I worked for a water company for twenty-five years and was one of their most productive repair crews — that is until the new manager started.
We had a monthly rota where you were on call for one week out of every four for emergency repairs out of hours.
On the day in question, I started work at 7:30 am on a Friday and finished work at 3:15 am on Saturday, so it was a pretty long shift. I got to work Tuesday morning, and [New Manager] called me into the office.
New Manager: “According to your vehicle tracker, you left the yard at 3:12 am but logged it as 3:15 am. That is an attempt to defraud the company!”
As you can imagine, I was absolutely fuming at this level of bulls***.
Me: “At the time, I was covered in mud and sweat, and I just wanted to get home after completing a monster shift for the company. Are you genuinely making a s***storm over three minutes?”
New Manager: “I’m making you aware that you could be fired for it.”
Cue malicious compliance.
Me: “If we’re going to be this petty, you can take me off the emergency contact list for extra coverage. And I won’t be starting twenty minutes early each day, either; I’ll now be clocking in at exactly 7:30 am, and I shall be heading out at exactly 5:30 pm, no deviation whatsoever. And you can explain to your bosses why productivity is down and you are struggling to get coverage for emergencies. We’ll then see how important your three minutes are when they are costing the company money.”
Little did I realise at the time that the guy’s job was bonus-related and linked to our productivity, which tanked after that because most of the other gangs followed my lead.
Three weeks went by with an absolute s***-show of customer service complaints about their work not being carried out in a timely manner. My productivity dropped from seven jobs per day down to four.
[New Manager] was called in by his bosses to try and explain what the f*** was going on. He tried to spin some BS story that I’d turned all the guys against him for no reason and that this was the result.
Little did he know that I’d actually trained his boss when he first started with the company fifteen years before. He’d wanted to come out and find out what we did and experience how hard the job was, and he’d surprised me by working a full month on the repair crews before going back to the office.
Anyhow, the boss called me in to find out what was really going on, so I explained how [New Manager] had used the tracker to monitor what time I’d left the yard and that I’d guesstimated my finish time and overestimated by three minutes because I was absolutely knackered after working a shift from Hell on call.
[New Manager] was let go for misuse of the tracking system as it was only supposed to be used for emergencies and not monitoring. We also had our on-call system reviewed to cut the hours we had to work.
