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One team responsible for tracking vehicle assignments faced a mystery in the office when someone apparently wasn’t doing their job. But who was it?

Each day, office managers were supposed to enter vehicle numbers into scheduling software before exporting the information for dispatchers to reference later. The system had worked for years, making it easy to identify who had been assigned to a specific vehicle if questions ever arose.

When a supervisor requested information about a vehicle assignment from a particular location, however, something seemed very wrong.

Every report showed blank vehicle fields, not just for one day but for every day on record.

The strangest part was that nobody had noticed the problem before.

Read the full story below, and find out what was happening.

End user doing a lot more work to avoid a little bit of work

Every day the office manager is supposed to finalize the shift and then export that to Excel and drop it into a shared folder for the Dispatch team to reference (Dispatch doesn’t have direct access to our database due to domain design choices years ago).

As part of that finalization step, the office manager is supposed to mark what vehicles, if any, were assigned to each person. So if any issues arise, like a ticket from a speed camera, we know who was supposed to be driving that car on that day.

It is also notable that the availability to export to an Excel sheet is locked with a password so it cannot be edited. You have to put the vehicle number into the scheduling software to have it properly show up on the sheet.

Or so we thought.

Something strange was happening.

We had a supervisor call trying to find out which car was driven on a particular day.

Went into the system and pulled the report for their location, and all of the vehicle fields were blank, not only for that day but every day.

Which didn’t make sense, as Dispatch needs those car numbers and would have complained if they didn’t have those.

Tried figuring out what was wrong and why it wasn’t saving, because that surely must be the issue, but it was a fruitless endeavor.

So I looked at the folder snapshots from the day before and noticed something…

Mystery solved.

That location’s schedule export was a PDF file, not an Excel sheet like every other file.

When I opened the file, I saw that the vehicle numbers were handwritten.

The office manager was printing off the sheet (which is frequently multiple pages), handwriting the assigned vehicles, then scanning that back to her e-mail, before dropping that into the file share.

When we asked her why she was doing that exactly, she said “I can just write faster than I can type”.

Can you believe it was the manager all along? Yikes. What did Reddit think?

Yup.

Someone shares a similar story.

A suggestion.

If you enjoyed this post, check out this story about a contractor who flew along way and spent 3 days on a fix only to find a breaker that needed to be flipped.

Another reader chimes in.

This process had been repeated day after day without anyone realizing it.

When asked why she was taking such an elaborate route, her explanation was simple: she believed writing by hand was faster than typing.

This is the kind of situation that people would say is unrealistic in a movie. But here we are.

Having said that, when end users do stuff like this, it’s a sign that something could be improved, usually.