When working at a large corporation it is important to be able to get along with people from other departments.

What happens when the manager of another department is incompetent and makes your life much more difficult?

That is what happened to the department head in this story, but in the end, he got what he wanted.

Check it out.

Annoy everyone – Enjoy being overlooked to become manager

The cast:

Romeo = Head of service desk and some other obscure things I don’t quite remember.

Juliet = Ordinary employee that is hired in, get promoted, and is almost without skills.

Boss man = Me and Romeo’s boss. He hasn’t got that much of a technical insight and is very close with Romeo.

Me = I was heading part of an it department with around 50 employees. All the fun stuff, server, storage, network and so on.

Juliet had actually worked another place where I later came to work.

From my colleague, I got some nasty stories about how she behaved and wasted a whole lot of time and money, and that she literally had no IT skills.

Fast forward 10+ years.

I am heading part of the IT department. Romeo hires her, but at least she is in another department under him.

No worries.

Some time goes by, Romeo begins to praises her all the time.

Fair enough, I have to see what the praise is about, she could have changed from the stories I had heard.

She does not have a whole lot to do, so it is easy for her to devote lots and lots of time to make the requested reports, and making it look like she is really good at doing it.

She is allowed to get some IBM tool implemented, and she thinks she is the best at it.

She might be, it is not commonly used, and she is even talking for IBM on workshop and seminars.

She gets in the spotlight a lot, and even the Boss man praises her.

She now thinks she is invincible, and she can do what she pleases.

She starts getting in the way of projects from my part of IT.

She wants specific IBM software as it integrates easier into her IBM product.

Now the decline begins.

It is hard to hide incompetence for too long.

I hear many of her coworkers complain how she thinks she is the boss, and that she isn’t really pulling her weight.

She gets other to do the work and then she takes the credit. And why do they not say anything to their boss Romeo?

They tried, but he is not an easy man to talk to, it’s his way or he won’t lift a finger, and somehow Boss Man thinks that is a great way to behave.

I try to give her the benefit of the doubt, I want to find out more.

She agrees to show me her BI tasks in her IBM tool.

I am not impressed.

She has used like 6 month to do something that should take maybe 6 weeks.

I start to notice that it is only when Romeo and Boss Man asks for something that it is quick.

Everything is pushed aside for them. Her lack of skills cost 2 breakdowns with a DB restore.

Not to mention a lot of other small fixes that needs to be done by my techs.

Now at a meeting I didn’t attend I read the summary, and can see that she blames my department for her missed milestones.

I confront her and ask, and she tries to crawl away saying that she was misquoted.

Then I talk to Romeo that was at the meeting, asking about it and he says she is missing milestones because my techs is taking to long to do their work.

For the record, Romeo is a by the book kind of guy.

Everything needs to be accounted for and requested the right way, or he won’t lift a finger himself.

I ask why that doesn’t apply to her.

Because we had actually tried to circumvent everything to get her up and running, even though she didn’t use the proper channels.

Ok, now I am starting to getting annoyed.

She sounds like a nightmare.

She is irritating my employees, the ones in her own department and blaming everyone else for her own mess ups.

She is always the last one at work, and the first to leave.

Some time goes by, and even though it should be obvious that she is good at talking about what she does and that there actually ain’t that many skills involved.

Romeo and Boss man decides that she deserves a promotion.

She is promoted instead of the guy with more skills and longer seniority and who has made a lot of the work for her, while she steals the credits.

Now she starts joining some of the meetings at my level.

And she continues on criticizing everyone except her boss and the department head.

She does everything in her power to make them dance at her tune.

And it works.

Did I mention she might not be young, but she looks really good for her age.

She plots with her boss to make some changes because that is the right way to do things.

The department head and her boss starts discussing this and more “new” projects involving her evil doing ensues.

Now I am starting to get mad.

When they produce even more work involving redundant systems, just because that is the way they think everything should be.

It involved an it system from IBM. It was meant to be used for 1 thing, and somehow from the start to it is actually bought, somehow several extra things was bought as part of a package.

It also including a whole lot of external help setting it up.

Because it was a system meant for their department, my department shouldn’t and wouldn’t touch it)

We already had a road map in my department, we already had installed software from another vendors that was far superior to the ones they started implementing.

Companies seem to love to waste money sometimes.

So why spend $200k on licensing and external assistance to get a new toy for her to play with.

One of my employees found new work, and suddenly I wasn’t allowed to rehire, as Boss Man felt a new hire for the new product “would bring more benefit.”

WTF we were short-handed enough as it was.

And they got “MY” employee to use on a piece of software.

I started plotting my revenge.

First part of the plan.

Making sure, she got plenty to do.

I never missed an opportunity to talk into Romeo and boss man’s “love” for her skills.

Getting all kind of extra reports requested and redone.

I even talked to several other departments saying that they could get all kind of reports and they should just talk to Romeo to get them done.

One of her new tools was for asset management, she just never told me.

She customized the system. (She made the external consultants do her bidding).

When it was ready, she presented it as the return of Jesus.

There was two features.

This sounds like a huge hassle.

One that for everyone to manually enter info.

