When upper management won’t listen to warnings, sometimes the only option left is to let them learn the hard way.

What would you do if your school’s dean forced a system change that everyone knew would backfire, right in the middle of exam season?

Would you push back again?

Or would you do exactly what they asked and let the meltdown speak for itself?

In the following story, one teacher finds himself in this exact situation and decides there is nothing more he can do to stop it.

Here’s how it played out.

Sure, I’ll shutdown all but one cooling system for the computer server to save you money…

I’m taking a Visual Design program at a Community College.

It’s the middle of Exam Month, and we’re working to finish a semester-long project that doubles as our final exam.

Naturally, everyone is working overtime to get things finished.

I was in the computer lab working near the back.

The place I’m working at is also near one of the server banks.

I’m wrapping up my work and getting ready to submit, when suddenly the file transfer stops, and it says I’ve lost connection to the server.

No big deal, I figure that it’s probably the fact that the servers are overloaded.

Until other people in the lab are asking if anyone has lost connection to the server, that’s when I notice the distinct smell of something akin to melting plastic.

A few minutes of investigating and the cause is found.

Surprisingly, the teacher seems happy about this.

Turns out that all the server banks are cooked. Completely.

Everyone in the lab agrees to email the person who handles those servers, who just so happens to be our teacher.

He shows up a half hour later with a wide grin on his face. The teacher is absolutely giddy.

He announces after sitting against the table at the front of the room for 10 minutes, “Sorry, everyone, but it looks like the servers are going to be down for the remainder of the semester. Be sure to send a thank-you letter to the Dean of the College.

Apparently, the Dean is the one who ordered the mistake.

The teacher later went on to explain that the Dean ordered him to shut down the cooling system of the servers and switch to a centralized system.

But he protested it and tried to explain that the system would fail, which would subsequently cause all the banks to overheat.

However, the Dean simply told him to do it or else she’d fire him, then hire someone who would.

The teacher is known to fight any decisions made that involve handling the Macs and everything related to them.

Primarily because he set the system up himself, and everyone who’s been hired to help him handle it messes it up in some form or another.

Lots of people have been affected.

So, he decided to execute some Malicious Compliance.

We haven’t been told if the backup servers were affected or how much this will cost the college.

But the server holds all the data for every art program in the college, so many people have been affected.

Moreover, we can’t submit our final exam with the servers effectively down.

We’ve been told that we have to print our projects out and that the expenses will be covered by the College.

Yikes! That sounds like a pretty serious mistake.

Let’s check out what the people over at Reddit have to say.

Perhaps he could’ve.

Let’s hope so.

This person may be right.

It never ends well.

What a blessing and a curse.

It’s funny how, depending on whether you’re a student or the school district, it’s either really good or really bad.

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.