Middle management who have been out of the trenches for too long often forget the realities of the jobs they came from.

What would you do if your manager implement completely asinine and ineffective rules? One guy recently shared a hilarious example of this going wrong on Reddit. Here’s what happened.

You want me to use the exact script word for word? Absolutely.

I worked in a call center for a home warranty company for about a year and a half.

If you don’t know what that is, basically people pay a monthly fee and we cover repairs on appliances and home systems.

The calls ranged from totally fine to absolutely miserable depending on the customer and the day.

You never know who or what you’re going to get.

Our team had a supervisor I’ll call Brenda.

Brenda was very by the book, which is fine, but she had one specific thing that drove everyone insane: she was obsessed with the official call script.

Every call had to open and close exactly as written, word for word, no variation, even if the phrasing was awkward or didn’t quite fit the situation.

Anyone who has worked in a call center knows this is torture.

A few of us had developed slightly smoother ways of saying the same things that customers actually responded better to, but Brenda kept monitoring calls and flagging anyone who deviated even a little.

She pulled me aside twice in one week and told me to use the exact script, nothing more, nothing less, or it would go in my review.

So I did exactly that.

That couldn’t have been good for business.

The closing script, ended with the following: “Is there anything else I can assist you with today regarding your home warranty plan or any of the covered systems or appliances included therein?”

Every single call.

Word for word.

It reads like AI before AI was a thing.

Customers would go quiet for a second because it sounds like a legal document, some would laugh, one guy asked me if I was a robot.

The best part was a call near the end of my second week of full compliance.

A customer said “Did you just say included therein?” and I said yes sir that is our official closing.

Sounds like he got a kick out of that.

He laughed for a solid 20 seconds and then asked to speak to a manager to compliment me specifically for being the funniest customer service rep he’d ever talked to.

I transferred him to Brenda.

She never mentioned the script to me again after that.

Sometimes these people need to be put in their place by members of the community. Let’s see how the good folks of Reddit weighed in on this one.

The comments section immediately started roasting the script.

One person shared how they thought the story was going to go.

Another explained the flaw in Brenda’s logic.

Someone else broke down the machinations of call centers.

But one person reminded everyone how unserious it all was.

The customer is supposed to always be right, NOT the supervisor.

If you enjoyed this story, check out this post about a woman who reported her manager to HR after being forced to work 24-hours straight.