Imagine working at a warehouse, and your job is to do inventory. If you knew there was a clerical error that made it look like you had more inventory for a client than you really did, would you insist on fixing it, or would you let the boss ignore it and suffer the consequences?

In this story, one employee is in this situation, and it happens to be an issue with the biggest client they have! This is not going to end well!

Let’s see how the story unfolds.

You think you know more then us? Fine, I’ll just sit back and enjoy the Overtime.

This happened a good 10ish years ago. I was in my early 20’s working as an Inventory Control “specialist” for a 3rd party logistics warehouse. All of that is just a fancy way of saying I worked for a company with 3 warehouses that stored, managed, and shipped inventory for other companies.

Essentially, my job was to fix problems with the inventory, find “lost” or misplaced pallets, and to figure out who screwed up. It was a pretty chill job, I did it for about 3 years before the incident.

I was the youngest of the 3 people in my department (coworker, boss, myself), and I had gotten especially good at using the in house software that was made by our IT department.

The head boss of the company was a giant idiot that made a lot of super dumb decisions, despite us advising him.

Here’s how they handled doing inventory.

So for those of you who haven’t worked in a warehouse or some retail places, there’s a thing we do once a year for our clients called “Inventory.”

During inventory, we completely freeze the account and do a full physical count of that clients in house items.

Nothing can be received or shipped during this time, in fact, the program was specifically written so that nobody but the 3 people in my department could alter any of the item counts in the system, as a failsafe against tampering. The account could only be accessed with our admin level accounts.

Now we get to the problem.

So this particular Inventory was for our biggest client, which took 80% of retail space in the largest of our 3 warehouses, with literally 10’s of thousands of items.

It was an all hands on deck situation from every employee in all 3 warehouses working 3 days of 12 hours straight.

The day before the event, I was doing pre-start checks, when I noticed an anomaly. There were about 80,000 “ghost” items in the inventory that had negative quantities.

I printed out a HUGE report, which took several hours to compile and print, and talked to our rep for the client.

He figured out what happened.

Apparently she was new, and had been doing something dumb when shipping off items, which somehow exploited a blind spot in the program and created all these items every time she shipped something.

I told my boss and he asked me to explain the situation to the big boss, who basically just blew me off.

I told him it was extremely important that he not initiate the inventory, that he had to talk to the client, get us a couple extra days, and get us the authority to clear out all of these ghost items.

He said he’d look into it, and that was basically all I could do.

I don’t think the boss looked into it.

We come in the next day, log into the program and…. Inventory had been initiated.

Now… I didn’t mention this before, but the biggest thing inventory does is ZERO OUT EVERY ITEM.

My boss tells me to just roll with it and we get started with the inventory.

3 days later and the count is done.

Uh-oh!

We send the report to the client and guess what? They have a panic attack about 80,000 items that aren’t accounted for!

There is absolutely no way for us to determine which are duplicates just by looking at the numbers alone, and since the inventory was zero’ed out, we’re basically screwed.

I know what you’re thinking, “But Nuka, what about that report you printed out BEFORE the inventory that had all the quantities?”

I’m so glad you asked that.

He knew what happened, knew the items never really existed and used it to suggest a devious plan.

On day one, i confronted the big boss about this issue, but before I could finish my concerns, he took my report, literally THREW IT IN A DUMPSTER and told me to stop messing around.

So I just said screw it and did exactly what he asked me to do.

When the mess hit the fan, I just sat there with a smug look on my face.

We were put in a conference call with the client to advise on how to proceed and with the biggest F you grin on my face, I told the client that the only thing we can do is literally search the entire warehouse for every single item. With current staff of 50 people, it would take a MONTH to do it all.

Suffice to say, they were not happy to hear that haha.

It was a lot of work, but not bad for OP.

It took about 250 people (taken from all the parent companies other warehouses across the state) 2 and a half weeks of straight overtime heavy days to confirm every single damn item.

And because the only people who could do data entry were the 3 people in my department, we just sat down the entire time from the comfort of our climate controlled office, enjoying the free soda and water provided by the company during the inventory.

The client was livid because of all their lost income.

They made 2 demands if the parent company wanted to keep them as a client. Fire the jerk who caused this mess and a huuuuuuge discount on warehousing their items.

It didn’t end well for the boss.

In the end, the idiot boss got fired and the client got their discount, which they used to save up enough moving costs to leave us a year later.

I guess once that trust is lost, it’s lost.

Haha i think in the end we estimated that it took nearly 45,000 combined man hours, much of which was overtime, to complete the inventory.

Moral of the story, listen to the people you hire to fix problems, before those problems become huge issues.

It sounds like this all started with a clueless employee who worked for the client and admitted to making a mistake. I don’t want her to lose her job, but I’m surprised OP never brought up the issue behind the issue to the boss at the other company.

Let’s see how Reddit responded to this story.

This person would’ve handled the situation differently.

Another person loves this phrasing.

It was an expensive mistake!

Here’s another story about an inventory mess.

Inaccurate inventory can cause a lot of problems!

If you liked that post, check out this one about an employee that got revenge on HR when they refused to reimburse his travel.