People Dispense Their Malicious Compliance Revenge Stories

Printing may be pretty cheap, but when you’re printing out thousands of pages, well, the cost adds up very quickly…

“The first “real job” I had when I left college was for an aerospace company that is fairly well-known for its commercial airplanes. I managed to learn fast and then streamline a lot of the processes that were holdovers from what most of my coworkers called “The Lazy B” down the road.

One of those processes that saved an enormous amount of money was the move away from print copies to PDF review.

The company went through reams upon reams of 8.5×11 and 11×17 paper every day, and we had the laser printer/copier guys out every week.

Just implementing my process, I saved the company around $5k in the first month alone, and more every month after that as more of the engineering review and document processing moved to PDF.

About two years into this, my boss’s boss hired a guy out of Kansas who epitomized the term “fake laconic.” He had bounced from shop to shop and came to us because his friend had become a manager at our company (this friend being one of the few engineering leads who refused to implement the new secured PDF review system).

By this time I’d already gotten several salary promotions and was over a team of five other people managing their work and submitting it to my boss, who spent less time having me do the work that I was originally hired to do and more time looking at how to automate a lot of our processes (one of those being teaching everyone to hit F7 and spend five minutes with a spell checker – and then setting up a script that did the same thing with every document submitted so that we didn’t have to pay the FAA guys to reject our stuff based on stupid punctuation and spelling mistakes).

Technically speaking, Kansas Boy was going to be an editor, which meant I needed to work with him in the submission process and get his input on the best way to integrate eyes-on review for specialty lines of business into our system.

This did not go well.

The first meeting I had with him, it took him over a minute to finish a sentence that when I counted, was less than 50 words total (not including redundant words and “Weeeeeeeeeellll…” and other faked drawls.) The second meeting had him saying, to me, “Man, you gots to slow down, you work yourself right out of a job!”

When, decades later, I played Red Dead Redemption 2 for the first time, I nearly quit playing the first time I heard Arthur Morgan open his mouth. If Arthur Morgan took fifty seconds to say twenty words, that was EXACTLY how Kansas Boy spoke.

Irritating was not half of it.

It did not help my perception of his being stuck in the 80s that he wore his hair in a modified mullet and wore a mustache and made sexist comments multiple times about our boss, who was a single mom with three kids and an actual Texas accent.

Things eventually came to a head between us when he was given just enough approval power to demand that he receive print copies of the documents before he would review them.

At that point, he had bogged the review process down so much that he had bottlenecked four projects, with the intention of taking people away from my team to “train properly as editors”.

He would work extra hours and then “take work home” – which as far as I could tell meant he would take it home and leave it on his table while he watched the football game. Since he was on an hourly wage, it also meant anything we had to have him review blew up in project hours by double the estimate.

And because you had to be signed in to the system to review work on my PDF system, and it tracked connection and access time, as well as when a modification was made to the document, he really didn’t like using it.

As for me, I was salaried and perfectly happy that way.

But I ran up against this clown taking hours and days to review things that could have been done in minutes if he just learned how to press three buttons, and he would refuse to do it.

Eventually, I went to the director of engineering and explained what was happening, which resulted in a conversation with this guy’s friend, who then went out of his way to insist that the PDF review process wasn’t secure (it was), that it was inefficient (it wasn’t) and that the best way to do things was the way Kansas boy liked to do them.

Months went by and the project bogged. Mostly because of Kansas Boy’s review “process.” Finally, it was down to the last week of submission, and my team had done everything they needed to do per our submission process.

The director called me in on Monday and said because this engineering lead was connected to the new project, he had the final say over how the documentation and instructions for install were going to be handled, and that my teams and I should support their team to the best of my ability.

Then he invited me to play golf with him that weekend.

I don’t play golf. I have never played golf. I can play minigolf with four shots of Ouzo and a can of beer in my hand, but the last time I played golf I hit a caddy with a golf ball on the previous hole.

Twice. Nobody knows how. The point is that inviting me to play golf is like asking a basketball player to play professional llama polo. You don’t do it unless there’s another reason that doesn’t involve watching very tall men avoid getting bitten by irritated camelids and laughing.

Then I got a memo (written on actual paper in a time of email) from Kansas Boy about a meeting to discuss the submission issues.

By lunch, I had had four hours of meetings with Kansas and his Lead (referred to by most of the people in the company as Duchee – a reference both to his being a French Canadian citizen and…well, a jerk), who were laying out, very smugly, their requirements for how they were submitting all their documents.

Having been given carte blanche to run this project to completion, they sat there and dictated exactly how it was all going to go down.

