Isn’t it annoying when some work places don’t let the designated people do their job?

This guy shares how his managing team messed up an entire case at work because of a small negligence!

Check out the full story!

Doesn’t matter if the case is closed or not? Ok then!

I work in a call center that primarily deals with the public with issues or queries they have and whilst we can deal with a lot ourselves, there are a lot of things we must either log for another department to look into or transfer them across to that department.

He explains how the job works…

For example, if someone calls about a broken streetlamp, they get transferred across to the street lighting team, but if someone calls about a pothole, we have to log it for the highway team to fix it– some departments don’t have an internal number for the caller to get transferred across to/a number we can call to speak to that department, and one of those departments is the enforcement department.

Of all the systems and departments we use and liaise with, the trickiest one we deal with is the enforcement system.

Basically, ranging from food safety to the environment, there were multiple teams that enforced things, and all these issues had to be logged on this system.

Things are laid out for the employees!

For example, if someone called to report their neighbor for being too loud, that had to get logged on the system for the noise enforcement team to investigate, but we had to arrange for letters to be sent out about it.

If someone reported an abandoned car, we logged it, and the environment enforcement team went out to investigate.

If someone said they got food poisoning from a restaurant, we logged it and the food safety team investigated it and so on.

The reason why it was so tricky was because if you missed a step, it didn’t get logged properly/it didn’t go to the correct team, which meant that someone would complain to your manager about it, and crucially, this was a legal system, which meant that if the issue escalated to court, whatever you wrote in your notes could be used in the court proceedings.

This is where it gets tricky!

This wasn’t a 2nd nature, eyes closed kind of system – you needed to be concentrating because something you log can bite you in the ass a month later, for example when someone calls to say that they haven’t received a letter and it turns out you didn’t send it in the first place

The way it worked was that a case was logged, which meant that it was open, and it got assigned to an officer like pulling a name out of a hat and throughout the time that it was open, if someone called back to give you more information about the case, you could update it, and that update went directly to the investigating officer, and then when the investigation had finished, the case was closed by that officer.

UH OH…

Basically, once a case was assigned to an officer, they had to see it through from start to finish, whether it was deciding if a noise complaint was justified or going through black bags that were reported as fly tipping to see if they could find anything that tied someone to that rubbish and so on.

It wasn’t as simple as that though, because there were cases that had been open for years, with multiple updates, there were multiple cases that had been opened and closed between the same properties for the same reasons, or someone had called about something and you weren’t 100% sure if it should be logged or not etc.

He was so not expecting that!

I’m not sure how my colleagues dealt with those situations, but whenever I got a call like that, I just emailed the investigating officer just to explain the situation and ask for advice, and CC’d in their colleagues just in case the investigating officer was off, or I just emailed the team to ask if they wanted me to log it as a new case or not, since if it was ongoing situation, with multiple cases for the same thing, many officers may have dealt with it, and they may not have wanted me to log it as new case.

I didn’t see an issue with it, because they either emailed me back with an answer, or they didn’t reply but logged it themselves after they’d looked into it, but one day I got a thorny email from a thornier senior environmental officer, basically telling me off and telling me not to send them emails anymore because the system was there to be used.

That’s INSANE!

I emailed him back, explaining that it wasn’t that simple because there were tricky cases that I needed help with, and I didn’t want to update an old case or log a case if I didn’t need to, to not unnecessarily add to the caseloads of the officers and he replied back reiterating that I shouldn’t send any more emails, and finished it off by telling me to either update the case whether it was open or closed, or open a new case – cue malicious compliance.

From that day forward, I did not send another email.

If I got a call about an issue, and the last time the issue was raised in 2017, I updated the 2017 case.

If I was on the fence about logging something as a new case or not, I just logged it anyway.

If I checked the last case, and the investigating officer had left, I updated it anyway.

He knew he had to do something about it!

I was unaware of this, but when I told people that the investigating officer would call them back, like they typically did after we asked them to in our updates, they would call us a couple of weeks later to ask why they hadn’t received a call, and my colleagues would have to raise a new case for them because the one I updated was closed.

The officers also suddenly had an influx of new cases, because every time I updated a closed case, it ‘reopened’, which added to their case load.

The system they used worked on dates and caseloads, for example, if I asked them to call someone or inspect a property in my update, the system generated a time frame for them to complete that action by, but if they were too busy do something I’d asked them to do, it went red, which counted against them.

It went on and on!

Also, for example, if they had 4 open cases, and then they closed 3 and they’d gone down to 1, they’d go back up to 4 again if I updated 3 of their old cases, so based on the system, they were not doing their jobs properly because they constantly had open cases.

This put their stats through the floor.

This went on for ages, and one day I was hauled into an office by my manager, and waiting for me was his manager, the senior enforcement officer, his manager, a HR advisor for me and HR.

They told me that I was doing call avoidance (gross misconduct), purposefully misadvising callers and not triaging calls correctly.

From what they were saying and the paperwork they had with them, I knew it was a ‘you’re fired’ meeting.

He was sure he needed to fix this for himself!

HR asked me if there was anything I wanted to say, so I looked at the enforcement manager, pointed at the senior enforcement officer and said, “he told me to do it.”

The enforcement manager looked at me, looked at the senior enforcement manager, looked at me again and then asked me to clarify what I meant.

I explained it all from start to finish, making it clear that when I was sending emails, I always asked for advice and offered to log a case for the enforcement team if they wanted me to, and that before the email from the senior enforcement officer, my emails either were not replied to, but someone logged it for me, or someone replied to me to tell me to log a new case or to not log a new case.

The enforcement manager sighed and then asked me if I could send him that email, so I quickly left, went back to my desk, sent the email thread to him and came back into the office.

Things finally picked up pace!

He read the email, sighed deeper than he did before and then asked us all to leave but asked the senior enforcement officer to stay, and I left with a massive crap eating grin on my face because I knew that I would keep my job.

The fallout was pretty big, because the IT team had to go in and manually close all the ‘open’ cases so that the stats for the enforcement officers would go back to normal, the payroll department had to backdate all the months that the stats were messed up so that the performance bonus matched what would have happened had I not put their stats down (I didn’t know they had performance bonuses until afterwards) and the senior enforcement officer got demoted to an enforcement officer, based on their new email signature

And the cherry on top!

A couple of weeks later, when the enforcement manager was less busy, he emailed me to basically say that he gives me permission to go back to emailing the enforcement team about cases, but I should use my own judgement.

If I think I could justifiably get away with not logging something on the system, as in I could explain to my manager why I didn’t think it should have been logged, then I shouldn’t log it, and that logic would cut down the amount of emails I had to send to the enforcement teams

No one got fired, but someone got demoted and a lot of work happened in the background to fix what I did.

YIKES! That sounds like a lot of drama!

Why do authorities abuse their authority like this?!

Let’s find out what folks on Reddit think about this one.

Exactly! This user knows the officer is responsible for all of it.

This user thinks this situation is bad because no one fixed the officer issue.

This user thinks a consultant could help them!

This user thinks this guy could have said things briefly as well!

This user believes the company is lucky to have this guy!

Everyone deserves an employee like this guy!

If you thought that was an interesting story, check this one out about a man who created a points system for his inheritance, and a family friend ends up getting almost all of it.