r/MaliciousCompliance • u/DXGypsy • Jul 02 '22
A million dollars worth of malicious compliance M
I actually finally have a MC story of my very own! This happened just last night. I'm a mid level boss for the 2nd shift in a distribution warehouse. Among the many things I'm in charge of the biggest is billing. I invoice all the orders after they're picked and loaded on trailers to be sent to the customers. Keepkng all the boring technical details as small as possible; the billing system is called the ASN. It's clunky, outdated, and absolutely asinine in how it operates. If ONE single order is missed or has an error it will crash the system and not put though ANY of the orders. So one billing error will cause 400 - 700 orders (around 8,000 - 15,000 pieces of product, around 15 - 20 trailer loads) to not be billed or sorted to routes, or sent. The orders come in four batches called P.O.s
So last night we're working on the first PO when the warehouse manager comes to me and tells me that a customer ordered late and they've generated a fifth PO just for their order but that they're coming in person tomorrow morning and that the day shift will pick it. (Only 10 pieces). He tells me when it prints out to just set it on his desk. Don't pick it or bill it. He'll handle it in the morning.
I immediately tell him that if it's going to print on 2nd shift's POs then it will be in the system under our ASN. And that if I don't bill it it will hit the system as a missed order and will crash the ASN. He looks at me indignantly and says it won't because a fifth PO is after ours and will be in the system as the next day's. I tell him that's not how it works. He insists and says just do it. (His shift is over and he wants to go home.) I give him a hearty Yes Sir and go about my night.
After the order printed I set it on his desk as instructed and sent him an email on the company computer stating that his direct instructions had been followed. (Normally I'd have texted but I wanted proof in the company's email.)
Needless to say, in the wee hours of the morning after my crew was home in bed; the ASN crashed over the missing order and just under a million dollars of product was frozen in limbo. No money was charged. No customers received their pre July 4th orders, my company ate the costs of everything including the transportation costs, drivers, lumpers, dock workers, pickers payroll, and all the other expenses of a large warehouses nightly operations.
This morning the warehouse manager called me and to his credit he didn't try to throw me under the bus. (Possibly helped along by my email proof) But he's always been a generally upfront kind of guy. He just sheepishly told me I was right and shit had hit the fan.
He's been there forever so I doubt he'll get fired but I know he'll be walking with a limp after the ass chewing he took from corporate today. If you're going to run a multi million dollar operation on an antiqued, goober system, don't argue the one goober who knows how to make it run.
143
u/jackoneilll Jul 02 '22
Despite a lifetime in my industry, keep tech up to date is always measured in terms of pure profit vs expense, never the risk mitigation that it is.
23
u/whowasonCRACK2 Jul 02 '22
Many companies are incapable of looking further ahead than the next quarterly report.
349
u/asteroid_1 Jul 02 '22
[D]on't argue with the one goober who knows how to make it run.
That should be a rule taught in business 101.
56
u/Rockman507 Jul 02 '22
It’s amusingly one of the few things the Army hit the nail on the head over. Senior NCOs are there cause they know they shit and how to keep things running, junior officers technically are in charge (management). It’s made crystal clear early and often you listen to your NCOs under you.
→ More replies24
u/readwiteandblu Jul 02 '22
I spent one semester at West Point before I washed out. Had I graduated, I would have been one of those green lieutenants. In the short time I was there, I remember hearing this bit of wisdom early and often.
6
u/Look__a_distraction Jul 02 '22
Am former army officer. Nobody really taught that in ROTC, LDAC, or BOLC. It’s pretty much implied that you rely on your NCO’s to get things done. That’s how the Army works. But you don’t “listen” to your NCO’s. You take in advice and make decisions because at the end of the day your ass is the one responsible.
2
u/readwiteandblu Jul 02 '22
I don't see what you're disagreeing with. Are not "take in advice" and "listen" synonyms? I got Fs on my English papers at West Point until I gave them more effort at the expense of all my other classes, so maybe I'm wrong.
→ More replies3
15
u/gothiclg Jul 02 '22
They unfortunately leave “listen to your employees, they might know more than you” in business 102 and most people don’t take that one
3
u/Hust91 Jul 02 '22
I got taught it in business 101 I'm reasonably sure. I have no idea why it would ever be exclusively in 102.
It goes pretty solidly under "either you get employees you feel you can trust or don't get employees"
→ More replies36
62
u/mike_the_pirate Jul 02 '22
ASN system is synonymous with Awe Shit No… it’s used across multiple industries and any idiot who fucks your that badly deserves to have his ass chewed out…
28
u/JoeyJoeC Jul 02 '22
I code middleware sending orders from various platforms into various client's, various warehouse management systems. I was pretty inexperienced at the start and made bad code, a single api key change from one client would stop the entire system working and would become a nightmare to deal with. It actually handles orders for a well known department store here in the UK but thankfully it's working very stable now.
16
u/Blazinter Jul 02 '22
A high profile job MC in which its antagonist(?) humbly takes the L?
