Today’s life lesson: it’s a good idea to treat your employees the right way and own up to your mistakes…
Because if you act like a shady creep, it’ll eventually come back to bite you in the ***.
And the story below is a perfect example of what I’m talking about.
Check out what happened!
“When I was in college some 10+ years ago, I worked for my University as a Resident Advisor in a dorm.
It was a student job that afforded me a place to live in exchange for managing a floor in one of the student housing buildings on campus. The job itself was fairly basic and consisted of helping students with housing issues, maintaining an office hour M-F, having a duty weekend once a month and enforcing university policy. While I initially took the position for the housing, the dorm-community aspect ended up being fairly enjoyable.
Most of the policies of the university housing were common sense, no loud music after 9pm or running in the building, ect. If someone was found breaking the rules, you would tell them to stop and document it in case the issue became a habitual.
There was one policy that stuck out.
There were some rule infractions that also came with fines, such as smoking inside or damaging physical property.
One of the policies that had a fine attached was getting locked out of your dorm. If you needed to be let back into your dorm the university would fine you $25 and if you actually lost your key then you would be charged $500 to re-core the door lock.
The first year I was an RA I never charged a student to get back into their dorm. I thought it was a bad policy as being a poor student myself, I understood what $25 could mean to someone.
The building’s Resident Manager, my boss, at that time was about to graduate and didn’t care if we charged them to get into their room and so everything was good.
The new guy was a little off-putting.
However in year two I have my first meeting with the other RAs and our new RM, we will call him Doug.
Doug was one of those people who was immediately overly friendly and because he was a “friend” felt like he could come into your personal space. Stuff like touching your shoulders or arms while talking to you.
It was in this first meeting that he assigned out all of the master keys for the building. He had 2 keys for each floor which were inside a zipper binder along with a key-log consisting of the keys serial number and RA it was assigned to.
This will become important later.
He gave us each one of the keys and then placed the 2nd on a “duty set” of keys which were checked out on the weekend by the pair of RAs on duty.
The master key was not something to be messed with.
While the University policies for a student losing a key were bad, the policies for an RA losing a master key are worse. If you were to lose a master key you would be terminated (thus losing your housing) and you would be fined the cost to re-core each door on your floor… $12,000.
While we all already knew this, I recall how much time Doug specifically spent reiterating this fact to us in this 1st meeting and how he was no longer responsible for the keys since we now had them.
Several weeks into the semester I am conducting duty rounds in the building with another RA whom I am friends with. We will call her Brittany. Brittany is very smart, assertive and always a laugh so I loved working duty with her.
This guy was screwing up the vibe of the dorm.
This day however, Brittany seems a bit down.
After a bit of prodding she confides in me that Doug has been making her uncomfortable and that he kept touching her. I believed I understood what she meant because I also disliked how touchy he was and how close he would get to me when we spoke…
That’s not what she meant.
I talked to her about reporting him but she did not want to, presumably since Doug was one of the department’s “Golden Boys”. Brittany said she had had enough so she told him off and didn’t think it would happen again but asked me to stick around her any time he was around.
After learning what Brittany told me, I asked another female RA who I was friends with what she thought of Doug. While she didn’t claim he had done anything to her, she did expressed that she didn’t like being alone with him.
They were tired of Doug’s antics.
I decided he was a creep and I became very brief any time I had to speak with him. I also made sure I would stick around after staff meetings until everyone left and would linger in the office doorway if Doug called one of the girls back.
The year goes on and I continue doing my job just as I had the year before. I document major and minor incidents, but I don’t ever document letting students back into their dorms. One weekend I am on duty and get a notification on the duty pager (yeah a pager) from a student, I call them and they are locked out on another floor.
I grab the duty-set keys and head to let them back into their dorm. In the hallway I run into Doug who asks what I am doing. We have a brief exchange, I tell him I am letting a student into their room and I continue about my way thinking nothing of it.
It was time to have a meeting.
The following Monday I am called into the office. I am asked about the student I let into his room and how often I have to let people in. I am honest and tell him that I never charge the students and I do it several times a month.
Apparently because the students are informed of the policy and their responsibilities when they accept the keys, he considers my failure to charge them to be theft from the university.
He had apparently reviewed all of the reports submitted under my user ID and seen that I had never charged anyone for being let back into their dorm and told me that he was referring me for disciplinary action.
They now firmly had their mind made up about Doug.
The disciplinary action did not go far, or at least no one higher up ever spoke to me about that situation. For me though, this drew a line that only served to reinforced my opinion of him.
School continues much as it had.
A few months before the end of the year I am again doing duty rounds with Brittany who is clearly upset. Apparently, a few nights prior she had a late night and a few drinks with friends. Early the next morning a student had awoken her from her intoxicated stupor because they had locked themselves out of their dorm.
Still half asleep, she grabbed her master key and let the student in. When she returned to her room, instead of putting the key up, she had instead set it on her counter where it then fell into the trash.
Awake the next day and not realizing what had happened, she took her trash to the dumpster and it was gone to the dump before she remembered what happened.
This was a bad situation.
Brittany couldn’t afford to lose her job, housing and being fined $12,000. She was at a complete loss as what to do.
