Doing home health was kinda instructive for me in this regard.

The only time you go to the office is to turn stuff in, do inservices/continuing education, or similar. But originally I would answer calls at weird hours because a patient would need coverage, otherwise they wouldn't be calling.

And then the management spent way too much money buying into some Disney corporate policy thing (literally, they paid money to Disney for the program) that changed a ton of rules in bullshit ways that made no sense for home health.

So, the next time they called, I didn't answer. Or the time after that, or the time after that. And, when you're one of three men working for a company that's partially reliant physical strength to be able to do the work needed for some patients, this alarmed my supervisor. She requested a meeting, and I went in. Mandatory meetings were paid though!

At the meeting, it was expressed that answering calls was part of my job. So I asked id I was being paid to sit at home and wait for calls. No, I wasn't "on call". So, you want me on call? No, just to answer when we call you. That's being on call, and we're supposed to get paid for that. No, this is different, we just want you to be available when someone calls out for a difficult patient. Soooo, you want me on call.

This went in circles for a while before I switched gears and directly said that answering calls when not on duty was not in place when I was hired, and that the employee handbook specified that being on call was considered a shift, and would be paid as such, and that maybe I should have been on call any of the dozens of times I did wake my ass up from sleep after workout two or three jobs in the first place, and that I never got paid a dime for doing so, so that was the end of it for me.

The response was that they couldn't stay operating if they paid everyone for being on call instead of us "supporting the company". My response was that maybe they could have if they hadn't shelled out for the Disney crap, or if the previous administrator hadn't been screwing around and embezzling, and that maybe it was time the company supported us.

Not surprisingly, I was one of several employees "let go to streamline services" a few weeks later, right before the company folded entirely.

So, you don't even have to have an office job to get treated like shit! Isn't that a relief? Isn't it?

As a middle manager in a corporate hellscape, one of my few joys in life is setting logic traps for HR and making them choose between admitting company policy is bullshit or directly instructing me to violate labor laws.

Man we had someone in the army do this. Army doctrine is either outdated or very accessible to the poor, I don't fuckin know, but you aren't required to have a phone.

So this one weird junior Joe just decided he didn't need a phone. Got rid of it, and as a result never got the information he needed on army shit. I loved him for it, and by the law he was in the right. Can't tell him to get a phone.

Unfortunately I was his team lead, and every time my chain of command decided to put out bullshit last minute information over text I had to tell them to suck it and pvt NoPhone wouldn't be at their surprise formation.

Sometimes for important stuff I would have to drive to the barracks and knock on homies door to let him know there's surprise inspections or piss tests and shit.

The workplace should operate entirely without external communication. It worked since the dawn of man, and it should continue to work until the end of man if we want any semblance of work-life balance.

Keep telling the DBAs that my company outsourced a big chunk of their tech stack to that its against company policy to work all the way on the other side of the planet, but they refuse to show up to the office.

I always refused to put work apps on my personal phone because they would make you agree to some bullshit where they could remote access your phone or potentially wipe it. So I would refuse and say they needed to provide a company phone for me if it was that important. Most companies are either ok with this or provide a phone, except for one company. This was a software company, and literally everything else about this company was a unicorn of a job. But for some reason they wanted me to have slack on my phone and also wouldn't give me a company phone. So I dug up an old phone, reset it to factory settings, and added slack to that so I could say I did it. Then I put the phone away and they never asked about it again. So I really don't know what the point of that was 🤷

The policy is you can only work from home when it benefits the company, not you.

Our boss was freaking out over people sometimes doing some private calls during work hours and at a certain point absolutely forbade it. So yeah, people would just end the call at 17:00 sharp and switch off the work phone. It took one week before that rule was rescinded.

In all of my IT jobs I would have been fired if I had signed into work accounts on my personal phone. It's a pretty big security risk.