It can be hard when things change at a company so much that the business goes from one shift to two shifts.

Now, instead of employees all working together, the employees are separated to cover the two shifts.

In today’s story, one manager isn’t happy with the people on her team, so she complains about it and requests the “most experienced” employee.

The problem is that she didn’t realize what she was really requesting!

Let’s see how the story plays out.

You want my most experienced employee? Well okay…

A few years ago I worked for Company X as the manager of some key administrative staff and had a chance to serve up some malicious compliance.

A bit of background;

At the time of the MC I had 4 employees;

– Generic Employee

– Rock Star

– New Guy

– Dummy (could not be fired as he was related to some very senior managers – nepotism at its best)

Change can be hard to adapt to at first.

We worked closely with the ops team where one of our responsibilities was to perform certain tasks – without which the entire operation would grind to a halt.

At the time there had been some expansion and a second shift was introduce (thus new guy was hired).

Like anytime something new happened there were a lot of teething issues.

At the time Dummy and Generic Employee were covering the new afternoon shift (rotating weekly) while I had New Guy learning the ropes on the morning (where the workload was a lot heavier) with Rockstar and Generic Employee/Dummy on their week of mornings.

Ops Manager sounds like a pain.

Anyhow – as mentioned, there were some problems with introducing a new shift and the Ops Manager (who I had worked with in the past and we didn’t really get along) did as most managers do when something isn’t going right – passed the blame over to our end (to be fair some truth to it however Dummy was a minor cause at best).

One thing I really didn’t like about Ops Manager was she was the type to go behind your back and be nothing but smiles to your face.

At the time Ops Manager wanted Rock Star on her shift – because he was the type of person who would constantly go above and beyond to make things happen (read: fix her problems).

Instead of asking me if it was possible – Ops Manager went to our bosses boss to complain that everything that was going wrong was due to my department and how she needed my most experienced employee on her shift.

She was furious…at first.

The next day I got an email from The Boss with Ops Manager, My Boss and Her Boss copied in;

“…… please ensure your most experienced employee is on the afternoon shift to help Ops Manager”.

I was a little annoyed.

I must have spent about 10 minutes just looking at that email – my temper consistently rising the entire time.

Until it finally dawned on me – Ops Manager wanted Rock Star but the request was for my most experienced employee.

The most experienced employee wasn’t who Ops Manager expected it to be.

What Ops Manager didn’t realize was that Dummy had started about 2 months before Rock Star – and a few years before Generic Employee.

Suddenly I was in a great mood and must have had the biggest poop eating grin on my face as I typed my reply.

Here’s how she responded…

“Hi The Boss,

We are of course happy to help Ops Manager with the multitude off issues that is happening within her shift.

As such, Dummy, being my most experienced employee will spend the next 8 weeks working only on Ops Managers shift”

My boss and I had a great laugh over it – as it was essentially career suicide to complain about Dummy – there was nothing Ops Manager could do but grin and bear it.

That’s hilarious!

She got what she asked for!

Let’s see how Reddit reacted to this story.

This person worked at a pizza place where there was an employee like Dummy.

Another person is reminded of the TV show “The Office.”

If only Ops Manager had requested Rockstar by name.

This person would love to have an opportunity to do something like this someday.

She got what she asked for!

Sometimes that’s the best you can hope for.

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.