When in doubt, keep the receipts!

This goes for a lot of things in life, and work-related items are right at the top of the list!

Check out what this worker had to say about a manager who went back on his word…but he wasn’t expecting them to have documented everything.

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Manager said to document everything. So I did.

“This happened at a call center job I had a few years ago.

We had a manager, I’ll call him Derek, who was very fond of saying “document everything” whenever there was any kind of dispute or miscommunication.

Paper trail, he’d say. Always have a paper trail.

Derek also had a habit of giving verbal instructions that contradicted what was in the written procedures. Small things mostly, like telling us to skip certain steps to handle calls faster, or to process refunds in a way that wasn’t quite by the book.

When you’d ask him to put it in writing he’d wave it off and say “just do it, I’ll back you up.”

They got to work…

After the third time I got flagged in a quality review for following Derek’s verbal instructions, I started documenting everything.

Every time he told me something verbally I would send him an email immediately after saying “just to confirm, you’re asking me to do X in situation Y, let me know if I got that wrong.”

He always ignored those emails. Never confirmed, never corrected. After about two months of this there was a bigger issue where a process I followed, again based on his verbal instruction, caused a problem that got escalated.

What?!?!

Derek said in the meeting that he never told me to do it that way.

I forwarded the email chain. Fourteen emails. All sent within minutes of our conversations. All ignored by him, timestamped, with no correction ever sent.

The meeting got very quiet. Derek said the emails “didn’t reflect the full context.”

His manager, who was also in the room, asked him to walk through what the full context was. He could not really do that.

I kept my job.

Derek was moved to a different role about six weeks later. I still send followup emails for everything.”

Check out what folks had to say on Reddit.

This person spoke up.

Another individual shared their thoughts.

This reader had a lot to say.

And this Reddit user weighed in.

Just following the rules, boss!

If you enjoyed this post, check out this story about what happened when a manager insisted only upper level staff handle urgent issues, only to find out the person monitoring the “urgent issues” mailbox wasn’t considered “upper level.”