Why does this always happen…?

I’m talking about bosses and managers telling their workers specific things and then getting all bent out of shape when they follow orders.

It’s ridiculous!

And this employee could only maliciously comply with the boss even though he knew it was wrong.

Check out what happened.

You can’t use a competitor’s phone!

“I work on cell phone towers.

I used to work an extremely remote rural area for a now defunct small cell phone company. The area I worked was the type of area where you could drive for hours and not see anything but field, forests, and animals.

Most of the sites I had were what is referred to as “island sites” meaning they don’t hand off to another cell tower. And most of these sites were about 30 minutes apart on a good day… well I worked nights, but you get the drift.

So it came around that a competitor had located quite a few sites near our sites. I being of the mindset of efficiency purchased a phone from them, and with approval from my boss kept it ready especially during upgrades.

This guy was a ballbuster.

But he was the type when anyone above him says “boo” he’d jump and ask if he jumped high enough or should he jump again.

So a couple of months later boss’s boss leaves and we get new boss’s boss who’s spent 250% of his life in the confines of New York City.

Within his first week, he’s working the switch and sees me call in from our competitor’s number. Of course he takes offense to this and it quickly comes down that nobody may use a competitors phone.

I bring up my concerns, but you know… They don’t need to do this in new York city, so we’re not going to do this. Mind you my job is to shut down our sites and upgrade or repair them. Yes I’m the guy you love to **** when you can’t make a phone call.

And so it happens a short time later, I’m at one of my most remote sites, a 45 minute drive to the next site on a good day. About 4 hours from home. I do my diligence, call the switch tell them what I need them to change and shut down the site. An hour later the site is not up.

There was a problem.

I go through everything on my end, yep everything’s good… Awww ****! Now there’s a couple of pay phones but… they were the competitor’s phone. So I start driving. It takes me about 1.5 hours to get to the next site because of a freak blizzard. That site’s down too.

Roll on to the next site, usually about 30 minutes but it’s snowing hard and the roads are ****. 2.5 hours on the road after leaving the original site, I finally get service, pull over and in 5 minutes we figured out the switch crossed a number and took down the wrong site.

Switch promises to fix it and I drive 3 hours back to the original site. 30 minutes later its still not up. This time it takes an hour to get to the closest site, call the switch again, they get it up and after about 30 minutes I verify it’s up.

Hurray!

That was a long day.

But I still have to drive back, clean up and make some testing calls. 18 some odd hours after I left my driveway, I pull back in and submit my time, complete with the OT. It’s my Friday, I turn off my phone and hit the bed.

Monday morning, I turn on my phone for our weekly call in meeting and I **** you not it buzzes with new texts and voicemals for 20 straight minutes all from boss and bosses boss. I jump on the call and first thing I hear is boss’s boss.

BB “Why the **** did you have a nearly 9 hour outage for a 30 minute upgrade!” Before I get a word in “and how dare you claim 9 hours of OT when you were clearly messing around not doing your job.”

ME “well there were a series of issues outside of the site and a freak snowstorm slowed my response” I hit send on emails I had already prepared before clocking out for the weekend with full rundown of events of the night, as a reply to the emails coming down from him dismissing my needs for a competitors phone. And included his boss (vice president of the company)

BB “I don’t want to hear excuses from you, why didn’t you just use a pay phone and call for help” literally everyone on the call groaned.

Don’t you remember?

ME, “in case you don’t remember I just replied to a series of emails where you forbade me under threat of termination, from using a competitor’s phone.” at this point I hear VP join our call.

“And since payphones are owned by a competitor, I spent 6 hours driving around in a blizzard searching for service, instead of spending 45 minutes to an hour and making a call on a competitors phone.”

BB “I never threatened to terminate anyone! Don’t be stupid you could have used a pay phone.”

VP cuts in “it appears BB that you do not remember what you said, and he has clearly documented his actions on the night in question. BB please call me immediately, thank you everyone else for your time this morning, please have a good day, this meeting is over”

BB was removed shortly afterwards having a fairly rocky rest of his short employment. I now work for the company which purchased our competitor. I’ve moved to my home state though still work a rural market, it’s not quite as bad.”

Check out what folks had to say on Reddit.

This person said you always have to cover your ***.

Another individual shared a story.

This Reddit user spoke up.

Another person spoke up.

And this Reddit user had a story to tell.

Sometimes, all you can do is follow orders…even when you know they’re ridiculous.

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.