Jeez, talk about throwing someone under the bus…

But don’t fret, folks!

Because this story from Reddit has a happy ending!

Read on and get all the details below.

Sign off under my name when I’m on vacation? I’ll report you to Congress.

“Not my story, but a family member’s from when he worked for the FDA.

A while ago, he knew a guy who we’ll call Rick back when they worked for the FDA.

At the time (and maybe still today, who knows) the FDA had a policy that whoever approved a medication application – which were all hard copies at the time – needed to manually sign off on the application to ensure they knew what they were doing, otherwise it was the kind of violation that other, much nastier parts of the government would immediately get involved in.

If anyone is wondering why this was such a big deal, look up Frances Kelsey and the whole thalidomide crisis.

He wasn’t having it…

One day Rick gets an application on his desk, but it doesn’t even follow the proper application procedures, so there’s absolutely no way he can approve it. It’s his last day before vacation, so he decides to leave it and formally reject it once he’s back.

A week or two later, Rick gets back from vacation to find out that – much to his surprise – the application has been approved, ostensibly by him.

Wow…

Now obviously this is impossible, so he does some digging and asks around, only to find out that his own boss has approved it for some reason, but didn’t manually sign off on it.

He takes the hard copy application to his boss’s office and requests to know why the boss approved it under his name when it wasn’t even filled out correctly. Boss is evasive and refuses to give a proper answer, and basically laughs Rick off when Rick tries to tell him that he’s not on board with a clearly incorrect application getting approved under his name.

Now Rick is a good employee, and so of course he’s obliged to follow the rules. The rules say that because the boss never manually signed off, this needs to be reported.

But Rick is also a nice guy, and he doesn’t want to report his boss and get him in trouble without giving his boss a chance to fix it without getting investigated for the serious violation it is, even though this is only the latest incident in a history of his boss not appreciating Rick’s expertise.

This was escalating!

So Rick decides to send an email to his boss’s bosses. In fact, he sends an email to his entire department informing them of his boss’s mistake, kindly letting them know that as per the rules, he will be informing Congress (yes, that Congress) of the violation, as the rules actually state he should do.

Is it overkill? Probably.

But the medication application is immediately rescinded and Rick’s boss gets rapidly hustled into a meeting with all his bosses.

This isn’t the first time Rick’s been treated poorly despite being a valuable employee, so he retires a week later, and – due to the FDA’s retirement policies – gets government health insurance and a stipend for the rest of his life because of how long he’s worked for them.

Boss was “retired” fairly soon after as well, but without the benefits, if you know what I mean.”

Check out how Reddit users reacted.

This person spoke up.

And another reader weighed in.

That was a really bad move on his boss’s part.

If you liked that story, check out this post about a group of employees who got together and why working from home was a good financial decision.