Boss Tries To Fire Employee For Not Answering Work Calls On His Personal Phone During The Weekend
If you didn't want him to stop answering work calls outside of work, maybe you should have gotten him a work phone.
Jelena Zelen / Shutterstock; Reddit A worker was reminded while reading a story about company phones that he had his own experience regarding the subject that led to a confrontation with his old boss.
He had asked his boss for a company phone since he was tired of receiving phone calls on his personal cell outside of work hours, but was almost fired after the boss said no.
He had gone an entire weekend without answering work calls on his personal phone.
He posted on Reddit’s “r/MaliciousCompliance” subreddit, which is basically a forum devoted to purposely failing when listening to demands, and provided context around the situation that he was in at his old job.
“Some background, I worked at a smaller factory where I was the logistics and purchasing manager. The problem area was on the logistics side of things,” he explained, and while this all sounds like gibberish to me, he explained that things never went according to plan.
Photo: Reddit
“It goes without saying that I would get calls pretty much 24/7 (on my personal cell). So, I go to my boss and say since I'm basically on call 24/7 I should get a company phone,” he wrote. “He said you don't really need a company phone since most of your calls came during normal business hours.”
The last bit was his ticket out because although his boss was right about the purchasing side of things, all of the logistics calls he would get would happen outside of business hours. “So anyway, I left that meeting with the understanding that I was expected to take care of all business calls during normal hours.”
After setting up his trucks for the weekend, he decided that he would go silent outside of work hours. “I put my phone on mute and didn't answer a single call from trucking [companies] or brokers all weekend,” he reveals. “I polish my resume in anticipation of my termination.”
Photo: Reddit
His boss called him into a meeting with HR — and they were on his side.
On Monday, the first thing that happened was that he was called into a conference call with his boss and HR — the former of which asked him why “pickups and drops were not on time or picked up at all.”
“I said I didn't know because I didn't answer any calls from [vendors] since it was outside normal business hours,” he claimed, in the true spirit of “malicious compliance.”
HR then asked him if this is a regular occurrence — referring to him receiving calls outside of work hours. The boss replies that although it’s not often, it does happen. Wondering what happened this weekend, HR asked why he wasn’t able to pick up the calls this time around.
The employee shared the story about his conversation regarding the company phone request that he made with his boss. “HR [says] ‘so if we get you a phone this won't happen again?’” to which he replies, “I can't guarantee loads won't get dropped but I can tell you that it'll never be this bad because I can work on solutions as they come up. Instead of having to chase them on Monday morning.”
After hearing that, HR told his boss to get him a company phone, but people in the comments didn’t see this as a win unless he got a raise.
Many people begged the question about what he actually gained from this confrontation, seeing that if all he got was a new phone that wasn’t his… what was the point?
Photo: Reddit
Some who defended the man pointed out the liability of doing business dealings on your own personal cell.
Others pointed out that phone lines and data and everything else isn’t exactly cheap, so his personal phone line would no longer be affected.
Isaac Serna-Diez is an Assistant Editor who focuses on entertainment and news, social justice, and politics.