I work at a basic data entry 9-5 job. I weirdly enjoy it and I’m also pretty good at it. I do the work faster and more accurately than most of my coworkers.

My whole life I’ve had trouble sleeping and I tend to show up a little late to anything that happens before 11am. It sucks, it’s not intentional, I’ve tried to change it… but I just can’t seem to fix this about myself. In high school I had a 4.0 but I had to get special permission to graduate because I was late so often.

I’m supposed to be at my job by 9am but I regularly show up 5-10 minutes late. That being said hours are strictly tracked at this office, and I work 40 hours or more every week. I just stay until I’ve done my 8 hours every day, and I’m never even the last person around because many people take much longer lunch breaks than me.

We had a couple people quit / move jobs and have had 3x the normal workload for the past 2 weeks. As a result, everyone in my office was offered overtime. I worked the overtime, and made a bunch of progress for us

Today I was pulled into my boss’s office because apparently I’m not allowed to work overtime anymore because I keep showing up late. I expressed some confusion at this, as I thought I was helping, and was told “overtime is a reward.” Ok, sure. I guess I won’t help out anymore?

But then I was told that I’m basically on the verge of being fired for this issue. It’s true they’ve talked to me about it in the past but since I do everything else well and this has ZERO impact on the day to day operations of the company… i don’t know it didn’t seem that serious to me? I’m never more than 15 minutes late.

I need to keep this job for the next few months because I’m trying to save up to leave for grad school in the fall. I just want a second opinion — am I justified in being frustrated about this?

I’m worried I’ll get fired because I struggle to be on time so much. People act like it’s simple and I’m doing it on purpose to hurt them or something… but it doesn’t feel that simple to me. And it’s just really really frustrating when I can’t understand / empathize with the idea that me struggling with this is negatively impacting my office in any way.