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The original was posted on /r/maliciouscompliance by /u/Khamero on 2025-05-28 21:09:11+00:00.
I work on the railway, and to put it simply was assigned to a project to check all incoming trains to the railyard during specific times. Now, for safety reasons for everyone involved, we need to tell the area control office when we are fiddling with a train, in case someone else is doing work on it (Bad times if we engage the brakes while someone is working on them for example). We get told that we should call in when we start checking a train, and once when we are done. So far, so good.
The control office however, were not prepared for how many train we were gonna check, and we were a handful of people, calling in twice for every train. Alot of calls, basically, but it worked.
Day 2 however we got new orders - we are to use the railyards own mobile app, where they make a list of all the trains we check and we just check in and out of the app. Super good for us since we can see if anyone else has entered that they are working on a train in the app. Super good for everyone involved!
Until day 3, when we left our list of trains for the day at the office, now with new personnel who proclaimed that they certinly did not have time to enter that whole list of trains into the app. Fair enough, we know we are a drain on their resources, and tell them thats fine, we will just call in when we start working on a train.
Now, we could sometimes call in and say "I'll be working on train XX, then YY, and later ZZ." and they would just check us into all of them since the trains just sit there most of the time if they are not being shunted or repaired (we could work around cleaners and other personnel safely), but not now. Now we call separately for the start and finish of each train. You can hear the control office people start figuring it out, they complained to our project manager, who basically said that we were clear to just phone in according to the rules. It took half the shift before the message came in that all the trains were in the app, and just use the app for all of it.
Apparently it was faster to just enter our list than taking oh so many calls for something rather trivial in the grand scheme of things.