Technology can make all of our lives easier, but I think we can all agree that it can also make our lives more difficult. Apps aren’t always helpful. Sometimes they make life more complicated.

In this story, one employee knows that first hand.

He works as a driver who delivers medication to customers, and he and his coworkers were told that they have to start using the itinerary provided by a certain app.

They tried to explain why this was a problem, but the higher ups making the decisions didn’t care until they saw the consequences for themselves.

Keep reading for the whole story.

You want us to follow the exact times the app says? Ok, we’re happy with the OT pay

My previous job was as a driver for a company that delivered medications.

We had two “branches”: one was delivering to pharmacies, the other was delivering special meds to private citizens. I was a driver on the second branch, along with four other drivers.

The first branch was pretty straightforward. The truck would go to the warehouse, load up and deliver to pharmacies.

But the other branch was quite different.

The second branch was a bit more complicated.

The medications we delivered had special prescriptions and you could get them only from certain government pharmacies.

Also, important for later, the pharmacies didn’t have the same stocks of drugs.

Our daily schedule consisted of visiting at least one of the pharmacies, get the meds and start delivering them and picking the paperwork from the clients for the next day. That meant between 8 to 12 stops every day on a 150 miles radius.

A new rule created a big problem.

Now, the trucks were using an app for their itinerary to maximize their efficiency of their schedule. So, some higher up decided to make us use the same app.

Immediately that produced problems.

First, as I said, the trucker’s job was pretty straightforward. They went to the warehouse and were loaded up in half an hour and on their way.

We, on the other hand, had to visit the pharmacies and wait in line. That could take between 5 minutes to 2 hours in each location.

But that wasn’t the only problem.

Second, and the one already noted by the truckers, was that the app didn’t accommodate for traffic. And while it wasn’t a big problem for the truckers that had four stops per day, for us was a big issue.

When it was first implemented as a test, we (the drivers) immediately saw our times starting to rise.

The first week we used it, no driver finished with less than 90 minutes overtime a day.

We talked about this to our manager and we got permission to not use it.

But that didn’t last long. They had to use the app.

One month later, word came down that we had to use the app and we had to follow the itinerary it provided.

We expressed our complaints to our manager, but he couldn’t do anything about it.

The MC:

Before the app, we started working at 07:40; gathered our paperwork and finding which pharmacy had what medications so we could optimize our routes. The working hours were 08:00 to 16:00. Those twenty minutes were unpaid overtime, but we never asked for it.

The work day got significantly longer.

Now we started exactly at 8. We left the offices at 08:30 at best (from 07:50 before) and followed the exact route the app provided.

That usually meant that instead of hitting the pharmacies just as they opened with the least amount of people waiting, we hit them in the middle of the day with a lot of waiting time.

Instead of finishing our routes at 15:30 to 15:50, we finished at 17:30 at the earliest.

They worked a lot of overtime.

The first department that got wind of the problem was Accounting. They had 5 drivers going from about 3 hours a month of OT to 35 hours of OT.

The higher ups tried to weasel their way out of paying the OT, but when we mentioned that the Labor Department was in our routes, we got paid the OT.

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They kept the app running for another two months before they decided that it costed them too much money and canceled it and we went back to our usual way of maximizing our routes.

At least the higher ups eventually realized their mistake and reversed the decision.

Let’s see how Reddit responded to this story.

One person paraphrases what happened.

This is a good point.

This person isn’t surprised.

If you enjoyed this story, check out this post about a hotel guest that made a scene in the middle of the night, then immediately wished they hadn’t.

Same!

They should still claim the overtime they’re working, but they should stop using the app. Clearly, the work was much more efficient before.

Management often seems to learn from their mistakes, but they could avoid mistakes if they’d listen to their employees.

An app isn’t always the answer.