Team Lead Told Project Manager to Shut Me Up. I Was a Most Experienced IT Guy. r/MaliciousCompliance

welcome to r malicious compliance where we share stories of people conforming to the letter but not the spirit of a request and today we have three great stories so subscribe hit the like button and let's begin the first story client paying almost half a million more than he should the second story team leader gets project manager to tell us to be quiet so we do the third story vendor keeps closing my ticket and won't answer on to the first story sure i'll count every part for you i work for an inventory company we literally go to business count their inventory update their computer systems and then my boss compiles a bunch of statistics about their inventory to discuss with management about how they're doing some of my boss's biggest business comes from buy sells or an inventory that's being done before the sale of a business in order to calculate the value of the current inventory and therefore how much the buyer has to pay the seller for it this can be complicated because what counts as a good piece of inventory changes depending on the agreement the two companies reach we're usually brought in as a neutral third party my boss has been doing this stuff for 40 years and has way too many stories of sellers trying to get him to inflate their inventory or buyers trying to get him to devalue it so a few years ago a client who will henceforth be known as buyer contacts my boss about doing an inventory for a business he wants to buy my boss had worked for many years with buyer's father who had recently retired and passed down the business to buyer my boss doesn't think very highly a buyer but he's not going to turn away business just because he thinks someone is an entitled idiot my boss informs buyer that he will need to see the sale agreement at least a week before the inventory so he can review it he is not a lawyer but has enough experience with these things that he can parse through the language on his own and if there is something weird the week gives him enough time to get an actual lawyer to look over the agreement or speak to the buyer or seller to go over things buyer agrees to send it as soon as the lawyers finish fleshing it out he doesn't for the next three months my boss is all but begging by her to send him the sale agreement buyer apparently has the attention span of a three-year-old learning trigonometry because he agrees every time and then a thing came up and he forgot he was even desperate enough to contact the seller to try to get the details but the seller refused to even take the calls the day before the inventory my boss finally calls buyer and says that if he doesn't have the agreement before 10 pm that night he was going to cancel the inventory buyer finally faxes the agreement over so my boss can get a handle on what exactly the buyer has agreed to buy from the seller so by the time the date of the inventory arrives my boss is starting the day severely annoyed because he had been up all night long going over the sale agreement side note because my boss is an epping wonderful human he often meets a group of us so we can carpool to the jobs together which meant i had a front row seat to the horror that was my boss is welcome bye bye or the day of the inventory buyer hey boss thanks for coming out today i really appreciate it boss well it's what you're paying me for hey before we get started with anything i wanted to talk to you in the seller about the sale agreement i just want to make sure everyone's on the same page before we get started buyer oh no need we've got it all figured out boss i'm sorry buyer well the seller is really hurting financially and he has to take care of his six father and family so i'm just going to buy the whole inventory boss you're just gonna buy everything buyer yeah that should make this simpler for you right you can just do the inventory like normal boss okay you realize that you don't need to do that right your agreement states that you only have to pay him for inventory that's below a certain age and in good condition buyer it's not a big deal if there's a few bad pieces here and there it'll be a lot faster if you guys just count everything boss i need to make sure you understand just from the casual look around i've had so far i can tell you that a good portion of what i'm seeing is outdated and in some cases completely destroyed you won't be able to sell them buyer well i've taken a look around too and i think you're exaggerating besides whatever i can't sell here i can always post up on ebay there's always somebody who wants this old stuff so i just want you to count everything boss i understand that and if you tell me you want to count everything that's what we'll do but i really think that buyer look i'm still gonna pay you the same so what the heck do you care what i buy you may know inventory but you can't see the big picture here i want everything counted and added into the inventory it's not like you guys have to work any harder boss okay then we're gonna need to reword our contract the current one specifies that we're doing the inventory according to the sales agreement you've reached if you want us to count everything then i just need buyer i just said i wanted everything counted i'm not paying a lawyer for you to change one line of a contract why are you making such a big deal out of something like this just count the stuff now as previously said my boss has been doing this job for over 40 years and he'd already walked in pretty annoyed by buyer and buyer has now been d around with the sales agreement for months forcing my boss to do a week's worth of planning in one night and now not only did he want to completely ignore all the work my boss had put in but buyer also did it with a ridiculous amount of snark and attitude while my boss was trying to make sure buyer didn't end up paying for junk here's where the malicious compliance comes in my boss gives buyer his giant customer service smile and says alright then you want us to count everything we'll count everything and then he came back to our crew and announced everyone choose a section we're counting everything broken peace counted a piece with a handwritten or ripped up part number counted a kit with pieces missing counted pieces so old that they become obsolete counted we counted each and every piece in the place no matter what the condition of the part a couple of months later one of the crew asked my boss about what happened and he burst out laughing the buyer finally figured out after about a month of nonsense and hearing his employees gripe that about 30 percent of the inventory he'd bought was simply garbage for a total of approximately half a million us dollars my boss lost him as a client he regrets absolutely nothing the next story is team leader wants certain people to be less chatty they stop talking altogether a group of about eight of us who have worked on projects for this employer before and have a reasonable amount of experience in the industry generally are put on a small project with a new team leader who we will call alex not her real name and when i say new alex had just graduated that year and just gotten her professional certification to be eligible for this work at all less than two months prior alex had worked on only one project before i know because alex was placed by me on that project so i could be a resource while she learned the ropes a lot of people were upset i was not but i did understand their sentiment and did think several of them were significantly more qualified to be team leaders than alex i had zero desire to be a team leader as we get to work on the project people encounter various issues issues with our