We all know that the people who actually do the work every day and the people who design the processes needed to complete that work often are not the same person.

Which can be a problem when the processes don’t work, so the workers develop a workaround, and no one knows what’s going on with the other group.

OP worked in a showroom that had a process in place that just wasn’t working.

I work as a sales advisor in a showroom, the company recently went through some changes specifically with the way price tickets are created.

All tickets are to have QR codes linking to the item online (stupid I know), but what makes things worse is that they’ve updated the printing system, so now if a product is not on the website or just hasn’t had it’s QR code linked it will output a script error making it impossible to print that ticket.

To keep work (and sales) flowing, OP came up with her own workaround.

As a result, yours truly has been making tickets from scratch for newer products or products that are just not on the site yet, for the past year.

This was supposed to be just while the other departments got the proper ones made.

Fast forward to last week and I get a email from upper management asking for a list of all the tickets needed for the showroom (a little over 100 tickets at this point).

I do so, as I thought this was just them wanting to make a push to have the rest complete.

Half an hour later and I get a follow up email saying “we need to deal with the issue at the source” questioning why I didn’t inform anyone about the tickets needed.

I did, in fact I’m still waiting for some that I asked for in back in January.

They were also questioning where I even got the template for the tickets from since “they would never give one out.”

When the suits found out, they scolded her and told her to stop.

After responding, I received another email stating that “I should never have done that” as “it looks unprofessional having some tickets with and without QR codes.”

The email ended by saying that I’m to never do this again and that I’m to take the ones that I made down now and put the proper ones up.

This was further reiterated in a meeting between my manager and upper management (he let me know afterwards).

She did, right before she left for a few days.

But would you look at that, the proper price tickets still aren’t made yet and I’m on holiday for a few days.

Oh well better take them down anyway, wouldn’t want to get in trouble for having anything unprofessional up after all.

Whenever I go on holiday I block all work numbers and emails so I’m not bothered, so no idea what was happening until I went in today.

She came back to chaos and apologies.

I walk in and everyone is in a panic since nobody could remember the names and specs of the new ranges and no one could find the tickets I removed (in my locker, took the keys with me so no one could access).

Coworkers start asking me what happened to the tickets and if I could put them back up, I state that it was upper management’s decision and that there was nothing I could do without their approval.

Fast forward to the final couple of hours of the work day and I received a lovely email apologising for their “curt reaction” in the prior email, walking back what they had said and asking me to put the tickets back up until the new ones are created, I was also offered a “secondment to the e-commerce department” to help fix some of the data errors on the website.

Apparently this was due to my co-workers sending complaints to the owner about what had happened and the owner then pressuring upper management to “sort out the situation before it escalated”.

Delicious.

To add why it’s a satisfying conclusion, for me at least, the secondment is a temporary position with increased pay and is more in line with what I actually want to do.

Also yes they asked me to put them back up… but I never said I did it now, did I?

Is Reddit on her side? Let’s find out!

The top comment says the bosses had no idea what they were asking.

It’s never been more obvious.

Sometimes the actual source gets what’s coming to them.

You can just follow the money.

I mean what did they think happened?

I just love it when managers try to blame employees for improving things.

Like…that’s not a bad thing.

If you liked this post, check out this story about an employee who got revenge on a co-worker who kept grading their work suspiciously low.