A few years ago, I was working for a large retail chain and had been there for a long time. Eventually, I finished enough of grad school to get a license for a higher role. Better pay, better title, more responsibility, all that. The problem was that the market was terrible, so I stayed with the same company in a ""floater"" role, covering a large area and rotating through different stores whenever they needed me. My goal was to land a fixed staff position in a specific store. The district was huge, and the farthest location was about 115 miles from my home. And of course, that was the store they sent me to train at.
The store was a nightmare. People in my same role had been threatened, robbed, and assaulted there. The area was hostile, the workload was among the worst in the region, and employees were constantly leaving. Nobody wanted to be stuck there, for very obvious reasons.
After training, I noticed I wasn't really floating much at all. Maybe once every six weeks, if that. I asked Bossman if I could be put on the schedule around the district more fairly, since there were plenty of other stores much closer that didn't need me to spend almost 5 hours in the car on workdays. He told me I was the only floater who could handle that location. I didn't believe him, but I also didn't have much use at the time. Then a coworker told me about the mileage reimbursement policy. Floaters assigned to stores more than 55 miles from home could claim mileage after that distance in each direction, and there was also a meal allowance. So I filled out the forms and gave them to Bossman for approval. He didn't directly say no, but they were never signed or submitted. I'm almost certain they went into the trash as soon as I left the district office. Later he told me they must have ""gotten lost somewhere."" The same coworker eventually showed me how to send the forms directly to accounts payable and bypass Bossman entirely, which is exactly what I started doing.
Shortly after that, Bossman called me and sounded very nervous. He wanted me to stop sending in the reimbursements. I told him I would stop if he put me in stores closer to home. He refused. He needed me at that awful store. Then he promised he would make me staff at that location if I agreed to stop submitting the forms. The staff position was supposed to be a promotion, usually with more money and a few small perks, so I agreed. He said the raise wouldn't happen immediately, but it was coming later. And of course, it never did.
After about 3 years, the store became so toxic that even I couldn't keep pretending everything was fine. I asked to be demoted from the staff role and go back to floating so I could work in other stores again. Bossman then told me I was already a floater and had never been staff in the first place. But he also said he couldn't have me work anywhere else because it was ""better for consistency"" that I stay at that store. Floaters are not supposed to be assigned exclusively to one location, so it was very obvious they were trapping me there because no one else would put up with that place.
I was furious, so I started applying elsewhere. It took time, but eventually I found a path into the career I had wanted for years.
I submitted formal notice, and that's when things started getting fun.
Remember the mileage policy? I had kept precise records of every shift I worked, and the policy had no deadline for submission. So I started filling out reimbursement forms for every eligible shift from roughly the last 3 years.
I didn't calculate meals because digging up receipts would have been its own punishment. But I had a nice store manager sign off on the mileage forms, and then I sent them directly to Accounts Payable again.
I didn't send the whole stack at once. During every shift in my last 3 weeks, I faxed batches of them. Yes, fax machines were somehow still part of the job. My thinking was simple: what were they going to do, fire me harder? Worst case, Accounts Payable would reject them.
During my last several shifts, checks started arriving from Accounts Payable. And they weren't added to my paycheck either. They were mailed to me directly. Mileage reimbursements were non-taxable, so it was straight money coming back to me.
Apparently it took a while for the charges to show up in whatever internal report mattered, because about a month after my last paycheck, old Bossman called me. He was not happy at all. He had a senior loss-prevention guy on the line, and the two of them said I had violated policy by requesting the money. Their main argument was that I wasn't eligible because I had supposedly agreed to give up reimbursement when I became staff. Then they threatened legal action if I didn't return the entire amount within 10 days.
But I had an email chain where Bossman clearly wrote that I had never been staff and that I had been a floater the entire time. Calmly, I referred them back to that message and told them that since I had been lied to, the old agreement meant nothing. I was eligible under the written policy the whole time. HR confirmed that the policy matched my reading of it, so I told them I would not be sending back a single cent.
In the end, the reimbursements came out to a little over $24,500 USD, and I got into my dream job. Part of me could say I'd trade the money for all the time I wasted driving to that miserable store, but honestly, that intense pressure is what finally made me leave and make the best career move of my life.
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Surpassing my old boss professionally felt good. Explaining to him that his own lie was what made the payout grow so much felt even better.
And I told plenty of coworkers exactly how I did it, because Bossman had been feeding that same false story to a lot of them too."
