Ever been hard at work at a job, and wish there was an easier way to get a task done? A shortcut of some sort, just to get everything done in a timely fashion? Luckily, such things do exist. It's finding them that can prove to be a bit difficult. Luckily, some people already have.
People on Reddit share the loophole they discovered at work. Content has been edited for clarity.
They’re A Stickler For The Rules
“I work in a shipyard and one important rule is you gotta have safety glasses. If you lose them, our safety department makes you talk to your boss’s boss and have him write a note saying that he talked to you so you can have another pair of glasses. Well, I walked into the safety office without safety glasses and asked for another pair. They said to go get a note. I then asked if they were going to let me walk out without any safety glasses. They knew that wasn’t allowed, so they gave me a scratched up pair.
Well, the reason they had those on hand is because you can trade your scratched ones for new ones. So I took the scratched ones, dealt with them for a day, and then went in the next day and traded them in for new ones. Never had to talk to my boss’s boss and get a note.”
“It Was All The Same To Them”
“I used to work in a call center doing tech support for a dial-up ISP. The 10 hour plan was $9.99 and then there were various tiers including an unlimited plan for $50 or something like that.
I ended up moving to a different city and called up the call center to set up internet and I asked for the 10 hour plan. The guy (who didn’t know I used to work there) tried to talk me into a bigger plan, but I stuck with the 10 hour plan.
Why? Because the company had no system for monitoring usage. You could use as much data as you wanted and it was all the same to them. There was no tracking system in place.”
“Needless To Say, I Was Seething”
“I submitted my resignation two weeks prior to accepting another gig. The general manager told me I could also cash in my accumulated sick leave. A few days before I was supposed to leave, he came back and told me that I couldn’t cash in the sick leave he had promised. Needless to say, I was seething. I immediately requested to cancel my resignation. The next day I called in sick and stayed in that status until my sick leave was exhausted. Meanwhile, I used my spare time wisely to prepare for my new job which was much better with plenty of room for advancement. I went back to the old job just about when the sick leave expired to pick up my check, and resigned once again.
I kept that next job for 35 years through several promotions and retired nearly 5 years ago to the day.
There are times when you just cannot do the right thing by an employer and you just gotta fight fire with fire.”
Always Good To Impress The Boss
“I work for this small tech company. I was in charge of ordering like $20,000 worth of parts. However, due to the fact that the warehouse I was ordering from was all the way in Japan and I’m ordering from the Midwest, there was a $1,000 shipping fee. I found out after sitting there for like 20 minutes thinking about how to get around the shipping fee that they only charged for shipping to somewhere, not shipping from somewhere.
With that knowledge, I changed the location on the computer I was using to order from Chicago to the warehouse in Japan, and proceeded to have the parts shipped out from ‘Japan.’ I saved my company a thousand dollars of unnecessary fees and my boss was impressed that I figured out that I could do that.”
They Should Be Able To Work Together
“I work at a doctor’s office and insurance companies are a PAIN to deal with. One company refused to add us to their network of providers because they were ‘closed to new providers.’ So, we charge the patients directly and submit the bills to the insurance provider (as out-of-network), who then reimburses the patient. The kicker? We charge less than what the insurance pays out. Patients make a profit off of visiting our office!”
Just Using The Same Policy
“I worked for Best Buy in my college years. One night, a bunch of employees and I decided to throw a house party so we ‘bought’ a bunch of DJ equipment and speakers. We used them for the night, and I returned them to the store the next day. The store would now have to sell that equipment discounted since it was open box, so all of management was very upset about this. The store manager at the time approached me later that day and asked my why I returned all that stuff (he knew we had bought it and I threw a party the night before). He was expecting me to confess and sing like a canary so he could probably fire me for violating some conduct policy. Instead I looked him dead in the eyes and said:
‘Well I was not satisfied with the quality of the equipment and it did not live up to my standards. I am exercising the same return policy that all customers are given.’
He was so mad after I said that, he just walked away. Forget you Josh.”
