Imagine working for a company where there’s a public-facing website that often has a message saying the site is down for maintenance due to a technical glitch. If you knew a workaround that would prevent this from happening in most cases, would you use it?

In this story, one employee is in this situation, and he had been using the workaround for years. Then, the department head tells him to stop using it.

Keep reading to see how the story plays out.

Department head wants to micro-manage and not allow IT to do it’s job

I am being somewhat vague to protect the innocent.

So this happened recently. I work for an entity that deals with the general public. We use an application internally but allow the general public to view the results on an external website.

The way it works is the vendor runs a script that dumps our local database each night and uploads it to their server to be viewed on their hosted website.

This sounds like a big problem!

The issue is their software is poorly implemented.

If the upload times out and only a partial file is uploaded (happens VERY frequently) the website will go down and display a message that it is down for maintenance.

We then have to run the uploader manually which can take several hours to complete which means the site is down that whole time.

OP came up with a workaround.

Being in IT and trying to be proactive, I found a free service that would monitor the site for specific changes and send an email when the change was detected.

It worked great, site went down, I received and email and could start the process to get it back up ASAP.

This worked well for several years.

But not everyone thought this was a great idea.

One day I get a call from another department that the site was offline before the monitor caught it so I ran the utility to bring it back up.

The department head had a fit.

He said only he could notify IT the site was down and we where to do nothing until we explicitly heard from him to run the update utility.

Fine, OK, his department had the contract for the app and it belonged to them.

Here’s the way it works now…

I canceled the monitor service.

I no longer restart the app when it fails but wait to hear from the department head.

When a user contacts me to let me know the site is down, I tell them they have to call the department head and let him know as I am forbidden to help them.

The site now can be down for most of the day before anyone notices it.

This sounds like a big mess!

The general public has started complaining that the site is “always down” which has made it all the way to the top.

Department head has to deal with complaints from not only the general public, our own internal employees but the top brass as well.

Apparently they are now looking for a new service provider as the vendor has been unable to fix the issue for several years.

I had already told them that, but they did not want to listen as I was able to keep the site up the majority of the time so no one was complaining about it. FYI, the automatic update ran at 3 AM. I would get a notification it failed around 4:30 so I would manually run the utility and have the site backup before the start of the business day.

I sleep much better now.

Hopefully, by seeing how bad this problem really is, the company will actually fix the problem. OP shouldn’t have to do a workaround to get the site to work.

Let’s see how Reddit responded to this story.

I agree with this comment.

Nobody asked him to be on call all night.

I like this quote!

This person shares a lesson they learned the hard way.

Another person thinks this situation was a good lesson to learn.

If the higher ups don’t know it’s broken, it’s not going to get fixed.

If you liked this post, check out this story about an employee who got revenge on a co-worker who kept grading their work suspiciously low.