by Will Emaus

Created on: October 13, 2009

I used to work as a technical "specialist" quite a few years back and was part of a much larger manufacturing group. I had done the work necessary to get promoted into management and then some, but I was considered somewhat "indespensable" in what I was doing so I hadn't gotten an opportunity to move up the ladder.

There was a supervisor in this group that had been well known for getting results in other operations, but he was really struggling with ours. A number of incidents happened that had turned the workforce against him and finally a group of employees wrote a letter to the group President in New York asking him to hear their concerns, it was done very, very professionally.

This was a large group of employees that mostly worked on 2nd shift; I just so happened to get moved to that shift temporarily on a Monday evening when with no warning everyone was told that the group President was flying in from New York unannounced and wanted to meet with all of the employees of that shift when the shift that night was finished.

So I went to the meeting and listened to the allegations, the most serious of which was a guy who was supposed to be on a break that had been physically threatened by the Supervisor if he didn't end his break early and sweep up a particular room, which wasn't really his responsibility to keep clean. It was serious enough that action was taken and the Supervisor was shipped off to another location within the week.

My boss was in charge of the technical department I worked in as well as being the Manager of the large department that the Supervisor had gotten removed from. She decided that she needed someone to take over that was "one of them" so she picked me to become the interim Supervisor as well as doing as much of my current role as I could.

The employees in this department were still extremely angry, as well as maybe a bit supercharged that they had gotten rid of the supervisor, so they were not at all easy to deal with even though many of them had been friends of mine for quite some time.

One night things were pretty slow, and the Manager walked in and in her usual overpowering sort of way, asked what everyone was doing. I answered and she must not have liked something in my answer (even though I thought it was fine) and proceeded out onto the floor and walked around the entire plant to observe.

She then walked back into my office and told me that she wanted a particular employee to sweep the floor. This just so happened to be the same

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