Every so often, a company’s employees will see reason to suspect that a workplace policy was put in place just to exert some petty control over them.
We can often find that these codes have to do with an aspect of someone’s appearance , but they can also force employees to find a more roundabout way to do their jobs just because some manager doesn’t like their preferred method.
But as annoying as these managerial decisions can be, some workers will find that the people responsible for them didn’t think them through as carefully as they assumed.
So by following them to the letter in just the right way, they can quickly make whoever set the rules just as miserable about them as they are.
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And in the case of one hospital’s workers, that clever tactic couldn’t have worked out better.
For the most part, the use of cell phones among healthcare workers is heavily restricted while they’re on the job.
As one explained in a Reddit post , using them while in patient care areas introduces the possibility of violating patients’ privacy and the hospital’s workplace health and safety policies.
For that reason, this person’s coworkers understand that they’re only to be used while on break or away from a patient care area.
As they said, “None of us check our phones while busy and if they do, will always get called out for it by other staff.”
Despite this cultural norm, it seems that one manager wasn’t satisfied and chose to prohibit the use of cell phones on hospital grounds at all.
This caused some serious backlash among the hospital’s staff as some had young children in day care and others had issues at home that could need their attention. Even if they wait until their breaks to deal with them, that’s still better than spending the entire day unaware of any major incidents.
However, the manager wasn’t sympathetic to any of this as the worker said, “We were told if the issues were that bad at home, we shouldn’t be at work.”
When staff insisted that this policy was unreasonable, the manager said to give the people who needed to talk to them her work number so she could relay their messages to them.
One commenter pointed out that this in turn violates the employees’ privacy, but it was something the workers agreed to.
That’s because they saw it as an opportunity to tell their important contacts to call the provided number for any reason, which led to a deluge of phone calls that this manager suddenly had to field herself.
Not only was this less efficient than just letting the nurses have their phones, but it left the manager constantly running around and giving workers their messages.
And as the employee described it, most of the calls she received that day concerned matters that were really best left to their intended recipient.
In their words, “First was a lady who’s husband needed approval for a big financial decision at home. The next was a vet calling to tell a co-worker their dog needed to be put down. I got a call from my children’s day care saying my son had been bitten and was bleeding (mandatory reporting policy).”
So after a day of having to deal with all of that, the manager decided to just shift everything back to the way it was.
Naturally, this also led her to ask everyone to tell their families to stop calling her.
But of course, no policy can end quite that neatly so it still took a few days before she finally stopped getting calls.
I’m sure each one was its own reminder not to try anything like that again.
h/t: Reddit | ashtit