Imagine working for a cleaning company, and you do all of your regular cleaning work. If your manager wanted to add some additional work to your plate, would you assume she wanted you to do that first, or would you go about your regular work first?

In this story, one manager seems to think the employee is a mind reader, when she’s clearly not. She gets really mad at her and assigns her another cleaning task in retaliation.

When the supervisor hears what happened, that’s when the story really gets good. Even though the manager sounds awful, the supervisor clearly has the employee’s back!

Let’s read the whole story.

Scrub the walls of the parking garage with a magic eraser? Ok, see ya in about 6 hours.

Ok so this happened about 3 years ago. I was working for a cleaning company in governmental buildings and fyi this is a manager that I and plenty of other people had issues with.

One day I went into work like normal everything was fine, my manager needed me to do some extra floors to vacuum.

Sure no problem, told her that I didn’t have that many floors to do and could do them after just needed a list of the floors to vacuum.

No argument from her just a “Mhm I’ll have it for you after” and off to work I went.

The manager apparently thinks OP should be a mind reader.

About 2 hours go by and I’m done my floors, I go to the office to get a list of the floors she needed me to do and turns out she needed me to do them early morning (news to me) and ended up sending someone else and I should have waited.

Told her she never said it was time sensitive otherwise I would have waited.

She rolls her eyes and just repeats the same thing and that I still should have waited but whatever what’s done is done and when I ask her if there was anything else that needed to be done she tells me to grab a bucket, some gloves and some magic erasers and scrub the walls of the parking garage.

OP got to to work.

There’s 5 levels and I knew that it wasn’t part of the contract to clean it plus this was a method she used as a form of “punishment” for “insubordination”.

She expected me to have it all done by the end of my shift.

I grabbed my stuff and did as told but was only able to clean 1 level. By the end of my shift I told her along with my supervisor that I was only able to do 1 level of the parking garage and that I would try and get more done tomorrow.

The supervisor sounds awesome.

Now my supervisor had no idea that’s where I was since she didn’t tell him and was needed elsewhere for something more important that ended up not being done at all since no one could find me (couldn’t get a radio and signal sucks there so no texts or calls).

HE WAS LIVID!

He asked everyone to leave and then the very loud argument started. “Why would you send her there!?” “It’s not even part of our contract!” “You were warned about pulling this crap on employees!”

The manager had to apologize.

She wasn’t fired (3 strikes and then your out kind of thing) but with the 2 higher ups (regional manager and regional supervisor) there with her the next day was forced to apologize for what she made me do and wasting my time face to face.

My only only reply “Thank you for your apology but you didn’t waste my time and money. It’s the company’s time and money that you wasted, now unless there’s something else I’ll get to my floors since I have a busy day of vacuuming.” And just left.

She hadn’t given me trouble since.

What an awful manager! I hope she eventually gets fired.

If you enjoyed this story, check out this post about a firm who was fed up with a client denying they’d asked for changes, so they simply stopped following up with them.

Let’s see how Reddit responded to this story.

One person blames management.

Another person shares a similar story.

A fantasy writer weighs in.

This person likes how the story played out.

When your boss tells you to do something, you might as well do it as long as you’re getting paid. Even if you know there might be more important things to do with your time, that’s not really up to you to decide if your boss chooses to fill your day with busy work.

The manager in this story sounds super annoying. I’m glad she was forced to apologize, but it’s disappointing that she wasn’t fired. Maybe there’s a three strikes rule, but if she’s pulled this stunt before, I’m sure there have been more than three strikes. The supervisor just doesn’t know about the other instances.

Hopefully, the manager learned from this situation, but if she didn’t she’ll probably lose her job eventually.