What’s the worst thing someone tried to correct you about something you’re specialized at?

This is a special one, because it was my boss' boss' boss.

I worked on a production line running what's called a 'cutter roll'. Now every cutter is different, just in our building there were six of them and all six had different eccentricities and weirdness. The worst of these is Cutter 3. Cutter 3 is a nightmare, people have quit their jobs rather than be assigned to Cutter 3. It's so weird, so difficult that you legally cannot run the machine without special training on dealing with its temperamental ass.

I ran Cutter 3 for a year and a half, and I loved it. I never had the same problems everyone else did with it, I just knew how to make it work. I trained 8/12 people who were qualified to run the machine, the plant manager would come to me to ask my opinion on changes and repairs they were planning, this was my fucking machine.

Enter Bill. Fuck you Bill. Bill was an old guard employee, one of the "we did it like this back in 1972 and it worked fine back then!" types. He'd been promoted over and over despite being incompetent because he knew how to make it look like he was fixing things and then leave other guys to pick up the slack.

My last month with the company, Bill came back running the entire cutter floor of the plant. That made him 2nd in command for the entire building behind only the plant manager. Now, Cutter 3 starts acting up again and thanks to whatever trickster God decided to fuck with me that day it starts acting up right as Bill comes along. I'm running back and forth fiddling with settings and tools getting the old girl to settle down, but something is different. Nothing is working, I can't get her to behave.

So I take a second to catch my breath and who do I see at my control panel? Fucking Bill. Fuck you Bill. Bill decided that since I couldn't be trusted to fix my machine, he'd 'help'. I ask him what he's doing, he tells me I've fucked the machine up and he'll put it back properly. I remind him that I've been running the machine with no problems for over a year, he reminds me that he's my boss. So I watch.

Bill is just up there fucking with everything and has no idea what he's doing because none of the buttons are the same as they were when he worked the line last (in 1997). He ends up breaking the entire fucking machine, cost the company 300k in repairs and over 15 million dollars of lost production.

Fuck you Bill.

/r/AskReddit Thread