If it was 10 minutes to investigate and fix an urgent production bug, it would be OK. But he was asked time to join a teleconference in order to listen to a bug

If it was 10 minutes to investigate and fix an urgent production bug, it would be OK. But he was asked time to join a teleconference in order to listen to a bug report! You can say "no" right there. A bug should be reported via a bug tracking system, maybe email for redundancy. There's no justification whatsoever to jump into a teleconference for a non-critical bug. Besides they got a QA department, so surely they have someone else (more technical than the bug reporter) who could look at it first to determine if it was really a bug, etc. > "you sit right here with me through this whole ordeal, and every minute of mine we waste, you owe me after 5 o'clock" That's not very savvy, to say the least. You sell your time to the company. The manager is not wasting your time, they're wasting the company's time or the "team's time" if you prefer. So you have to let him know when they're making decisions against their own best interest: "look, we have tasks A, B, and C, currently A is high priority, if you wish me to do task D, I'll be happy to do it, but it will delay A for n hours. And which of B or C should we re-schedule? I think it's C because blablah".