Last post here: https://www.reddit.com/r/antiwork/comments/tnadbm/manager_from_hell/
Another story goes like this. We had some important training coming up. As I was planning it, I wanted to have a mockup to train as close to the job as possible. I brought this up in a meeting and said I could build it. one of the engineers said that there already was one that was built for tool testing years ago but it was stored at a different site. Emails were sent and I ended up traveling to that site to inspect and claim it but when I got there they showed me something different. There had been some confusion and the old mockup had been scrapped. At the next meeting I showed drawings of what I wanted to build since the other option was no longer available. Everyone liked the idea. My manager kind of mumbled a go ahead. With 8 people sitting on this meeting I said “I just want to clarify that I am to proceed with this proposed construction, is this correct?” She said yes. That day I took my drawings to our carpenters and started ordering materials. I am also a bit of a maker so I was able to make some components at home in my shop and banked some hours for the time. (There will be more on this in another story) By the next weeks meeting it was starting to look amazing. I brought a bunch of photos to show it off. I proudly passed a few printed out photos to my manager who looked at it, scoffed and asked who authorized me to do this? I said “you did, one week ago sitting in the same chair you are right now. I even asked for clarification!” She looked like she was going to deny it but saw everyone else nodding their heads in agreement with me. She started to complain that she didn't know what it was going to look like and it was going to cost too much money. I pointed to her notebook and said “I can see the drawings I gave you last week hanging out of your book, so you know what it was going to entail”. As for the cost, the carpenters had a lot of material already on hand. We only had to order about $130.00 of extra stuff. (Keep in mind this is for a job worth hundreds of millions of dollars). She huffed and puffed and for the next few weeks she kept making underhanded comments about how I was wasting money and time on a worthless project. When it was finished people were amazed. It turned out perfect and was incredibly useful to the people we brought in to train. It was so good in fact that the company did an article on it in the newsletter where my manager talked about how she arranged everything to get it done.