All of their documents were due by Friday afternoon. Over 700,000 pages of reports, assessments, drawings, installation manuals, etc. For a personal review of every page by Kansas boy and his paid intern (who was the only person that hadn’t quit after being transferred to his team).

It was impressed upon me that this project was under the eye of the president of the company itself.

And they insisted they all be printed out, completely in paper.

These arrogant s******s were all but picking nuts out of their poop-eating grins at the end of the meeting.

I should mention that at this point there were so few printers used in the company that the massive copier/printer in the file archive was the only one really capable of handling the load. Everything else was the standard small office laser printer setup with less than three reams of paper usable.

To wit, the amount of printing they wanted to do would take about the full capacity of the whole company’s printing capacity UNLESS we hired an external contractor to do it, which couldn’t happen in the short turnaround time they had.

And since my purview at that point included the production of documentation, it technically fell into my lap to make it happen.

They also told me that if I managed to complete it by Friday, the company would get a bonus from our client, which was incredibly important as this was a client we wanted to impress to get more business from in the future (and not coincidentally, our company’s profit-sharing incentives would reward the people who made that happen at the end of the year, meaning that the two of them would get bonuses for being the face of this particular project while everyone who actually made it happen would get…a $5 Starbucks gift card.

Yeah.)

Tuesday, I pulled all ten of my team members off their projects and retasked them to printing everything. We commandeered every single printer in the building, including the president’s personal laser printer and the photocopier his secretary used. I had them working overtime four hours a night with pizza and beer with stacks of toner, reams of paper, and repurposed the biggest conference rooms with laptops and printers, and parked myself in the file archives with the big beast to run the majority of the work.

At the end of the week we had more angry complaints (“hey man, this is the project Kansas Boy and Duchee tasked us to do. If you need to have a conversation, I suggest you take it up with them) ranging from the conference room being occupied by our operation to lack of printing supplies, staples, and overloaded print queues for almost everything.

At one point the FAA guy who was in charge of the project stepped in and demanded to know when he could print out HIS files – which were needed to actually submit all this crap.

We made it happen on Thursday night with three hours to spare before the deadline of Friday morning, Greenwich standard time (this is PST).

We delivered the whole thing to Kansas Boy’s 6-foot by six-foot cubicle. All 700,000 pages of it, in boxes and boxes of paper. Stacked precisely in his cube so as to prevent any blocking of the emergency egress, as per our ISO 9000 and safety protocols.

And we provided an electronic copy of everything we would submit normally to the FAA guy, whose responsibility it was to review everything before submission – but more to the point, to review anything that deviated from the normal submission package that was either a client request or a new submission methodology.

Anything new or modified, he only wanted to have print copies of the changed pages.

I want to be clear – while we did block Kansas Boy’s desk almost completely, this was not the malicious part.

When I came into the job, one of the new hires in my orientation class had a tradition of taking a tiny vector line art drawing figure of his alma mater’s mascot and adding it to every single file.

It was never significant enough to be seen even on a full plot of an engineering drawing, but that was his running joke for every single drawing he worked on.

The engineering state university that was the rival to his school also had a few engineers that worked at our company, and they began putting THEIR mascot in vector line art into their drawings.

Then someone who had a different sense of humor (cough cough) made one from a popular animated cartoon of the 1980s that, at a certain size, looked absolutely nothing like a robot that turned into a jet plane and more like a very small standard metric but, and made it available in the library of standard parts as a “do not use this model” part for a drawing template.

None of these things are kosher to include on an official engineering specification, even in drawing form. Even if the plotter at maximum size cannot determine if it is a school mascot or a maple leaf or a goofy robot toy from the 1980s. The only reason that the company got away with it was because nobody was stupid enough to resize all of the CAD components to show exactly what every single part was supposed to look like.

Once I realized what would happen if it ever came out or the models made it through to submission, I had the engineers who did this as a game go through their old drawings and take their little mascots out, and asked them to pass it on to anyone who did the same.

Being able to search the engineering database by part number meant I could also flag those drawings for editing and have the people responsible for them take them out.

Unfortunately, nobody knew that someone (cough cough DUCHEE cough cough) had included his own little vector art thing, which was an inappropriate image of a woman.

It never made it into the primary database of templates, because the engineering team and template review group I had set up for that purpose never received a copy of the template set from Duchee’s group, because he refused to use the standard templates because they weren’t “up to his standard”.

Nor did we know he had left it on every single one of the templates he demanded his team use, because he was still one of the holdouts who refused to use the system to check drawings in and out of the main database until he had approved them from his team.

He DID, however, check them into the database of approved drawings once they had been submitted to both the client and the FAA, meaning that the copies of the most recent files were on record, but as far as participating in the rest of it?