The Disorganization Worked Out Well
“I worked in a music shop when I was 17. This store was the satellite store of the main store a town over. All inventory was tracked and shipped at the main store. The items shipped to the satellite store were pulled out of inventory after a short amount of time. They didn’t require inventory tracking at the satellite store. There was a pretty disorganized back room that actually had a ton of product in it. We saw the potential for huge amounts of theft but resisted for the most part. We did grab some discontinued cymbals and microphones but we could have really been way worse about this. My buddy got a really nice guitar that fell off the rack from our boss before the satellite store closed. Wish a guitar would’ve fell off the shelf when I was there that day!”
Good Catch!
“Used to work at EB Games back in 2002. Black Friday sale was coming up and I noticed that we were offering $3 trade-in credit for a game that sold for less than $2 used. I told my boss about it and he thought it wasn’t a big deal, I told him not to be surprised if he had hundreds of ‘copies’ of this being bought and sold as it was basically printing money.
It was removed from the promotion the day before Black Friday.”
Where Working Out Pays
“I used to work at a State job. They encouraged work from home, any state employee could work 50% of the time from home (let’s say, 20 hours of a 40 hour work week). They also had a healthy living program; for every hour spent working out was an hour less you had to work each week, up to 4 hours. If you have a full time job and take advantage of that program, you essentially only work 36 hours a week, and 20 of those hours you can work from home. I would work in the office Monday through Wednesday, work half day in the office Thursday, rest of the day at home. And work from home half day Friday. It was amazing, but the pay was garbage.”
A Lesson Well Learned
“I have 2 loopholes that I purely accidentally exploited while serving in the military.
Both of these were 100% legit. The government is mad stupid.
Five years into my time in the military, I was asking around to get my assignment to Germany extended to match my separation date rather than have to move 11 months before leaving the military. Everybody told me that it wouldn’t be possible and my only option was to extend my enlistment, adding another year and half or so to my total time so that I could also extend my time in Germany. Well lo and behold, the government decided they couldn’t afford to pay everybody and offered a sweet severance check to anybody willing to exit their service early. Under some special rule, I qualified and volunteered to cut my total enlistment back down to the original 6 year term. This meant I was able to stay in Germany until the end, and got that sweet severance. All because they wouldn’t let me just tack on 11 months to my time in Germany the simple way.
I very stupidly married my high school sweetheart while in training, only to realize like literally 2 days later what a bad idea that was. He openly admitted to doing illegal substances after I had explicitly told him not to because of the whole ‘I work for the government’ thing. Well in the state of Louisiana, you cannot divorce unless you have been separated for 6 months. So I told my supervisor that they should just stick me in the dorms in the meantime since the marriage wasn’t going to be a permanent thing. Fast forward to me going back and forth with the finance office several times before they confirmed that I was legally entitled to housing allowance while in the free dorms since I was legally married. Thank god 18 year old me was smarter with money than with life changing decisions about relationships cause that extra money was really helpful.”
Should Not Have Been That Difficult
“I worked for a man who traveled so frequently that half my job was handling his itinerary and ticket purchases. Unfortunately, the previous person in my position had left without letting us know the password to get in to his account for one of the airlines. To make matters even worse, IT had deleted her email, which was linked to the account. This airline charged an additional fee if you called them to make reservations rather than use the website.
I called the airline to update the login password. I was told that only the person named on the account could do that. Of course, said person was currently on a flight, and, frankly, too important to make such a minor call. I explained the situation, but no matter what I said, I was told no, it was for the account holder’s protection, no one else could change the password.
So I asked her if she could change the email address. Yes, she could, and five minutes later, I was in his account.”
Everyone Wins
“In high school, I worked as a cashier at a major grocery store chain. Our store offered a loyalty card that accrued points for discounted gas. Every $100 spent equaled 10 cents off per gallon at the store’s gas pump. Many customers would come in who didn’t have/want a store card.
