Posted by Ask a Manager
https://www.askamanager.org/2025/08/the-website-redesign-with-pizazz-the-explosive-gas-and-other-stories-of-people-overstepping-their-expertise.html
https://www.askamanager.org/?p=32752
Earlier this month, we talked about coworkers overstepping their expertise in disastrous ways. Here are 12 of my favorite stories you shared.
1. The cocktail hour
At a past job, I worked at a substance use treatment center. My boss was planning a fundraising event and was completely floored that his idea of having cocktails at the event was immediately shot down by everyone. He kept saying “I have decades of experience in this and cocktails are the way to go” and leadership continued to push back with a hard no. He was a fundraising expert but was brand new to the recovery industry. Many of our donors were in recovery themselves so it would have been exceptionally poor taste, on top of just being bad optics. Not sure why he never understood that.
2. The punctuation
I used to work in corporate communications. I was helping the IT department set up a new internal site, which featured a gorgeous graphic of all the company’s various platforms. There were only three or four paragraphs of copy, which the team sent me in Word. I lightly edited and approved all the copy.
Imagine my surprise when I logged in a few weeks later and found a solid block of word soup. Every period, comma, and dash had been removed, as had spaces between paragraphs. No words were capitalized, aside from the names of IT platforms. I assumed it’d been some kind of technical error, but when I asked the team member, she told me, “Oh no, I removed the punctuation before we published the page.” Long pause as my brain malfunctioned. “But … why? Why remove punctuation?” “It made it all so cluttered.” Another long pause. “Huh. Well. In this company, we use periods. Punctuation makes sentences easier to read. So could you go ahead and put those back?”
“If you really think it’s better,” she said, somewhat miffed. i do i said i do this is not a %4*& eecummings poem this is a corporate website for the it department for the love of god put the damn periods back where they go
3. The title change
I had a friend change her own title on email and other correspondence from “Manager Assistant” to “Assistant Manager” because she thought it flowed better and meant the same thing. It definitely did not.
4. The command
My very first job out of college was as a computer programmer for a major financial institution. I could write a book about all the stupid and toxic stuff I encountered there, but this particular thing happened in my first week. The team manager (who was supposed to also be a programmer, but I saw no evidence of it during the year I was there) asked me to create a command-line script that could be called with two options. One option would list all the processes running on a specified production machine, and the other would kill all the processes. So I created a script with the options “-list” and “-kill”. The manager said this was too slow and inefficient, and I should change it to “-l” and “-k.” I did that, but added a confirmation prompt, so that if someone typed “-k”, the script would ask if they really wanted to kill all the processes, and they would have to type Y or N in order to continue. The manager said this was also too slow, and demanded that I remove the confirmation prompt. I pointed out that l and k were right next to each other on the keyboard, so it would be way too easy for someone to kill everything by mistake. I also pointed out that the script would be run once a day at most, so taking a few extra seconds to run it would hardly affect anything, while restarting everything after an accidental kill all would take much longer. No matter; everything must run at MAXIMUM SPEED!
So I removed the prompt as instructed, put the script into production, and sent out a group-wide email explaining the new command and warning everyone to be careful and not type k instead of l. Guess what happened less than five minutes later? Go on, guess?
After that, the manager grudgingly allowed me to put the confirmation prompt back in.
5. The article
The owner of a prominent local business won some big industry award and my editors told me to do a story on it (the newsworthiness of it was questionable, but that’s another issue). I reached out to the business owner, who I had done a profile on a year before, and she proceeded to condescendingly school me on how to properly write the story to ensure her many previous honors, talent, and business acumen were included and highlighted. Then she sent me a previous story about her that she said was a prime example of the best journalism she had seen, and I should try to copy that one because unlike me, that reporter was an expert who knew what they were doing.
That previous story was mine. She sent me my own story to tell me I was both an excellent reporter and a rank amateur.
6. The certification application
About six months ago, several Very High Up people at the university where I work received a Very Scary Email from a government agency with the subject line, “Recertification Request Denied.” Cue panicked calls and emails. Several people are immediately called into meetings to investigate what is going on.
Well. The university was indeed in the process of applying for a recertification (think something along the lines of, showing the Department of Education we should be able to continue getting federal financial aid dollars). At the same time, somewhere in an advising office, a well-meaning advisor told a precocious freshman to go set up a profile on a government website (think, making an account on the FAFSA site). Can you see where this is going?
Our dear freshman somehow found the backend government website used only for high-level university administrators and started an application as if he were a university applying for certification. Whenever he encountered questions like, “Who is the chair of the Board of Trustees?” or “Date of incorporation with the State Higher Education Regulatory Agency” (you know, things that would make the average person think, “Maybe I’m on the wrong form”) he conducted research on our university website to find the answers. This must have taken hours.
As it turned out, the email we received from the government said, in essence, that they had received our request from our wayward student, but the request was denied as there was already a well-established university with our name in their system.
