When leadership cares more about appearances than getting the job done, things can backfire quickly.

So, what would you do if your boss demanded spotless vehicles in the middle of a desert deployment?

Would you explain why it’s not possible? Or would you make sure to note every little imperfection?

In the following story, a group of military airline maintainers find themselves in this exact situation. Here’s what they did.

Put deployed maintainers in a lose/lose? Now you lose.

This happened a few years back while I was on active duty in aircraft maintenance.

Our rotating shifts were about 40 people. To get to our aircraft, it was a 20-minute drive to pass two checkpoints and get on a flight line, and it was not possible to walk through (the checkpoints and flight lines were non-walkable).

Now, when a unit deploys, you get a grab-bag officer and senior leadership.

This is either really good or really bad. This trip was really bad.

We had an officer desperately looking for a promotion and a senior who cared only about himself and making his leadership happy (his job is usually to take care of his troops under him).

The trucks had definitely seen better days.

We had 7 trucks to take us to the aircraft, and all of them were worn thin.

They’d been in a desert environment and worked hard their whole lives, and many had duct tape handles, spliced wires, torn-up walls, you name it.

On top of that, the sand had permanently stained them an ugly light brown color.

When they wouldn’t run, we’d turn them in to be fixed, but we’d make everything else work to do the job.

Leadership decided the trucks needed to look better.

One day, the officer’s boss dropped in to visit the peons. He was bothered by the ugly color of the vehicles and disgusted by the cosmetic look of the interiors.

After talking to the maintainers, he settled down and understood the situation. The officer and senior were with him during the walk-through and heard his complaints and saw him relax and understand.

Once he left, we were all called to a meeting.

Our leadership demanded we turn in our vehicles for any damage at all that they had, even scratches, and that he would personally give us paperwork for any section that had a damaged or dirty vehicle.

He wouldn’t listen to reason, as even our QA guys were fine with the vehicles, and we had no liability.

Burned, ignored, and chastised, we walked out to get in the vehicles and catch the aircraft that was landing in 30 minutes.

Senior followed us out with paper towels and cleaning products and demanded we make the vehicles white before we left.

Here’s where the maintainers banded together to create a plan.

We couldn’t convince him otherwise, and catching the jet was more important, so everybody frantically tried scrubbing at the trucks.

Nothing was changing, they truly were permanently stained. Time was short, and we had to leave that second.

Senior started screaming at one of the maintainers, grabbed a rag and cleaner, and stood on his truck trying to scrub it as we were rushing to get out to the line.

That truck stayed, and we had enough people to barely make it out and catch and bed down the aircraft.

While out on the line, we all got together and wrote down every single scratch and issue on the remaining 6 vehicles. I’m talking discolorations, scratches, smells, everything.

Once their list was complete, it would be months before the trucks were ready.

Each vehicle had a laundry list of 80+ items. Our vehicle maintenance would take a week and a half to get a vehicle back to us for an oil change, and we knew we wouldn’t see these again for six months.

Some items would make the vehicle “unusable,” such as broken windows that wouldn’t close and broken a/c that we simply dealt with to meet the mission.

This means vehicle maintenance would not be able to release/return them once turned in until they were fixed.

Returning from the line, we dropped all six vehicles off at vehicle maintenance and walked back to our unit.

Sitting in the parking lot in a screaming match with the maintainer in the only remaining vehicle was our senior, still holding a rag. He’d been yelling and scrubbing for hours.

The senior and the office realized they made a huge mistake.

We told him we had turned all the vehicles in and that we needed to turn that last one in.

We also let him know we were told not to expect the vehicles back for a few months due to the extensive work on them and the low priority on cosmetic damage.

He nearly had a stroke. His face turned red, and he ran inside to the officer.

As we were finishing up the list of damages on the last vehicle, our officer and senior walked out, the senior looking like a beaten dog.

The officer apologized for the short-sighted threats and said he had tried to get the vehicles back, but they could only release three.

To make up for their actions, leadership had to give the maintainers their personal vehicles.

The officer and senior had their own personal vehicles to get to work and could be driven on the flightline.

They had no choice but to give us the keys so we could get our guys to and from work and out to the aircraft.

For the remainder of the deployment, the officer and senior had to use the base busses and walk nearly a mile in the desert heat to get to work as their schedule was skewed two hours from ours.

I assume they didn’t pursue another vehicle because they didn’t want to look bad to the big boss, who was fine with the cosmetic damage.

The maintainers took turns driving the nice cars that leadership gave up, and seeing the senior show up half an hour late covered in sweat always raised morale.

Yikes! Talk about putting your foot in your mouth!

Let’s see what the fine folks over at Reddit had to say about this story.

It’s a small world – this person may have been involved.

Agree! It’s obvious the big boss was much more rational.

Eeek. According to this person, the Air Force has toxic leaders.

That will change a person’s mind real quick.

They should’ve thought this through more and not been so quick to assume they knew more than the maintainers.

The leadership was out of line.

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.