I used to work as a supervisor of a security team at a large industrial facility. I had a good relationship with the manager (we will call him Dave) until he appointed his friend as a middle manager (we will call him Steve) between the supervisors and himself.
I did not have a good relationship with Steve at all, and suddenly, Dave started rejecting ideas, suggestions, and requests out of hand. The friendly guy I used to sit down and chat with regularly became standoffish and outwardly hostile at times.
The staff all noticed this as well and would frequently comment that they didn’t know what I’d done to Dave and Steve, but it was clear that I was being “bullied” all of a sudden.
It’s entirely fair to say that I couldn’t do right for doing wrong, and every little thing I did or did not do resulted in a lengthy email conversation with Dave and Steve. There is a lot I could add to this, but for the sake of brevity, I’m going to move on to the point of my story.
The site we had to patrol was about five square miles, so vehicles were provided to allow us to patrol effectively and carry equipment and personnel to the required locations.
Part of my duties at the start of each shift was ensuring that the vehicles had not been damaged during the previous shift and that all vehicles contained the required levels of equipment.
The first patrol went out the moment our shift started, and as this was a regulatory requirement, it could not be delayed or skipped.
This was the start of a night shift, so it was dark. Very dark. We had Maglite torches, but after six years of use and abuse, they weren’t exactly brilliant.
I didn’t find any new damage, so I recorded that the vehicles were okay and noted their mileage on our check sheets.
The next night, when I came in, I had an email from Dave with a very angry tone, demanding to know why my team had damaged one of the vehicles during the previous night. Apparently, the vehicle looked as if it had been reversed into a wall.
I immediately went to check the vehicle and found… two extremely small divots in the rear bumper. I found them not by looking, but by feeling the bumper. I simply could not see them at all using the light available to me at the time.
I then asked everyone on my team, and all of them insisted that they had not even used the vehicle. I checked the vehicle check sheets and found, true to my team’s word, that the mileage on the day shift’s sheet was identical to the mileage on the night shift’s sheet.
The vehicle had not been moved.
I sent an email back to Dave informing him that the vehicle had not been used by us and apologised for missing the damage; however, the lighting had made it extremely difficult to spot.
This was my last shift before my scheduled days off, so I was certain that Steve would be pushing Dave to punish me for “something” by the time I returned.
Sure enough, on my first day back, I was summoned to Dave’s office for what we British politely refer to as a “b*llocking.”
Dave insisted that he could see the damage in the dark and could actually spot it from about ten metres away. For context, all of my guys had been shown the damage, and every one of them, without fail, had said, “Where?” when I pointed it out at close range.
Not only that, but there was now additional damage that I hadn’t spotted, and my team was supposedly responsible for that as well!
Luckily, my boss had included a photograph of the damage I had missed, such as a very light scratch.
For Dave and Steve, however, this was enough to justify being punitive towards me and my team. They told me that unless a culprit was found and named, I would be held personally responsible and would have to “pay the insurance excess to get it fixed.”
Dave also insisted that the lighting was more than sufficient to spot any damage to the vehicles.
I told Dave that this was ridiculous and that he couldn’t enforce financial penalties over damage to a vehicle that had, again, not been used by my team.
Dave was insistent, though:
Dave: “It is your job to report 100% of the damage on the vehicles, or you will be held responsible.”
At this point, something clicked in my mind. Luckily, Dave decided to back up his instruction with an email, which Steve was CC’d into.
The next shift, I refused to allow my team to use the vehicles until they had all been fully checked: inside, outside, underneath, mechanically, and for equipment levels.
Each vehicle took about two hours.
I photographed every single small bit of damage I found, no matter how insignificant it was or whether it had been reported previously. Remember, the instruction was to report 100% of the damage, not 100% of the unreported damage.
I sent it all in an email to Dave, with a text description of the nature and location of the damage for each photograph.
There were 162 photographs in total.
The first patrol could not be skipped, so I had to send one of my officers out on foot to patrol the site. This meant that the site patrol took nearly three hours, and he was not available to fulfil other duties afterward.
It’s worth noting at this point that my team also saw this as a direct attack on them, rather than just on me, so they were fully supportive of the measures I was taking.
This resulted in the site shift manager demanding answers. I was able to tell him about Dave’s instructions and explain why I was having to send officers out on foot.
I had (and still have) a great relationship with all of the site shift managers, so while he was frustrated, he understood the predicament I had been put in, especially when the instructions were shown to him in black and white.
This resulted in a financial penalty for my company.
Dave was off the next day, so I did the exact same thing again, with the exact same number of photographs, all taken again during a fresh inspection.
On the night shift after that, I came to work to find Dave waiting in the office for me. I was allowed to finish my handover with the off-going supervisor before Dave shut the door and refused to let me leave before discussing why he had received multiple emails totalling over 800 MB (I hadn’t compressed or reduced the size of the photographs) how the company had received a financial penalty, and why the regulatory body was coming to speak to him.
I reminded him that he had demanded that I report 100% of the damage to the vehicles and that this had taken time. I couldn’t allow any member of the team to use any vehicle until it had been checked, as there could be financial penalties involved.
Frustrated, Dave pointed out that many of the pictures were too dark to see anything anyway, so most of the photographs were pointless.
I apologised for the lighting but pointed out that he had said the lighting was more than sufficient to spot any damage, so he should be able to see the damage I had reported easily.
Dave insisted that I had deliberately misinterpreted his instructions and that he would be taking the matter to a disciplinary.
I informed him that this was no problem. If he could just let me know the date and time, I would inform my union representative, who had been fully apprised of the situation and was 100% behind my suggestion that I report every single tiny bit of damage to the vehicles.
Dave was ultimately left with no choice but to drop any attempt to discipline me, and he left Steve to deal with me from that point on.
Steve then took up the role of disciplinarian for the next three months, until I left the job. However, every time he tried, I was able to shut it all down due to briefings with my union representative.
I left the job in February 2019 and still, to this day, receive complaints from members of staff who remained there about how terrible the job has become because of Dave and Steve.
