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A good supervisor will admit when an employee is more knowledgable about a certain subject area than he is. Some supervisors let their egos get in the way and pretend to be an expert when they aren’t even if they have an expert who works for them. That’s a problem.

That’s why I have to give some credit to the supervisor in this story. He doesn’t know very much about computers, so when there’s a kiosk with an error message he doesn’t understand, he turns to his computer expert employee to handle the call to tech support.

The supervisor was left amazed at how easily the problem was resolved when the employee knew exactly how to describe it.

Keep reading for all the details.

The clueless supervisor

I’ve worked for my company as front line operations for over a decade.

I’ve been using computers for over 2 decades, and consider myself an advanced user and pretty knowledgable about tech issues.

I enjoy working with our IM and Tech departments cause I know how to communicate issues with them.

Well onto the story.

There’s a problem with one workstation.

Our kiosk shared workstation has been having issues since before Christmas. It seems every week there is an update for windows 10 being pushed through the network and when that happens all background processes slow to a crawl on our machine.

My coworkers aren’t that great with technology and I know they would reboot out of frustration and It began Interfering with the boot sector on the disk.

Every time on boot the smart disk hard drive error screen would come up, and then eventually let you boot into windows.

Well last week, the hdd decided it was done booting and decided to go into a repair bootloop. Us users couldnt recover the installation manually due to network lockouts so a call to IM was required.

The supervisor let OP handle the situation.

So, to the supervisor, who is very clueless about computers and how they operate and what certain screens mean. So that meant that I got to be on the call to IM with him to describe the problem. Couldn’t do it myself “cause he wanted to learn”. Fine.

Call them up, introduce ourselves then he puts me on. I had barely said the word smart disk drive error and bootloop when the tech on the phone started chuckling and immediately said he’d send out a new computer asap.

That’s what I wanted to hear, mainly to get the supe out of my hair.

The look of shock on his face as to how easily the situation was resolved was priceless and now we should have a newer kiosk that runs wayyyyyy better.

That was easy!

Let’s see how Reddit responded to this story.

This person shares their diagnosis.

Another person thinks they should’ve gotten a replacement a lot sooner.

Apparently, this person thinks “supervisor” is a synonym for “confused.”

What I like about this story is that the supervisor let the employee handle the situation because he knew and admitted that the employee was more knowledgable about computers. That’s the sign of a good supervisor.

Instead of pretending that he knew what he was talking about and getting it wrong, he delegated to the person who actually understood what was happening, was able to explain it, and was able to get the problem resolved. Well done!