There’s this guy at my job who loves to take other people’s thunder.
Exhibit 1, if you will:
We’re implementing a real-time data acquisition program (by Rockwell Automation) at our factory. Tonto (stupid in Spanish), the production manager knows as much technical info as my 82-year-old grandmother knows about riding a Harley. We’ve gotten past the stages of deciding what we want to pull out of the machines when we needed funding for performing a test on one of the machines. Tonto gets invited to the meeting to go over testing specs. He shows up 45 minutes later asking to be informed of everything we went over, (keep in mind that this guy is not higher than me in the company bureaucracy). My VP of Operations (my boss) happens to pass by two minutes later and decides to stop in. The VP asks to be informed about our decisions.
I tell our VP that what we need is approval for testing funds (only $1000 but still need approval), at which Tonto takes charge of the meeting as if he’s been present the whole time, trying to take the thunder from the rest of us who had in-depth discussions on implementing a very technical issue into our infrastructure. Unfortunately, remember Tonto knows jack about technical matters. As the production manager, he’s a glorified warehouse supervisor. I take particular joy in pointing out his many incorrect technical assumptions, which I do about every three seconds for the next ten minutes until it becomes blatantly obvious this guy is trying to nuke a metal fork in the microwave.
Exhibit 2, if you please:
I got saddled with the job of purchasing two new time clocks, one for each of our new warehouses. For two months, the VP and I discussed the pros and conns of going with one model vs. another and performing a payroll software upgrade vs. not. We purchase the clocks last week on Monday, and they come in Thursday. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to even sit down in my office on Thursday until 1pm as I was busy with other things. I walk into my office and there is an open box from the time clock company. Contained within is a note written on the packing slip from Tonto. It reads: See if you can integrate this with our current time clock system. We’d like to make it as easy as possible to conform to our current time clocks. Let me know if you need help.
On top of that, he writes an email to the VP, the Accounting Manager, our electrician (who knows why), and the three senior team leaders from the warehouse floor that says exactly what the note says. Again, Tonto wasn’t a part of the decision making but decided to come in at the last minute (unfortunately b/c the time clocks arrived via UPS through his office) and belittle me in front of multiple people and try to take the glory of adding new time clocks. The email was copied to multiple people but addressed only me, didn’t even include a reference to anyone else, and repeated verbatum what the note said.
I responded with an email copied to everyone he copied it to, saying, Thanks Tonto. I saw your note. The VP and I have been working on this for about two months. It’s good to see you’d like to get involved now and that the time clock company was prompt with delivery. If you’d like any more info on the project, please let me know.
There are tons more stories like this about the glory taker but I’ve already written too much.
Just wanted to know if anyone else had stupid stories like this.