So, you’re asking about the “Lia Strike,” huh? Funny, we never wrote that down in any official reports, but man, if you were on the Omega project, you knew exactly what it meant. It wasn’t even a real strike, not in the walking-off-the-job sense. It was pure Lia.
Lia, well, she was one of those folks who’d been with the company since the stone age. Knew where all the bodies were buried, if you catch my drift. Super smart, no doubt, but stuck in her ways like nobody’s business. We were trying to roll out this new workflow system, you know, something to drag us into the 21st century. Everyone else was grumbling but getting on with it. Not Lia.
She just… stopped. Anything that had to go through this new system, if it landed on her desk, it just sat there. Piled up. She wouldn’t touch it. Said the old way was “perfectly efficient” and this new thing was “a disaster waiting to happen.” Her words. She’d still do her other tasks, the old-fashioned way, humming to herself in her corner, surrounded by printouts. It was surreal.
And the thing is, a huge chunk of the Omega project depended on her specific expertise. Stuff nobody else really understood because, well, Lia had made sure of that over the years. She wasn’t malicious, I don’t think. Just… territorial. And incredibly stubborn.
So, this “strike” of hers, this silent refusal, it brought a critical part of Omega to a screeching halt. It was like a dam bursting, but in slow motion. Deadlines started whooshing past. Management, bless their hearts, they’d have these “chats” with her. She’d nod, say “I understand,” and then go right back to ignoring the new system.
I remember one Tuesday, our team lead, poor guy, was practically tearing his hair out. We were all scrambling, trying to find workarounds, trying to decode Lia’s ancient spreadsheets and notes. It was chaos. And Lia? She was meticulously watering her desk plant. That plant was probably the most stress-free thing in the office.
What did we get out of the “Lia Strike”? Oh, plenty. Mostly a massive headache and a delayed project. But it also really hammered home how risky it is when knowledge isn’t shared. When one person becomes a single point of failure, not because they’re a genius, but because they’re a gatekeeper, whether they mean to be or not.
It also showed how weak our change management was. We just assumed everyone would eventually fall in line. We didn’t have a real plan for someone as dug-in as Lia. We ended up having to bring in a consultant, at great expense, to basically recreate Lia’s part of the process in the new system, using whatever bits and pieces we could pry from her old work.
Lia, she eventually took early retirement a year later. Still think she believes she was right. And maybe, for her specific little world, her old system was perfect. But the rest of us had to move on. The “Lia Strike” became this cautionary tale we’d tell new hires. A reminder that progress can be painful, and sometimes the biggest roadblocks are the quiet ones in the corner, just saying “no.”