7. The website redesign
I was the lead developer on a nonprofit’s website overhaul—clean, accessible, fast. Enter our events coordinator, Dana, who had recently taken one HTML course on YouTube and insisted she should “take a stab” at the homepage.
The next morning, we woke up to an absolute horror show:
1. The hero image was a 12MB TIFF of a cat in sunglasses (because “it’s fun!”).
2. All the navigation links were Comic Sans.
3. The “Donate” button now played an auto-looping MIDI version of “Eye of the Tiger.”
4. Somehow, she had embedded a YouTube video inside another YouTube video.
Oh, and she replaced the accessibility menu with a “sparkle cursor.” When I asked her what happened, she said: “I just wanted to add some ✨pizzazz✨ and I think I fixed the SEO too — I changed all the alt text to just say ‘hot website.’”
We had to roll back the site using an emergency backup, and our IT guy started labeling backups “Before Dana” and “After Dana.”
8. The stolen presentation
I came up with a new procedure that would save the company money. Said procedure was presented to all relevant departments, and all of those department heads approved the new process with one exception. One small department informed us that they just hired a new guy from another division who was a “genius” and he wanted to do a presentation on what he came up with.
The guy started the presentation by telling me “nice try” in front of many, many senior people, and then he proceeded to present my original idea using my original documentation. I requested that the guy zoom in on the bottom of one of the graphics on page 3, where I had typed my name in a very small font. The guy truly did not understand why everyone in the room laughed and walked out of the conference room.
My grandboss went up to the guy, shook his hand and said “Good luck in your future new career, whatever that may be.”
9. The explosive gas
I was responsible for a complex scientific experiment with many parts, involving explosive gas. We were ordered to shut our experiments down to prepare for a possible power failure and to have our supervisors check the experiments to make sure they were shut down properly. I shut it down and went looking for my supervisor. His colleague Jack said he’s not here but offered to do the inspection. I pointed out he doesn’t know anything about it and he brushed me off.
I brought him to the lab and showed him the experiment. He clearly had no idea what he was looking at. He asked me how the experiment worked and what different pieces of equipment did, and I answered.
He then nodded thoughtfully, turned to me, repeated back to me everything I’d just told him, and asked me, “Do you understand?” I was over it so I just said, “Yes, thank you” and he told me he was glad he could help.
And yes, I’m a woman.
10. The suggestion
A few years ago, part of my then-job was a focus on a specific agent process, including writing or revamping some of the procedures, and doing quality reviews of their adherence to said procedures. I did somewhere between 30 and 100 of these reviews a month; all were scored, but in a way where the points didn’t affect the agents’ performance ratings. My boss felt that the scoring had a psychological impact; also, it did give us insight into struggle areas and enable us to provide better and more targeted feedback.
So one day I get an email response to a review, in which the agent condescendingly told me that the procedure in question did not say what I claimed it said. I don’t remember the exact wording of the email, except that his final sentence began, “I suggest you educate yourself.” On a procedure that I wrote.
11. The complex mathematics
Eons ago, I got a job as a data analyst for a small company. The position had been empty for a while and a guy in marketing who was “good with numbers” had been covering it and providing KPIs for the team to use. He gave me printouts of the spreadsheets he’d been using and I didn’t understand anything. I eventually got him to email me the actual files and discovered he’d been using some very creative formulas.
Most egregious examples that have stuck with me for almost two decades:
– For the average, he would sum all values then divide by 2. Not by the number of values. Always by 2. Thus the average of 100, 200, and 300 would be 300.
– To increase a value by 10% he would add +0.10. So if you have an item that costs 200 and increase its price by 10%, the result would be 200.10.
When I pointed out that, respectfully, the numbers were a mess, he told me that mathematics is a very complex subject and I shouldn’t feel bad if I didn’t understand it. I am of course a woman and also my degree is in mathematics. People didn’t like me at that job. They said that since I started all the KPIs had gotten worse (they were just getting the correct numbers instead of marketing guy’s). I think everyone was happy when I got another job a few months later and I quit.
12. The cyberattack
My job suffered a cyberattack. An external email (the sender had a “valid” email) with an attachment and instructions to open said attachment was forwarded from the email account of a coworker – this is the point of infiltration, I think. This forwarded email was sent to approximately half the employees. The coworker with the valid email sent a company-wide email stating, “Don’t open the email with the attachment. It is not from me.”
Another third coworker took the opportunity to email the scammer directly asking, “Is it okay to open the attachment?” Scammer responded, ‘YES!!” The third coworker proceeded to tell the entire agency we could open the attachment. (He has no authority to do so.) Most of the employees who received the forwarded email opened it. The entire company was locked down. The IT department had to reconfigure ALL our computers. I’ve heard the IT department thinks the third employee should be disciplined, but we shall see if they are.
The post the website redesign with pizazz, the explosive gas, and other stories of people overstepping their expertise appeared first on Ask a Manager.
https://www.askamanager.org/2025/08/the-website-redesign-with-pizazz-the-explosive-gas-and-other-stories-of-people-overstepping-their-expertise.html
https://www.askamanager.org/?p=32752
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