We see stories like this all the time on Reddit’s “Malicious Compliance” page…

I’m talking about workers who try to show managers and bosses the errors of their ways, but they just don’t listen!

But these bigwigs usually get what’s coming to them in the end…

Check out what happened this time!

I brought the company to a standstill to make a point.

“I worked in the engineering department of a smaller manufacturing company (around 70-80 employees).

My responsibility among other things was to handle any design changes; edit part and assembly drawings, bills of materials, etc.

Previously this was all handled by putting together a packet of actual paper documents that had to be shuffled from engineering to manufacturing, sometimes ping ponging back and forth if we were doing something complicated that required input from various people within those departments.

Eventually the company started to implement a software-driven procedure that was supposed to eliminate the stacks of paper that would sometimes get lost on someone’s desk.

There wasn’t time for this…

The problem was that our bare bones staff didn’t really have time to learn all of the ins and outs of the software, and refine the process to be truly efficient.

Basically it was left so that if an item was entered into an engineering change order, it was locked down so that no one could build one, but also a customer couldn’t even order one, or any machine that this item happened to be a component of until the change process was completed.

Sometimes this could take weeks.

They tried to tell ’em…

I tried explaining several times that if we ever had to work on some item that is used in several of our products, this would bring everything to a screeching halt.

My manager at the time understood this but could never get all of the people who needed to work on the software procedure to sit down and finalize everything.

One day I was tasked with changing the design of a hardware component that was used in EVERY machine we built.

I told my manager that as soon as I started the process, no one in sales would be able to enter an order for any customers until the process would be completed.

He shrugged and said “do it”, knowing that I was right.

Within 30 minutes of getting started, a salesman came to my desk asking why he couldn’t enter an order.

I explained what was happening. He left, and soon after the VP of the company was at my desk asking what needed to be done.

Here’s the deal…

So I told him he needed to corral everyone needed to hash out how the software was supposed to work properly instead of the half ***** “just lock everything down” deal they left off with.

He immediately called in whoever was on that list.

It took a few days as I recall, and the component in question was expedited to be approved within the week.

To this day I use this story in interviews whenever I’m asked one of those questions, like “Give me an instance where you had to solve a major problem in the workplace”.”

Reddit users shard their thoughts.

This person chimed in.

Another individual had a lot to say.

This Reddit user spoke up.

This reader weighed in.

And this individual shared their thoughts.

Some people always need to learn the hard way…

It’s an unfortunate truth.

If you liked that post, check out this one about an employee that got revenge on HR when they refused to reimburse his travel.