software or in interpreting the guidelines as they apply to this project they tend to go to the most experienced people to ask for help with these things first i tend not to ask for help much as while i'm only third most experienced on the team at this point i'm relatively tech savvy and have had occasion to learn the software more in depth than most and are more willing to make judgment calls without input when it comes to matters of interpretation after a couple weeks the most experienced people are no longer answering questions to help others so they're coming to me i was trying to keep my head down since i knew alex was the sore issue for people so i hadn't put it together yet i get asked by alex to come speak with the project manager who says that i'm being too chatty and can i keep the chatter to a minimum alex isn't saying anything but has a certain look on her face i put it together i agree and go back to work on break the other two approach me and compare notes same thing happened to them we figure alex is upset and feels that people coming to us instead of her is undermining her position we mutually agree to remain completely non-verbal when in the workspace in the future all communication from us will be written alex was happy no one was undermining her position by helping others but alex was also unhappy because no one would speak to her when she wanted to chat i don't know who explicitly told the rest of the team but one of them asked me if it was true i confirmed it spread to the other teams our project was wrapped up and we were given a new assignment our team was going to be joined with another for a larger project alex was going to be the team leader again half the team expressed that they did not feel comfortable working under alex i just stayed silent project manager said that was too bad but it was her project i then spoke up and said that i would not be available to work this project so sorry i'll inform you when i'm available again and walked out the chorus of me too was substantially more than half the team i was in the lobby with most of the others on the phone with another employer checking to see if they had need for 14 or so contractors when alex came down the elevator and blame me for losing the team leader position and told everyone if they came back someone else would be assigned i don't think it was a gender issue one of the more senior people to me was a woman and one was the man i think it was an insecure young person feeling threatened that she didn't have the control and respect she felt she deserved i think she blamed me because i was the first to turn the project down people did assume and suggest she got the position due to an inappropriate relationship with the project manager or someone else more senior i do not assume that is the case and while i am aware that sort of thing happens at times i refuse to even joke about it without something more substantial to base it on i have downplayed the amount of animosity other people had toward alex i generally had none until the meeting with the project manager at that point i was irritated but most of the team regarded alex as unqualified inexperienced personally obnoxious and felt she talked down to them which peed them off since they all had the same advanced degree as her and more experience my compliance was not calculated to prompt a mass revolt nor was my declining the new project i simply did not want to work with someone who would get upset at me for answering questions to help out my colleagues as for declining the new project i should clarify i was not a full-time permanent employee of this company none of us were we were contracted workers brought on for the duration of a particular project when one ended the employer would often have another and transfer people they wanted to keep from one to another they could sign a new contract or just effectively agree through performance to extend the old one through the duration of the new project walking out was not the same as quitting it was declining to extend my contract slash declining to sign on to the new project there were many firms in the industry in that city as well so none of us were overly concerned about finding more work i chose not to go back to the new project and instead went to the other firm i'd been talking to honestly three of the most experienced people went with me we heard from the ones who stayed alex would gossip to the new contractors about the fat redneck who cost her a team leader position and how she blamed her lack of advancement on me and the last story is returns require a ticket but you won't respond to tickets okay i'll make you respond i worked for an i.t company a while back and needed to do a return on a faulty computer component my tickets would be constantly closed as complete from the vendor with no information given we realized they used the same ticketing system as us due to a loop created by auto responses back and forth from both systems we stopped the issue on our side and said oh well that's good to know after a few weeks and 50 plus tickets i was no closer to a resolution my strategy at that time was spamming them with tickets as they were very easy to create in their system i tried calling i'd leave voicemails but messages stated all returns are done via their online ticketing system okay i sent my ticket to every department several times a day after getting no response from the returns department or my voicemails clearly the tickets could be closed just as easily on their end with no care repercussion then i realized i had the answer all along i asked my boss to remove the new rules he had implemented to stop the loop of responses he set another rule to basically autoclear the response right after it's received and we've already auto responded this was to ensure it doesn't crash the ticketing system given this was generating a response every few seconds and i was going to do this on five tickets these responses also generated an email being sent back and forth that should make for several hundred emails per minute better yet i'm fairly certain images were getting relayed with each response on an older or poorly set up system that's a whole lot of traffic and data coming in even worse if no one there knows what's happening or how to stop it many companies don't have an i.t department due to overall need they outsource to companies like mine to fulfill those needs it took less than an hour we received a frantic call from the vendor asking to stop the auto responses from our system because they didn't know how it had basically taken down their email server because it was full and no one knew how to fix it oh sorry about that i'm glad you called though i wasn't sure anyone worked at your company because i've been trying to contact you for weeks we didn't notice a problem on our end but we can see what's going on now must be a different setup weird i had a credit for the part before we ended the call i hung up the phone victorious called the boss and told him to put the rule back we never bought from them again thanks for listening

Channel: Slash Start

Views: 64,358

Rating: 4.9209094 out of 5

Keywords: r/maliciouscompliance, maliciouscompliance, malicious compliance, reddit, r/, subreddit, best of reddit, reddit top posts, top posts, comedy, funny reddit, reddit stories, reddit posts, reddit cringe, /Start, malicious, compliance, reddit story, funny reddit stories, reddit top post, r/MaliciousCompliance manager, r/maliciouscompliance lead, r/MaliciousCompliance HR Manager, manager, boss, r/prorevenge IT Guy, Who I Am, Doesn't Realize, r/MaliciousCompliance Project Manager, IT Guy

Id: glj__wanS7s

Length: 12min 57sec (777 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 28 2021