Supervisors and managers sure have a lot of power. But not more than the boss!
This story humbles an INSANE supervisor who wouldn’t budge!
Why are there so many of those out there?
Let’s check it out this one!
Talk to the boss…
About 14 years ago, I was working IT for a large medical center, one of several owned by the same people.
The regional CIO personally put me in charge of setting up and issuing laptops to doctors and other medical staff to go out and see patient in their homes when they were unable to come to the hospital for any number of reasons including disability, lack of adequate transportation, etc.
This is where it begins…
When we got a new shop supervisor (who was only promoted to that position exactly one year to the day after being hired from the outside, something that left myself and a lot of the other IT techs very upset), he made it abundantly clear that he was going to make several people’s lives miserable, including mine.
He’d look at my Outlook calendar (we all had to share access to our calendar with him) to see when I had someone scheduled to pick a laptop up, do their three-month software update, etc.,
He would always make things harder.
then a few minutes before the person was supposed to arrive, he would order me to do some menial project halfway across the hospital that he could have just as easily done himself or delegated to one of the new people.
If I tried to tell him that I had an appointment, he’d threaten to write me up for insubordination.
Then comes the fun part!
Cue malicious compliance:
One day, the regional CIO was due for his 3-month update. Right on cue, the shop sup tasked me with unboxing, then installing monitors on the first floor.
About 15 minutes later, when the regional CIO arrived, he called to asked that I return to the office. I headed back up right away.
He got carried away with his habits.
The shop sup didn’t know and never met the regional CIO, so the shop sup had no clue who he was dealing with. When I arrived, the CIO asked the shop sup to leave the room.
He asked me what was going on, since I was always punctual & thorough to a fault.
I told him about the shop sup making several of the lives of anyone he disliked miserable with reassigning trouble tickets in multiple random floors at the last second, just as they had projects scheduled, or in my case, as I had appointments close to arriving for the laptops.
The boss wasn’t very happy with the supervisor.
The CIO even asked why the shop sup always seemed to be out of the office most times the director came up, and could never get him on the phone.
I just told the truth; “He’s been much too busy chasing skirts and shooting the breeze with his friends, sir.” When the CIO asked if the shop sup had a girlfriend on the side, my response was “which one? He has us too busy running around to count them.”
Then the big verdict!
He told me to wait outside the office for a few minutes, and brought the shop sup back in to have “Come to Jesus” moment with him.
The shop sup was put on 90-days’ unpaid suspension, and was written up for gross insubordination for talking back to him, among other things.
Poor supervisor…
The CIO even asked HR to start an investigation to see what other department regulations he violated.
Is that a cliffhanger?! People might want more information!
Let’s find out what folks on Reddit think about this story.
This person knows how these stories go.
This person has a funny term for such meetings.
This person has a question!
This person has a personal story to share!
This person wants to know the full story!
We don’t know what happened after 90 days, but it sounds like the supervisor learned his lesson!
Or at least, he should have.
If you liked that story, check out this post about an oblivious CEO who tells a web developer to “act his wage”… and it results in 30% of the workforce being laid off.