It’s funny how some people refuse to accept an answer unless it comes from the “right” person.

So, what would you do if an HR manager kept bypassing you and pushing a minor issue higher instead of listening to the explanation right in front of them?

Would you keep explaining yourself? Or would you let it escalate until someone higher up stepped in?

In the following story, one system admin finds himself in this situation with the HR lady.

Here’s how it all played out.

HR managers HATE this one trick

Every office has its special users. The ones who can’t figure out anything technical, everything is an emergency, and everything has to function exactly the same, or they can’t work.

At my job, it’s the HR lady. Since she is just HR, all her problems boil down to a printer error, Excel, Word, reboot, and it works type of issues, and since I am the System admin, they are all my responsibility.

However, every issue she has, she comes back to IT, walks right by my desk, goes to the programmer, manager, or network admin, and explains the issue. Every time they either tell her to go to me (even though she gets ******), or relay the info to me to fix.

The lady won’t listen to his answer.

A few weeks back, she had a problem with the calculations on an Excel spreadsheet. Everyone was at lunch, so she was forced to ask me.

Immediately, I say it is probably rounding up or down because it is only off by a penny. This doesn’t suffice, so she ignores me and waits until lunches are done to return.

She goes to the programmer guy and, as usual, he passes it to me. I emailed her with a breakdown showing how it is rounding. She still wants the programmer guy to look at it, so my manager responds with a message saying he will get to it when he can.

Finally, the VP puts the HR lady in her place.

Well, the programmer guy is swamped, the new website launch is getting pushed out, and her Excel “problem” gets shelved with her emails coming ever more frequently.

My manager even resends my explanation, but she wants the programmer guy to look at it. This is unacceptable, so she goes to the VP, saying we aren’t helping her.

My boss sets up a meeting with the 3 of us for me to explain the issue. It was the shortest meeting ever because I started explaining it, and our VP completely understood right away.

The VP cuts me off, looks at the HR lady, and says, “You pulled me into a meeting for this?”

Yikes! He must get so frustrated dealing with her.

Let’s see if the people over at Reddit can relate to coworkers like this.

This probably would’ve set her off.

This is kinda funny.

Here’s someone who also had dealings with HR.

For this person, it’s all about the wasted time and money.

That was an expensive penny!

The longer she made this an issue, the more it cost the company. Geez.

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