... goes unpunished.
I have a friend who works for a 24-hour company which will be left unnamed.
Lately, there have been many staffing issues at this particular place. However, my friend (I'll call him "John" for arguement's sake) is usually a reliable guy to help fix the problem. He often volunteers to stay late in place of other employees who didn't come in (either because they're skipping work, or because the retard managers didn't schedule them), and he is happy to do so because he is able to pick up many overtime hours in this manner.Now, John is a great guy. Everyone loves him. He's been working at this place for a while and knows his stuff up and down. He's a very reliable worker.
Now, on Friday, it was worse than normal. There were MAJOR staffing issues. People who needed to be there just weren't there. There was only one thing for John to do: stay. Ovenight. For a massive amount of time.
Now, on top of the required 1.5x pay you get for working more than 40 hours a week, this particular company also offers 1.5x pay to employees for each hour they work longer than 12 hours in a day. I'm just saying this to illustrate the fact that John is always very happy to be picking up these hours. He was tired, yes, but he still did it all with a smile.
John stayed for a whopping 20 hours, raking in x2 his normal pay for
most of the night (at least, I think that's how it works...). He only
awaited the morning manager to come in...
And then THIS came from left field.
The morning manager came in, and BOOM, suddenly, John is fired.
Why?
He broke the zero-tolerance uniform policy for having facial hair.
Yes, I'm not joking. He fired just like that for having a beard. Because he stayed for 20 hours and couldn't shave on the job. And according to him, it wasn't even a "beard", just some stubble. He'd shaved before he came into work that day. Or, the previous day. Whatever you want to call it. And no demerit or anything. Just out-right fired.
Now, I don't know how this story is going to end, since the shit is still in the fan at the moment. John says he's going to be able to get his job back, because the particular manager who made the call is new and perhaps didn't realize what kind of an asset he got rid of. Besides, it wasn't John's fault at all. He was doing the place a favor by staying. You can't even make the point that he could have brought a razor to work with him, since he didn't know he'd be staying that long when he came in.
He just got done telling me all of this over an AIM conversation. I don't think I've ever seen him this pissed. I'll let you know how the story ends. (If you ask me, though, it sounds like the facial hair probably wasn't the whole story. This manager probably had the whole "I hate this guy, fire him on the first mistake he makes" thing going on. Or maybe he was just having a bad morning.)