Imagine working as a maintenance technician on an assembly line, and your supervisor tells you that if a machine has problems, you can’t shut it down without checking with him first.

What would you do if you couldn’t find your supervisor anywhere?

In this story, one employee is in this exact situation. The first time it happens, he fixes the machine anyway. The second time, he takes a different approach.

Let’s see how the story plays out.

The night shift supervisor has a date with Malicious Compliance

Many years ago I worked as a maintenance technician on an automated assembly line. It was my job to perform quality audits throughout the section of the line where I worked.

If something didn’t pass inspection then I would put the product on hold and test additional samples.

Whenever this further tests failed, I would stop production, notify the lead or supervisor and then troubleshoot and repair the machine in question.

For a few years I worked the nightshift.

I wonder where the supervisor was all night.

The nightshift supervisor, who I will call TD Grey, had a habit of vanishing for most of the night.

He would be around at the start of the shift, (We worked twelve hour shifts) and then he would show up after the morning meeting at maybe doddle about the office until the end of the shift.

As I was doing my audits one night, I found a machine that was drifting out of spec. I shut it down and paged Mr Grey but he didn’t respond.

I found the issue causing the quality failure and got the parts required for the repair. The repair took about an hour followed by testing of 100% of the product for a few minutes.

Oh-uh!

Meanwhile TD Grey returned from the morning meeting.

He was angry and walked straight up to me and asked who authorized me to shut down his machine.

I tried to explain that it had failed an audit and that I was just following procedure.

TD wasn’t interested in anything I had to say.

I think TD was just embarrassed that he didn’t know the machine was down.

Apparently during the morning meeting he reported that our area was running with no issues.

An engineer who would walk our area each morning contradicted him and said that the technician had one of the machines down for an hour and was just now releasing it to production.

TD gave me a written warning and told me that I do not have the authority to stop production without his approval.

Next time, he was determined to find his supervisor.

A month or so later, a similar situation arose and I tried paging Mr Grey who didn’t respond.

I should mention that this was well before cell phones and no we didn’t carry pagers. To page someone you had to call the reception desk and they would page them over the PA System. Since there wasn’t a receptionist at night, this function was handled by a security guard.

I told security to page Mr Grey every five minutes until he responded.

They wanted to do it every thirty minutes but I insisted on nothing less than every ten minutes and I also wanted them to log each page. This was normal procedure but they often would just record one entry in the log regardless of how many times they repeat the page.

Eventually, the engineer told him what to do.

When the engineer came in he looked at my audit sheet and asked me why I hadn’t stopped production.

I explained that I had been told I couldn’t without Mr Grey’s approval. I also told him that security had been paging him every ten minutes since I found the issue.

The engineer stopped production and told me to begin repairs.

Now, it’s time to really put TD in his place!

He then got a copy of the log from security and went to the morning meeting.

When TD Grey reported that all machines were running with no issues, the engineer spoke up and asked why security had been paging him every ten minutes for over three hours.

I never did find out where Mr Grey went every night or what he did but he soon had more time to do whatever it was.

I really would be curious to know where TD was all night. He clearly wasn’t at work if he didn’t hear the pages.

Let’s see how Reddit reacted to this story.

But how would he sleep through the security pages?

The paging record was a good idea.

The supervisor had to take full responsibility.

Another person has a supervisor like this.

What does a supervisor do if he doesn’t supervise?

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.