Parking has always been kind of an issue at my workplace. We’re landlocked and cannot, per city ordinance, expand out anymore to add stuff. We do have a chunk of area on the northwest corner of the lot that has room to add a small parking area, but that area of the lot is on a hill that slopes down toward the building. In the lawn, there is a drain with a big metal grate that sits at the bottom of the hill for rain and snow melt to go.

On the northwest side of the building is a side entrance that workers can use to come into the warehouse and packing area. Ownership figured adding some additional parking at that spot would let some of the packers park right by an entrance and they wouldn’t have to walk very far.

Ownership and the maintenance team worked together for a while. They all drew up a plan that would best fit for a parking area in the available space we had, and ownership pulled the trigger on getting the work done. A few months back, they got some bids and went with a construction company that would be able to handle all our needs.

Fast forward a few months. Construction has begun.

For the past few days, a construction crew has been in.

Day 1: They’ve been digging up the ground, grading it, and making things nice and smooth. The plans for the construction work call for them to dig up the drain in the lawn, fill it in, and pour blacktop over it.

Day 2: A new long concrete curb is poured in and left to set.

Day 3: The crew comes back and puts down the new blacktop, getting it nice and smooth, and things look great!

Work is done, the new parking area is finished, and now things have to set for a few days before anyone can officially park on it.

Here’s where it gets funny… on a sad and pathetic level.

No one, out of the eight to ten people who had their hands in the drawing up of the new parking area, thought about water runoff. The new parking area has an entrance driveway and an exit driveway, both of which slope downhill into the parking area. The ground right up to the entrance has been poured with new concrete and blacktop, and the area was graded to slope directly to the side entrance. This leaves water from rain or melting snow to build up and run into the building.

This $20,000 to $30,000 job was set up to fail because maintenance and ownership did not think to include a drain for water runoff. They had the construction company remove and fill in the original runoff drain but never had them add a new one.

Now, maintenance has to dig up new concrete and blacktop and then dig through the grass leading to the closest drain-off point. We’ll need to pay for the construction company to come back out and pour new concrete again and fix the blacktop.

You can’t make this stuff up.

I’m not an engineer, and I don’t work in construction, but I know why roads have a crown in them, and I understand why there’s a slight downward grade in parking lots that leads to a drain. You need a spot for water runoff to go!

I was working at a tech support job. I was very self-motivated, I like solving problems and I like working with computers. I read any SOP (Standard Operating Procedure) I could get my hands on (which wasn’t too many at that time), and I constantly asked questions to senior techs that had been working there for a while.

After about eighteen months at the job, I was promoted from Tier 1 to Tier 2. When I was a Tier 1, I was the official go-to guy for all Tier 1 techs to get information on how to handle issues that all the Tier 1 techs should know for resolving. I was basically a trainer for Tier 1 techs, helping them learn the easy stuff so it wouldn’t get escalated to Tier 2.

Most Tier 2 techs were fairly new employees, but we had a handful that had been Tier 1 techs longer than I had been working at the company. After a few days as a Tier 2 tech, I started to notice that a lot of Tier 1 techs were constantly struggling with a simple task that they should all know how to do based on escalated tickets I’d been doing. It was a task that would take about two minutes to fix and get the customer off the phone fast, resolving the issue.

While I was the go-to guy for Tier 1 techs, I was also trying to alleviate the unnecessary tickets pushed to Tier 2, and this one simple task was a great learning experience for all the Tier 1 techs to know. This way, the actual harder issues that took a lot more time were only coming to the senior techs so we could keep within our SLAs (Service Level Agreement).

I took the time to write up an SOP about the issue and step-by-step instructions on how to resolve the issue. I emailed out the SOP to all the Tier 1 techs, and I copied the help desk manager. I also flagged all the emails I sent to notify me when the email was read because a lot of Tier 1 techs would glance at emails and then claim they had never gotten any email. This way, they couldn’t say they didn’t get the email.

As the day dragged on, I had my list of Tier 1 techs, and I checked off their names when I got confirmation emails that they had read my email. About two-thirds of Tier 1 had read it as the day wound down and I headed home. I figured by the time I got to work the next day, the other third of the Tier 1 techs would have read the email.

I showed up at work the next day, and I saw that almost all Tier 1 techs had read my email. As I was just about to start my day, the help desk manager wanted to talk to me about the SOP.

Manager: “I saw that SOP you emailed out. I like it, but I wanted to let you know that this isn’t your job, and I don’t want you sending any more mass emails out to your team members. If you have something important to send out, you give it to me first, and I’ll decide if it’s something everyone else needs to know.”

Me: “No one else is creating SOPs for problems or helping other techs out… but if that’s what you want, okay. I won’t send out group emails anymore.”

Manager: “I also see a lot of Tier 1s coming to you. They don’t need to be coming over and bothering you. If they have an issue with a ticket, they can escalate it to Tier 2. I don’t want to see them constantly getting up to talk to you.”

Me: “All right, I’ll let them know.”

Manager: “Thank you. Go ahead and get yourself logged in.”

I had worked with enough crappy managers to know that [Manager] wanted to take credit for work he didn’t do; that’s why he wanted me to send any SOPs I created to him first. He was always looking to take credit for something to look good to upper management. I don’t like people taking credit for my work, but at the same time, I was not looking to stand in the spotlight and hope to get an “Attaboy!” I just genuinely wanted to help my coworkers out so I wouldn’t have to bust my butt picking up their slack; it was a win-win for all the techs on the help desk.

