Nothing hinders efficiency quite like corporate bureaucracy.

How would you handle a management team that seemed uninterested in solving problems you had the answers to?

One guy recently told Reddit his hack to speeding things up in the workplace.

Here are the details.

No heat for you

Back when I was a field tech, one of my customers was in a tall office building.

The Purchasing Dept. was often super stingy approving maintenance and custodial quotes.

It was always a fight.

Management has a talent of putting off necessary fixes until the last minute.

There was some repair work being done on the HVAC (Heating/Cooling) system and one of the maintenance personnel asked the contractors to add a couple of extra shutoff valves leading to the executive floor.

Whenever Purchasing would deny an HVAC maintenance request, one of the support staff would go into a crawlspace and throttle the ball valve to the executive loop back by about 60%.

That’s one way to speed up the approval process.

This would restrict the flow just enough to make the executive floor too cold or too hot.

When one of the big wigs would complain, maintenance would just reply with: “Well, we need a new bearing assembly (or whatever). We put a quote in last week and we just are waiting for purchasing to approve it. But I’ll see what I can do today.”

Gaslighting at its finest.

An hour or so later, the quote would be approved and a few hours after that, the valve would be opened back to almost full.

Then opened completely when the new whatever arrived.

Many disagreed on how the story was told, but valued the premise.

And agreed that this kind of problem was far too commonplace.

Some wondered if the trick could work elsewhere.

One person was appalled.

And another reiterated the lesson of the story.

Apparently management helps those that help themselves.

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