a few years ago i worked in a shitty little retail shop that was owned by two brothers i never met that lived in another state (the company owned a chain of these stores across 2 or 3 states, there were maybe 4 or 5 total stores). we used this ipad in a stand to clock in and out. you had to take a picture of yourself every time, which i despised. i had been there for maybe 7 months or so when one day i decided to look at the app that was like the user version of the app from the ipad. it had a record of all of my in and out times… and a record of every time they had been edited.
and edited they had been. every single shift, one of the two owners was shaving off between 1 and 15 minutes from clock out time. i brought it up with my manager, who i got along really well with, and got him to look at his. same thing. my other coworker, same thing. i went home and made a spreadsheet containing every single time it had happened for as far back as the records went. it ended up being something like $400 worth of time they had taken from me.
the next day i got a call from that owner, and he explained to me that he felt like i was taking too long to close the store, that it shouldn’t take that long, and that he was sorry (sorry that he got caught!) and was going to add $200 to my next paycheck (half of what he stole), plus from now on all clock in and out times would be rounded to the nearest quarter hour, and asked me if that made it better.
i was in a pretty bad place at the time, financially and mentally, and for as terrible as that job was i did also kind of like it, and didn’t think i could find anything better, so i accepted the money and the apology and let it go.
anything like that ever happened to you? did you do anything cooler than roll over like i did?
I discovered a very similar situation as a receptionist at a used car lot 20+ years ago. The lot was owned by a rich boy who had taken over for his late father, and the office was managed by his mother, who I’m pretty sure must be the top result when you image search “Harridan.” She loved making people cry, she loved to rule with an iron fist, she enjoyed arguing and cussing - it was a wild place to work, and I was 18 and didn’t yet realize how unacceptable everything was.
Anywho. They were archaic even then, but this place was using an old time clock with actual punchcards. I was a broke-ass barely-adult and Christmas was coming, and I was stressing hard about money. I noticed that my check hours and clock hours didn’t match, so even though I was absolutely not permitted to dig through payroll and personnel stuff, I took advantage of her long lunches and dug out the records for previous weeks. The manager’s handwritten notes to the side showed how many hours she was counting for each shift and that hours were being rounded down all over the place.
I told everyone. 😂 I even called the service garage and told them, they came up to look, it was fucking on. 😂😂😂 everybody was super pissed. The garage guys mentioned in their removed about her that she had been having them do stuff to people’s cars to bring them back or just not really fix them so they’d have to come back! Fucking wild that that really happens, but it’s true.
I left a note resigning alongside my annotated time cards and walked out. She left a nasty voicemail at my apartment after she got back to the chaos I had created in the office, and I only reluctantly went back to get my last paycheck because she refused up mail it (she insisted she needed my signature proving that I had personally received it, but really, she needed one last opportunity to cuss me out and slam a door), so idk how many of the others actually quit. I had to threaten her via certified mail to get my paperwork for taxes the next year.
I would like to say that that was an empowering turning point in my life, but a lot of things went wrong in my personal life as a result of that incident, some of it directly so because of judgment about the irresponsible nature of my unplanned resignation. It didn’t stop me. I have continued making things uncomfortable by insisting it’s not okay to just live with injustice that we can reasonably, feasibly fix, and being unwilling to let things lie has caused a lot of problems in my personal life and contributed to my lack of popularity.
I don’t think I’m the problem, though - I think comfort and apathy are the problem, so I don’t have a ton of motivation to try to change that part of my personality so I can fit in better. I would rather be lonely than be in the company of comfortable cowards.