Gabrielle Judge, the self-titled “anti-work girl boss,” recently released a video discussing her personal approach to the corporate work environment.

It also captured the Gen Z influencer recounting an experience when she was accused of “time theft” by a former employer.

Time theft can be a grave accusation by an employer, with many claiming it is virtually the same as stealing physical items from a company.

The term covers certain behaviors that intentionally waste time at work. Good examples include logging off early, taking long scheduled breaks, or using work time to complete personal tasks.

Gabrielle Judge, known on TikTok as @gabrille_judge, shared a huge mistake she made in her first corporate position. She hopes that by sharing her experience, she can help others in her position avoid the same mistakes.

Judge got her first managerial job outside college during the summer between her junior and senior years. According to her, she received this job because of her past experience as a resident advisor (RA) in her college dorm, and she didn’t know what to expect from the new environment.

While traveling through Thailand during the summer break, the TikToker says she missed out on the training shifts necessary for the position. However, she incorrectly assumed that the training would either be made up before the actual job began or that she would have the training materials waiting in her inbox.

Since she missed the valuable training classes, she didn’t realize that when she clocked into her shifts, she was using two different codes with two different wages, one of which did not belong to her.

She was called into an early morning meeting to discuss the issue. Her bosses assumed she was doing it intentionally to receive a higher wage as she used the codes randomly throughout the month.

According to Judge, she felt terrified of being accused of such a blatant crime. After all, she’s always been a teacher’s pet and a bit of a “goody-two-shoes.” Imagine her shock when she found out what was going on. Due to her self-set schedule, she always worked different hours and received paychecks for varying amounts. She genuinely never realized that on some shifts throughout the month, she was making $2 more per hour.

When her activity came to light, the company accused her of stealing time from them. It was an innocent mistake on Judge’s part, but the company had to take the theft seriously, as the hours she clocked did not belong to her.

Time theft is a serious issue and should be handled quickly as soon as an employer notices it. However, Judge claims that her direct superior approved her time every two weeks before issuing her paychecks and that the issue should have been noticed. She believes that if her superiors knew she was doing something wrong, they should have notified her of the mistake instead of letting it go on for so long.

After completing her work at the company during her senior year of college, Judge says the experience stayed with her, making her never want to work in another management position. Ironically, when she moved into the tech space after graduation, she quickly realized that people management was one of the only ways to move up the ranks in the company.

Since her parents never went to college and worked blue-collar jobs, Judge says she had no one in her family she could turn to for advice on the situation. She eventually reached out to a colleague in a similar position, and they advised her to schedule another meeting to hash out the issue. However, Judge says that this advice confused her even more since it wasn’t her issue in the first place.

Many people claim that working in corporate America comes with its own secret set of rules and social cues to live by. To succeed, Judge now knows that she will have to learn the rules of the somewhat dysfunctional game even to try to compete for higher-paying jobs.