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Anecdote from a previous job that you just gave me a PTSD flashback to, back when I worked on the help desk and sysadmin side of things instead of development:
The company I was working at got acquired by another company (most Americans here would probably know the acquiring company but I won't get any more specific than that). Our accounting department was mostly laid off and we now had to send our invoices to accounting in the acquiring company to get them paid.
My boss starts sending them our invoices for the phone company (and internet, and a bunch of other important things) up to corporate accounting every single day because accounting isn't responding to him and isn't paying our bills. He's also calling them multiple times a week, but no one is answering. Also our long distance phone service is separate from our main phone service (this will be important) for complicated reasons I never bothered to learn because I was a help desk grunt at the time.
This goes on for months, and the phone company is getting pissy and threatening to cut off our phone service. My manager is forwarding the service cut off threats to accounting too. Finally long distance service actually gets cut off (but local phone service still works), and me and the other help desk grunt got flooded with about 200 calls from pissed off users that day.
This causes enough of a stink that corporate catches wind of it and ask my manager why he wasn't paying the phone bill. After all, they showed him how to send invoices to accounting, etc., how could he be so irresponsible? My manager whips out 60+ emails and his phone call logs and corporate immediately apologizes and presumably goes to bite off someone's head in accounting.
Perhaps this is a stupid question, but why couldn't your manager escalate to his boss until it gets to someone who can do something about it?
Yeah, I assumed reading the story that something must have been communicated up the chain because without that, it just looks a lot like malicious compliance.
If I recall correctly, my manager's new manager was someone in IT at the corporate HQ and they got some blowback over it too because my manager had reached out to them several times about accounting not responding.
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I believe your war story, because I've seen the likes of it in a previous job. Being as vague as possible, two separate entities were amalgamated into One Big Happy Family for the sake of efficiency and cost-cutting and other fun management notions. It was all going to be peachy, the matters handled by both halves would now all be handled in the post-amalgamation blob and this would mean Better Customer Service and More Responsiveness and the other buzz words.
First thing to blow up was the annual Christmas party (I hadn't worked there long enough to have gone to previous parties). Before, both places had their own parties and management of both places threw a few bob in the respective funds for it. Afterwards, entity A (based in the city) would not come down to our town, and entity B (based in our town) would not go to the city to host it, because transport (everyone wanted to get blotto on free-ish booze because it was the Christmas party, nobody wanted to have to be sober enough to drive home). Plans to arranging hire of private buses (so people would be collected and then dropped back home or near enough) foundered on "yeah, but where will we hold it?" There wasn't any compromise "here's a nice restaurant or hotel halfway between both places", so it ended up no Christmas party at all for anyone.
That was the kind of co-operation and mutual understanding which developed between the two halves, which post-amalgamation continued on with "we do our stuff, you do your stuff, we don't interact or co-operate any more than absolutely necessary".
I imagine the reason for the accounting snafu was a combination of acquiring company accounting department going "Well nobody told us we were supposed to pay their bills" so the bills coming in got shoved into a pile on somebody's desk and ignored, and "who the hell are these guys, never mind, go to the bottom of the heap while we deal with the really important payments for our main office".
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