Imagine working at a company where you’re very busy, so busy that your boss decides to hire someone to take on some of your tasks. Even though this new hire isn’t your direct report, would you still be willing to help answer any questions they had since their job used to be part of your job?

In this story, one employee was in this situation, and yes, they were happy to help…until the boss put an end to that!

Let’s see how the story plays out.

Cut My Work In Half? Won’t Hear Any Complaints From Me

I work for a General Contracting Company (GC) in construction. Our job is to handle the Sub-Contractors (SC) – the smaller companies that do specific types of work – and make sure they’re all doing what the Designer, Engineer, and Client want.

For quite a while, the name of the game has just been document management in my department. We get a document from the SC, we push it to the Designer and Engineer, get the document back, and then push it to the client. Basically we just play hot potato with the documents.

I handle about 100 of these every week.

The boss expects perfection.

Generally, about 1-3 per week will have some kind of problem, either caused by a mistake by me, someone else, or the computer system.

My manager has gotten increasingly frustrated about these mistakes as time has gone on.

I’ve tried many times to explain the difficulty – much of which is out of our control – of getting every document processed perfectly.

He doesn’t want to hear it, he says my job is simple and it should be done perfectly, no excuses.

The boss couldn’t do any better.

At first, he tried doing some of it himself. He would do maybe 20 in a week, but about 5 would have mistakes, all caused entirely by him.

He quietly stopped doing that after realizing the frustration that went along with it, and instead opted for asking for a new hire to do one part of my workload, while I continue with a different and separate portion.

Sounded great to me, I’ve been working more than 40 hours a week and would be happy to see that decrease.

But the new guy makes mistakes too.

This new hire has been a great guy; great attitude, shows up to work before me almost every day, and does what you tell him.

The issue is, as my manager realized firsthand, there’s a lot of pedantic things you have to learn before you can send off all these documents without a hitch.

He started making mistakes, as expected, and I’d send him an email if I saw it, tell him in person, whatever.

Until one day I sent him an email telling him there was an issue, and he forwarded it to my manager because he didn’t understand what I meant, and I was on PTO for the day.

Uh-oh!

My manager kindly responded to both of us, saying that “Perhaps he wasn’t clear – the New Hire’s job is X, mine is Y, and I am NOT the New Hire’s manager, and shouldn’t be trying to manage him, if the New Hire has any issues, he can raise them to [Our Manager]”

Immediately when I read that email I knew the inevitable fireworks that were to come.

I never emailed the New Hire again.

We still talk, we’re friendly, but I never answer his questions, never point out his mistakes, and certainly never touch any work that would fall in his territory.

Everything was fine…until it wasn’t!

For a couple weeks, all was silent and to my manager, I’m sure everything seemed to be going smoothly.

That was until our monthly report.

Suddenly, we are now 360 documents behind our goal, 100 that have been processed have errors, 30 of them critical, and the client is witholding funds purely because of the sudden halt in document management.

The VP talked to the New Hire and myself to see what was going on.

OP was honest.

The New Hire was on the verge of tears, apologizing up and down.

And I explained how things seemed to have been going well until our manager discouraged me from teaching the New Hire the ropes.

The New Hire and I were both excused by the VP, neither one of us in any trouble.

Our manager is currently being ripped apart by the VP as I write this for “leaving [the New Hire] out to dry.”

Yikes! You can’t hire someone and refuse to let anyone train them! How ridiculous!

Let’s see how Reddit responded to this story.

Just because someone makes their job look easy doesn’t mean it is easy.

I feel bad for the new hire too.

This person knows the new hire needed to be trained.

Here’s a thought!

Mistakes are common when an employee first starts their job.

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.