcing employees to do time sheets after hours, nobody gets paid on time for weeks, so he's fired

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Jesse Kessenheimer • Writer and Editor
Sep 23, 2025 1:00 PM EDT

The last thing a temporary manager should do is rock the boat, yet managers have the incurable urge to ruin functional work policies the second they step into a new establishment. Managers feel a tingle of power in their stomach when they flex their superiority, but not every manager makes good decisions. Sometimes those bad calls get them working late hours on a Friday, and eventually getting fired.

This can be seen in this viral story, where a new manager comes into an established workplace and changes everything. He was only supposed to be covering for their usual manager's maternity leave, but upon fluffing his feathers and stomping into the break room, this manager couldn't resist making some enormous changes. Forcing all of the employees to fill out their time sheets after hours on a Friday, he destabilized a functional payroll system, losing hours of his time on a Friday sifting through timesheets and failing to get them in on time. 

This blunder ultimately rose through the ranks, and when an entire department repeatedly failed to get paid on time, the company started to notice… In a bad way.

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  • 01
    Cheezburger Image 10556177664
    via pixelfit

    Image is representative only and does not depict the actual subjects of the story.

  • 02
    Manager insisted we do timesheets after hours
    via JoeyJoJo_Senior
  • 03
    At our work, time sheets have to be filled in every fortnight on a Friday, by close of business, to be processed first thing Monday morning.
    via JoeyJoJo_Senior
  • 04
    Our manager was a really chill woman who would sign off on timesheets Friday morning, and then send them to payroll before 5pm.
    via JoeyJoJo_Senior
  • 05
    Cheezburger Image 10556177920
    via pixelfit

    Image is representative only and does not depict the actual subjects of the story.

  • 06
    She went on leave because her daughter was having a baby, and we got some young dude to temporarily fill in as manager.
    via JoeyJoJo_Senior
  • 07
    This guy was a total d- bag. One of the things he did was insist we complete time sheets only AFTER we'd worked our fortnightly hours.
    via JoeyJoJo_Senior
  • 08
    This meant we had to work until 5, then get our timesheets signed, and then get them to payroll.
    via JoeyJoJo_Senior
  • 09
    Except payroll closes at 5. Which meant we couldn't get our timesheets to payroll until Monday morning, and they'd be processed late.
    via JoeyJoJo_Senior
  • 10
    So we decided we'd take our time filling in timesheets, a lot of us hang around chatting on a Friday because there's a bar across the road that does cheap drinks 6-7pm.
    via JoeyJoJo_Senior
  • 11
    So we'd leisurely do our timesheets, and dbag manager would have to hang around to sign them all. One week we didn't give them to him until right before 6pm. He was P SED.
    via JoeyJoJo_Senior
  • 12
    This lasted about 6 weeks. I guess something got flagged somewhere that our whole department wasn't getting paid on
    via JoeyJoJo_Senior
  • 13
    time. Dbag manager was quickly identified as the culprit and given the boot. They ended up getting one of my coworkers to take over until our real manager came back.
    via JoeyJoJo_Senior
  • 14
    P... Surely you added the hour overtime you spent to fill out the timesheet to your timesheet?
    via JoeyJoJo_Senior
  • 15
    RealUltimate Pa... Dbag did not think this through at all. What did he have to gain by staying back himself?
    via RealUltimatePa
  • 16
    Cakeriel Don't forget to include time doing time sheet in the time sheet.
    via Cakeriel
  • 17
    Fightmemod⚫ As a manager the last thing I'm doing when filling in for another manager is rocking the boat. I've got way more
    via Fightmemod
  • 18
    than enough sh to do than needlessly off a whole other department. This tells me that d-bag had nothing better to do
    via Fightmemod
  • 19
    and was a drain on the company. All I do when filling in for another manager is approve time sheets and PTO, maybe take a few calls and monitor their email so they don't come back to a mess.
    via Fightmemod

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