Imagine working at a hotel, and a new assistant manager is hired who thinks he knows everything but has no idea what he’s doing. If he made changes that angered all of the employees, would you deal with it, quit, or work together to annoy him until he decided to quit?

In this story, a hotel has to deal with this exact issue, and the supervisors work together to annoy the assistant manager until he literally can’t even sleep through the night. It gets even worse the night of a big conference.

Keep reading to see how the story plays out.

New Assistant Manager Brings Compliance on Himself

When I was at university, I used to work for a national chain of budget hotels with onsite restaurants.

We were constantly packed out with business travellers and events because we had that identikit soulless corporate atmosphere HR managers go wild for, and we wouldn’t destroy the company coffers.

The pay was dreadful and the hours were illegal (there was many a time I and other staff were called on to do 18+ hour shifts because the site was too cheap to hire extra workers) but the people were cool, and it paid my rent so whatever.

The supervisors were generally well liked.

The manager (M) was almost never seen.

He spent 99% of his time at his holiday home and left the running of the business to the supervisors, which was fine, everybody liked it better that way.

The supes were all tough but decent; they trusted us to govern ourselves and only stepped in when we needed the help.

They were all industry veterans too, who’d worked their way up from the lowest positions, so they were well-respected.

Uh-oh!

But then, about a year and a half after I started working there, corporate starts making changes to nationwide policy.

The manager is forced to hire an assistant manager (AM), so he lets corporate handle it and they send us this young guy fresh out of university who thinks he’s hot stuff because he’s from London and we’re just a little northern backwoods town.

He has no management experience at all and it shows.

He comes in like a bulldozer, doesn’t take any time to learn about the hotel and how it runs, doesn’t want to take any advice from the supes, and insists on micromanaging everything down to the smallest detail.

These changes sound unreasonable!

The worst thing he does is take the autonomy away from the staff.

We’re no longer allowed to self-govern, and he even institutes a rule that we’re not allowed to go to the bathroom or get a drink of water (in the kitchen, out of customer view) unless we’re on our actual break – something that would happen once a shift, if we were lucky.

He also stops all staff meals – previously, staff could get a meal on a shift of 12 hours or more so long as it was under a certain price threshold and it would get written off as expenses – meaning if, like many of us did, you worked pretty much an entire day, you would have to pay full price for a meal or try to bring something in (but nothing that needed refrigerated or heated because there were no staff amenities and he banned us from using the kitchen fridge/microwave).

Every day we’d come in to a new stupid rule, like girls couldn’t wear their hair in a ponytail unless the band was a certain colour, or lemon wedges had to be cut using a template to ensure they were an exact size and any that were wrong would have to be thrown away and would come out of the employee’s wage.

It gets even worse!

That was bad enough, but when he took over the rotas, he managed to mess up so monumentally that we ended up with a single bartender on a friday night after a major local rugby game.

People were put on to work when they had holiday booked, or only given 7 hours in a week when they were on a full time contract.

Also, where before the rota was put up in the staff room a month in advance so you could plan accordingly, he locked the supes out of the rota document and would only put that week’s rota up – and sometimes only the rota for mon-thurs, waiting until thursday evening to put up fri-sun to “make sure no one tries to call out”.

He cancelled leave that had been approved by the supes, even before he was employed, including one waitress’ day off to attend her graduation, and a cleaner’s bereavement leave to attend her brother’s funeral overseas, and tried to make them do this grovelling ritual of humiliation to him to get it reinstated.

The manager was clueless about what was going on.

People start quitting in droves, and to cover up his own unpopularity, AM tells M that the site is overstaffed anyway so he’s just cutting unnecessary costs.

M’s not around enough to know if that’s true or not, and every penny saved is one back in his pocket so it’s all good with him.

He doesn’t want to hear reports from the supes, he just wants to enjoy his golfing so he dismisses everything they have to say and tells them to take all their issues to AM.

So they do.

The supervisors knew just what to do!

See, AM lived onsite in an apartment above the hotel, so even though he only worked “business hours” (9-5 mon-fri), he was technically accessible at all hours of the day.

The supes, all four of them, and the kitchen manager, unilaterally declared war on the guy.

Customer complaint? Better hike up those 3 flights of stairs and go hammer on AM’s door.

Kitchen stock check out by a couple of quid? AM better hear about it.

One of the waitstaff has called in sick? Go ask AM what to do.

They really made sure to annoy AM as much as possible!

The night supe had his timing down to a fine art, leaving JUST enough time between each nonsense interruption for AM to start to fall asleep again before he went back up and started braying on his door.

AM couldn’t get more than 45 consecutive minutes of peace and quiet without being interrupted, even on his days off.

Naturally, he went crying to M. And god bless that fat, lazy, retiree. M told him if he couldn’t handle the job then he should go back to London.

Then everyone quit at once!

AM stuck it out for another couple of weeks, but on the day of an extremely important conference worth 20K to the site and a contract worth considerably more to the company overall, he got in a knock down drag out fight with the kitchen manager who walked out, taking his entire staff with him.

Us on bar and wait weren’t about to stick around to get reamed by the customers when they discovered there was no catering, so we all started to vacate too.

AM ended up BEGGING the duty supe to convince us all to come back, because if he messed up this conference, his future in the industry – at least in this country – was gone.

The supe told him he had to submit his resignation to M right then and there, otherwise he wasn’t doing anything.

He had no choice but to agree.

AM did, the conference went ahead, and in two weeks he left and was never heard from again – although I heard that M gave him a blistering reference that called him spineless, entitled, workshy, and useless, so I’m pretty sure he had a rough ride in the hotel business for a while.

M was too lazy to hire another AM, so he just promoted the supe who’d forced AM’s hand and things went right back to how they’d been before.

I worked there another year before graduating, and it was still a mess, but it was a mess where you were at least treated like a person.

I love how the supervisors worked together to get the assistant manager to quit. And then all the staff walking out at once was the icing on the cake! Teamwork makes the dream work, as the saying goes!

Let’s see how Reddit responded to this story.

This person doesn’t understand why anyone wants to work at a hotel.

Exactly!

I don’t know if this story took place in the UK. The AM was from London, but I was assuming it took place in the United States.

If only more managers understood this!

Promoting from within was a much better idea.

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.