'That’s millions of pounds of [our] order you’ve lost us!': Spare parts estimator plays the long game after company refuses to pay up

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Remy Millisky • Writer and Editor
Apr 4, 2024 3:00 PM EDT

This worker sure has a lot of patience. Imagine if you were promised a huge, well-paying order by a client… only for them to never complete the order! That's exactly what happened to this person, u/Jamespg614, who works as a spare parts estimator. 

The employee shared their malicious compliance story that comes with a few words of caution. Just because your boss or a client asks you to do something illegal, that doesn't make that action legal. In situations like that, the only thing you can do is try to get that information in writing (and don't do that thing, of course). You can try to tip off police officers too, but then you risk putting your job in jeopardy. This person didn't get immediate results, but at least they avoided breaking the law. They literally had to explain to their company why their request was so wrong! 

The entire saga took place over two years, which must have been a very satisfying outcome for the worker. After you check out their entire story below, read about these times the airport was the worst part of someone's trip, like the person who complained that a "girl [is] sleeping across all 5 seats in the cellphone charging section."

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  • 01
    Cheezburger Image 9904214784
    via Scott Graham on Unsplash
  • 02
    Break the law? Sure thing Boss, sign here please! M OC Long time stalker, first time poster. Only doing this now because it FINALLY came to fruition last week.
    via u/Jamespg614
  • 03
    I used to work as a spare parts estimator for a fairly niche industry. My job was essentially to work out what parts of our main product the customer wanted, find out how much it would cost us to make, add a little mark up and send them a quote. My boss was pretty strict on traceability so everything needed to be recorded, including why a certain mark up had been applied to a particular product.
    via u/Jamespg614
  • 04
    Normal value of these quotes is somewhere between £200 and a few hundred thousand. Very rarely do we get orders for anything more than that (once or twice a decade in my experience)
    via u/Jamespg614
  • 05
    A request for quotation landed on my desk when I was WFH during Covid, and it was a biggy. Just looking at the list of parts the customer wanted, this was going to be an absolute killer, over a million pounds all by itself. I was told by the sales guy that if this one went well, there was another to follow of an even bigger size, ultimately looking at ten million over the next four years. So I set to work.
    via u/Jamespg614
  • 06
    Normally I can do five or six of these quotes in a day, but this one quote took me six weeks to put together. I was in constant contact with 20+ vendors getting specifications, technical details, prices and lead times for over four hundred items. Finally, my masterpiece was complete. Then came the snag.
    via u/Jamespg614
  • 07
    Sales guy then says that because of the country this customer is in, they need to have four or more quotes in from different customers in order to get it cleared by their government (some anti-corruption policy that had been instituted). We were the OEM of the product and there's nowhere else on the planet they could get these parts from, so we'd have to work through third parties to get it done, and he knew just the guy.
    via u/Jamespg614
  • 08
    In comes a one man band with a dodgy looking entry at companies house to save the day. Sales guy and him go way back, so he was going to be the "preferential supplier". I was asked to do the normal quote to him, then to bump the prices up by 30% and send that to three other companies who had been asking about it so they would absolutely not get the contract with the end
    via u/Jamespg614
  • 09
    user. I argued the point, saying that the whole purpose of the anti- corruption policy is to prevent situations exactly like this, but I was overruled. The COO of the company now tells me to just do it over a phone call, at which point I request that in writing before I go ahead and do it.
    via u/Jamespg614
  • 10
    Fast forward two years and there's still no order been placed. Then I find out through a different sales guy that the One Man Band has been put on a blacklist by this country's government over this project, the other three companies have been turned down, and the end user is asking other companies to come in and take our product out and replace it with their own. A huge investigation is called for by senior management,
    via u/Jamespg614
  • 11
    my quote is ripped to pieces and examined in microscopic detail, and the question gets asked “why did you give different prices to these other three when you knew it was all to do with anti- corruption, we should fire you! That's millions of pounds of order you've lost us!" Out comes the email from my little black book, on the desk it goes, everyone suddenly gets veeeeeery quiet, and the COO starts packing his desk in a box the next week.
    via u/Jamespg614
  • 12
    And the moral of the story is, if someone tells you to do something borderline illegal, make sure to get it in writing. EDIT: Wow. This really went crazy, thank you so much guys. My first silver too!
    via u/Jamespg614
  • 13
    For those asking about the legality of what I did, because all of the third parties were outside of the country where the anti-corruption policy was in place, I didn't personally break any laws. Whilst the anti-corruption policies are in place for the end-user, the worst the government can do it put us on a blacklist so all of our bids in the future are either refused outright or looked at in far more detail than others might be. I did investigate
    via u/Jamespg614
  • 14
    this at the time, and if there were going to be any implications on me that my company wouldn't have been responsible for, it would have been a flat no. I was acting against the intention of the policy, but not expressly breaking it. Do not do something illegal just because your boss told you to.
    via u/Jamespg614
  • 15
    The issue as far as the company was concerned was the lost millions in revenue and the damage to their reputation (the end-user is a huge company with contacts and is in a reasonably close knit industry, people talk). They ultimately wanted a scapegoat to parade in front of the board to explain why the multi- million pound deal they'd all been talking about for the last two years had suddenly vanished.
    via u/Jamespg614
  • 16
    I did also look at OEM angle at the time, but because we aren't the only company who make this TYPE of product, it didn't appear to be possible to use this as an exception (the reasoning being that the option existed to replace our system with a competitor's) EDIT 2: After posting this, I did a bit of research into the final customer and their VP of Finance did some fairly well publicised jail time a few years back for buying an oil rig for the company at a suspiciously low price, so there was n
    via u/Jamespg614
  • 17
    Tom Marvolo Tomato When will managers learn that if they are asked to put it in writing, they need to step back and rethink the whole idea?
    via u/Jamespg614
  • 18
    NotAllWhoPonderRLost I once typed an email outlining the impact of delaying paying a vendor for preventative preventive maintenance on a machine they ran for us. Not doing the maintenance could result in the machine crashing and being down some time for repairs. I printed it and added a handwritten note, "I will take the action but will not be responsible for the consequences. Please sign below acknowledging that you accept the consequences of delaying this maintenance."
    via u/Jamespg614
  • 19
    I placed this on my colleagues desk. A few minutes after he returned to his desk, he approved the money for the maintenance.
    via u/Jamespg614
  • 20
    imarc This makes up for all of the posts where they couldn't wait 1 week for fallout before posting. Gold star. With something this far out, I'd be worried that I got the appropriate CTA email about it but it was auto-deleted after X years by the company's deletion policy.
    via u/Jamespg614
  • 21
    Jamespg614 OP. Oh no, I technically broke IT policy by downloading that email on to a personal usb drive that I keep for just such occasions. Given the other contents of that usb drive though, the company never thought to go after me for it (lots of work emails from employees on furlough, for example)
    via u/Jamespg614

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