It meant everyone should manually enter everything that was company issued.

Serial, type, manufacturer etc. for phone, iPad, computer, monitor… EVERYTHING.

After a hefty discussion I lost, every employee now had to maintain their own entries in this software with all there electronics.

(I wanted it to be service desk that entered the information when they received it and made it ready.

Just if you were wondering, that made more sense to several others and me. But introduced new work to service desk.)

The other feature she wanted to install a small client to every server in the company to make asset inventory.

I crushed that idea, we already have one for monitoring, and 2 other because of mandatory compliance issues.

Had she just talked to me before using $25k setting it up and customizing it, no problem.

Now everyone in the room I got the news that what she spend $25k and 3 month on I would have ready later the same day.

And every time there I had a chance I asked for how the implementation plan for her toy was doing.

She had lots of trouble and was way behind.

Each and every time she joined meetings, offering progress reports with feature x now functional I already had the answer

“But our existing can already do that now, and it can also do x and y. When is this going to be implemented in the new system?”

A bit petty, but hey, she did what she could to annoy me in lots of other ways.

Part two was actually more of an opportunity I jumped on.

There are several offices of the firm, and the one I spend the majority of the time at, is also her daily workplace.

One day she decides that, she being the all mighty sidekick to romeo, that she should have her own office.

In her terminology that meant rearranging the complete seating plan for that office branch.

Normally I don’t really care to much if someone has to move around to make space.

She was promoted, and should have her own office.

No doubt.. She just decided to do it, and annoy everyone by just making plans with Romeo, and then sending out who should move when.

Normally it’s decided together and face-to-face.

I quickly stopped it, everyone came running to me anyway complaining about how and where they where being placed.

I talked with her, explaining that the way she wanted to do it wouldn’t fly, gave her another and better way. Her way included building several walls.

So I did make the utmost effort to keep 100% calm and professional and telling her and Romeo that it made NO sense at all, and we could do it my way.

Romeo immediately ran to Boss Man.

Unfortunately he was quite annoyed that we couldn’t agree among ourselves.

Again, camly explaining my way, and how much money we would save in not building walls and less wasted time in not moving everyone around, while still achieving the goal of an office to Juliet.

Boooom headshot, another victory as he completely agreed with me.

Even Romeo could see that it actually did make more sense.

Juliet ended up crying on the phone call, and I felt somewhat sorry for doing that to her.

Again, I rationally explained something she didn’t agree on, and she didn’t get it how she wanted.

Now everyone at the office started hated her guts even more for being mean to them.

That didn’t help her at all.

She had plenty of reports to churn out, so she actually worked more now.

This should be good.

New CEO arrives – a level over Boss man.

The new one was way better than the old one.

He could see reason and had some technical insight.

Poor Juliet, now everything starts going downhill fast from here.

The company had to save money, or there would be layoffs.

PERFECT, how about Juliet’s software toy, it has a massive upkeep as there is no one in the department that could maintain it.

Meaning it cost a bundle each time something should be changed.

(And it wasn’t in my department, so I never had any intention of letting some of the tech guys maintain it, they already got plenty to do.).

So, I mention that we do have several overlapping software solutions.

If we should clean house and get our overhead down.

Luckily Boss man and Romeo thinks that is a great idea, they both think the toy solution is amazing.

So I clean house, all the crappy software Romeo and Boss Man has is brought forward.

Including several other software as well, and a cost comparison is made.

It’s easy to see how much money is sinked into her toy, and that it is still not on par with the open source solution we are using.

(the software is free, but we do pay money to have new features updated and such, and the inhouse tech maintained it).

Good to see management saw the value in this.

So seeing that the best software was almost free compared to the cost of Juliet’s toy, lots of the extra software was cut, and almost all funding was cut from it.

So it could die slowly in a corner.

Her other software where she spent a bunch of time with was next.

In an earlier job I had been using several other tools that could do more, smarter and faster.

A little nudge to our vendor when renewing our license on some other software meant we got it for free (We did have to pay SA if we started using it).

A short casually meeting with the CEO in the hall “We just got this wonderful software that is almost free, why not use that instead of the other software to save a bunch of money?”

Ok, there was a lot of nudging the right places, but it did end up with being thrown to the curb as well.

That left Juliet with a system that started it’s downwards spiral of death, and she had to get up to speed on the new software.

That actually not be that hard, but did I mention that her technical skills wasn’t that great.

Did I mention that Boss man was getting ready to retire and had been for a couple of years and had been grooming Juliet to be his replacement.

After all this he actually realized that she wasn’t exactly as good as he had thought.

And she began suspecting as much.

At least she is gone now.

So even before he retired, she quit and took a job somewhere else.

From what I heard from a former work colleague that works with her now, is she did exactly the same.

She convinced them to get the same software, and behaved the same way.

But hey, at least she wasn’t here to annoy everyone else.

It is amazing how often things like this happen at big companies.

Take a look at the comments on this story to see what others think.

She got passed up for a promotion and had to leave her job.

There is a lot of waste in IT.

Now that would have been epic.

It is crazy how common stories like this are.

Crazy coworkers are everywhere!

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.