When you work for a larger company, you will generally have specific procedures to follow when it comes to fixing problems with hardware.

What would you do if your boss said to follow those procedures and you shouldn’t get her involved with them at any point?

That is what happened to the pharmacy tech in this story, so he followed her instructions, which meant a problem didn’t get fixed for weeks and ended up costing thousands more than it should have.

You just want me to submit tickets, no exceptions? Okay.

So back in October, we noticed our drive thru drawer was slowing down and the last time this happened it basically meant it needed to be cleaned/lubed up again since we use it a lot.

Sounds easy enough.

What we usually have to do to get any traction and action is submit a ticket online so it can be logged, and hopefully worked on.

Now I say hopefully because, well… the system is bad. You can submit tickets for anything for software issues, slowness with internet, physical issues that have to be fixed, etc, but getting some action for 80% of anything you submit requires some luck and hopefully getting someone who wants to help you out on the other end.

Sometimes you have to go around the normal systems.

To counter this and make things go smoother, we’d typically get in touch with management and they’d check in on the tickets as well so it would hopefully get taken care of sooner and not get higher on the severity list, which then may lead to an emergency and extra billing.

We did have a great assistant manager that I could talk with and work together on this and we had great rapport, but he left early November because the new-ish store manager of a year basically drove out a lot of the old staff with severe micromanaging and blocking them on promotions, and she was a stickler on costs on the store.

She just wants to follow the established procedure.

So, since he was gone and it’s just the store manager, I tried to talk to her about it and give her a heads up and was met with “Just submit the tickets and resubmit it if nothing happens.”

So, just to make sure all was good, I copied the ticket numbers, sent an email and copied my pharmacy manager on it. I made sure to resubmit the tickets and also ask “So you don’t want me to tell you verbally or on email from here on about any ticket issues, pharmacy problems or delays, correct?”

Fair enough, he has it in writing.

She replied back yes, and so I didn’t.

So back to the drive thru. We had someone come out and check on the drawer, they said it would have to get looked at for replacement, so I made a ticket, put in all the info in that was needed and submitted it.

Just following the manager’s instructions.

Didn’t say anything, just let the people do their job they were supposed to do. Resubmitted every 48 hours as the systems allows you to “bump” it if nothing has been looked at and did that for about 10 days with no action on replacement.

Well, day 12 comes around and I opened that morning, and as I was taking care of someone, the shelf doesn’t move.

At least they were able to help the customer.

Had to have them come inside to get finished up and we had to shut down the lane. So by this point, since it’s down and we really need some movement on this, we submit a ticket for an emergency to get this on the record and addressed.

When a claim is done as emergency, we’re basically guaranteed to get someone in there in about 2-4 hours, however it comes with all the charges that would make a frugal manager flip out about, with fees, premium time costs for service, etc, and then ordering the parts was done automatically, instead of needing the manager approval because the need was there.

Oh, now she is interested.

So, you best believe when the manager got the heads up that an emergency claim was put in, she nearly ran over to the pharmacy to ask why we didn’t tell her something was happening, and I gently reminded her the she said herself in an email to not bother her with issues and submit tickets accordingly, and since it had been almost two weeks and we now cannot operate efficiently, we now had to take this route.

I think when we do emergency options our district manager also gets an email, but I’m not sure. I didn’t hear anything from him though.

This is going to be expensive.

The fallout was a huge bill for the store, since the system we had to get replaced was from a company that initially put the system in when the store opened in the early 2000’s.

So, they had to custom make this drive thru replacement cause it wasn’t the current model they produce, have multiple visits to prep for the install, and as a cherry on top, the store got to hear a lot of complaints about drive thru being shut down for so long, and if the scores don’t look good there, bonuses get lowered too.

Wow, that is a lot.

I saw an invoice of some of the work and the guy who was working on things was chill, but I think he quoted the drive thru production around 25k cause they had to put a rush on it, and that’s not adding in the service fees and more.

So, a fix that could have casually be started at the first ticket and followed up on and finished sooner and for less cost, ended up costing maybe 3-4x the amount just due to the fees.

Maybe she should have listened to him from the start.

Needless to say, the store manager has now conveniently asked me a few times here and there if there’s any tickets in the system that need to be looked at.

She’s not my boss anyway, but that email chain is definitely saved in case it needs to be sent to our district manager if she thinks she can blame me for something in the future.

This is always good advice.

Anyway, moral of the story is – take care of your problems early and listen to the workers and you’ll save money.

Why do some managers think that ignoring their employees is the best way to get things done? It never works out well.

Read on to see what the people in the comments have to say about it.

This is a fact.

There are a lot of problems in this system.

I love this.

This is a very good saying.

It really is that simple.

Just following your instructions boss.

If you liked that story, check out this post about an oblivious CEO who tells a web developer to “act his wage”… and it results in 30% of the workforce being laid off.