When a new manager comes in to a department, they often make some changes to try to improve things.

What would you do if your new manager implemented a policy that all his employees needed to watch a significant number of training videos each month, no matter what?

That is what the tech support employee in this story experienced, so he got approval to watch the videos after hours and the entire team racked up tons of overtime watching videos.

Check it out.

Mandatory training videos, you say?

I do tech support for a medium-sized retailer.

About a year and a half ago, we got a new boss.

Old boss was an incompetent jerk, so this was a good change.

At first, new boss seemed like a breath of fresh air.

Then, as many new bosses will, he started changing things.

There was a lot about the department that needed to be changed; old boss’ mismanagement had left us undertrained, understaffed, and incredibly disorganized.

But new boss’ changes didn’t stop at the necessary, he started feeling the need to replace things that did work just because it wasn’t what he’d had or used at his previous job.

I’m sure you all know the type.

Training can be a good thing, when done properly.

One of the changes new boss made was to sign us all up for a training website where you watch videos and take practice exams.

Now, this site costs a moderate amount of money to sign up for, so he added a requirement of 5 hours of training videos a month, which we do on the clock.

All of us were fine with this; it gave people a break, and many of the video training tracks are certification training.

Then one coworker quit. And it took forever to replace him.

Then another coworker quit. And it took forever to replace him.

Suddenly, our workloads had shifted.

We’d lost two people who knew the systems inside and out, and gotten two noobs.

On top of that, one of the two had been a sysadmin, who we discovered had been messing stuff up for months, and we only discovered the damage after he’d left.

This on top of all the unnecessary changes new boss was making left us very short on time.

Serving customers should always come first.

We had to prioritize help desk tickets and users, of course, and right below that was all the projects new boss had heaped on us.

Training videos dropped to the absolute rock bottom of our priority list, and for several months were completely overlooked, by us and boss.

Then, last month, boss realized that we weren’t watching our videos.

He sent out an angry email reminding us that we need to watch videos, and picked our 4-5 training courses for each of us to watch and take practice exams on.

He decreed that these were mandatory, and needed to be a high priority.

So, we immediately, like good little workers, dropped everything else to watch training videos.

Supervisor, our network supervisor who is technically between Us and Boss, walked out of his office to find no tickets being worked on and 11 techs watching movies.

He stormed over and demanded to know what we were doing.

We pointed at Boss’ email.

He told us to get back to work, and went and raise questions with Boss.

We thought that was the end of it.

Then, a week later, another angry email, this time with another mandatory training video for all of us on “Communications.”

(Turns out being overworked makes techs a bit short tempered…)

He stressed, in 24-point red font, that this video series was Mandatory with a Capital M, and a Priority with a Capital P.

I added up all the little courses that he’d assigned me. This didn’t come out to a few hours of training, oh no.

The courses he’d assigned me to take came out to over TWO HUNDRED AND FIFTY HOURS of videos.

So I sent out an email, ccd to the whole department.

This guy is really thinking.

“Hey, Boss? That’s a lot of training videos. There’s no way we can watch them at work and still get our tickets done. Can we clock in and watch them after hours?”

The response?

“Yes, it just can’t interfere with other work”.

I checked with Supervisor.

HR has a blanket approval on all IT overtime, and I wanted to make sure that email said what it did.

Supervisor and I were pretty sure he hadn’t quite gotten the connection, but we agreed that’s what it said.

All of us have put in at least 20 hours of overtime watching training videos – each – for the last few weeks at time-and-a-half.

That is a huge amount of money they will have to pay out.

A few of the guys actually did the full 40.

Payroll blew a gasket.

Finance blew a gasket.

Boss hasn’t rescinded the order, however, or told us we can only watch so many hours a week.

So every day I clock out of work, drive home, clock back into work and watch training videos and get paid to wash dishes, cook dinner, fold laundry, crochet.

This worked out beautifully for the employees and hopefully the new boss will learn this expensive lesson.

Read on to see what the people in the comments think of this story.

There are some good ones out there, but they are rare.

Sadly, this is a fact.

Lots of video training is useless.

This person says it is a beautiful story.

This is likely true.

This manager is in for a big surprise.

And probably a pay cut.

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.