Sometimes it is fascinating how some bosses can ask for the most unnecessary tasks and waste the company’s time!

This guy shares how his co-worker dealt with a random request that their boss had made. Not only was it effective, but it proved the boss wasn’t really paying attention.

Check out the full story!

Boss wants more words on the comment for each ticket solved, engineer writes a novel.

I’ve been working on IT for around 25-26 years now. Different companies but you see quite a bit of MC on the IT world.

Back in 2005-06 I worked for a telephone company, a huge one, that had the typical Jira-like bug reporting tool for one of its most complicated and convoluted softwares.

Things were pretty complicated with this company…

The software was so complex, so legacy, that even the development team in house was afraid to do changes in it.

Some updates in the past did backfire spectacularly more than once, so even the tiniest update to that software had to take weeks of analysis before taking place.

In that dev team worked 3 of my friends from college. I worked on another one that had an easier life.

One of my guys at that team was Bedu.

They were having fun at their workplace like no other!

To portrait Bedu accurately, imagine that guy that’s always playing innocent pranks, that you never know if he’s for real when he’s talking because he’s always saying the most shocking things just for the LOLs, knows a little bit of magic, uses it to prank, loves football (soccer) as well.

He used to be good at his job but he’s also a quite bit tired of it, procrastinating and, generally, not putting too much effort on it.

The fact that he’s part of that software dev team doesn’t help. It’s not a fast-paced environment and people get bored by the inaction.

So, since he’s bored, he plays pranks, like connecting a second wireless mouse controller to the PC of a colleague to randomly move the mouse and have him call tech support because his mouse misbehaves but, do absolutely nothing with the mouse when tech support comes.

Bedu was a professional prankster!

The guy behind the target of the prank ended up calling tech support 4 times before being told what was going on.

The team once a week also books a windowless meeting room for an hour, so 3 of them can take a nap while the 4th one guards against someone finding out. Who’s the guard rotates each week.

The requests for update Bedu gets are almost always something in this style: “This report indicates that X value is 25, when it should be 27, please fix”.

Each request typically comes from a different area, but each area sends a couple of requests probably once a month.

He knew his work!

But Bedu knows that the algorithm doing that calculation is extremely complex, reports are “baked” on a monthly basis on batch processes that can take hours, testing this is extremely painful also, so he updates the end value on the report, where it was 25, now is 27, easy peasy, see you next month.

He gets probably like 10-15 of these requests per day.

Bedu updates the bug tool ticket stating, on the comment field, something like “End value verified and corrected” and moves on.

New boss comes to that dev team from another team on the company. He’s well known around the company as being quite… dense.

This is where it gets bad!

He instantly clashes with the team.

He thinks quantity equals quality and loves to look into numbers. He comes from the database world so he’s constantly using queries to gather information.

He also thinks that each ticket solved is because the underlying condition is being solved, he knows nothing about the complexity of the system, he just thinks that the team is really good at identifying causes and solving them fast.

Glorified pencil pusher.

He gathers the team and says that he did a query and found out that the comments being put into the bug tool are really short, like less than 50 characters long, and that is not enough to explain what has been done to solve the incident.

UH OH!

The whole team explains that what’s being put into the comment field is more than enough.

He says that comments should, AT LEAST, have 1000 characters, it’s the minimum he’ll accept.

He says that having comments with less than a 1000 characters will impact his valuation of the work being done.

Bedu, being the devious character he is, decides to complain. Specially since he knows that boss would never open the bug tool, he loves his databases.

Bedu knew how to get around this!

First ticket comes in, “this value is this, should be that”, he updates value, writes the same comment he always does “End value verified and corrected” and then, taking advantage on the fact that the comment field has format capabilities (WYSIWYG type of editor) copies and pastes the chronicle from the latest futbol match into the field, changes the color to white and the font size to 1 so it can’t be seen against the background on the tool and closes the ticket.

If you’re the original ticket poster, that comment field is read-only, so unless someone selects and highlights the comment, they won’t know that something else is there.

Next ticket comes, does the same but writes a rant about some stupid thing. Then on the next ticket, he just puts keeps pushing random keys and the space bar until the character counter reaches 1000.

He gets bored of doing this, so he becomes more ingenious and inventive by the ticket.

He wasn’t going to give in to the new rules!

Somewhere hidden in that bug tool comment system, a complete original Bedu NOVEL separated in small chapters ends up being written that no one knows about (outside of us few that have lunch with Bedu and the team).

Boss comes a month after and says to Bedu: “I’ve noticed that the size of your comments has gone up last month, you’re averaging well over a 1000 characters per ticket, keep it up!”

Bedu (plus all my other friends and myself) left the company to greener pastures a year later.

I still talk daily with Bedu and people from that team.

YIKES! That’s a funny one!

How can the boss make such stupid requests?

Let’s find out what the Reddit community has to say about this one.

This user knows there’s something wrong here…

This user got reminded of their high school!

This user thinks this story is great!

This user is taking notes from this story!

This user shares what their friend used to do in school…

His boss clearly wasn’t looking at the comments!

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.