I'm not the OP you initially posed your question to. But if you ask me, they just gave you the runaround. With what I would currently consider an insulting excu

I'm not the OP you initially posed your question to. But if you ask me, they just gave you the runaround. With what I would currently consider an insulting excuse. There is always a way, no matter how silly the "rule" if you could even find it written anywhere. Any manager, or moderately-motivated HR person would immediately find a way around it. If not, you don't really want to work there. I was in a slightly similar situation at some point a long time ago. Did a 3-month "internship" as part of my degree at a real business. It was a token salary at that point, and I was fine even when the 3-month internship was extended for another three months. After that three months, I got a 10% raise, and when I questioned it I was given a cheesy response by a just-below-ceo-level person of "10% is a huge raise" as if ignoring the base salary that the 10% was adding onto. Being a fairly shy, non-confrontational person I agreed. 6 months later when the year was over, and it came time to further renew the "contract", I told them I'm not signing diddly. That's when the story changed and they tripled the salary to a very good entry-level point. Two things: One, I made my point clear that they knew they would be losing a very productive and useful member of their team. And two, I spoke to someone a little lower down the hierarchy that ended up vouching and making my case to the "higher ups".