New supervisor tells warehouse worker to mind her own business when she points out that one of the other machines is smoking, '10 minutes later, the thing actually caught fire'

If you need proof that your boss's policies are a literal dumpster fire, there's nothing more obvious than a literal fire resulting from their policies. That's where this employee found herself when she was wedged firmly between the "rock" of common sense and the "hard place" of following her boss's orders. 

When a new supervisor came onto the scene, he fell victim to one of the classic blunders of managing a new team: rigid policy rife with authoritarianism, leaving workers with little room to think for themselves and put their actual experience to good use. Where there's smoke, there's fire, and depending on your given workplace, that might be more literal than it is metaphorical. In this case, it was more in the literal sense. When the warehouse worker was told to follow orders and not to touch things "unless it's your job," after reporting that one of the machines in the warehouse was smoking, she listed and just focused purely on the tasks she had been assigned. But when the machine went up in flames, production came to a standstill, with the previous policy that led to the issue being swept under the rug with the ashes.

There is no shortage of situations like this in workplaces worldwide. What's your workplace's most ridiculous policy that backfired?