Employee continuously calls coworkers out of hours, gets blocked for calling before 7AM on day off: 'She thinks she's helping us, but she isn't'

Ally Perry • Writer and Editor

Apr 4, 2026 9:00 PM EDT

Clocking out is a definitive action, not a suggestion.

In the era of side hustles and remote work, it has become a lot easier for people with office jobs that once had a strict 9-to-5 schedule to blur the boundaries and take on working responsibilities outside of the hours that they are strictly paid for. These days, you don't have to be a workaholic to spend much of your week going the extra mile for your job off the clock.

Of course, just because you have the ability to do this does not mean that you should. In fact, a lot of people resent the fact that work is ever more capable of creeping into our personal lives in this way. It is all well and good to set a personal boundary about when and where you are willing to work, but that doesn't mean that managers or coworkers are going to live by the same rules. This is where out-of-hours working becomes a real issue, as there are likely to be conflicts if people do not respect the ways in which other people work. So long as somebody does their job when they are supposed to, it should not be an issue.

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An employee found themselves increasingly irritated by a coworker with micromanaging tendencies who liked to call her team members about work when they were off the clock. She tended to call them early in the morning to ask them questions that they felt were not necessary while they were not in the office.
Eventually, they had had enough, and when she called them at 7 AM on their only day off that week, they decided that they had no choice but to block her number. They were not sure how to broach the topic with her in a professional manner.
Was I right to block my coworker?

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