People Speak About The Time They Got Petty With Their Revenge
24. Call Me Unprofessional? Good Luck Finding Another Instructor
“Many, many moons ago, my school was having a massive shift in priorities and focus.
We were a rural school, so a new principal was assigned to the building, pupils were redistricted, and mass retirements. Several people were being pushed out and run off by the incoming principal. A good number of people quit because of the toxic work environment, but I was not in a position to do so.
At the time, I had a unique schedule. I taught mostly dual credit courses to juniors and seniors, but I also taught one course to students with SEN/SPED issues.
The dual credit courses required a specific advanced degree as I was essentially teaching college credits in high school. This detail will become essential later.
At my school, we would be assigned support teachers to give additional help to students with SEN/SPED services. That support was not allowed to teach, but would typically share a classroom with the content teacher. I was usually unconcerned with who my assigned support was, as I’m a laid-back person who can work with just about anyone and I don’t care about sharing a classroom.
But there was one male support teacher who was not allowed in my room or near me in the hall. Ever. For the sake of this story, we’ll refer to him as Jerk. If ever a man knew how close he could get to harassment without crossing the line, it was him. Heck, sometimes he even did cross the line. I made dozens of complaints, but nothing was ever done as I wasn’t the ‘target’ of his comments.
He was very religious, carrying on all the time about how a woman’s place was at home, so the school was clearly filled with easy women. (He made this comment in the hall during the transition.) He also believed that if a woman was ever elected president, she would nuke the world the first time she had PMS. (He told this to a class of freshmen.)
The school year in question, Jerk was assigned to the most experienced teacher in the building. She was set to retire at the end of the year. Coupled with her no-nonsense attitude, the powers that be thought she could keep him in line. It took three weeks, and she threatened to quit if Jerk was not moved out of her classroom. Fearful of losing another teacher at the start of a chaotic year, Jerk was assigned to me as my support teacher.
I found out when he walked into my room, announced that we could be buddies now, and made a crude joke about how he could ‘domesticate’ me now.
I immediately left the school ‘sick’ and called my principal about the matter. He informed me, in no uncertain terms, that I could not refuse to work with someone just because that person made me uncomfortable. I reminded him of the previous complaints I had made.
He snapped at me a bit, telling me he could not believe what an unprofessional child I was being. I was told to come up with a legitimate reason Jerk shouldn’t be in my class or shut my mouth and make it work.
After hanging up the phone, the malicious compliance began.
You see, I did have a legitimate reason. Because of a health issue I have had for my entire life, enduring extended periods of stress and anxiety can kill me.
I even carry medicine with me to lower my heart rate, just in case.
Step one was to call my doctor, who brought me in the very next day after I explained what was going on. She took my b***d pressure, faxed a medical letter to my school immediately, and signed me out of work for six weeks since I had six weeks of leave earned at this point.
Step two was to literally stop. Doing. ANYTHING. Usually, when a teacher goes out, lessons are pulled from other members of the school who teach the same content. Unfortunately for them, I was the only person in my building teaching dual credit. A few phone calls by my principal to the surrounding schools taught him what I already knew: I was the only person teaching these courses out of 11 high schools.
There were no lessons to be found. I’m not sure what they gave my students to do during that time, but it surely wasn’t the correct work.
Step three was to let two or three of the parents know what was going on. I never directly told them, but a friend of a cousin of a neighbor might have heard about my health issues and passed the information along.
Here’s the point in the story when you think I’m about to tell you I enjoyed my six-week paid vacation and went back to work, right? Oh no, the malicious compliance continues.
A week before I am scheduled to return to work, my principal calls me up. Standard well wishes about my health are extended, after which he says that he hopes the weeks away from the building have cleared my mind and helped me realize how hysterical I was acting.
He continued by telling me that regardless of my feelings, I would continue to have Jerk as a support teacher. I asked him if he was ready to lose a teacher over this, and he laughed and hung up.
Knowing that this was probably going to happen, I already had a doctor’s appointment set up for Phase II. Because my health issue is explicitly and clearly covered by the ADA, my doctor issued me reasonable accommodation paperwork to give HR.
Essentially, I was to be allowed to teach in the ‘least stressful environment possible,’ as determined by myself and my supervisor, along with a doctor’s note restricting me to ‘teaching duties that could be performed at home’ because of the ‘excessive stress’ currently in the building. Remote learning was unheard of in most places. I checked with a lawyer to make sure my contract was airtight (it was), and I delivered the paperwork to the head of HR (whose child I taught).
I also contacted my college supervisor (whose child I taught) to inform her that as of Monday, I would have been absent for more than 20% of the seat time for my courses, thus rendering those credits invalid. Over the weeks, she had pieced together what was going on, despite the school refusing to communicate any information with her, and she was furious. She may have told other parents what was going on, which resulted in dozen of calls to the school within a few days.
