Boss Makes a Dollar, I Make a Dime

About

Boss Makes a Dollar, I Make a Dime is the start of a rhyming couplet online which usually ends with "That's why I poop on company time." The couplet has also been used as a snowclone where "poop" is replaced with a different activity a worker might use to shirk their duties while on the job.

Origin

The phrase began spreading on the internet as early as 2009. On September 1st, 2009, Twitter user @shankspeare used the phrase.^[7] On July 18th, 2015, it was used in a Reddit thread,^[6] and on August 20th, 2015, an Imgur^[1] post by thecanadianpresident used the phrase as a title to an image macro which states that taking 10 minutes a day to use the bathroom equates to 40 hours of paid bathroom time a year (shown below).

Spread

The phrase grew popular over the following several years, particularly in concert with a GIF of Elmo from Sesame Street on the toilet. User clisis made such a post on Imgur on January 30th, 2016 (shown below, left). Reddit user Gryff_the_Ginger posted a GIF version of the meme to /r/funny on March 12th, 2016, gaining over 2,400 points (shown below, right).

The phrase has also been used as a snowclone in which "poop" is replaced with another activity. For example, on Tumblr, memehumor^[2] posted a Surprised Pikachu meme with the caption on October 15th, 2019, gaining over 90,000 notes (shown below, left). On August 5th, 2019, Twitter user icedoutomnitrix posted the snowclone with "that's why I tweet," gaining over 19,000 retweets and 116,000 likes (shown below, right).

Meme-related Firing

On October 20th, 2019, Facebook user Cody Hidalgo^[3] reported that he was fired for posting the Elmo version of the meme to his Facebook, including a screenshot of a text conversation he had with his boss (shown below). The interaction was tweeted by @ChrisCaesar^[4] where it gained over 8,300 retweets and 47,000 likes. After it was discovered that Hidalgo worked at Roman Stone Works, Facebook users reportedly flooded the page with negative comments until Facebook temporarily shut the page down.^[5]

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References