I've been in IT for the past few years with my current employer and we've never had to clock in/out until today. My boss is normally very lenient (sp) and never cared if people came in a little late.

We got an email on Friday (he was off) saying that beginning Monday it is mandatory that we clock in/out. He's been mentioning switching to this route before since people aren't submitting their time sheets (spreadsheet on a network share) and he's having to go in and manually pull that info and update our time system spending a couple hours each cycle.

Being that I'm 40-45min away from work I never know if I'll be late due to tunnel traffic so I'm beginning to go in early. The benefit to this is that I arrive 30min early. So thats 30min of OT gained everyday because I'm not going to get there and wait till 7am before I clock in, I'm clocking in as I arrive.

And if I'm ever running late, I can stop by the local office and clock in on my way to work. It's about 10 min from my house. The days I want to leave early.....I just leave an hour early and clock out of the local office. h:

But..it's not all about beating the system. Arriving early today put me in a more productive mood and I got a lot done. Normally I'm running late and just sit around till lunch.

So I guess it all works out.