Office politics get especially messy when technology meets ego.

One IT employee found himself sidelined by the HR lady who refused to accept a simple Excel explanation.

So her bad attitude set the stage for a very short (and very curt) meeting with the VP.

Keep reading for the full story!

Every office has their 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 is the HR lady.

All things considered, these aren’t particularly complex issues.

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.

But her bad attitude has managed to tick this IT employee off.

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 come to me (even though she gets ticked, or they relay the info to me to fix.

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.

This IT worker couldn’t help at the moment, so the HR lady continued to wait around.

Immediately, I said it was probably rounding up or down because it was only off by a penny.

This didn’t suffice, so she ignored me and waited until lunches were done to return.

She went to the programmer guy, and like usual, he passed it to me.

I emailed her with a breakdown showing how it was rounding.

But this still wasn’t good enough for her.

She still wanted the programmer guy to look at it, so my manager responded with a message saying he would get to it when he could.

Well, the programmer guy was swamped.

She didn’t understand how to leave well enough alone.

The new website launch was getting pushed out, her Excel “problem” got shelved, and her emails became more and more frequent.

My manager even resent my explanation, but she still wanted the programmer guy to look at it.

Finally, she escalated the issue as high as it would go.

This was unacceptable, so she went to the VP saying we weren’t helping her.

My boss set up a meeting with the three 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 was now quite displeased with this lady.

The VP cut me off, looked at the HR lady, and said, “You pulled me into a meeting for this?”

The spreadsheet wasn’t the thing that was broken — it was her patience.

What did Reddit have to say?

Sometimes you just need a strong authority figure to lay down the law.

HR has a pretty bad reputation around this IT worker’s office.

If anyone was supposed to know what was going on, it should have been this lady.

Stubborn biases could be at the heart of the issue here.

Turns out, this lady could have saved herself a lot of embarrassment if she had just listened the first time!

If you liked this post, you might want to read this story about a teacher who taught the school’s administration a lesson after they made a sick kid take a final exam.