Sometimes people get even more destructive as they already paying for their stupidity.

The same goes for employers. Read on to see how this worker gave them what they asked for.

Eliminate history ? Ok sure.

I worked for a few years at a branch of a bank in Toronto. It was a total failure because it was clear our division was going down the drain and would be sold off.

The director took a bizarre position on a cost cutting program that head office had going.

The mind boggling overhaul made no sense.

They wanted all divisions to cut back on voicemail, network storage and email storage. So, head office had a spreadsheet of the metrics of this cost cutting, the director laid down the law and wanted deep cuts so our little division appeared at the top of that spreadsheet.

The thing was, i worked on small projects which were often repetitive so i reused a great deal of information and files from previous projects. This even included voice mail from clients.

He’s wary of participating.

This information all had to go. This sounded nuts. I told my manager, who was a real suck up and never question directives. He knew this was a stupid idea but wouldn’t admit it.

I took a quick pass on everything. I seldom deleted emails, so this was a good idea. I purged as much as I could. Turns out I was one of the biggest users and now they are making this out to be a problem. Which my boss pointed out in my quarterly review (Only company I knew that had quarterly reviews).

What happened next got him taking them literally.

They…bring up…in..a review…my..voicemail…storage.

That was it, i purged all my voicemail, email and file storage (no local storage) . I printed out hundreds of pages until my boss noticed (micromanager) and put a stop it.

Then new projects came up, critical of project planning and i increased my estimates by 10%, which angered my manager. I stepped him through the steps required. Tell me I’m wrong?

What do you suggest? I asked.

Then he used all his working time on their ridiculous orders.

They said to just make it up within the tolerances. Except that it will take me longer. Oh well.

Of course, I had all the requirements annotated, over 300 pages. That will take time to review.

Oh, this will end up in my quarterly review?

i never made it and found a new job.

Here is what folks are talking about.

Haha good luck with this one.

Maybe they thought the voicemails took up a lot more space than they did.

Sounds like it worked out for everyone.

If you liked that story, check out this post about an oblivious CEO who tells a web developer to “act his wage”… and it results in 30% of the workforce being laid off.