It can be hard when someone you had a great working relationship retires – especially when their replacement goes out of their way to make things harder and not easier.
OP is in charge of corporate training and all of the troubleshooting that comes with it.
A while ago, I was in charge of training for a large organization. I mostly did the organizing; for a ficticious example, I might coordinate the Dean of medicine at Yale to come in and give a speech to 200 employees.
Our usual location was a large auditorium/classroom, complete with podium and computer.
The aforementioned Dean might show up with a power point that he needed to run, etc, so I had my two admin assistants show up at 7:45 am each morning, to make sure whatever the room was running for whatever speaker/lecturer was there as the usual start time was 0800.
Sometimes, as was bound to happen, computer issues arose. Not too often; maybe once or twice a month, tops. Maybe the Dean couldn’t pull up his powerpoint.
So, we’d call our IT guy, Gary, who was two offices away, and he’d come and fix the problem. Everyone was happy.
Until Gary retired.
His new IT person was not as flexible as the one who retired.
His new replacement, Todd, didn’t like the arrangement. Though his start time was 0800, he’d often drift in at 0810, or 0815. This is not good, when we’re having a computer crisis at 0802.
Further, he hated walking into the office and immediately having a call waiting for him. He wanted to have his coffee, read his email, and ease his way into the work day (can’t blame him there).
So, Todd decided that he would no longer attend our computer calls. He told me to have my admin assistants troubleshoot the problems, “since they were there, anyways”.
He was pretty hardcore about this, until I pulled out the job description of my assistants, and nowhere did it say that computer repair fell under their workload. I then showed him HIS job description, where it said that computer repair was.
Enter malicious compliance on Todd’s part.
“You want me to attend? Ok. Then we do it by the books. No more calling me directly. You need to call the central helpline, and have them open a user ticket. Then I’ll attend.”
While attempting malicious compliance of his own, though, he gave OP the answer.
I pointed out the foolishness of this; It’s 0754, I have the Yale Dean of Medicine and he can’t work his powerpoint. I need it fixed now.
I can’t spend 15 minutes waiting on hold for the next available helpdesk agent, then 15 minutes explaining the problem to them, then have them open a ticket and send it to Todd, then another 20 minutes before Todd opens/responds to the ticket.
We can’t have 200 people sitting for 45 minutes waiting on Todd.
“Too bad,” he said with a smirk. “Those are the rules. Orrrrrr….. you could just have you admin ladies fix the problem.”
I tried one last ditch effort to reason.
When the CEO is going to give a speech and the computer shorts out, *he* doesn’t have to wait 45 minutes. So, obviously, you can make exceptions. Common sense says this should be one too.
“Nope!” Todd said. “The CEO’s staff do what’s called a pre-emptive ticket, they submit it ahead of time and have me there on standby in case things do go wrong. So, yes, even he has to do the ticket process!”
They have now come to an understanding.
OK, Todd, I see your malicious compliance, and raise you one of my own.
The next morning, I sat with coffee in hand, and waited, smiling in anticipation. Sure enough, my door burst open, with a furious Todd.
“What the heck is this?” he snarled, waving a printout.
I had submitted pre-emptive tickets for every day, for the next three months, requiring Todd to be at my training room at 7:45 every day “just in case” there was a computer emergency.
Even better, I had contacted his boss’ boss, and received authorization to change Todd’s work schedule due to operational requirements, so he would now be required to work 7-3 instead of 8-4.
“Orrrrrrrr….. you could just pick up the phone when I call, and come over.”
We agreed that the ticket process would not be necessary, and he would show up as needed.
I bet Reddit gets a good chuckle out of this one!
The top comment got a good chuckle out of one part of the story.
Sometimes you just have to let them ramble.
The rules are always applicable.
This IT person says the tickets are important, though.
There’s nothing better than having good, reliable IT.
If only all work issues could be resolved so satisfactorily.
One can dream!
If you liked this post, check out this story about an employee who got revenge on a co-worker who kept grading their work suspiciously low.