In my business I’m a passionate advocate for ensuring that you only grow a company as fast as you can grow its operations. Why?

Because if you don’t, issues like this story happen. It’s costly in countless ways.

Read on to see how this employee dealt with the countless false security alarms he had to deal with. I’ll give you a hint: the CEO gets his just desserts and it’s hilarious.

Put me on the alarm notification list but don’t give me any guidelines? Good luck!

Shortly after I started working at my employer, a medium-sized company, approx 50 employees, they asked me if I would mind being listed as a contact for the burglar alarm since all of the facilities / admin people lived pretty far away and I was right across the street. They said any time the burglar alarm goes off, someone has to drive over to meet the police.

Sounds annoying, but it’s manageable.

I’d get a few false alarm calls a year but I’d always get an apologetic call from the employee that set the alarm off so I would just tell the alarm company to ignore it.

This is so inconsiderate to OP and also a terrible security practice.

Then the company started growing and we started having more and more false alarms as we had new employees that would forget about the alarm, and then we started having employees that would ignore the policy and would just leave after setting the alarm off without notifying anybody.

Yikes. It wasn’t cool of his employer to do this, but OP put people at risk and that’s not okay.

After I got wise to this, I started telling the alarm company to ignore everything even if I didn’t get a call because we started getting charged false alarm fees and I figured there was a 99% chance it was a false alarm. I figured we shouldn’t waste the time of the police or waste company money paying false alarm fees. I brought this up in a meeting with our COO and they s*** a brick and insisted that we couldn’t ignore alarm events because what if someone really did break in and somebody was working late?

Good. Although I wonder how much time it took him to do this.

Anytime I got an alarm call without someone notifying me of a false alarm, I followed the policy and had them send the police.

There were two or three false alarm calls where the police showed up, found nothing, and sent us a bill.

Haha! Not a very good employer if things have to embarrass the CEO before he’ll take action on something serious.

The very next call, I sent the police like the policy said and right as they were pulling up, they saw a vehicle pulling out of the parking lot and chased it.

The employee that got chased? Yeah, it was the CEO.

In addition to getting chased, he ended up getting cited for speeding as well.

I would have said a lot more than that! A COO should know better than this. Incompetent as well as rude.

The next day, COO tries to pin this on me like it’s somehow my fault, to which I reply “I just followed the policy you gave me”.

Good! A win indeed. This must have been a huge relief.

The next day the entire company went through refresher training on alarm procedures and I was taken off the alarm call list.

I count it as a win.

Let’s check out the comments.

I definitely agree. Otherwise they got away with exploiting you.

It sounds like the COO doesn’t know what he’s doing.

Exactly. What if OP decided to go rogue and rob the company or worse?

It probably would have gone viral. My dad and I watch Karen videos and I’d love that to be in our feed.

I’d wager that COO is mystified why his staff don’t respect him.

This is just plain sad. There has to be a better way. I wouldn’t expect this of anyone.

Sometimes a heavy price needs to be paid before you can get a stubborn executive to change things. At least this price is satisfying for the people affected.

If you thought that was an interesting story, check out what happened when a family gave their in-laws a free place to stay in exchange for babysitting, but things changed when they don’t hold up their end of the bargain.