My buddy was looking at the statement for his reported hours the previous month and he was a bit surprised that there was a small discrepancy in the hours he reported versus the statement. The difference was that 15 minutes were missing over the course of the work week which seemed to be an impossible number considering that the time was entered in whole hours.
Martin is a bit of a perfectionist and had to find out what had happened, so he called the company help desk and ended up having discussions with second and third level support. Eventually he discovered that according to German law (or perhaps it was company policy) that he must have a 15 minute break after each four hours of his day, and on Monday when he traveled to the project he had exactly eight hours entered into the reporting system which considering no lunch was correct. Yet the system knew about this special requirement and automatically deducted 15 minutes from his time-sheet which is where the discrepancy occurred.
I did agree with Martin that it was a bit ridiculous that during his five hour train journey that the system automatically inserted a “break”, which I tried to imagine him standing up and trying to do a just bit less for the company during those minutes while trapped on the train. Eventually he learned that if there was no pause during the day, such as lunch, the system automatically deducted this time and there was nothing that could be done about it. I am not positive about this but I think starting the next month, his train journeys including the time at the client site started to take about a quarter of an hour longer on Mondays and Fridays.