This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.

The original was posted on /r/maliciouscompliance by /u/Downtown_Physics8853 on 2025-07-17 23:49:20+00:00.

I work at a manufacturing company. The closest timeclock to the employee parking lot is down in the machine shop, and every day about 2 dozen people can be seen standing around the clock, waiting for it to click over to 3:30 and they can punch out. But, about a year ago, we got a new general manager.

After she had been there for a couple of months, she decided that this would should not be allowed, and a notice was posted stating that people may NOT congregate around the time clock any more. At about the same time, there was a corporate-wide exercise campaign based around the Olympics, and many people downloaded an exercise app that tracked their daily steps (along with other things) for possible prizes and locational honors.

Now, the downstairs machine shop is a large, open, roughly square space, with a marked aisle running around the periphery of the floor. So, when the time-clock edict came around, people still headed to the clock, but instead spent the time “getting their daily steps in”. By the end of the week, we had about 30 people spending the last 5-10 minutes of the shift circumambulating clockwise around the entire machining department, checking the clock each time they passed.

After the GM saw this spectacle one day, I guess it reminded her too much of that scene in Midnight Express and she reversed the clock edict. Funny thing, though, people still kept coming down to get their steps in for a few weeks afterward, until the contest was over…