All jobs have tasks that need to be done that aren’t any fun or may seem useless.

What would you do if you had a new manager who was demanding unrealistic reports that could never be provided without disrupting the whole department?

That is what happened to the supervisor in this story, so he decided to comply with the demands perfectly, causing chaos for the department.

Check it out.

Boss asks me to report 100% of vehicle damage

I used to work as a supervisor of a security team at a large industrial facility.

I had a good relationship with the manager (we will call him Dave), until he appointed his friend as a middle manager (We will call him Steve) between the supervisors and himself.

I did not have a good relationship with Steve at all and suddenly, Dave started rejecting ideas, suggestions, and requests out of hand.

People change as they move up in a company.

The friendly guy that I used to go and have sit down chats with regularly became stand-offish and outwardly hostile at times.

The staff all noticed this as well and would frequently comment that they didnt know what I’d done to Dave and Steve but it was clear that I was being “bullied” all of a sudden.

Its entirely fair to say that I couldnt do right, for doing wrong all the time and every little thing I did or did not do, resulted in a lengthy email conversation with Dave and Steve.

There is a lot I could add to this but for the sake of brevity, Im going to move on to the point of my story:

This is a big area to patrol.

The site we had to patrol was about 5 square miles so vehicles were provided so that we could patrol effectively and carry equipment and personnel to required locations.

Part of my duties at the start of the shift were ensuring that the vehicles had not been damaged on the previous shift and that all vehicles had the required levels of equipment in them.

The first patrol went out the moment our shift started (and as this was a regulatory requirement, could not be delayed or skipped).

This was the start of a night shift and so, it was dark.

Very dark.

We had Maglite torches but after 6 years of use and abuse, they werent exactly brilliant.

I didnt find any new damage and so recorded that the vehicles were OK, and recorded their mileage on our check sheets.

Now, Dave is exaggerating the problems?

The next night when I came in, I had a very angry-in-tone email from Dave demanding to know why my team had damaged one of the vehicles on the previous night.

Apparently the vehicle looked as if it had been reversed into a wall. I immediately went to check the vehicle and found 2 extremely small divots in the rear bumper.

I found them not by looking but by feeling the bumper. I simply could not see them at all using the light available to me at the time.

I then went and asked all my team and all them insisted they had not even used the vehicle.

I went and checked the vehicle check sheets and found, true to my teams word, that the mileage on the day shifts sheet was identical to the night shifts sheet.

The vehicle had not been moved.

He seems to be handling this like a professional.

I sent an email back to Dave informing him that the vehicle hadnt been used by us and apologized for missing the damage however lighting had made that extremely difficult.

This was my last shift before my scheduled days off, so I was certain that Steve would be pushing Dave to punish me for “something” by the time I got back.

Sure enough, on my first day back in I was summoned to Daves office for what we British politely refer to as a “bollocking.”

Dave insisted that he could see the damage in the dark and could actually spot it from about 10 metres away.

For context, all of my guys had been shown the damage and all of them, without fail had said “where?” when I pointed it out at close range.

Not only that but there was now additional damage that I hadnt spotted and my team was also now responsible for!

They seem to want to get him fired.

Luckily my boss had included a photograph of the damage I had missed.

For Dave and Steve however, this was good enough to be punitive towards me and my team and told me that unless a culprit was found and nameed, I would be held personally responsible and would have to “pay the insurance excess to get it fixed.”

Dave also insisted that the lighting was more than sufficient to spot the damage on the vehicles.

I told Dave that this was ridiculous and he couldnt enforce financial penalties on a vehicle that had, again, not been used my team.

Dave was insistent though: It was my job to report 100% of the damage on the vehicles or I would be held responsible and at this point, something clicked in my mind and luckily, Dave decided to back up his instruction with an email, that Steve was CCed into.

He is just giving Steve what he asked for.

The next shift, I refused to allow my team to use the vehicles until they had all been fully checked: inside, outside, underneath, mechanically and equipment levels.

Each vehicle took about 2 hours.

I photographed every single small bit of damage that I found, no matter how insignificant or whether it had been reported previously (remember, the instruction was to report 100% of damage, not 100% of unreported damage) and sent it all in an email to Dave with a text description of the nature and location of the damage for each photograph.

There were 162 photographs in total.

The first patrol could not be skipped and so I had to send out of my officers on foot to patrol the site.

This meant that the site patrol took nearly 3 hours and he was not available to fulfill other duties afterwards.

Its worth noting at this point that my team were also seeing this as a direct attack on them, rather than just me, so were fully supportive of the measures I was taking.

I’m sure the next shift wasn’t happy about this.

This resulted in the site shift manager demanding answers, to which I was able to tell the shift manager of Daves instructions and why I was having to send officers out on foot.

I had (and still do have) a great relationship with all of the site shift managers and so, while he was frustrated, he understood the predicament I had been put in, especially when the instructions were shown him in black and white. This resulted in a financial penalty for my company.

Dave was off the next day so I did the exact same thing again, with the exact same amount of photographs but all taken again on a fresh inspection.

The night shift after, I came to work to find Dave waiting in the office for me.

I was allowed to finish my handover with the offgoing supervisor before Dave shut the door and refused to let me leave before he had discussed why he had received multiple emails, over 800Mb in total (I didnt compress or reduce the size of the photos) and how the company had received a financial penalty and the regulatory body were coming to speak to him.

Hey, this was all Steve’s requirement.

I reminded him that he had demanded that I report 100% of the damage on the vehicles and that this had taken time.

I couldnt allow any member of the team to use any vehicle until they had been checked as there could be financial penalties involved.

Dave frustratedly pointed out that many of the pics were too dark to see anything anyway and so most of the photographs were pointless.

I apologised for the lighting but pointed out that he said the lighting was more than sufficient to spot any damage and so he should be able to easily see the damage I had reported.

Dave insisted that I had deliberately misinterpreted his instructions and he would be taking it to a disciplinary.

I informed him that this was no problem, if he could just let me know the date and time I would inform my union rep who had been fully appraised of the situation and was 100% behind my suggestion that I report every single tiny bit of damage on the vehicles.

Dave doesn’t want to mess with the union.

Dave was ultimately left with no choice but to drop any attempts to discipline me and left Steve to deal with me from that point on.

Steve then took up the role of disciplinarian for the next 3 months until I left the job, however every time he tried, I was able to shut it all down due to briefings with my union rep.

I left the job in February of 2019 and still, to this day, receive complaints from members of staff who remained there about how terrible the job has gotten due to Dave and Steve.

Bad managers can really ruin a job faster than anything else.

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

This would have made it even better.

This is an important point to be aware of.

This person went through something similar but couldn’t get revenge.

Sometimes complying with stupid demands is very satisfying.

This commenter says it will eventually cost the company a lot of money.

Why do so many managers let power go to their heads and mistreat employees?

Surely they should know that treating employees well is much more profitable.

If you liked that post, check out this post about a woman who tracked down a contractor who tried to vanish without a trace.