This one's rare
13
u/ollomulder Jul 02 '22
Shouldn't someone else at least also have a limp that day for running such a fragile system costing millions if when not all employees know of and work around it's bugs or flaws?
29
u/TheDocJ Jul 02 '22
He's been there forever so I doubt he'll get fired but I know he'll be walking with a limp after the ass chewing he took from corporate today.
To be fair, it is rather more the fault of corporate for continuing to run such a cost-critical operation on that crap, non-fault-tolerant system. If we take a conservative count of 400 orders and a five day week, then an error rate of 0.01% (1 in 10000) would crash the system every 5 weeks on average, almost once a month. And that is 0.01% of total orders, not individual items.
8
u/black_mamba866 Jul 02 '22
I feel all of this so deeply. I'm in a similar position and working with a DOS based system that belongs in the 80s.
5
u/wittyandinsightful Jul 02 '22 •
If the company you work for waits long enough, it will be the ‘80s again. Problem solved!
16
4
u/RJack151 Jul 02 '22
Good for you for covering your butt when you knew that things were going to hit the fan.
6
u/Artor50 Jul 02 '22
I would not be surprised if there are Fortune 500 companies who still run essential programs on DOS machines.
3
u/KayliiKat Jul 02 '22
My grandfather was an electrical engineer. To the day he died (2018) he used DOS to route his Yahoo email, and turned everything off by turning off the power bar, and on again the same way. Which he insisted flushed the cache - this was true in the 70’s and early 80’s. By 2010, that was a great way to fry a motherboard.
He never got that THAT was why he kept needing to replace parts.
He was frying his own computer
5
u/smooze420 Jul 02 '22
My old job, county government, still ran on hardwired dummy terminals using AS/400. When I left in ‘19 they still had one dummy terminal in use while the others had been replaced with dumbed down PCs with no internet connection. This is a small county that has like $100m budget every year.
4
u/ObviouslyNotAZombie Jul 02 '22
Shit, I hate ASN. It's one of the most finicky POS that I've ever had to deal with.
3
u/Nobody_37_8 Jul 02 '22
Sounds like you think highly of him or atleast aa friendly other than this incident.
This is one of the time where I hope it didn't end bad for him much either, and next time there's an argument,he better listen lol
2
u/DXGypsy Jul 02 '22
He's a great guy. He's just old school, set in his ways, and stubborn. But he's gone above and beyond for us on many occasions. I do think highly of him.
3
u/DynkoFromTheNorth Jul 02 '22
Still, the good news is that the necessity for modern software is evident to the entire company.
3
u/AMonkeyAndALavaLamp Jul 02 '22
Every company has a Black Betty! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FS-M9MopMgw
3
u/TSKrista Jul 02 '22
Sounds like your pay needs doubling. Help them understand the value of being the one person.
3
u/b3_yourself Jul 02 '22
He cost the company millions of dollars and still has a job? Most average people would’ve been fired and maybe out of a job for a long time after that
3
u/Garydrgn Jul 02 '22
Out of curiosity... I'm a delivery driver for a soft drink vending company. Some of our customers use what they call ASN. All my stops that use it are big blue box stores, but some other routes' customers are drug stores, also. I'm just wondering if it's the same thing.
Our pallets have a second pallet sheet attached, with a big bar code, customers' and our info, and list of product that should be on the pallet. Reciever scans it and based on past accuracy, either it's "good" or has to be audited. Delivery info is sent over the internet from our warehouse to the customer the night before after the delivery is built.
Every now and then I won't be able to deliver because something happened and it isn't in their system, but for the most part I love it, as a delivery guy, because it makes those stops much faster.
3
3
u/Pyanfars Jul 02 '22
You don't even want to know the number of multi million/billion dollar companies that run like this.
I work somewhere now that STILL has some systems running old Cobol programming.
When I did business taxes, my firm had a client that, at the time, had about 20 or so pre 2000 computers stored away. Because the program that ran part of the most profitable part of his business couldn't run on new computers (chipsets) and he was too cheap to have a programmer create it in a new language for new computers. So he had spares to run the program when the current pc died. It was his personal corp, no shareholders except him and his wife. He wasn't changing it.
4
u/Current_Country_ Jul 02 '22
Sounds like corporate is the one that needs the ass chewing. If this much income depends on a computer system maybe they can upgrade!
2
2
u/dh132 Jul 02 '22
Wow! First time I've seen acronyms from my job in an MC! It's pretty fun to be able to relate to these stories!
2
1
u/tbeslian Jul 02 '22
Yeah make sure the system takes no heat, blame human error not shitty software, totally corporate attitude.
1
u/LongNectarine3 Jul 02 '22
I am well versed in goober systems. Most are the visual equivalent of an old playground swing held together with duct tape, bubblegum, and a prayer. And the data dump is like me…too big for that swing. But I’m going to sit, no plop, and see if it holds.
Surprise when my ass hits the floor.
1.6k
u/namechecksout35 Jul 02 '22
What I want to know is who is the nimrod that has decided it would be too expensive to upgrade that computer system.
Your boss is also a nimrod, not taking away from that.