Lies at the laser printer

A company I used to work for printed its invoices on a laser printer using preprinted forms. It was one of my staff members’ responsibilities to make sure these were printed and delivered to accounting every morning, so they could be mailed out.

I came in one morning to find this employee in complete panic. He was ranting about the printer being broken, that every invoice had printed wrong and he had no idea how to fix the problem. Part of the reason for his panic was that the accounting manager was a raving lunatic if she didn’t receive the invoices by 8 in the morning, and quite obviously she was not going to get them by that time this morning.

I calmly asked my employee to show me what the problem was. He handed me an invoice and it was printed upside down. I asked him if he had loaded the invoice with forms this morning and he had answered in the affirmative. I started laughing and told him he had put them in upside down when he loaded them in the printer. He yelled at me “NO, I DIDN’T!” I said yes, he had, and from there, our discussion degraded into an exchange you might expect to hear from a couple of 2-year-olds.

I opened the printer, flipped the forms, and had him reprint the invoices. What do you know? They printed right side up! My employee, however, persisted in claiming that he did not load the forms upside down and that it was a printer problem.

As a manager, I never had a problem with one of my employees when they made an honest mistake. One sure way to get on my bad side, though, is not to be accountable when it’s obvious you screwed up. Needless to say, this guy didn’t last much longer on my staff.