I've always been someone who believes the commute should count. Back prior to the pandemic, we were in the office for a single day every week and were allowed to head back home on our lunch breaks and finish the day there - great right? Well, yeah if you worked 8-5 so you'd leave at 12 right after the weekly team meeting. Meanwhile, I'd have to show up at 11:55 to make the meeting and was subsequently told to stay in the office til my 4:30 lunch break. This would've been reasonable, had our office not been right beside the interstate ramp which meant that from 4-6 you'd sit at the entrance to the office, wait at least 30 minutes before you could get out and go the opposite direction.

Brought this up to my supervisor and mentioned how it really meant that I got like a 20 minute lunch break once a week because the other 40 minutes would be spent in unreasonable traffic - even mentioned how I'd been stuck in traffic for the entire hour once before and wound up coming back late. "well you could switch your schedule around to 8-5???"

Nah. I quickly realized that, if everyone else left the office at 12 after the meetings - I could just also sneak out at like 2-3 and completely bypass the 4/5pm interstate traffic to get back home in <10 minutes and also take my entire lunch hour at 4. They never noticed and honestly I kinda wish they had before we got rid of the office during the pandemic.