I filled out an application for a store card with fake info and a dummy phone number and used it on any customer without a card. This resulted in them not missing out on store deals and me pretty much never having to pay for gas throughout most of high school.”
“Best Loophole Ever”
“I was on a sub in the navy. On my 2nd deployment (basically a 6 month tour of the pacific) I was sent to Hawaii with two other dudes for 3 months to attend training schools while the boat was at sea.
So we have our orders in hand with a flight ticket and a return ticket (San Diego to Honolulu, then Honolulu to Japan.) We show up on base to report for classes, but there was a mix up. Our boat yeoman never told them we were coming. We couldn’t get a seat in our classes and we had no bed in the barracks. Our tickets were already paid for and they weren’t about to issue us new orders and tickets.
So we get told to find a reasonably priced hotel in town for the duration of our stay and to report to the barracks pretty officer for a work detail. Naturally like any good shitbags, we booked a place two blocks from Waikiki. It was awesome. We show up to muster with the Barracks Petty Officer the next day and he basically tells us he has no work for us. He also said even if he did he wouldn’t give a care, because he was set to retire in a few months and did not care about work (we called that the ROAD program: retired on active duty.) He says he doesn’t want to see us ever again.
And he never did. We basically got a 3 month vacation in Waikiki. I partied every night, learned to scuba, explored the islands, nailed tourists, grew a beard. Best loophole ever.”
“This One Event Solidified It”
“The ‘act busy’ loophole. I always kind of knew it was a thing as do most people, but this one event solidified it.
One day at work, me and my brother were the only ones there, we didn’t really have much to do besides the usual work (cleaning, mowing, ect). So we were just hanging out in the warehouse on our phones. I hear the boss man’s pick up pulling into the lot. Earlier in the day we had been doing some painting, so I picked up the paint brush and was acting like I was getting all the nooks and crannies on this thing.
My brother stayed on his phone. The boss man didn’t say anything to us, just grabbed some work orders and left. So I go back to my phone. About 5 minutes later, he texts my brother and tells him to go mow. I got to keep sitting on my butt, getting paid just by acting busy.
Since that day, I’ve become the master of acting busy.”
Everyone’s Favorite Person
“I worked for a welding shop that was part of an… international conglomerate? I guess… anyways it was a bunch of shops from various places in the US and Canada all under one corporate umbrella. Our shop had a unique work schedule of 9 hours per day Mon-Thurs, and a half day on Friday. Everybody that worked in our shop loved it, corporate hated it and tried to get rid of it several times.
One time the excuse they used had to do with legally mandated maximum times between breaks. The four 9’s and a 4 schedule had a gap between first break and lunch that was 15 minutes too long and there was no way to move the two 15 minute breaks and the one half hour lunch blocks around to make it work. They read off a bunch of rules and regulations, which included a rule that said the amount of time allowed between a regular break and lunch break was slightly different than the amount of time between a lunch break and a regular break, and another that said the lunch break could be divided into two smaller 15 minute lunch breaks.
So I asked to see the sheet of regulations and scribbled some quick napkin math while the corporate schmuck droned his insincere regrets that we wouldn’t be able to have short Fridays anymore. It turns out that if we split our lunch break in two and swapped places with the first break the time between breaks would fall writhing the legal parameters and not disrupt the schedule at all.
I was a popular guy that day after I pointed that out to everybody.”
“I Couldn’t Hide My Smirk”
“I was about 2 minutes late to a terrible job and their policy was 15 minutes unpaid for being late. Assembly line lead told me as such and told me to get to it. I couldn’t hide my smirk as I told him.
‘Uh, yeah I’ll see ya in about 15 minutes, bro,’ I said as I walked outside.
Best smoke break I ever had.”
That’s A Nice Schedule
“My senior year of high school, I took the hardest schedule possible but the lowest allowable number of credits. So I had one study hall every day and two study halls every other day. Seniors got to come in late or leave early if they had study hall for first or last period, so I arranged my schedule so that at least once every two weeks I got to come in late and leave early on the same day.