Nope. His excuse was that his team worked better that way.

And yet that meant, of course, that any given part that HE chose a specific ID number for would often conflict with other part numbers in the database, which would then result in a meeting to iron out the fact that he was ignoring the convention everyone else used (meaning check the database to make sure you weren’t creating two identical part numbers for two completely different parts in your drawing).

To add insult to injury and irritation for his team members, he also placed his name on almost every single one regardless of who had done the drawing, which meant that anyone who needed information about the project had to go through him instead of checking with the person who built the model in the first place.

Duchee had more turnover on his team than anywhere else in the company for multiple reasons, but the fact that he would routinely take credit for engineering drawings he didn’t do at a company that tended to use how many you did as a metric for your job performance was a huge one.

His insistence on making extra work that didn’t actually help the client was another. And his general jerkery towards anyone who told him “no” was another – especially those who used it when he told them they had to work through the weekend because his team was behind again on their projects.

This big, huge project was no exception to his “make work” idiocy.

As part of the submission for this particular project, Duchee had demanded to have a full catalog of every single modeled part and component printed up and submitted with every single engineering drawing so that the client (who hadn’t asked for it) would be able to determine which part they needed. His rationale was that because we were the source supplier for 60% of the parts included, we could make sure they knew we were the only ones they could buy them from.

And the one thing Duchee had decided to actually allow to be automated in this process? A script that expanded every single component on the engineering drawing to full 8.5″x11″ page size and submitted it as part of the official engineering parts list.

You might see where this is going.

I had taken Friday off, but on Monday morning I got a call from the VP’s personal assistant to come into the office for an important meeting.

On Friday afternoon, I walked into the conference room next to my director’s office. My director had the most poker-faced expression I have ever seen on his face when he opened the door and let me into one of the loudest ass-chewings I ever have walked in on before or since.

The FAA rep, the president of the company, the VP of our department, Kansas Boy, and Duchee were all sitting around the table.

The FAA rep, a generally fairly genial, round-bellied man, was yelling at Duchee and Kansas Boy at the top of his lungs about how serious this matter was and how ridiculous they would make the company look, and that if he submitted this garbage the fact that he let it through would at the very least require a full review of every single document he had approved while working with our company.

When there was a pause in the barrage, my director asked me if I knew if there were any non-standard drawings or cartoons in our engineering database of CAD files. I said, “Well, yeah. Those are the template example parts that are removed automatically from the template when someone copies it to their local drive.

They’re just there as examples. They’re labeled that way, too. Nobody actually keeps those, and they can’t; they’re deleted from the drawing immediately when someone saves a local copy of the template.”

And that’s when the VP, a woman in her mid-40s brought in to change the heavy bro-culture of our company, said, “you actually keep THIS as an example in your template database??” and held up a full ream’s worth of blown-up Canadian Hockey adult content vector line art images framed beautifully in an engineering 3D isometric part view.

My jaw dropped open and I think I made some odd noises that could have been mistaken for strangled laughter.

“Kansas Boy and Duchee tell us you’re responsible for maintaining the full engineering part database system. So if the buck stops with you, this is on you to explain to everyone here what this is doing here.

Can you honestly say you’ve never seen this image before in your database?”

I shot a look at both Kansas Boy and Duchee, who were both looking at me the way a chicken watches someone with an axe walking across the farmyard to the grindstone.

Because I had seen a full blown-up copy of that image colored in with highlighter on Kansas Boy’s desk, I said, “Yeah, you probably should take that down, that’s not appropriate for a workplace environment” before getting a long-drawn-out drawled explanation of where a stick was and why I should pull it out of my butt.

He knew I knew where I’d seen it before. And while I didn’t know where Kansas Boy had gotten it from, I could make an educated guess.

And they both knew I had zero inclination to even pretend to take a hit for them. The bus was rolling downhill and while I wasn’t throwing them under it like they’d tried to throw me, I sure as crap wasn’t going to push them out of the way.

My jaw worked a few more times before I said, “Yes, I can honestly say it does not exist in the engineering database. Now or ever. I can show you what DOES exist, and the history of created part numbers. I know for certain that the part number does not exist. Here,” and pulled up the template database on my director’s computer.

We went through the full template database using every iteration of that particular part number until the VP was satisfied. Then she asked me, “And you and your team never saw this while you were doing all the printing this week?”

“I can’t speak to anyone else, but if we had seen it we would have flagged it.

We would have immediately brought it to the attention of the reviewer of the schematic (Kansas Boy) and the engineer whose name is on the drawing (Duchee) to have it removed immediately. We can run a search in the full engineering database to see where this part number shows up on all drawings so long as we make sure to search for all hidden part numbers.”