By Monday, my accommodations were approved, I was allowed to teach my classes remotely from my home to save the embarrassment of canceling dual credit courses, and I rode out the year at home before transferring districts at the end of the year. I never spoke to or saw Jerk again.”
23. Spend A Specific Amount Of Time On Each Task? I'll Do That
“So recently we got a new manager at work.
Before, with my old manager, I was trusted to know how long to spend on each task to complete it properly. I work in a pretty niche field so aside from me and my old manager who worked alongside me, no one really knew how long tasks would take me. So they would ask me, could you have that report ready by Friday and I might say yeah that’s fine, or I might say, actually I can do that in an hour and have it to you before lunch today.
Other times I might say, oh it will probably be next week before I get that done. This manager, however, is more like an office-wide manager and doesn’t really understand what I do at all, she just knows it makes the company a lot of money.
Anyway, I had a meeting with her and she essentially gave out to me for not doing each client report in a regular amount of time.
She was very condescending, implying that I was lazy and taking naps at work. I actually thought she must think I’m new or an intern but I have been here for years. I explained to her that almost all of our reports are bespoke. One client might spend 60,000 euros on a report, the next might spend 350,000 on a much more convoluted and wider-reaching piece of work.
She sort of blew me off saying ‘I understand that, but in order to ensure you are not slacking off when working remotely, I’ll allocate your hours for each report going forward. Got it?’ I told her I did but to email me the details ‘for reference’. Her email came in before I got back to my desk. It read something like Due to irregularities in your timesheets which you were not able to adequately explain, I will now be allocating your time for each report.
All caps! UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCES ARE YOU TO GO OVER THESE HOURS.
I was already laughing internally as I read this. I just replied, politely apologizing that I wasn’t clear in explaining myself. I restated that because projects varied, some naturally took longer, but that as she was my boss, I was happy to work however she wanted.
The next day I got my allocation from her.
To keep it simple let’s say 4 client projects, 10 hours each. Her emails restated not to go over hours. So I didn’t. Projects one and two took an hour each. Then I went downstairs and played Elden Ring. Project 3 was about 40% done when I ran out of hours. Project 4 was about 10% done. I forwarded my work at the end of the ten hours. In each email, I told how much work was remaining and if I would be allocated more hours.
I put these at the bottom of the email.
It took about a week for crap to hit the fan. Presenting to the clients for projects one and two had gone smoothly. And the manager had become very smug. ‘See, isn’t this way much better? No company time wasted!’ I just nodded and smiled. Then came time to present for client 3. What had been happening in these meetings was that my manager would introduce herself as the head of the project making it look like she was the closest involved, then say something like ‘we really want to give OP experience in presenting to clients so why doesn’t he take the lead here?’ Then I would present as I normally do.
I had even presented to these clients several times in the past.
Today though she asked as usual ‘you ready to take the lead?’
I pretended to be shocked. ‘I can’t? I have only done like 40% of the report. I haven’t even seen the finished report!’
The look on her face was priceless. ‘What? But we are presenting in a few hours, where is the report?’
‘I sent you the unfinished report weeks ago, as soon as I went over my allocated hours. I told you it was incomplete and even asked if I would be allocated more hours. When I didn’t hear back, I assumed you did it. Yourself.’ Then I pointed out that this was not the only incomplete project.
There was screaming but long story short, she frantically rang the client saying I was ill so she would have to cancel.
They said ‘No problem, just send on the report and we can review it ourselves!!’
The next day I was called into an emergency in-person meeting with my manager and the Boss. When I walked in, they had clearly been talking about the issue. Manager was glaring at me. I took my seat and boss said ‘OP, what is happening?’
I started to explain but when I got to the part about sending progress emails, manager cut me off ‘I never received any emails.’
‘Well I sent them, they are here on my phone with time stamps. I mean it’s your job to review them before we show them to clients. If you didn’t receive them, you should have asked about it.’
No response. I went on to explain to boss that I presented to the clients solely, that I was told not to spend more than 10 hours on a project.
When I left, boss was angry, manager was sweating.
I no longer have a manager, our company had to pay a few fines for late delivery, I got enough overtime to buy a car so it all ended well.”
22. Ghost Your Ex Wife? Maybe You Should Think Things Through
“I’m working in the billing queue in a call center for one of the big three telcos, and a client calls in regarding a billing concern.
This lady calls in and is puzzled by why she got charged a one-time fee of $49 for a wireless access point (it’s gen 1 equipment for wireless set-top boxes for Optik TV).
She’s even more puzzled, why would she have that charge when she doesn’t have TV services from us. And I inform her she does, it started more or less a month ago. She’s disputing that Optik TV isn’t available in her area.
Now I’m confused. She lives in a small town and there’s no Optik TV there. I do a little digging and find out that someone (ex-husband) was still on the account and got a 3-year contract to get a free TV for Optik TV and Internet.