Seeing as how I was shot down, I figured I’d do exactly what my manager asked for.

As the day went on, I had a lot of pissed-off Tier 1 techs because they weren’t getting any help on issues like they usually did when they came to me. They’d approach me to ask me questions, and I’d tell them that management didn’t want me talking to them anymore and that they needed to go back to their desks. This meant that easy issues were getting pushed to Tier 2 and not getting handled fast enough for their SLA.

A build-up of tickets and failed SLAs started to plague the help desk over the next few weeks, and [Manager] was getting in hot water with upper management because of it. Now the company wanted Tier 2 techs to put in eight hours a week of mandatory overtime until the backlog was cleared. This happened over and over again for months, and [Manager] was getting reamed about it constantly.

With [Manager] in charge, I never went out of my way again to help my coworkers so they could further learn and grow by writing up SOPs for easy tasks or talking with Tier 1 techs to help them out. I let them flounder and get frustrated, and they would eventually leave because they couldn’t get help with their job.

Management always wondered why the retention rate of Tier 1 techs was so abysmal and why they had such crappy times on their SLAs and metrics for such simple problems.

Eventually, [Manager] was let go and a good manager came in. I ended up being the Tier 2 lead and was given the green light to manage my time as seen fit to help other Tier 2 and Tier 1 techs, and any SOPs I wrote up weren’t questioned.

After ten years of working for myself as a graphic designer and marketing consultant, I became disenchanted with having to chase after clients to collect my paycheck and sought a typical nine-to-five job. I interviewed for a position as a marketing manager with a company that I seemed like a great fit. During my interview, the CEO asked me what programs I use to “draw.”

Me: “Uh, I usually work in Illustrator, because vector graphics are scalable.”

Client: “Oh, that’s good. Not many people would understand that or know that.”

He offered me the position and I accepted.

A few weeks into the job, when discussing a project with the same CEO, he asked how I was going to prepare a specific piece of marketing collateral. It included the creation of new logos and would need to be sent to a printer in .eps format. I told him I was going to use Illustrator. He replied in a tone that was a unique cross of amusement, sneering condemnation, and anger.

Client: “No. People don’t know how to use Illustrator, and there isn’t anything you can do in Illustrator that you can’t do in Microsoft Word. Use that.”

About 95% of our business is done online, and our products are shipped to the customers. As part of the process, the warehouse team will pick and pack the box and then process the shipping label. Our team then processes the invoice to make sure all the money’s good and something didn’t slip through. Then, it goes back to the warehouse to be finalized. It’s not the most efficient system, but it definitely cuts down on mistakes… usually.

As of late, though, the warehouse has been “getting in gear” later and later in the day. True, they still get everything processed, but now it puts a time crunch on us, since our team is also in charge of entering the orders, so we end up not getting that done because we’re too busy invoicing. The shipping manager insists that we’re exaggerating and it’s not so bad, so I get permission to run a few reports, which my boss takes into the next meeting.

This isn’t counting high-priority or special request orders, of which there are only a couple per day at most.

Monday: 10 orders picked at 12:00 pm, 21 orders picked at 1:00 pm, 29 orders picked at 2:00 pm, 42 orders picked at 3:00 pm. The first label was generated at 3:30 pm.

Tuesday: 8 orders picked at 12:00 pm, 16 orders picked at 1:00 pm, 35 orders picked at 2:00 pm, 47 orders picked at 3:00 pm. The first label was generated at 3:47 pm.

Wednesday: 15 orders picked at 12:00 pm, 31 orders picked at 2:00 pm, 45 orders picked at 3:00 pm, 57 orders picked at 4:00 pm. The first label was generated at 4:07 pm.

Thursday “didn’t count” because we were having system problems in the morning that affected the whole company.

By the time they had the meeting on Friday at 3:00 pm, there were “only” 32 orders picked, and we hadn’t gotten any orders back to invoice.

I wasn’t privy to the conversation, but the muffled shouting of the confrontation between the office manager, the warehouse manager, and the shipping team made its way from the office in the warehouse into the main office for a good fifteen minutes afterward.

Weirdly, the next week, we started getting labels earlier in the day.

A coworker of mine was sent to a remote site to help with a project. He caught the red-eye flight to the location, the site manager picked him up and drove him to the site, he changed into work clothes and punched his card into the site proper… and the customer called the site manager to say that the job was postponed indefinitely.

Well, it happens. So, the site manager gave him some menial tasks such as supervising another team while he dealt with the repercussions of the cancelled job. He came back a couple of hours later.

Site Manager: “I have you covered for tonight. You can have dinner at my place, sleep in the guest room at [Other Coworker]’s house, and tomorrow, in the morning, you’ll catch the flight back home.”

Then, the site manager’s phone rang, and he had a very angry discussion with someone at the other end.

Site Manager: “They want you back by this evening no matter what. They changed the booking to this afternoon’s flight, which more than doubled the price. I have a meeting with the customer this afternoon that I must attend in person, so I have to take a guy off the team to drive you back to the airport.”

My coworker changed into civvies, and then another coworker drove him to the airport and he took the evening flight, getting home well past midnight. On the following day, he was assigned… to PTO.