New York compliance manager drives 6 hours round-trip during his vacation to do 1 minute of work: ‘The owner… warned Dan that the next mistake would cost him his bonus’ – FAIL Blog

These coworkers both have strong feelings about their property management work, but neither have benefited from their on-going disagreement. 

You don’t need to have identical beliefs to your colleagues; in fact, it’s better when you don’t. While it’s fun to have workplace friends, having a diverse set of minds to tackle various problems is a winning solution. But sometimes these disagreements aren’t productive. Sometimes they wind up in a wash cycle in your inbox — the same problems over and over, rinse and repeat. It seems like these 2 workers fall into that pattern, as one of them explained in their story below. They handle time-sensitive documents through their job at the NYC Department of Buildings, a job that does indeed sound very important and timely, considering how many buildings there are here, and how quickly many of them are built. Even a novice like myself could tell you that delays cost big $$$ for the entire crew involved, so suffice it to say that these guys know what they’re talking about. When their office says that a document is time-sensitive, they mean it. There are fines involved! 

This worker was irritated that their colleague wanted to have his own computer login… which is honestly pretty standard. This person suggested that a solution was a computer login that anyone could use, which is just kind of unheard of in the modern age. You need to know who is doing what — you can’t just let a ton of people all access one account, leaving no one accountable for mishaps. There are solutions for things like this — usually there are admin accounts and user accounts, and documents can be shared between people. There is definitely middle ground here that neither colleague is seeing. In this workspace, there’s room for improvement — both workers need to collaborate so that they can actually construct a solution to their problems, rather than relying on petty instances of malicious compliance. 

Regardless of the actual solutions to this disagreement, this worker was clearly thrilled that their colleague, Dan, had to spend 6 hours of vacation time clearing up this issue. It was probably very satisfying! Sometimes it’s the little wins that keep you motivated.