Boss demands IT engineer write "more words" on ticket resolutions, they begin writing a novel hidden in the reports: 'You're averaging well over a 1000 characters per ticket, keep it up!'

Petty requirements for the sake of requirements can often feel like just another hoop to jump through, and when they're unnecessary and baseless, there's a tendency there for people to just use shortcuts to meet that requirement anyways.

Like when you were writing a report or an essay in school and there were certain requirements for either the number of words or pages that the report must have—both being a requirement for quantity but not necessarily quality. Some of us would be desperately trying to finish our report the night before, tired and weary, stressed from the pressure of having left it till the last minute. In order to reach the proper page length, you'd start messing with margins and font size—or add unnecessary words—in order to reach the outlined minimum requirements…

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Author image for Brad Dickson Brad Dickson
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  • 01
    [He] changes the color to white and the font size to 1 so it can't be seen against the background on the tool and closes the ticket..."
    via Getty Images For Unsplash+
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  • This would also carry on to university, sitting working in our dorm rooms at 11:45 PM before a midnight submission deadline, desperately trying to squeeze through the deadline. 

    Of course, school really exists just to prepare us for the monotony of our working lives, and the techniques we use to circumvent the outlines and rules set by authority figures also translate over, inspiring some of us to maliciously comply to the rules in order to keep our bosses happy. 

  • 02

    "Boss wants more words on the comment for each ticket solved, engineer writes a novel."

    I've been working on IT for around 25-26 years now. Different companies but you see quite a bit of MC on the IT world. Back in 2005-06 I worked for a telephone company, a huge one, that had the typical Jira-like bug reporting tool for one of its most complicated and convoluted softwares.
    via mdlapla
  • 03
    The software was so complex, so legacy, that even the development team in house was afraid to do changes in it. Some updates in the past did backfire spectacularly more than once, so even the tyniest update to that software had to take weeks of analysis before taking place. In that dev team worked 3 of my friends from college. I worked on another one that had an easier life.
    via mdlapla
  • 04
    One of my guys at that team was Bedu. To portrait Bedu accurately, imagine that guy that's always playing innocent pranks, that you never know if he's for real when he's talking because he's always saying the most shocking things just for the LOLs, knows a little bit of magic, uses it to prank, loves futbol (soccer) as well.
    via mdlapla
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  • 05
    He used to be good at his job but he's also a quite bit tired of it, procrastinating and, generally, not putting too much effort on it. The fact that he's part of that software dev team doesn't help. It's not a fast-paced environment and people gets bored by the inaction.
    via mdlapla
  • 06
    So, since he's bored, he plays pranks, like connecting a second wireless mouse controller to the PC of a colleague to randomly move the mouse and have him call tech support because his mouse misbehaves but, do absolutely nothing with the mouse when tech support comes. The guy behing the target of the prank ended up calling tech support 4 times before being told what was going on.
    via mdlapla
  • 07
    The team once a week also books a windowless meeting room for an hour, so 3 of them can take a nap while the 4th one guards against someone finding out. Who's the guard rotates each week.
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  • 08
    The requests for update Bedu gets are almost always something in this style: "This report indicates that X value is 25, when it should be 27, please fix". Each request typically comes from a different area, but each area sends a couple of requests probably once a month.
    via mdlapla
  • 09
    But Bedu knows that the algorithm doing that calculation is extremely complex, reports are "baked" on a monthly basis on batch processes that can take hours, testing this is extremely painful also, so he updates the end value on the report, where it was 25, now is 27, easy peasy, see you next month. He gets probably like 10-15 of these requests per day.
    via mdlapla
  • 10
    Bedu updates the bug tool ticket stating, on the comment field, something like "End value verified and corrected" and moves on.
    via mdlapla
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  • 11
    New boss comes to that dev team from another team on the company. He's well known around the company as being quite... dense. He instantly clashes with the team. He thinks quantity equals quality and loves to look into numbers. He comes from the database world so he's constantly using queries to gather information.
    via mdlapla
  • 12
    He also thinks that each ticket solved is because the underlying condition is being solved, he knows nothing about the complexity of the system, he just thinks that the team is really good at identifying causes and solving them fast. Glorified pencil pusher.
    via mdlapla
  • 13
    He gathers the team and says that he did a query and found out that the comments being put into the bug tool are really short, like less than 50 characters long, and that is not enough to explain what has been done to solve the incident.
    via mdlapla
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  • 14
    The whole team explains that what's being put into the comment field is more than enough. He says that comments should, AT LEAST, have 1000 characters, it's the minimum he'll accept. He says that having comments with less than a 1000 characters will impact his valuation of the work being done.
    via mdlapla
  • 15
    Bedu, being the devious character he is, decides to complain. Specially since he knows that boss would never open the bug tool, he loves his databases.
    via mdlapla
  • 16
    First ticket comes in, "this value is this, should be that", he updates value, writes the same comment he always does "End value verified and corrected" and then, taking advantage on the fact that the comment field has format capabilities (WYSIWYG type of editor) copies and pastes the chronicle from the latest futbol match into the field, changes the color to white and the font size to 1 so it can't be
    via mdlapla
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  • 17
    seen against the background on the tool and closes the ticket. If you're the original ticket poster, that comment field is read-only, so unless someone selects and highlights the comment, they won't know that something else is there.
    via mdlapla
  • 18
    Next ticket comes, does the same but writes a rant about some stupid thing. Then on the next ticket, he just puts keeps pushing random keys and the space bar until the character counter reaches 1000. He gets bored of doing this, so he becomes more ingenious and inventive by the ticket.
    via mdlapla
  • 19
    Somewhere hidden in that bug tool comment system, a complete original Bedu NOVEL separated in small chapters ends up being written that noone knows about (outside of us few that have lunch with Bedu and the team). Boss comes a month after and says to Bedu: "I've noticed that the size of your comments has gone up last month, you're averaging well over a 1000 characters per ticket, keep it up!"
    via mdlapla
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  • 20
    Bedu (plus all my other friends and myself) left the company to greener pastures a year later. I still talk daily with Bedu and people from that team.
    via mdlapla
  • 21
    TLDR: New boss says that bug tool comment should be AT LEAST a 1000 characters when 50 are more than enough, engineer starts writing hidden messages to comply with that, while making it interesting for himself.
    via mdlapla
  • 22
    Cheezburger Image 10474247680
    via Getty Images For Unsplash+

