Work can get frustrating really fast when you’re told not to call the one person who actually knows how to fix things.

So what would you do if your most experienced technician specifically told you to reach out whenever a machine was down too long, but his manager suddenly ordered you not to involve him “for morale reasons?”

Would you call him anyway? Or would you follow the instruction, no matter how much downtime it leads to?

In the following story, one manufacturing employee finds himself in this predicament and chooses the latter.

Here’s how it played out.

Don’t want us to call our most experienced technician? Okay.

I work in a manufacturing facility.

We had a technician who knew almost everything about our machines: how to fix them, troubleshoot them, and all their weird quirks. When other technicians struggled to find the problem, he came through and saved ALOT of downtime, up to hours per shift.

He moved to a different department with slightly different hours for personal reasons. Understandable. He’s still there 6 hours during our shift, so he’s well within reach if things need to escalate.

So he told my boss and me, “If a machine is ever down for longer than an hour, call me.”

He was told not to contact the technician again.

One day, our technicians couldn’t find the root cause of a problem. An hour passed, and I called him on the walkie.

Then I got a message from the technician’s boss (who I really enjoy working with) asking me NOT to call this technician over from his department because of “morale reasons”.

You got it, technician boss.

So now, whenever we have a problem on a machine, it will be down for as long as it takes to get fixed or passed down to the next shift, which has engineers and more support staff on call.

Wow! If the guy said it was okay, it should’ve been okay.

Let’s see what the fine folks over at Reddit think about what the manager did here.

This sounds frustrating.

For this reader, it brings back memories.

This is a good point.

Here’s someone who can relate.

It only hurts the company! Some managers don’t use common sense.

If you liked that post, check out this story about a customer who insists that their credit card works, and finds out that isn’t the case.