After considering the consequences of reporting what had happened and deciding that was a bad course of action, we brainstorm and decide that we need to find a way make a new key without anyone knowing.
We didn’t have long to act either as each day ran the risk of a random key check by Doug.
The university keys are made on a key blank that are not readily available at the local shops, presumably for this exact reason. So we scoured the internet looking for a copy and ended up finding one that looked like a match.
However, the websites picture was just a silhouette of what the keys outline looked like so we weren’t 100% sure.
It was our best option, so we ordered it.
The friends set it all in motion…
A plan was born.
With our key blank in route, we decided that we would take the 2nd master key on the duty set mid-week (when its not being used) and take it somewhere to make a copy. The next problem was once we had a working copy of the key, we would still need to find a way to get the Keys serial number back on the copy.
Luckily, Brittany knew someone with hammer stamps we could use to imprint the numbers on the key and I somehow remembered the binder that Doug had with the serial numbers.
Because Doug’s office was across the hall from his room, he could always hear if anyone was in there. Since Brittany had bad experiences with Doug we didn’t want him to find her in there alone, so it fell to me. I waited till night on one of my duty weekends and got into the office.
I opened the door as quietly as I could and snuck in leaving the door only slightly ajar so that no one in the hall could immediately see in. I was only half way through looking for the binder when I heard his door open.
Sure enough, Doug steps in and asks what I am doing. I know my heart was racing but I had come up with what I though was a believable lie. I told him I had to use the university computer in his office to file an incident report because my laptop wasn’t working.
That was a close one!
The lie was good enough and he bought it, leaving me alone to continue my search. It only took a few minutes before I found the binder and got the key number assigned to Brittany. I went ahead and filed a bogus report on a minor infraction in case Doug checked and was out of there.
Each day we waited to see if the key blank would arrive. The plan hinged on this key and it was exhilarating feeling the plan beginning to come together. When it finally came, it was a perfect match… except for the large key brand stamped across it.
There wasn’t a way to cover it up and it was too noticeable to pass as a real key. The whole plan seemed to fall apart.
We decided we would still make a copy on this branded-blank so that if Brittany needed to use the key, she could do so without being discovered not having her master key.
Brittany waited till mid-week and took the 2nd master key off of the duty set to use to make a copy. Once she had it, we talked over the plan and joked about how nice it would be if we could just change the numbers on the 2nd key to match the serial number of the 1st. While that seemed like it probably wouldn’t work we decided to look at how many numbers would have to be changed.
It was zero…
There was a big surprise.
In our first meeting where Doug had assigned us keys, where he stressed how we would be fired if we lost these keys… he had accidentally issued Brittany his copy.
We realized we didn’t have to do anything else and Brittany put her master key in her lock-box. After two weeks, no one had noticed that the duty set was missing a key. Because we were tired of waiting, we had a student pretend to get locked out while Brittany was in town.
The responding RA didn’t have a clue and was confused why none of the keys worked and they called up Doug. Doug couldn’t seem to get any of the keys to work either and so he called Brittany back to the dorm, so that he could use her master key. A task in which she was happy to assist.
When everyone realized a master key was missing, the big bosses got involved. There was a complete building search, a search of dorm rooms and multiple interviews of each RA. None of the RAs knew anything but Brittany and I, so we feigned ignorance along with everyone else.
I believe they suspected Brittany initially, but when she was able to produce her correct master key their demeanor with her drastically changed.
The floor got re-cored as you would expect. They never did figure out where that key had gone and thus couldn’t justifiably charge anyone for the incident. We had a meeting where they basically chewed all of us out about keys and the importance of their security.
Doug was now in the spotlight.
While the meeting was for us all, a heavy emphasis was clearly directed towards Doug.
Apparently as part of his position, he was required to complete a key log each day to make sure that the keys on the duty set were accounted for.
Unfortunately, he had not been doing so and there was no way to tell how long the key had been missing.
Like he had told me when he wrote me up, this was important since those keys were assigned to him and he had been informed of the policy and his responsibilities when he accepted the keys.
Doug got the short end of the stick…but he had it coming.
Since he was the bosses golden boy, they didn’t fire him like we were all warned would happen. Doug did end up getting a substantial fine and while I don’t know the exact amount, I do know he was incredibly upset about it.
The year was almost over and Doug got moved to another building the next year, so I never had much more to do with him. I do know that he ended up losing his job due to some incident involving another female RA.
Well that was longer than i expected. Hopefully its worth a laugh for anyone who actually read it and at least i have it wrote down now.”
Check out what people had to say about this.
This person can’t believe the prices associated with this.
Another Reddit user shared what they learned in college.
This individual was impressed with this story.
Another reader thought this was a real nail-biter!
And this Reddit user talked about how a classmate handled a problem like this.
You love to see it!
Nice work!
Thought that was satisfying? Check out what this employee did when their manager refused to pay for their time while they were travelling for business.
Source: https://twistedsifter.com/2024/01/they-got-revenge-against-a-boss-who-tried-to-screw-over-their-co-worker-over-lost-keys-while-employed-as-resident-advisors-at-a-college/
