The internal number was my supervisor’s. I asked IT whether that could happen accidentally, and they said not with that routing configuration. Every one of those 211 calls had been redirected before my phone ever rang. I requested the detailed call records and compared them with my clients’ messages. The calls lined up almost perfectly with the complaints that my clients had made. Then I noticed something else: my supervisor had been logging the forwarded calls as if he had personally handled them.
I took the records to HR and asked why my performance was being judged on calls that had never reached me. They said they would investigate, but my supervisor immediately insisted the routing had been changed because I was “overwhelmed.” I asked why nobody had told me, and he couldn’t answer. IT eventually found that the forwarding rule had been created from my supervisor’s account six months earlier and had never been authorized by me. Worse, the performance report used the number of unanswered calls to justify putting me on the plan.
The company removed the performance warning and restored my accounts after reviewing the call logs. My supervisor was placed on leave while they investigated, and several clients were reassigned back to me. One client even emailed HR saying she had thought I was ignoring her for months. I didn’t tell her what had happened; I simply called her back and apologized for a problem that had never been mine. They told me my numbers were falling because I wasn’t answering the phone, but for six months they had been making sure my phone never had the chance to ring.
