Who Blows The Final Whistle?

I am fifteen years old and work as a soccer referee. I will normally arrive ten to fifteen minutes early to a game, which is plenty of time to check in players from both teams and make sure the field is in proper playing condition.

One game, I showed up as an assistant referee. My center referee, eighteen years old, told me that all refs have to arrive thirty minutes early to every game. I know this is not true, and I stayed silent.

We reffed the game as usual, and returned to where we put our stuff at the end of the game. [Center Ref] told me that because I didn’t arrive thirty minutes early, he would mark that I didn’t show up, basically telling me that I wouldn’t get paid for the game we had just worked. I complained that this was a rule that he made up. He left the game without saying anything else, figuring that would be all.

If you referee without any assistant referees, you get paid like $5 more. I think this was his plan.

When I got home, I made sure to sign up to be a center referee at every game where this guy was an assistant referee. Poor him, he showed up to his next game fifteen minutes early, which is absolutely unacceptable. I said nothing the whole game, but only marked him absent, which means he wouldn’t get paid.

This went on for a week and a half until his paycheck came in, and he was about $120 off of what his total should’ve been.

He emails the main referee boss (who runs everything) to see what the problem was. He’s told that he wasn’t there, so he wouldn’t get paid.

He put two and two together and realized what I did. Emails were sent between him, the boss, and me until the boss had the full story. He was fired for making up rules, and I got paid for that first game where I’d lost my pay.