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The original was posted on /r/maliciouscompliance by /u/filip__vondracek on 2023-07-06 08:20:12+00:00.

Back in my younger days, before most people had cell phones, I was working at a fast food restaurant during my senior year of high school. The main reason I decided to work there was because one of my best friends worked there, and around the time I started working, our other best friend joined us. We were very close, and we spent our minimum wage earnings on stupid stuff.

This fast food restaurant was the King when it came to Burgers, so we had to learn how to prepare a Whopper of a hamburger in no time flat. We also had to learn how to manage the fried foods station, the registers, the drive thru, all specialty items, and all cleaning and end-of-day operations. We were pretty sharp kids despite being stupid teenagers, and within a couple months we could run an entire shift by ourselves (normally there were at least four or five workers and a manager). We were regularly scheduled with just three of us and a manager to work all the night shifts, and we enjoyed working together and running the store. We knew the manager was saving money on labor costs, which made the whole store look good when compared against other stores in the district, but we didn’t care. We worked hard, had fun together, and made a nearly criminally small wage for our efforts (at the time it seemed like we had made it big).

As it tends to do, prom season came around. We all went to the same school, so we all had prom on the same day. Compounding the issue, one of my friends was taking another worker as his date. Thinking it would help with scheduling, we notified our managers several weeks in advance. We were all told “no.” We found that amusing, because of course we were going to go to our prom. Well, the company policy was that as long as you called before missing a shift, then you wouldn’t get in trouble for calling in with an emergency.

We timed our calls so that we would all call within a few minutes of each other. The poor manager on shift almost broke down crying, but we felt self-righteous as teenagers often do. I was the last to call, and the manager was full-on begging me to not call-out sick. We went off and enjoyed our prom.

The next day when we went in for our shifts, we found out the store had struggled in our absence. The manager had scrambled to get people to come in on their scheduled day off, incurring some overtime (to call overtime discouraged with that company would be an understatement). Some of the managers glared at us, while some others gave us knowing grins. Within a week, we were only ever scheduled with two of us working together. I’m sure it ended up costing the company a lot, but it was also very clear that the management had gotten in trouble for not fixing the schedule when we informed them of our prom.

The story does have a happy ending-- I met my wife while working there, and we’ve been together for over 20 years now…