Imagine working for a company where you’re assembling products, and a part you need for the products has run out. If the head purchaser refused to order more, would you find a workaround, or would you prove the purchaser wrong?

In this story, one man is in this situation, and he is determined to get the part he needs and to teach the head purchaser a lesson.

Let’s see how the story plays out.

“You have enough parts!” “No, we don’t.”

This is my husbands story. (Henceforth referred to as ‘hubby”)

Hubby works for a smallish company that makes medical equipment in the production department.

It’s important to note that that there are multiple teams in the production department divided by product type produced.

Each team has a supervisor and the entire production department is overseen by the production manager.

The database is apparently wrong.

One day hubby and his coworkers are building a particular product(hereafter called Product A) and realise they don’t have enough clamps.

Hubby goes to the Head purchaser and tells him: “We’re running low on clamps. Please order some.”

Head purchaser checks the database and goes: “According to database you have 1000 clamps, though.”

Hubby: “No, we don’t. We looked everywhere. There are none.”

Head purchaser: “Then look again. You probably didn’t see them.” And with that he dismissed hubby from his office.

This was an urgent need.

Hubby and his supervisor looked everywhere, but there were none, though the other team had 200 clamps as emergency stock.

It felt like either the warehouse screwed up or the numbers in the database were incorrect.

Hubby then wrote an email to the head purchaser CCing hubby’s supervisor, the production manager and the CEO, that the production urgently needs clamps and to please order them.

He didn’t mention the emergency stock of the other team.

This is getting more intense!

Head purchaser was angry about the email, stomped into the production hall beelining towards hubby and said something to the effect of: “How could you humiliate me like that? I’ll show what it’s like to be really humiliated!”

He then looked for the clamps himself, found the emergency stock of the other team and told hubby: “See? There are the clamps. Just use these and resume the production!”

Head purchaser then retreated to his office to write an email to hubby CCing the same people as hubby, included a screenshot of the database page for clamps and stated basically what he told hubby about there being clamps, but more politely.

Hubby saw the email and when heading to the other teams hall to get 100 of the 200 clamps to resume the production for the time being, stopped by the CEOs office to merely explain the situation to him and point out that the numbers in the database are wrong using the very screenshot the head purchaser sent as an example.

The head purchaser was NOT happy!

CEO tore the head purchaser a new one for not ordering the clamps immediately.

The guy responsible for keeping the numbers of the database up-to-date happened to be on vacation at the time but got reamed by the CEO as well when he returned.

Cherry on top: CEO gave hubby’s supervisor permission to directly contact the supplier and establish a routine for regular deliveries.

Head purchaser was hopping mad about it, but hubby just told him, that they had CEOs permission to do that and he couldn’t do anything about it.

Wow! They needed the part and it wasn’t there. What were they supposed to do? Reality may be different than what the database says, but that doesn’t mean reality is wrong.

Let’s see how Reddit reacted to this story.

Saying the problem doesn’t exit doesn’t fix the problem.

Here’s a saying that relates to the story.

Yes, I feel bad for the guy who was on vacation. What an awful way to return to work!

This person loved the last line.

Just because the database says there’s inventory doesn’t mean there’s inventory.

If you liked that post, check out this post about a rude customer who got exactly what they wanted in their pizza.