Some timing seems ironic, and other times you have to wonder if it was actually a plan.

In this story, we hear about a tech support trainee who isn’t 100% up to speed on the role yet. In fact, it seems that he made a really big mistake.

But, ironically or possibly even intentionally, he wasn’t there to take the blame.

Keep reading for all the details and to decide if you think it was an accident or on purpose.

The Norman Chronicles, Part Two: Unexpected Overtime

Norman was a 23 yr old trainee with, it turned out, 18 months working for local IT company. After part one where he showed his ineptitude, I began to wonder if he was up to the task.

Norman had now been with us me for 2 months, and was learning well. He had expert knowledge of the Office Apps and of Windows, but the networking and server aspect of our job were not his strongest point.

Norman made an announcement.

He walked in to the office for the start of his late shift, and promptly started to tell everyone that he’d just applied for the job in the infrastructure team. Servers and Networks.

I reminded him that he had to have 6 months in post before he could apply for any other role.

But he said that it didn’t matter as firstly he was an internal candidate (internal candidates always get to the first interview stage) and secondly, he was a minority.

And this is where I started to take my dislike to him.

Here’s what OP found annoying…

He always considered himself English, and when he spoke his accent was from Leeds, where he grew up and not from the Caribbean island where he was born.

Now, he was using his race to exploit a loophole because the town we lived in was predominantly White European, and he wasn’t, and the council had a minorities quota to fulfil.

I offered to give him a quick test on our networking side and he agreed.

He did better than expected.

To my surprise, he got a pretty decent score but it wasn’t the really tricky stuff.

One area that let him down was our tricky permissions that we had on some of the servers.

I fed this back to him, and we continued the daily fixing of stupid user issues.

Yikes! That had to hurt.

It got to break time in the afternoon, when he came back from the kitchen and promptly tripped on his own shoelace, dropping his boiling hot tea down his chest.

First Aid turned up and sent him to the A & E unit at the hospital where he was treated for a superficial burn.

He’d been out the door 30 seconds when we started getting calls from frantic users that followed these lines.

So. Many. Problems!

User: I can’t access my S drive.

Another User: I should have access to this folder, but it’s not there any more.

Yet Another: I’m getting access denied errors saving my word doc to

I checked the server as the calls waiting jumped from 2 to somewhere nearer 100.

OP and his boss researched the problem.

There were no permissions set to any folder on the data structure past the root folder.

The boss recorded a quick message on the call queue and parked all held calls there so that they heard the message, while we looked at it.

Norman had resolved an issue where someone needed access to a folder. All the relevant forms had been completed, and his notes said that he had assigned a group access to a set of folders.

I could see the group, I could see the users within it, but I couldn’t see the permissions.

He called the infrastructure team.

Me: Hey, Infrastruture team, we can restore permissions only right?

Infrastruture: Sure. Server is it?

Me: Yup. Only admin access to anything the other side of root. Can we find out who reset them?

Infrastructure: No. It’s not currently logged. Who was the last person working on it?

I bet you can guess.

Me: Norman.

Although nothing could be proved, it was speculated that he accidentally removed all access by not reading the permissions he was setting.

We also hoped that he hadn’t deliberately injured himself to get out of the clean-up, but the boss autorised overtime to clean it up.

Norman came back after two days and protested his innocence but then again, so did everyone else and he was the last one with that call…

This is interesting timing. I really hope Norman wouldn’t injure himself on purpose to avoid taking the blame.

Let’s see how Reddit responded.

This is a good point.

Another person shares the correct way to handle it when you mess up.

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.

This person has a question.

I really hope he didn’t burn himself on purpose, but I’m leaning towards thinking he probably did. The timing is too ironic.

It’s pretty bad when you’d rather go to the hospital than take the blame for a mistake at work.

I don’t think he’s cut out for that job.