The best lesson you need to learn quickly in a new job is who shows up to give one hundred percent of their effort, and who shows up to give…well, whatever the opposite is.

How would you handle the frustrations of knowing all of your teammates got the instructions you laid out perfectly for them wrong? One guy recently shared how his dream project at work got royally screwed up (then inevitably fixed) by his teammates. Here’s what happened.

Just a minor problem with timing

It was decided that one of the manf. plants I was supporting would be expanded with a big new warehouse, new shipping offices, new employee breakrooms, automatic boxing, auto printing, huge palletizer, etc.

I requested a set of the plans as CAD drawings (I did CAD way, way back, adequate, just not speedy) and got them.

So based on what I asked and was told, I laid out where I want network IDFs to make sure I could cover everything.

Seems like this guy knows what he’s talking about.

I asked a bunch of people and ton of What If’s.

No problem, laid it out and submitted for the contractors.

Well as it turned out, production decided to turn up the production line and use the new shipping docks before the warehouse was completed.

Well now, that can’t be good.

They’d just use one corner. Uh, ..ok..

The kicker to this was that the storage area that I planned to use and got quoted to install my IDF was pushed to the last to be even framed, much less finished.

Oh, and the contractor could not get the fiber installed quickly enough.

That’s the cherry on top of a perfect situation.

Ended up wall mounting an IDF at about 90m from an existing IDF so strung copper CAT5 and got enough drops and Wifi APs running to get production happy.

All’s well that ends well – as it turned out, there was a LOT more network required than production had told me.

The “temp” IDF became permanent, and TWO additional ones to support the docks and shipping offices, all eventually on fiber.

Very few teams are able to troubleshoot situations like this this quickly.

For what it’s worth – I never saw a full project scope on the project, general contractor was changed halfway in, about 6 different equipment-specific PLC contractors, the internal “project manager” was a recently graduated quasi-IE.

Eventually it was smoothed out but, what a struggle.

Yikes, sounds like whatever this guy is getting paid, it’s not enough. Let’s see what the good folks of Reddit had to say about this one.

The comments, even the laypeople, were able to empathize.

Others vented their own frustrations.

One person even one-upped the story.

Someone else could relate all too well.

And some people just used the opportunity to vent.

In every job, there will always those people who have to be both the planners AND the fixers.

If you enjoyed this story, check out this post about a man who refused to keep giving his coworker rides to work because he left a mess in his car.