    The image does not depict the actual subjects of the story. Subjects are models.

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  • 23
    aldwinligaya 18h ago . Maybe I shouldn't be surprised, but the new boss is supposed to be a database guy but doesn't look at the comments? The font size/color doesn't matter, when you query the database it would show the full text.
    via mdlapla
  • 24
    . Nunov_DAbov 16h ago This sounds like my high school history class. We would have homework assignments to discuss 3-4 topics. My answers were terse 2 or 3 sentences. - The teacher told me he wanted longer answers - 2- 3 paragraphs. I responded by turning in 10-15 pages per answer. After a few assignments that took hours to grade, he relented and said my original answers were fine.
    via mdlapla
  • 25
    PAUL_DNAP • 18h ago . That's wonderful, when I close my Jira tickets I don't put any additional comments only close them as done. If anyone mentions that I now have a plan to deal with it.
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  • 26
    "It was a sunny but chilly February morn, and it was my quest to add a new specification to the product so armed with only a strong coffee and a packet of skittles I set forth into the depths of the quality system...."
    via mdlapla
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    Cheezburger Image 10474248960
    via Getty Images For Unsplash+

    The image does not depict the actual subjects of the story. Subjects are models.

  • 28
    Strongit 13h ago I have to do the same thing submitting warranty requests for Dell at my job. I swear there's a character limit, because I can take a picture of the problem, like an obviously damaged screen, tell them I rebooted but it's not enough. I end up putting things in the troubleshooting section like "tapped screen, still broken" or "spun in a circle, screen still damaged". They accept it every time now.
    via mdlapla
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  • 29
    JanB1 18h ago . Small correction, in the middle you say "1000 words" but then later you specify "1000 characters", you might wanna correct that one. But yeah, really good story, thanks for sharing!
    via mdlapla
  • 30
    Dedalian7 18h ago • I had a friend in school who did something similar. The subject was physical education. The teacher was a typical jock who only cared about the word count of the answers to his questions. We were sure he never even read them. So this friend of mine wrote the correct intro to a couple of answers and then subsequently just wrote the lyrics to his rather long favourite song. He ended up with the highest marks in class that term!
    via mdlapla
  • 31
    foyrkopp 16h ago • Um... so your friend decides to hardcode exceptions rather than address the underlying issue, and when a manager wants more detailed comments (to catch that exact type of behavior), he finds a way to cheat? Wouldn't it be more honest to just write "in order to genuinely fix that, I'd need about 15.000 man-hours, please advise on how to proceed"?
    via mdlapla
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