Being flexible is great. No, I’m not talking about stretching every day, but rather being able to bend the rules ever so slightly in your favor when you need it.

You shouldn’t forget that the same goes for you; if the rules are flexible for you, you should sometimes be flexible for the rules.

This is a story about how a worker was flexible with his job, working overtime and skimping on breaks, when his boss decided he’d rather chew him out for being late once and lose all of that.

More info: Reddit

If you bend the rules to be helpful, it’s only natural to expect to receive the same treatment

Image credits: Andrea Piacquadio (not the actual image)

This poster would skip breaks or stay late to finish up work, but got reprimanded for being 6 minutes late one morning

Image credits: u/dannybau87

Image credits: Gilles De Muynck (not the actual image)

After being reprimanded, he decided he’d take full breaks and never stay late again, much to the chagrin of the boss

The OP of the story, dannybau87, begins the story by saying that it never was a problem for him to work a bit more to catch up when needed.

But when he was just 6 minutes late to work, the boss reprimanded him, basically saying “rules are rules.”

So, next time, when the boss asked him to stay on 5 minutes after work every day, to finish up with last-minute customers, he also hit him with “rules are rules” and refused to do so.

Losing a productive worker by being a stickler for rules (when they were favorable to him, of course) hopefully taught him at least some tiny lesson about being more flexible.

Bored Panda reached out to the poster of this story, to get some more context.

After their original conflict, things settled down until the office pushed a new policy. It dictated that only work-related websites could be accessed during work hours.

“I pointed out that he was also looking at news sites, YouTube, etc., during downtime, but, of course, it didn’t apply to him.”

OP mentions that he simply quit not long after that, for some “strange” reason.

Unbothered by the boss’s pettiness and toxicity, OP never went back to skipping breaks or working longer ever again. Instead, he’d go on walks, if the weather was nice enough, which led him to lose some weight and get some healthy exercise nearly daily.

This also had the bonus effect of annoying that boss, as he “thought ideally people should be eating lunch at their desk.”

Finally, when asked about if the boss had a reason to dislike him, OP went into a bit more detail.

He began by saying that he was a bit of an outlier as most people in the office had little experience and no degree, while dannybau87 had worked in two large organizations before and had a university degree.

His job was to handle technical support for resellers, while the boss’s team were customer service, meaning that they were all part of the call center, but OP was working on a different branch.

“I flat-out refused to do data entry in my down time because it was outside my job description (no need to quiet quit if you say no beforehand),” the poster said.

This led the boss to ask if he thought he was better than everyone else in the office, because they all did data entry during downtime, to which OP replied by saying: “No, I don’t think I’m better than them or you, I just studied hard and got a degree, so I wouldn’t have to do data entry.”

Image credits: logan jeffrey (not the actual image)

People on Quora were wondering about this same question – whether it’s okay to come into work late if you make up for it by staying late.

The overwhelming majority of people said that it isn’t, as you’re just making up your own schedule at that point. Plus, they correctly pointed out that you’re better off asking your boss instead of random people on the internet.

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Similarly, jostle has some good reasons for why you should never stay late at work. It turns out that instead of improving your standing at the workplace and making you stand out in a good way, it simply harms your health, your productivity and your work relationships.

Obviously, it’s bad for your mental and physical health. It may make you feel fatigued and scattered or even give you insomnia. Mentally, it may cause feelings of anxiety or anger, which may strengthen if you don’t give yourself a break.

With this drop in your wellbeing, your productivity is directly affected, dropping rapidly as well.

Finally, if your coworkers start feeling as if it’s a competition of “who stays longest” at your workplace, they may start resenting you, because leaving at the time that it’s normal to go home may make them look bad.

So if you need a couple of minutes to finish up that last task and make tomorrow easier for yourself, go for it, but don’t stay any longer as it will do more bad than good.

OP’s post collected 1.8k upvotes and almost a hundred comments. People commented in support of the poster, saying that flexibility and good behavior should have its limits.

The community supported the poster, saying that you should only be as flexible as others will be with you

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Image credits: AlphaTradeZone (not the actual image)

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