'I'll get someone else to do your job': Vacationing employee accuses coworker of ignoring complaints while he was away

Author image for Remy Millisky
Remy Millisky • Writer and Editor
Jul 4, 2023 11:00 AM EDT

A software support employee was surprised when their client accused them of not doing any work. But the employee definitely got the last laugh. 

Each workplace handles employee vacations differently. At some jobs, there are enough of your coworkers on hand that you can delegate your tasks for a few days while you soak up the sun on a beach somewhere else. At other places, you're expected to try and do extra work beforehand to prepare, and still other places will just let your work wait for you during your vacation days. But whichever method your job prefers, it's all about communication. This person in the story below seems terrible at communicating, and it cost them more than just a relationship with his colleague. 

Along with this OP's client/colleague berating them, it's also pretty tasteless to go around berating others for your own shortcomings. This person didn't read their email, and decided to blame the OP. It couldn't be any clearer — all he had to do was look through his inbox before throwing blame around. 

Check out the full story below, along with comments from followers who applauded the OP on their tactics. After that, this frequent-flyer employee often traveled from Hawaii, but when their employer started changing their travel expenses, they achieved some excellent malicious compliance. 

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  • 01
    Furniture - www
    via Austin Distel on Unsplash
  • 02
    Font - Want someone else to do my job? Okay, I'll get someone else to do your job. L OC To reduce recognizability i'll avoid details as much as possible. tl;dr at the bottom.
    via u/deleted
  • 03
    Font - I work as 3rd level support for a company that develops and provides software for a business area, that's quite heavily regulated, a lot of our development efforts go to just keeping up with new and changing laws. Also the software, while being mainly used for one purpose, usually in one way or the other gets used throughout the whole company using it, so with bigger companies, they sometimes have multiple departments, each only supporting parts of the software in-house, basically each de
    via u/deleted
  • 04
    Font - So with this one customer. They have one main-support-team (containing, but not led by the CTO of the company) for our software and each department has their own sub-team who answer to the head of the main-team. As always, new years had brought new laws and regulations. Especially in one department, an up to now optional feature became mandatory by law starting 01.01.23. Mind you, the information about the new law was public in February 22 and our software supports this feature since the
    via u/deleted
  • 05
    Font - Unfortunately, as it's an extremely technical topic, i'm currently the only person in our company's support-team with in-depth knowledge. We're working on changing that, but not everyone who works in support has a background deeply rooted in software development, so it takes time.
    via u/deleted
  • 06
    Font - Well, starting January this one sub- department, basically a one man show, as it's a rather small department at the customer started sending support tickets "this isn't working with the new feature", "that isn't working with the new feature" and so on, 7 Tickets total, all highest priority, because "it's an error message and we're legally required to use it".
    via u/deleted
  • 07
    Font - Each and every one of the tickets I answered them the exact passage of the manual where they could read up that exact error message, explaining how it's a missing configuration on their end and exactly (with screenshots!) what to configure. These configurations are not part of any kind of support plan we offer, so work on these tickets is a "pay by hour" thing for the company. Never got any reply to them so considered them done with that.
    via u/deleted
  • 08
    Font - Well, i guessed wrong. I got another highest priority support- ticket today stating it's not working. Obviously i asked, if the configurations i sent over in the other tickets have been done, to which i get the reply, how should they know, they're just back from a multi-week vacation. I politely replied, that he should check those configurations and to not cost them unnecessary money, i would hold off working on that ticket until he checked them.
    via u/deleted
  • 09
    Font - The reply i received to that basically stated, that he found it very audacious that there are now 8 open highest priority requests about that topic and the company i worked at haven't moved a finger in the month since they were submitted and that he demands i hand over those tickets to someone else in our support-team, who actually wants to do our job or he will escalate the issue to the main team.
    via u/deleted
  • 10
    Font - Now, you should know that this customer is one of our biggest clients, so their requests inherently get slightly higher priority on our side and also we know that they generally (with a few black sheep obviously) have a very good in- house team, so the team is pretty liberal at routing their technical requests through to me. Because of that i get to work a lot with their main-team who handles those technical issues and the bigger the installation, the more troublesome. They enjoy working
    via u/deleted
  • 11
    Font - So, to spare him the work of escalating the issue, according to process i wrote a formal escalation mail (using first names, petty, i know) to the lead of their main team, as well as my team-lead cc- ing the guy from the sub-team, informing them about all the highest priority tickets, including detailed information since when the feature is available, when the information about it becoming mandatory by law was publizised and when it became mandatory, compiling the answers from all the tic
    via u/deleted
  • 12
    Font - About an hour later i got a formal answer from one of their main- team that the configurations i sent have been implemented and every issue has been resolved, the feature works as intended, thanking me for bringing to their attention that they were behind on that topic, followed half a minute later by an informal mail informing me that i don't need to worry, the next person to submit tickets on behalf of that one-person department should be much more professional.
    via u/deleted
  • 13
    Font - And the moral of the story: Don't try to threaten with authority you don't have. tl;dr: Customer-Employee threatened to report me not doing his job while he went on vacation, got fired for it.
    via u/deleted
  • 14
    Font - Downright Drewski +2. Ah, this is more a satisfying petty revenge with a nice side of facepalm. I like the way you handled this.
    via u/DownrightDrewski
  • 15
    Gesture - Ariyana_Dumon This is beautiful
    via u/Ariyana_Dumon
  • 16
    Facial expression - QubeRewt Sounds like SAP, but definitely insurance or accounting
    via u/QubeRewt

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workplace-stories work stories work coworkers software coworker malicious compliance malicious-compliance-reddit
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