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When you are in the military, you are often asked to perform certain tasks that might not make sense to you at the time.

What would you do if your commanding officer made you inventory certain equipment repeatedly because the results didn’t match what he wanted to see?

That is what happened to the soldier in this story, so he kept conducting the exact same inventory over and over again until he found a way to let the higher-ups know what was happening. Once they learned of the issue, his commanding officer and several others were fired.

I think that he handled this frustrating (and very wasteful) situation perfectly. Read through the full story below and see if you agree.

Was forced to do a task. Got my entire Chain of Command fired.

I’ve been serving in a certain military branch for 5 years and I’m nearing the end of my contract.

Are these things being stolen?

So, the “give a care” is completely gone. I’m in charge of inventory of specific pieces of equipment. Smaller pieces that are used by many people at my job.

From time to time these pieces “disappear”. Most of the time that just means things are misplaced, but we just got out of a certain period where we had MANY hired contractors at our job that tend to take things.

I bet he could get in real trouble.

Now every once and a while we conduct an inventory of these pieces of equipment for accountability reasons. When we lose things, it looks very bad on my work. More specifically, bad on my bosses.

So, I prepared the inventory and was startled by the amount of missing pieces. I did everything I needed to do and presented the inventory to my boss.

The numbers aren’t going to change, sir.

He didn’t believe we had so many pieces missing and asked for me to inventory them again. So I did, got the same number, and put the inventory in his inbox.

Few months go by and I get the same thing. “There can’t be that many! Do another one.” So, I’m very compliant and do it again, and again…..and again.

Oh, now it is starting to make sense.

This gets dragged on over a year and I’m starting to notice something. My boss is about to leave soon and he is deliberately pushing this off to the next guy to cover himself.

So, last week I was sleeping since I work nights and I’m woken up. My boss tells me I have to do a specific survey with my co-workers that will get sent up to the head honcho.

Surveys like this can be very valuable.

This survey allows the small guy to have a voice directly to the top. I tell him that I have the night watch, but he doesn’t care and demands I go and do this survey.

Fine. Before the survey starts our boss tells us we need to be completely honest and all these surveys are anonymous.

Hey, he wanted him to be honest.

Rad. I wrote down what had been happening with the inventory and directed where they could find the documentation of the done inventories.

Fast forward to yesterday. All my bosses are fired and now I’m reporting to new people who are now fixing the issues with the inventory.

Someone who is telling his direct reports to waste this much time should be careful about telling them to be honest on a survey.

Read on to see what other people think about this fun story.

I believe this for sure. So much stuff goes missing.

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This would get old quickly.

What a crazy waste of taxpayer money.

Oh, I hope this isn’t what was missing.

Good use for critical equipment.

All he did was follow orders, but his commanding officer never expected this result. I love to see when something actually goes right with the military like this.

There is so much wasted money that goes through the military that it is hard to believe. Stories like this make you see how it could happen.

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Author

Michael Levanduski