Rushing orders without listening usually has a way of slowing things down.

So, what would you do if a manager cut you off mid-sentence and demanded you fetch materials right away, ignoring your warning about a missing step in the process?

Would you try to explain again?

Or would you do what they said and let them deal with the delay?

In the following story, one night shift worker finds himself in this situation and spends hours stuck in an airlock.

Here’s the full scoop.

But theres no bleach

Several years ago, I worked the night shift for big pharma, producing injectables. At that hour, there were very few people running the place.

I was relatively new there and only had limited training on what I was allowed to do and what I was not.

The buildings were designed with air flow direction and flow patterns to prevent biological contamination.

You can’t go the other way, or it’s a shutdown and a cleaning for about 3-4 hours. Nobody wants that.

There were strict rules to follow when walking through the building.

My compliance was being instructed to go get raw material X from an earlier room.

For me, that meant doing practically a full loop of the building, exiting completely, and starting over.

That’s fine. It only takes about 15 minutes. But the catch here is that everything is “more clean” as you progress through the stages of the building, going through airlocks.

He tried to tell him there was no bleach, but he didn’t listen.

Going through the airlocks means spraying the objects you’re bringing in with bleach, giving them 10 minutes of contact time, wiping them down, and then proceeding.

My malicious compliance here is that when I informed the manager on duty that the prior airlock had no bleach, he just interrupted me and said, “NOW!”

So I do as I’m told and hurry up, exit, go around, wash up, change my scrubs—the works.

I get the material, and just as expected, I get stuck in the airlock with no bleach to wipe down a cart of raw material.

Hours later, he was finally able to leave the airlock.

What the manager wasn’t aware of was that I wasn’t trained in mixing and making bleach. Yeah, it’s easy enough in practice, but it’s still a sign-off I wasn’t “trained” on, so I simply couldn’t.

I was in there for a good two hours until the manager found me. All I could do was point at the empty bleach container on the wall as he stared through the glass.

He had to leave, do a lap, make bleach himself, wait another 30 minutes or so for the bleach to settle, then join me in the airlock for another 10 minutes of contact time together, in silence.

Wow! It only takes seconds to listen to someone.

Let’s see what the fine folks over at Reddit have to say about all this.

This is what he tried to do.

According to this comment, people who act like this lack problem-solving skills.

For this reader, the ending was the best.

Here’s someone who thinks things like this are the supervisor’s responsibility.

Hey, he did what he was told!

Next time, the supervisor will listen when someone is speaking.

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.