Duchee, said, “Oh no, that would take way too much time, we can’t do that, we have to submit this by the end of day today.”

Kansas Boy, in one of the speediest possible sentences I had ever heard come out of his mouth, said the exact same thing.

The president, who had been glowering in the corner, said, “This project is on hold until we determine exactly how compromised these engineering drawings are, and every single drawing that this part shows up on must be resubmitted and reviewed by at least three people, one of whom is going to be the lead engineer who signed off on every one of these and at least one senior manager of engineering who isn’t involved. We aren’t this kind of company.”

Duchee and Kansas Boy actually went white at that, and both started looking at me with this pleading expression. The axe was sharpened to a razor’s edge and now it was down to whether fried chicken or duck a la orange was on the menu.

The president looked at me and said, “Run the search. I don’t care how long it takes. I want a copy on VP’s desk in print of every drawing with this part in our database, and one for everyone in this room, along with who created the drawing, who reviewed it, and who approved it.”

Now, I’m one of the only people in the company who had admin access to the engineering part database, because I helped create it, and I set an automated rule that forced everyone who used it to change their password once a month to a new sixteen or more character string with symbols and numbers.

I knew for a fact nobody who had access to it was in the office except me.

So did my director, who did have access but kept forgetting the code, and eventually told me just to take him off the list because, as he put it, “I know just enough to be dangerous.”

I said, “Absolutely. It will probably take at least six hours. Do you want me to stay late to finish it?”

The director looked at me after checking with the VP and President and said, “No, you and your team already clocked over 80 hours each this week dealing with this deadline.

Take the weekend and get it to us by Monday afternoon.”

Now Kansas Boy and Duchee are looking like they need to get up but they’re being held back, so I grabbed a secured laptop from one of the IT guys that I used for maintaining the database, headed to the IT department secure server room, plugged it in to run overnight, logged in to my account, started the compilation, locked the screen with an authentication dongle, pulled it from the USB port, stuck it in my pocket, then headed home.

About ten minutes after I left I began getting panicked phone calls from my work number on my mobile. Then I began getting email notifications. Since the director had my number and he would just call me from his mobile and would give it to the VP and President if they needed it, I knew it was Kansas Boy and Duchee.

So I ignored it. Because screw them.

The next day I went golfing with my director as part of a charity golf event he had been working on and, as it turned out, the president and his wife, who all agreed that my golfing was utterly terrible, and laughably so.

They kept me around for the rest of the evening for dinner and a charity auction and got me intoxicated enough that they called me a cab and had a valet from the club drive my car home for me.

Sunday I spent recuperating.

Monday morning I went into the office, opened up the IT server room and found the laptop I had left plugged in missing.

After checking with the IT crew, they let me know that Kansas Boy had insisted on Saturday morning that he needed to get the laptop to provide a critical list to the president by the end of the day. By Saturday afternoon he had browbeat the help desk guy making barely $15 an hour into letting him in to “check on it” but after an hour said he was done and left.

When I went by Duchee’s desk on my way to the director’s office right after I found out about the laptop incident, he and Kansas Boy were talking at his desk.

Kansas gave me a huge poop-eating smirk and then laughed. Duchee still looked worried, but less so.

When I walked out of my director’s five-minute closed-door session, my director said, “You know you didn’t have to make print copies, and you didn’t have to come in Saturday morning to do it. You could have just sent us a PDF file.”

“Yeah, but you know Kansas Boy and Duchee like their print copies,” and I walked over to hand two thick wodges of printed database info to both Kansas and Duchee.

Looking right at them, I said, “Besides. I was up early on Saturday anyway for the golf tournament and I had to give President his laser printer back. Might as well make some last copies before it all goes back to normal.”

When I dropped off the list, I said, “yeah, I gave everyone else their copies Saturday morning.”

On that list was every single engineering drawing from Duchee’s team. Duchee had put his name on every single piece of paper his team had produced as either the originating engineer or the approving engineer. Kansas Boy was the reviewer of the record.

Over 40,000 engineering drawings last and present had their little project.

Maple leaf part in them. From the project itself, there were nearly 150,000 pages of documentation referencing those drawings and using the line vector art from those files.

By noon, both Duchee and Kansas Boy’s desks were completely empty. Duchee had been fired and frog-marched from the building.

Kansas Boy saw the writing on the wall and managed to submit his letter of resignation right before HR finished the paperwork.

I left that company a few years later, and I’d like to say they never worked in aerospace again, but the reality is that both were working for a major airplane manufacturer within months of this story.

And that’s why I quit working in aerospace.”