I worked Customer Service for a company who has contracts with several electric power companies in the southeast part of the country. The job was enjoyable enough and I had been moved into a Supervisor job. (there were 5 supervisors in our division)

The manager was nice enough and I liked working for her. She had a special needs son and had to leave 30 minutes early on Fridays and I had started doing a weekly report for her to help her out. The report listed the amount of calls we had taken that week and broke them down into categories. (high bills, power outages etc.) I was verifying our data with the electric power companies data, making sure we had taken the amount of calls we were contracted to take weekly.) The company I worked for was paid a bonus for every thousand calls we exceeded in the contract. It was a simple report, cut and paste and email, and took 5 minutes to do, did not affect payroll, it just had to be submitted the last 30 minutes on Friday.

My manager quit for greener pastures and the new manager was a jerk. He made no effort to learn what his supervisors did or the electric power companies rules and regulations. I thought he needed to know about this report and see if he wanted me to keep submitting it for him. Each email I sent him was ignored, so I just kept on submitting the report on Friday.

The manager started hiring assistants for his supervisors even though we really did not need them. He expected the assistant to learn everything the supervisor did and would fire the supervisor after 2 weeks and move the assistant into the job. I quietly kept my head down and continued to do my job. My assistant arrived unannounced and I knew was going to be let go. I taught her my job, but never mentioned the Friday report to her as it really was not part of my job (I did it as a courtesy for the old manager and had tried to set up a meeting with the new manager to discuss this report and had been ignored) I end up getting let go and walked away from a job/people I really loved.

A VP with the company called me a month later and wanted to know if I knew anything about this report. I replied yes, I do and told him that while it was not my responsibility, I had been sending it as a courtesy to the old manager. He wanted to know why I had not shown it to my assistant, and I again told him it really was not our responsibility, I was doing it as a courtesy for the old manager. I asked him if he could still get into my company email, he said he could, and I asked him to look at how many emails I had sent to the new manager with the subject “Reports”. They found 6 emails and they read them and realized I had asked the new manager for a meeting to go over this and that the new manager had ignored me each time.

The company lost over $800,000 in bonus money all because a manager would not answer an email. The manager was fired. (YEAH!!!)