Sometimes the limiting atmosphere of the workplace can weigh down on a person. Having to follow certain guidelines and policies can result in frustrating inconvenience and debilitation of the human spirit. If only there was a way to work around these rules... Apparently, such cheats exist. The following stories come from employees who took advantage of loopholes they discovered at their jobs and shared the experience on Reddit. How about taking five and seeing what you can learn from? Content has been edited for clarity.
Slow And Steady Does Win The Race
Most employees’ method was to start scanning and press total at the end. In between that time, the timer was running. Any little breaks one would take to make small talk and such would lower the items per minute. By pressing ‘Total’ intermittently when you’re not doing anything, you could stop the timer and keep it at a higher count.
I abused it hard.
There was a target of 18 items per minute. The first month, I had 40 items a minute. Second place was 28. Obviously, I won the points that month, but it looked suspicious. I pulled it back a little and kept it around a low 30 to make it believable.
I paid for my shopping for about six months using that trick, but it was actively discouraged when they found out people did it.”
Helpful Tips, If You Like Tim Horton’s
“I have never personally done this, but I did figure this out pretty quickly after working at Tim Hortons for four years.
The way that you word things when buying stuff can save you a small bit of money. For instance, a bottle of water is $2, but if you ask for a cup of water, it’s free.
There is also a big one that can save someone a lot of money over the course of a long period of time if you drink tea daily. A tea, depending on the size, ranges from $1.50-$2.20. But, if you ask for a cup of hot water and a tea bag on the side it is $0.25. If you drink tea daily, you can knock off a couple hundred bucks a year by doing this.”
When A Per Diem Works For You
“I used to be a professional traveler for work. When I was on site in a city, I would get paid a per diem for meals based on the location (some locations were as much as $75 per day. Some were as cheap as $25).
The thing about this per diem value was that I received the money regardless of whether I spent it or not. Being a young and recently poor man, I would arrive on Monday, order two pizzas from Dominos for around $12 and just graze off of that for my five days in that city. On occasion, my clients would take me out for dinner or lunch, which would just make saving the per diem that much easier.
I ended up making a small fortune in just per diem money as a result of just eating my favorite food.”
Please Hold For My Break
“I used to work at a call center which used a dialing program. I figured out that if you hit a series of functions on the dialer in the correct order, it would freeze up the program and you had to restart your computer. It amounted to about half an hour worth of free time.
The only problem was that I told a few people who then told a few people. It got worse and worse until they fixed that specific problem on the program in an update.”