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Imagine working in tech support for a company. If one of the employees called with a problem you were easily able to solve, would you solve just that one problem, or if you noticed another problem, would you solve that too?

In this story, one tech worker is in this situation and solves both problems; however, he doesn’t tell the caller why he’s doing what he’s doing until after the fact. This leads to an argument over the phone, but the tech worker stands firm.

Keep reading for all the details.

“You don’t have to report this”

The cast for is;

Me: your humble narrator and the hero of this anime.

User: the “brilliant” mind who tried to beat the system

Here’s some background information about the story.

Our story begins on a Thursday morning, and I happen to get a fairly routine call that should’ve been an easy fix.

Keyword: should’ve

The call goes as follows;

Me: Service desk, my name is EonThief, can I have your employee ID number?

User: *provides ID*

Let’s see what the problem is.

Me: Alright sir how can I help you today?

User: My teams isn’t working, I’m getting an error message.

Me: Alright that’s definitely something I can get fixed for you, can I have your 10.98 number?

What we call the assigned local IP of their computers the “10.98 number” to simplify what we’re asking for.

It was actually an easy problem to solve.

Me: Okay sir, can you show me the issue just so I can see if and make sure we’re on the same page?

User: Of course

He proceeds to pull up teams and sure enough he had the error I was expecting. This error is very common and insanely easy to fix on top of it. The fix involves going into Windows settings and removing and re-adding the work/school account.

As I do this I notice a personal account on the machine, this of course is a big no-no so I go ahead and remove it. Not but a few seconds after removing it the user begins to scold me.

The caller was upset.

User: Why did you not ask before removing that account?

Me: Because it’s a personal account and doesn’t need to be on this computer sir per our security policy.

User: But you didn’t ask me why it was there in the first place.

Me: As I mentioned sir, it’s against our security policy regardless of your reason. But I do have to ask why?

The caller explained why he needed that account.

User: I use it for work purposes if the system goes down.

Me: *kinda shocked* Can you repeat that?

User: I use the personal account, that you deleted so rudely, for work if the system goes down so I can keep working.

Now I was shocked by how confident this person was that he was, like he thought he was playing 5D chess in the year 3021 or something. Unfortunately for him, I really enjoy when users are overconfident about fixes they try. Because I really love destroying that confidence.

OP can’t ignore what the caller said.

Me: As I said sir you can’t have that personal account on your device for security reasons, now that I know that you’ve been using said personal account for work purposes I will have to inform your supervisor.

User: *playing it cool* Nah you don’t have to tell my manager.

Me: Unfortunately sir I do, you’ve been breaking security protocol by using that personal account for work purposes. Regardless of any data sent using that email, it still flies in the face of the security policies set by [insert company name here].

OP followed through.

User: *still trying to play it cool* Well if you have to tell them then do it, I know I’m in the right here.

The call ends after I get the users issue resolved, I then got all the necessary information and forwarded it all through the proper channels.

Unfortunately, I don’t know what happened to the user. If I had to guess, I’d say a very light slap on the wrist and a “don’t do it again”.

It’s possible it wasn’t a big deal. Perhaps the caller had permission from his boss to use this workaround. Perhaps not. I guess we’ll never know.

Let’s see how Reddit responded.

This person thinks the caller was lying.

Another person thinks OP probably guessed correctly at the outcome.

Someone who works in Risk Management weighs in.

If you enjoyed this story, check out this post about an employee who was denied a raise for “not being dedicated enough,” but then went on to discover what was really going on behind the scenes.

Another person doesn’t like OP’s attitude.

He did the right thing, but he could’ve told the caller what he was doing instead of arguing with him about it. He could’ve said something like, “I notice you have a personal account on here as well. I’m going to remove that because it is against company policy.” And then remove it. At least the caller wouldn’t be able to ask “What’d you do that for?”

Explaining is better than arguing.