While at work, it is often an unfortunate reality that you have to follow the instructions of management who don’t know what they are doing.

What would you do if you were told to make custom labels for products to link them to a website, but then later told to remove those new labels because they looked unprofessional?

That is what the employee in this story had to do, so he removed all the labels leaving them with no way to be sold.

Check it out.

Remove the price tickets I made? Sure you got it boss!

I work as a sales advisor in a showroom, the company recently went through some changes specifically with the way price tickets are created.

All tickets are to have QR codes linking to the item online (stupid I know).

But what makes things worse is that they’ve updated the printing system, so now if a product is not on the website or just hasn’t had it’s QR code linked it will output a script error making it impossible to print that ticket.

Annoying, but at least it will address the issue.

As a result, yours truly has been making tickets from scratch for newer products or products that are just not on the site yet, for the past year, (this was supposed to be just while the other departments got the proper ones made).

Fast forward to last week and I get a email from upper management asking for a list of all the tickets needed for the showroom (a little over 100 tickets at this point).

I do so, as I thought this was just them wanting to make a push to have the rest complete.

Management needs to get on the same page.

Half an hour later and I get a follow up email saying “we need to deal with the issue at the source” questioning why I didn’t inform anyone about the tickets needed.

(I did, in fact I’m still waiting for some that I asked for in back in January) and questioning where I even got the template for the tickets from since “they would never give one out”.

After responding, I received another email stating that “I should never have done that” as “it looks unprofessional having some tickets with and without QR codes.”

The email ended by saying that I’m to never do this again and that I’m to take the ones that I made down now and put the proper ones up.

It is clear that management knows what they want.

This was further reiterated in a meeting between my manager and upper management (he let me know afterwards).

But would you look at that, the proper price tickets still aren’t made yet and I’m on holiday for a few days.

Oh well, better take them down anyway, wouldn’t want to get in trouble for having anything unprofessional up after all.

Sometimes you need to do exactly as you are told to teach management a lesson.

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

I agree, I like QR codes.

An insult to pond scum.

Yes, always use your vacation.

It is never management’s fault!

An excellent summary of the story.

When will management learn?

It seems like never, at this point.

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.