In the fall, I was working two jobs, playing two sports, and applying to college with relative ease, all because I figured out how to game my schedule into letting me do my homework during the actual school day.”
A Little Extra
“So the restaurant I worked at pays out cash for all credit card tips at the end of the night, taking it from their bank of $3,000 in the office. While I was working, I would buy something small, run my credit card which gives 4% cashback on dining, tip myself $400, and then my manager would just give me that $400 in cash at the end of the night and I wouldn’t report it as tips (like most servers do), essentially getting me an extra $16 every week I did it.”
Saving Some Money
“The parking garage nearby where I used to work would have a max out of $12 dollars per 12 hours and sometimes I wanted to get wasted after work and take a Lyft home and just leave my car overnight. By the time I would get back to my car, my ticket would charge me $20-30. But they also had a $10 lost ticket fee. So I would take my ticket, park, and come back the next day and just tell them I lost my ticket and would only have to pay the $10.”
Always Important To Be Clear
“I had a salary job, contract said, ‘You are paid $X for all hours work as complete compensation. No overtime pay will be granted, you are expected to work as long as it takes to finish your work.’
Little did they know, they didn’t specify a minimum hour requirement. Being a fast worker, I basically showed up whenever I wanted. The only thing that kept me at work longer than a few hours each day was my supervisor, he was a cool guy so I stuck around with him.”
Why Wouldn’t They Do That?
“My last company had an Employee Stock Purchase Plan. It was literally free money every 3 months. Here’s how it worked:
You already had to agree to a percentage of your salary before the start of the quarter. Then, they noted the price of the stock on day one of the quarter. Three months pass, and they note the price of the stock at the end of the quarter. You get to purchase the stock at 15% off of the price of whichever noted price was lower.
For example, Day 1 the stock is $10, and day 90 the stock is $15. You purchase the stock at $8.50. You can sell it at $15 the day you purchase it.
Example 2, Day 1 the stock is $15 and day 90 the stock is $10. You purchase the stock at $8.50, and can immediately sell it for $10.
Example 2 doesn’t make you a ton of money, but it’s still 15% of free money.
I tried to explain this to every person I worked with but there were still people who weren’t taking advantage of it.
Unfortunately, they ended the program. I was so mad.”
That’s A Lot Of Peanut Butter
“At my old job (grocery store), we had one of those ticket board things, like the McDonald’s Monopoly one. Employees had a different one than the customer’s, which was lesser in value than the customer’s but was still decent.
Tickets had a certain code on them, you tape it to the matching code on the board. Simple enough. The tickets were given at random however.
You got a ticket with each complete transaction (if you went to the register to buy something, you got one ticket regardless of how small the whole purchase was). You then got extra tickets for certain items. Let’s say for example, peanut butter. You buy three things of peanut butter you got three extra tickets along with the one you get anyway. So four tickets in total.
I did the loophole where you automatically got a ticket regardless of how small the purchase was. We had Laffy Taffy, the long ones. They were three for a dollar but could be bought individually for thirty three cents. Throughout my shift, I’d go and buy a single Laffy Taffy.
After a month, I won one of the prizes, an Xbox One. Best part, they lost the Xbox One in the mail so they just gave me $350 to make up for it.
Only two employees won prizes there but I got the better one. The other got like a $50 gift card for the store.
Money went towards my upcoming anime convention. Had a lot of fun.”
“I Felt Rather Smug”
“Back in the 80’s, I was in the 2nd year of a Fortran programming job and the final project was to write a program that would print Roman Numeral equivalent of any number inputted on the command line up to some large number. I can’t remember what the highest number was that we had to go to but it was quite challenge for the time. It was pre object-oriented programming and all.
My program would trip up on a certain number and for the life of me I couldn’t figure out why so I just said, ‘Forget this’ and buried a direct if statement for that one number deep in one of the subroutines. As luck would have it, my program was the only one that worked and I felt rather smug (and a wee bit guilty) as he congratulated me when he handed them back.”