For The Flip, I need to write both an employee handbook and a volunteer handbook. I need your stories of That One Guy.
My theory is that an awful lot of those manuals exist because of incidents where somebody did something stupid but not covered, so the boss rolled their eyes and said, "Ok, Terry, I'll write it down for next time."
So please give me your best dumbass-colleague stories. Think of them as handbook test cases. I'll open source the results!
@williampietri this one is from the gambling industry. But is relevant to any industry where everything is tracked and audited.
We worked in the backend for player loyalty cards and the points tracking system. For pubs, clubs and casinos.
My colleague decided to manually grant himself extra points to his wife’s card at their local pub. When the pub ran their manual adjustment report and noticed an operator name they didn’t recognise. She called into our help line to figure out what was going on. The helpline staff recognised the operator name straight away.
So my colleague lost his job and got instantly walked out of the office. All for enough points that you could have redeemed on a $30 toaster.
@williampietri A few years back, one of our business administration colleagues won an internal prize for realizing significant cost savings on IT services.
Everyone was happy until the internal network at the site went down. Someone called the support company, only to learn that the SLA had recently been revised, and the target to bring the network back up had been changed from 4 hours to 4 weeks.
Everyone ended up working from home for a month.
The version I heard from an ex was "It's all fun and games till somebody gets hit in the nuts with a paint can".
@williampietri A little different, but the same principle. I rented an old house near campus with 3 friends junior year. The lease had rules like:
- No containers of water greater than 1 gallon
- No rollerblading in the kitchen
- DO NOT GO IN THE BASEMENT
Does that mean you could rollerblade in the rest of the house ?
@nickzoic @electrafish @williampietri
You just tweaked my memory of being maybe 11 or 12 or 13 and at the urging of a parent bringing my skateboard (which I was very bad at) to Bronte Creek Provincial Park to practice in the area outside the pool. The rest of the family were off at the farm or something.
Despite how fashionable skateboarding happened to be at the time I was, as mentioned, very bad at it so spent most of 45 minutes falling off my skateboard onto the concrete, usually catching myself with my feet or hands. (It was the 1980s and values around padding were different.)
The very next time we went to Bronte Creek there was a sign, in the same signage style as the rest of the park but absolutely brand shiny new, prohibiting skateboarding in the area. I felt at the time that my lack of skateboard skill was being singled out there.
(If you have noticed that this parent was urging me to practice skateboarding unpadded on concrete, yes, that's how things went at the time.)
References:
Worked support for a white box server maker. Our salespeople had the ability to create BOMs, and the factory would build and ship the product no matter how weird.
A customer called, said they had a problem running an OS.
Found the factory testing records in the database, and from there tried looking up the motherboard model online. It didn't exist!
Figured out: goddamn salesperson raided a stash of one-off engineering prototypes to make product.
Only 100 existed!
Another job, another sales weasel. Also a server manufacturer.
Sales people did not have the ability to just make up some nonsense bill of materials and get factory to make it.
But they were able to make up a list of "replacement parts", and tried to trick factory in assembling into server.
A week later, incredulous customer calls up,
"We ordered a computer. And you sent us a box of parts! Is this a kit?"
Oh, reading your request more carefully...
My examples were not appropriate.
Nah, because this was tech, so nobody ever learned anything, and nobody ever wrote down a rule that covered anything related to a previous mistake!
You should also look at CoC's from FOSS projects, a lot of them are bloated because "that asshole who one time..."
Therefore, in the Vinyl Cache Project, we have rule zero which says "We'll throw you out of the project, rather than add a rule to proscribe your bad conduct".
@phloggen @williampietri
The fedi instance that I'm on has a rule that says "don't be a ballox".
Most people understand what it means.
Mod team probably put it in because they know all about That Guy (it's nearly always a guy) who will almost break the rules, and be ready to point out how he didn't actually break any of the actual rules actually.
This one involved supervising contractors who sold subscriptions. There was a substantial incentive to reach a monthly target, such that some people would just pay for subscriptions for random people out of their own pocket to make the target. These subscriptions were delivered to people’s homes and auto-renewed, much to the dismay of customer service.
Takeaway: design incentives very carefully.
On the subject of volunteers, be very careful about how volunteers are expected to communicate with each other. A particularly bad dynamic is guys who think nothing of asking for a phone number because it’s a business thing for them, but women, such as students, for whom a phone number is a personal thing. Changing a phone number is a lot more of a pain than changing an email (which is still a pain).
Something people often don’t grasp is why they need to be reachable when they are on duty. There are of course numerous “that one guy” stories. But the thing people miss is that when, sooner or later, there is an emergency, managers need to account for everyone who should be there.
William Pietri
Craig Askings
nick
Isocat
Tyrone Slothrop
markc568
Steve Foerster 🌐
Condorito
Daniel Fisher
Richard W. Woodley ELBOWS UP 🇨🇦🌹🚴♂️📷 🗺️
HollieK
zygmyd
Ari [APz] Sovijärvi
Muro deGrizeco
Poul-Henning Kamp
Dec [{(
)}]
Jake
J Miller