Greedy Boss Wants Employees To Visit Clients Twice Instead Of Once So They Can Bill More, But That Means The Work Takes A Lot Longer To Complete

Jayne Elliott

5 minutes ago

Shutterstock/Reddit

Imagine working for a boss who wants you to make each job take as long as possible so you can bill the client more, but he doesn’t understand the consequences. Would you comply, or would you insist that slowing down is a bad idea?

In this story, a land surveyor is in this situation, and the boss clearly does not understand the consequences. All he sees are dollar signs…that is, until the clients start to complain.

Keep reading to see how the story plays out.

Divide every intervention in two ? As you want.

First, context and explanation.

I work as a surveyor. In this profession, you often have to divide lands so that the owner can sell a part of it, or even delimit the entire perimeter or just a part of it. For example when two neighbors are fighting about where each of their lands end (“Your fence is on my land ! No you are lying !” that kind of stuff).

Usually, we would make our own research beforehand, and often find some previously existing landmarks, property documents and stuff like that. Then get to the land on the day we appointed to everyone concerned, measure visible limits and landmarks, and if everything is clear enough, establish the limit for everyone with their accord.

Meaning that you have only one travel on the spot, and the rest is just drawing the plan on a computer and creating legal documents to sign by everyone quoted before.

Here’s how it usually works…

It works perfectly like 95% of the time, and the remaining 5% are either because we made a mistake and need to come back to change the limit (with everyone’s accord again), or because one of the neighbors doesn’t agree with what we determined to be the limit, and want to go to court to have it settled by a judge (this is between the two neighbors, and we have about nothing to do with it once they decide to go to that extent).

Some times though, the limit is not that easy to find, and we have to do it in two appointments (first to measure the land and try to find elements that would help us, then the second to show everyone where the limit is, based on our measures)

So yeah, it works well, and it is fast enough so that we can pass from one case to the other without losing too much time.

The boss got greedy.

But here is the thing. With two appointments, clients have to pay more (of course). And our boss like that.

So one day, he decided that rather than doing everything at once when we could, we would systematically do it in two appointments.

We tried telling him that it was a bad idea as we were already treating every case we had with just no delay, but he didn’t listen and made us do it anyway.

They complied.

So we started doing as he said.

Every case, even the easiest ones, were treated in two times.

The folders started to pile up on our desks, because we had to go to each location a second time, but we also had to attend to the appointments of the new ones. Which themselves had to be taken care of a second time, while other were coming. etc, etc…

Everyone was angry.

Now, clients are calling angrier and angrier, because they are waiting for our work to be done so that they can sell their lands.

The boss came at us angry because he thought we were slacking off.

But we just showed him the folders that we have to get treated, twice.

The boss eventually had to admit defeat.

He tried to argue, claiming that we were just taking too much time, but we reminded him that he was warned this would happen.

He got one really angry call from a notary last week, who was about to lose a sell because we didn’t worked fast enough (at this point, we had months of delay).

He then came to us asking to go back to the way we treated our case before.

But I know one of my colleague got really annoyed by his behavior and is actively looking for another job. While we are way behind on many cases.

The boss really didn’t think that through very well. Making every project take twice as long so you can charge more means you can’t handle as many projects. The math doesn’t really work in anyone’s favor.

Let’s see how Reddit responded to this story.

Exactly!