I’ve been lurking on the reddit sub for many years, but I finally have a story I’m excited to tell!
This is a story from a few years back, before the world went to shit.
I was working for a company that was mid-sized. We traveled a lot to meet clients, and had an expense policy. But because it wasn’t a huge company, the expense policy was more of a guideline than a strict rule. Everyone knew each other, and we all acted sensibly.
I was supposed to attend a client meeting overseas in the UK. This was a somewhat last-minute request, and I had a personal vacation planned a few days after - also to Europe, but a different country. When I started looking up flights for the client meeting, I realised that instead of paying for my flight back home, it was cheaper for the company to just pay for a flight to bring me to my vacation destination. The catch was, I had an interval of 2 days between my vacation and the meeting - and I would need a hotel room paid for as well.
In the past, I would’ve just told my boss and he’d be ok with it. But the company had hired a HR director 2 months back. So I presented my plan to my HR director. I showed them the cost of flying me back home, compared with the cost of paying for 2 nights in a mid-level hotel while I worked remotely, and then flying me straight to my vacation. The latter would save them a fair bit of money - and as a bonus, I cut down on travel time.
The HR director didn’t take kindly to my proposal, and accused me of trying to “game the system” to get 2 extra vacation days. He scolded me for taking advantage of the company, and told me to follow the expense policy “to the letter”.
Did I mention that our expense policy wasn’t very well written, and was more of a guideline than a strict rule? One example was the section on land transport. I can’t remember the exact wording, but it said something like “we will cover the cost of flights to the nearest airport and subsequent car transport”.
Most of us knew the spirit of the policy, and we’d fly in to a reasonably near airport and take a train or cab. Sometimes that meant flying in to a hub that was further. In this case, it would have been way cheaper to fly to London and take a train to the client’s city for about $50. But hey, the HR director said to follow the policy “to the letter”, didn’t he?
I booked a flight to the nearest airport. It was literally twice the price of a flight to London - and we’re talking thousands of dollars here. But hey, I’m just following the policy. Instead of taking a train to the city centre for $5 or less, I also took a cab, which turned out to be $40 or so. Gotta follow the policy, which doesn’t cover trains!
When I came back from my vacation, I found out that my expenses had been flagged (no surprises there, it was way beyond what previous visits cost). I was called in to speak with the HR director about the issue. I simply pointed out to him that I had not been following the expense policy to the letter in the past, and I had learnt my lesson after the last time I spoke to him, so this time round I religiously followed the policy, and I would continue to do so in future.
HR had to spend a few weeks rewriting the policy. Because my expenses were out of the norm, the HR director had to get our CFO’s approval to cover part of my expenses so they didn’t have to explain it to the client. The CFO was pissed at the HR director for breaking something that had worked for years. I left after a year or so, but I heard the HR director was slowly pushed out and left a few months after me.
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Tale as old as time, lose a dollar to save a penny
I always say “they’re stepping over dollars to pick up pennies.” Similar, but I like to point out that they’re exerting extra energy and reducing profits in one fell swoop.
My brain wanted ‘dime’ not penny.
I’m not a native English speaker, so I probably messed up the saying 😅
‘Dime’ is American, I’d say penny is more international. There’s a saying in the UK: “penny wise, pound foolish”, I’m sure there’s plenty or regional variations of this in different countries.
lose a dollarydoo to save a centarydoo.
Don’t worry it makes sense either way, but you were one word away from a short rhyme.
OMG, you’re right! Now I’m disappointed in myself for not seeing it lmao
except in this case, it was “lose a dollar by refusing to… save a dime?”.
Love the way you worked this against HR. I had a situation kind of like yours once where we got a per diem daily for a hotel and one meal. The company let us keep the leftover money from the per diem until they hired a new manager that insisted we turn in the extra (it wasn’t much maybe $5-25). Fine, we all started getting more expensive hotel rooms and spending the rest on food using every cent they gave us. . After about 2 years the guy who made us turn in the leftover money left and we went back to being able to keep the extra money.
I had a P card and would expense food on the road, so no per diem to worry about. I didn’t travel super often, so I would use this opportunity to treat myself on the company dime, choosing food and drink that often went beyond the limits of what we were allowed to get. So I would just pick whatever the fuck I wanted and tell my server/bartender that I was gonna be splitting my solo check: $X on company card, everything else including tip on my personal card. I’d get whiskey or beer or wine and steak or lamb or something like that. I would wind up with excellent meals for like $10 out of pocket. But because I rarely traveled, my company mileage and fuel costs were like 5% of everybody else’s in my district, so my monthly expense reports were almost always under $1k (usually more like $300) while everybody else was routinely $5-10k. So thankfully, nobody was dumb enough to give me a slam dunk malicious compliance story haha.
They spend so much time trying to add red tape to stop abuses, they hurt those who are looking out for the good of everyone.
I thought the HR director was being especially ridiculous, because I wasn’t paid by the hour. Also I had to rush to complete stuff after the meeting anyway, so there was zero chance I could have slacked off in those two days.
But muh policies!!
Corporate life 101.
Oh boy, this is such an awesome story. Thank you for sticking it up to the abusive manager and entertaining us with the result.
Unfortunately I didn’t have the guts to do this. I used to work at a place where everything was fine until a new line manager was installed who moved me to a different desk in another building. That desk was right next to the server room, which was noisy with a constant low-pitched grumbling. I was not able to think or concentrate in that environment, so I would frequently take my laptop to another floor and do my work there. The manager was not happy about that and demanded that I should return to my assigned desk and stay there. I told him it would mean I wouldn’t be able to accomplish any work and he said something on the lines of “I don’t care”. I should have taken him up on that; I should have stopped working entirely and just browsed the web all day until he gets wind of it and finally admits that he does care. But I was too cowardly to dare. I continued to defy him by spending most of my time at the “wrong” desk though.
know your worth and stand up to incompetent bosses!
“If yor employees are trying to help you, let them.” Sounds like common sense, but it seems like MBAs aren’t being taught common sense…
It’s a bit absurd.
Let’s imagine OP was trying to scam the company. The sheer gall of asking for approval on a scam would be so audacious that honestly, it wouldn’t be safe to have an employee like that working on anything of value. The level of “fuck you, I don’t care” that it would show would mean that the safest thing to do with an employee like that would be to fire them.
The guy didn’t ask the basic question of “has OP given us any reason not to trust them?” If the answer to that was “yes”, then maybe flying them out to the UK to act on the company’s behalf isn’t a great idea. And if that doesn’t seem likely, then it’s probably an employee trying to help and they should be encouraged
Exactly. If I were a good executive, I’d be pretty impressed that OP was being so transparent and forthright . . . not react in that way.
To this day I have no idea what HR Director’s thought process was. He literally declined free money for the company.
One example was the section on land transport. I can’t remember the exact wording, but it said something like “we will cover the cost of flights to the nearest airport and subsequent car transport”.
That company must not be European :)
Obviously not - American clients were its bread and butter then.
