Experienced Lead Technician Knows His Machines Inside And Out, But A New Supervisor Is Insisting He Throw Out Everything He Knows And Follow His Rules
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When you have been working in the same company for a long time – and especially if you have been working in the same role, or department all that time – you will have a very clear and detailed knowledge of how it works. That’s why handover periods are so important as an old employee leaves to be replaced by someone new. Without proper handover procedures – ideally time working beside the employee as well as a detailed handover document – the new employee has to start fully from scratch, and all the tips and tricks that the old employee came up with on the job will leave the company with them.
In this story, the employee is not leaving, but he has been with the company for a long time. He is the lead technician that fixes the machines, and as such he has a very detailed knowledge of each of the machines, their quirks and how to deal with them. But a new supervisor did not know nor understand those machines, nor their systems. But that didn’t stop him from making new rules for them, that ended up costing the company a lot of money.
Read on to find out why.
“Follow the official manual only.” Okay, enjoy the three day downtime
I work in a specialised printing facility handling high-volume industrial presses. These machines are older than I am, and they have a lot of “personality” if you know what I mean.
I’ve been the lead tech here for six years and there are dozens of little tricks we use to keep them running—bits of tape in certain spots, slightly bending a guide rail, or just knowing exactly where to kick it when the paper jams.
Well, we got a new “Technical Training Supervisor” last month who came straight from a corporate office and has never actually stained his hands with grease. He saw me fixing a sensor issue with a bit of cleaning alcohol and a q-tip (a 5 minute fix) and he absolutely lost it.
He told me I was “compromising the integrity of the equipment” and issued a formal directive stating that from now on, every single repair must strictly adhere to the Manufacturer’s Service Maunal. No exceptions, no “field hacks,” or he would write me up for safety violations.
Uh-oh. Read on to find out how this changed things going forward.
Fine. Two days later, the main drive motor on Press 3 threw a standard thermal sync error. Normally, I’d just reset the breaker, wait ten minutes for it to cool, and we’d be back in business.
But the “Official Manual” has a very specific protocol for this error. Step one: completely de-energize the entire power grid for that sector. Step two: Wait 48 hours to ensure “full thermal stabilization of the copper windings.”
Step three: Perform a 12-point diagnostic test that requires a specialized calibration tool we dont even own, meaning we have to order it from the manufacturer in Germany.
I went straight to the supervisor’s office, showed him the error code, and asked if he wanted me to “proceed according to the directive.” He didn’t even look up from his laptop and just said “Follow the book to the letter, thats what it is there for.”
Yikes. Let’s see how this affected the company.
So I did exactly that. I shut down the press, locked out the power, and sat in the breakroom. By the next morning, the floor manager was screaming because we were missing a massive deadline for a major client. The supervisor tried to throw me under the bus, telling the plant manager that I was “refusing to work.”
I just calmly handed over the signed directive he gave me, and the opened manual page that explicitly requires a 48-hour wait and a tool that is currently on a flight from Frankfurt.
The plant manager looked at the supervisor, looked at the manual, and then looked back at the cold, silent machine that should be printing $50k worth of product a day.
The “follow the book” rule was rescinded within the hour, but I insisted on finishing the 48-hour “stabilization period” since the power was already cut and “re-energizing early could cause a fire hazard” according to the safety section. I spent the rest of the week getting paid to read a book while the supervisor got a very loud “re-education” in the main office.
Sometimes you just have to trust your workers.
Especially when said worker has been dealing with the machinery’s particular foibles for years and knows them like the back of their hand.
Especially when you have only just started at the company, and have no idea what is going on here yet.
Let’s see what folk on Reddit made of this.
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This person had experience with similar fixes.
While others were used to bosses stepping in an enforcing protocol where it wasn’t necessary.
If you enjoyed this story, check out this post about an employee who found a way around his company’s denial of company time to study for his Commercial Driver’s License.
Meanwhile, others thought there was a simple answer to this: put the fixes in the documentation.
In this instance, this employee was exactly right with his malicious compliance. Because honestly, the executive might have thought they were doing the right thing and certainly their reasons (largely health and safety based) for doing things by the book were sound. But the truth was, they didn’t realise that there was a clear system here that this technician had been working by for a long time – he knew the machines, and exactly what they needed in a way that the manuals didn’t. And of course the exec didn’t know that, because he hadn’t been in the company’s employment for long enough to.
This just goes to show the danger of trying to make change when you haven’t gotten a real feel for the place yet. And even worse, making change that affects the way expert employees work without even consulting them, or spending even an hour or two working beside them and seeing how their job actually goes. And in focusing on the wrong things, this manager ended up costing the company a lot of money. And that’s wholly on the manager, not the technician.
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