So I work as a desktop support tech for the biggest healthcare organization in my state. 14.45 an hour and they reimburse my mileage since I have to travel all over the state or so I thought.
Last month my boss denied one of my reimbursement requests since “the hospital is right across the street.” Like yea it’s right across the street but that street is a six lane highway and I don’t want to risk getting hit by a car but whatever. If they don’t want to pay me the 58.5 cents to drive there then I will walk whenever I have to go that hospital. So instead of paying me 1.61 for a round trip I walk over which is a twenty minute walk at least. It’s actually kind of enjoyable and healthier for me so no real complaints.
Anyway today I’m covering as the morning weekend desktop tech for my region- I don’t normally work weekends but my buddy wanted off and I’m a team player. I get a call that the PC room at the hospital across the street is making a weird noise so I start my walk over. I get to my normal entrance and the doors are locked. Turns out that entrance is only open on the weekdays. The main entrance is on the complete opposite side of the campus like almost a mile away so I start my walk there and my dispatch called me to update that all the PCs in the hospital have stopped working. Like every single one. That’s crazy but nothing I can do until I get there.
I finally get to the open entrance and I see their PC is definitely down – “No login servers available” I see that same error on all the PCs as I make my way to the main server room. I finally make it to the server room and it’s been about an hour at this point. Open up the door and it’s fucking hot. Turns out the room
air conditioner had failed causing the room to overheat which shut down all the equipment. I manage to get the AC back on and was able to get some of the equipment working again but the majority is going to need to be replaced. Probably a half million dollars in equipment is lost and an unknown amount of down time until it can be replaced.
I call my boss and let them know what happened and that we’re going to need more people to get this fixed. They are not happy at all. A couple minutes later I get a call and it’s a conference call with my boss, my bosses boss, various VPs and executive leadership (CEO, CFO, CTO) all wanting to know what the fuck happened and why it took so long to get fixed. I was completely honest and told them that I was told we do not reimburse mileage to this site because it’s across the street… no one on the call liked that and after a lot of yelling I was asked to leave the call so I did and started my job of fixing what I could while other techs started coming in to help.
About an hour after I left the call I get a text from my bosses boss making it clear that all mileage will be reimbursed and we are not allowed to walk between sites. All trips between sites must be with a vehicle. Turns out my boss unofficially implemented the no reimbursement policy as a way to save the department money and it has massively backfired. Most of the other techs would just drive over even though they don’t get reimbursed so he assumed I would do the same. I’m not sure of how this is going to end but I would imagine someone is getting fired. My shift ended an hour ago and we weren’t even close to getting everything fixed so I just dipped. I seriously debated Ubering back to my car and submitting a reimbursement for it but it’s probably best to keep my head down for a while.
tl;dr – boss violated policy to save one dollar and sixty one cents. Ended up costing hundreds of thousands of dollars and likely their job.