I had a rough day at work yesterday (Monday too, go figure 
). One of the kids I tutor normally does reading. But last week his mom decided she would like him to get tutoring in math as well. Being the absentminded dolt that I am, I forgot he was starting math last Saturday, and did a session of reading by accident. Fortunately, his mom was ok with the mistake, and I told her that we would just to math the next time they came in.
He shows up Monday, and I get his math stuff together. My manager sees this, and tells me I HAVE to do reading with him, it’s on the schedule, woe be it to the mortal who dares defy the schedule, yadda yadda yadda.
I was rather pissed at my manager about this. I was trying to fix my own mistake, and got chewed out for it. If there was a reasonable explanation, that would be fine, but there wasn’t. I was just trying to salvage a previous error I had made. This is just one of many examples of things I try to do that get coopted by my manager. I kind of feel like our manager wants to have it both ways in terms of employees- she wants robots, in the sense that they aren’t going to do anything outside of what she specifically said so that the employees don’t screw things up/get her in trouble, and yet she also wants problem solvers; people who are dynamic and can quickly deal with unexpected events and come up with solutions so that they can operate independently.
Half the time, I’ll do something (like what I mentioned above) and get patted on the back for my quick thinking/good judgement. The other half of the time, I get chewed out for not passing it off to the manager. It can be rather frustrating sometimes. 95% of our company’s service is provided by people in my position, yet a lot of times I feel like we aren’t “in the know” about things as much as we should be. A big cause of these conflicts are built from manager/employee miscommunications, and I feel (unfortunately) that every month we run around in circles ‘setting the record straight’ about what everybody’s expectations are.