Employee uses manager's own rule against him after he refused to retrain employees on alarm policy

Employers often have a set of rules that employees have to comply with. Most of the time, these rules make sense and are required to run the organization smoothly. But that wasn't the case at u/vrtigo1's office. They had an interesting story to share about how they made their COO understand that one of his rules was redundant and required action. The post has got 1.3K upvotes and 38 comments on the platform so far. The individual began by sharing how they used to work at a medium-sized business that had approximately 50 employees at the time that they joined.

They also happened to live close to the company when they started. The individual wrote, "Shortly after I started working there, they asked me if I would mind being listed as a contact for the burglar alarm since all of the facilities/admin people lived pretty far away and I was right across the street." They revealed the company policy about the burglar alarm, saying, "Our internal company policy was if you accidentally set the alarm off, you immediately call the people on the alarm company's list, in order, so they know it's a false alarm and they can tell the alarm company to ignore it."

If the alarm went off, the individual would also have to go down to the office and meet the police. They highlighted how they didn't really understand why the company had such a policy but decided to be helpful and affirmed that they could be added as a contact for the alarm. At first, the individual had no problem with the system as they would only get a few false alarm calls in a year. This was usually followed by an employee calling them up to apologize as they had accidentally triggered the alarm. However, problems started to come up when the company became larger and began hiring more employees.

Soon, there was an increasing number of false alarms as many new employees often forgot about the policy. It even got to the point where some employees would trigger the alarm and leave the office without notifying any of the contacts on the list. The individual decided that they would not go down to the office every time the alarm went off because it was very likely a false alarm. They wrote, "I figured we shouldn't waste the time of the police or waste company money paying false alarm fees." When the COO got to know that they were doing this, he was not okay with it and said that they needed to come down to the office in case there was an actual intruder.

The individual was okay with this request but mentioned that the staff needed to have refresher training on the alarm because most people were not notifying them when the alarm was being triggered. Unfortunately, the COO thought this was not necessary and insisted that the policy continue as it is. So, the individual decided to teach him a lesson by fully complying with this rule and began calling the police every time the alarm was triggered. They wrote, "There were two or three false alarm calls where the police showed up, found nothing and sent us a bill." Funnily enough, the CEO ended up being chased by the police one night because they showed up when the alarm went off and saw his car leaving the parking lot.

He was also given a fine for speeding. The COO tried to blame the individual, but they calmly told him that they were just following the policy he wanted. The post concluded with the individual saying, "The next day, the entire company went through refresher training on alarm procedures, and I was taken off the alarm call list. I count it as a win." People loved the story and put down their thoughts in the comments section. u/CoderJoe1 suggested, "You should get extra pay every time they call you." u/tofuroll jested, "Hey COO, you should probably talk to the CEO about all these charges we're getting, eh?"