Tech worker maliciously complies with 'dumb' request; ruins Friday and costs thousands.

My co-workers wanted me to hold onto our meeting schedule so I did and ruined their Friday and got paid overtime.

Sinaneos writes:

I work in a tech company where we typically have a software deployment every other Thursday. Following the deployment, our team usually holds a lengthy meeting on Friday, lasting 2-3 hours.

However, due to the recurring minor issues that arise post-deployment, I often find myself heavily involved in monitoring and troubleshooting. Consequently, I frequently request the team to postpone the meeting to Monday to allow us to stabilize the system first.

A few weeks ago during one of these meetings, my colleagues pointed out my consistent habit of postponing the meeting, emphasizing that we never hold it on its originally scheduled day, which is Friday. In response, I explained that the system is usually unstable on Fridays, necessitating my attention to resolve issues. However, they collectively insisted on adhering to the schedule, to which I reluctantly agreed.

Two weeks later, I attended the meeting as scheduled on Friday, and it extended for approximately three hours. Upon exiting the meeting, I was inundated with hundreds of emails and support tickets from our clients, and our servers had experienced hours of downtime, particularly during peak usage times. Our clients were understandably furious and had incurred substantial financial losses, totaling tens of thousands of dollars during that period.

Adding to the predicament, it was already the end of my workday when the crisis unfolded. Consequently, my boss had to compensate me significantly for working during the weekend, and I also received double the number of leave days as compensation for my efforts.

Here are some of the most popular comments:

RedditAdminAreMorons says:

So why wasn't it ever suggested to permanently move the meeting to a Monday after everything has been tested, implemented, and found?

unkiepunkie says:

This is why deployments should happen at the beginning of the week.

FunnySheep says:

This is a good story, but it sounds to me your team is doing IT in an absolute terrible manner. That level of manual involvement is beyond absurd, there are huge problems.

Have you ever had your co-workers make annoying requests that would be against their own interests?