One Worker Raised An Obvious Problem With Being Assigned To Multiple Locations At Once, But His Manager Refused To Offer Any Real Solution
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Bad management gets creative when impossible workloads still somehow come with absolute expectations.
An IT technician is told to personally check meeting rooms scattered across huge distances while also keeping executive meetings running.
Instead of arguing about physics, he finds a way to make the reports show exactly what management wants to see.
Let’s see how this one went down.
You want me in 3 places at once? You got it!
A little over a decade ago, I worked up in the oil patch in Northern Canada on different IT contracts.
The current contract I was on was maintaining virtual meeting rooms.
The oil company had decided that if you didn’t need to be on site, they would move your job south and pay you 25 to 50 % less. When you needed to meet with people on site, you’d book a meeting and all is golden.
The IT company I was with was amazing, but they lost the contract to an international IT company “A”, servicing oil company “B”.
He was lucky.
I was one of the fortunate few that got a job with IT company A; which was so unbelievably stupid. Most of the rest of the talent that had been working IT under contracting companies for 10 plus years took a walk.
I think the management literally sat down and said “What’s the absolute worst way we can mess things up”, and then they did that.
They hired a bunch of fresh out of college or unqualified people and within a few months our ticket count had gone from averaging around 50 at any given time to well over 600 and growing with no end in site.
This is all well and good, and we got chewed out for the ticket count being high, we got chewed out for bringing it down low, because our ticket closure rates weren’t similar, it didn’t really matter; good, bad, we got chewed out.
Company A was hemorrhaging money to Company B. Like every ticket outside of the allowed failures that was a failure and not resolved was a fine, and there were multiple sites.
This is not sustainable.
Basically IT company A ended up paying Oil company B to do IT for them.
Most salaried oil company employees who had computer problems took weeks or months to get problems solved, but they were salaried and it didn’t affect oil coming out of the ground, so it didn’t matter.
Except for the meeting rooms.
Managers couldn’t have virtual meetings with staff, things were getting delayed, and it was going to affect oil coming out of the ground, so it was a problem.
The 12 of us working there were given full time work and 6 vehicles. The supervisor took one for himself for driving too and from town and wouldn’t let anyone use it during the day, so that left 5 vehicles.
Specializing job duties can be a good idea.
It used to be that we were dedicated to a specific type of work, but now everyone did everything, and we were expected to just “Check the meeting rooms” as we drove by, or “if we had a ticket in that building”.
So all the meeting room maintenance was just not being done and the new guys that would get a ticket to facilitate a virtual meeting of the vice presidents, directors, etc… of the oil company would just not show up and the meeting would fail.
During this time I had been loudly and constantly complaining about our inability to “check meeting rooms in buildings that we don’t have tickets for when we don’t have a vehicle to get there anyways”, a coworker told me that one of IT company A’s managers had come North to review the situation, was at lunch, saw one of my emails, said “I’m not reading that”, tossed down his phone and ate his lunch.
So I just gave up, gave in, and did what I was told.
Hard work often doesn’t pay off.
I had been busting my butt to keep everything working for all the execs of oil company B for months, and it was time to “cue malicious compliance”.
There was a building in town with meeting rooms, our building on site was around 45 minutes North. Every morning, rather than being on site and working at 7, I would be at the town building at 8, checking a meeting room, stocking it with supplies, and fixing problems; except it wasn’t because it was in use and I couldn’t get in.
So, I would drive North and get to our building around 9 and start my day, do a few tickets, be one of the only ones that the oil execs saw that could actually make meetings run successfully, and then leave at 2 to go check a meeting room I couldn’t get into, and then go home.
This lasted about a month before the oil execs called in my supervisor, manager, and manager’s manager and said something along the lines of “Put this guy on doing just meeting rooms and meetings”.
I bet he was very happy with this.
I got called into a meeting with my supervisor, most of my other work was taken away, I was given my own vehicle, and I was told to check all the meeting rooms every week (a 4 person job) and to take care of all of the exec meetings.
I told my supervisor that it wasn’t physically possible for me to be in 3 or 4 places at once to check all the meeting rooms.
He didn’t care, he didn’t care how I did it, just get it done.
So I got it done.
Every time we checked a meeting room, we had to scan a QR code with a company phone that we would then export into Excel and submit as the rooms we checked.
Every minute of every day I clicked the scan button and scanned nothing.
At the end of the week I would export to Excel, then get the list of all the room codes, randomize them, paste them in, save, and submit.
He got creative.
Click I’m in town checking a room. 1 minute later Click I’m 30 kilometers North. 1 minute later Click I’m 70 kilometers across the river etc.
I breezed through rest of my stay there, attending exec meetings and keeping them happy, starting late and ending early, with my own dedicate vehicle.
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I applied for a new job, was approved, and just had to wait on the background check; my start date was given at about 6 months out and I was set.
I planned a 3 week vacation at IT company A, months in advance, and then on my last day before vacation, I handed in my three weeks notice and left.
Friends made at work often last a lifetime.
I had made some good friends there, I kept getting invited to the social events for some time, and my understanding from the new people is that they ended up hiring more people, had put 4 people on meeting rooms, and still couldn’t get the work done (because no one ever bothered to learn it).
Eventually the IT company lost the contract.
Why is it that some managers think they can demand the impossible from their employees and assume it will get done? Of course employees will just find a work around like this.
Read on to see what the people in the comments on Reddit say about it.
He deserves it.
It worked out, that’s all that matters.
Usually virtual meeting rooms run smoothly.
If you enjoyed this story, check out this post about a company that didn’t expect their work-from-home policy to result in better time off benefits for their employees.
This commenter is confused.
OP automated the appearance of endless room checks while focusing on the executive meetings that actually mattered and enjoying his new dedicated vehicle.
Management eventually assigned four people to the same work after he left, and the company still ultimately lost the contract.
Turns out being everywhere at once is much easier when nobody checks the map.
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