She begins to cry on the phone and tells me her now ex-husband had an affair with a younger woman, divorced her, milked her for as much as he could, and apparently still is milking her for more.
He totally ghosted her. Moved to Alberta, changed his email, phone number, blocked her on all social media, etc.
In my mind, I’m like, what a jerk. And I’m like, well I’m sorry if you cancel the services you’re on the hook to pay for cancellation fees and so on. I can tell her though, I can remove his access to your account and you can also add on a password, downgrade the internet and tv to the bare essentials and I can attempt to redirect the TV gift from his address to hers but there’s no guarantee as it’s been processed already.
I can hear the light going off in her head. ‘Wait, what? You have where he’s living at now?’
‘Why, yes. He’s got TV and Internet services so there’s a service address.’
She goes really quiet and says she and her lawyer have been trying to track him down but his family and friends are being tight-lipped about it.
She asks if I’m allowed to give that info to her.
I smile and reply, this is your account. You have unrestricted access to the service addresses, phone numbers, and emails that your now ex-husband provided to us to get hooked up. She asks that I give her his new address, his new cell number (and the 2nd number left on the account, presumably the new woman), and contact info over the phone right now. I asked if she had a pen and paper handy.
She was so ecstatic. And after giving her all the details from her account regarding the 2nd service address, I downgrade everything. He was a hockey fan and there was a game playing right now with his team, so I wish I could have been a fly on the wall when the game cuts out and he calls in to ask what’s going on and discovers he’s been removed, and there’s an account PIN and he’s been discovered by his ex-wife and lawyer.”
21. My Neighbor Yelled At My Mom With Cancer, So I Got His Car Towed
“Just so this story makes more sense I live in a smallish gated community and my and my neighbors’ house are in the corner of the community and our garages face each other so we can’t pull out at the same time because it’s a tight space.
Our direct neighbors consist of a couple and their kids. The wife is nice enough, and the kids are okay, but the husband (recently found out he’s now EX husband) is a total jerk.
We’ll call him Sam for the purpose of the story.
We and the community HOA have had multiple previous issues with Sam. First was the night that he was in the house screaming obscenities at the top of his lungs to his wife in the garage (the cops were called but nothing happened). The second was him illegally dumping a mattress outside our gate (which he was recorded doing on various ring doorbell cameras and reprimanded).
And then there was the incident with my mom.
My mom who had cancer at the time was headed to an appointment and she opened the garage to leave Sam’s big truck was parked outside of his open garage, therefore, blocking my mom from leaving. He was nowhere to be found. My mom sat patiently waiting for 15 minutes before honking her horn. Not even 30 seconds later he emerges from his house and stands behind my mom’s car angrily screaming that my mom is a witch, and he knows we reported him for the mattress (which we didn’t), and yelling screw you, etc. at the top of his lungs waving his arms in the air like an idiot.
Finally, he gets in his truck and whips it around so my mom can leave (now late for her appointment). That’s when we knew Sam was a complete jerk.
After that incident, we noticed more often that he would just park his truck in front of his garage (again, therefore, blocking ours) and would disappear for 30-40 mins. The final straw happened last week.
I’m at work and get a ring doorbell notification that my mom is entering through the front door. Which was weird because that means she didn’t park in the garage she parked in one of the parking spots in the neighborhood. YES, THERE ARE OTHER PUBLIC SPOTS IN THE NEIGHBORHOOD THAT SAM COULD’VE BEEN PARKING IN. And in the background of the camera I can see Sam’s dumb truck once again blocking our garage..
30 minutes go by and it’s still there and I’m FED UP. I screenshot the video feed and send it to a member of the HOA and send a message outlining how this has been happening for months blah blah he screamed at my mom. And what’d they do?
Called a tow truck.
Screw you, Sam.”
20. You Want Me To Abandon My Position And Do Something Else? You Got It
“I was around 16 (m) at that time when I was being offered to work at Community Center for 2 nights making $70 a week. As a high schooler, $70 a week makes me feel like the richest kid in school, so I agreed. My main job is cafeteria assistant from 5:30-9 PM and it’s extremely relaxing, most of the time.
I just have to prep, cook very little, handle cashier stuff, and help the main cook, who is around 80 (f) so she does need a bit of physical assistance as well. It’s not difficult by any means and after a while, I started to understand the pattern of when it’s busy time and when it’s relaxing time.
The reason they opened the cafeteria around that time is, that during those hours, they opened the gym floor for bingo night.
There is staff outside the cafeteria as well who are selling bingo tickets, number caller, greeter, and the manager. At random times, when it’s usually quiet in the cafeteria, my manager asked if I can help the floor by going around selling tickets and merchandise. Usually, it was at reasonable times when I know I can leave my main cook to be on her own, so I never refused. Also, the customers sometimes gave me tips when their tickets are a winner, so that’s good as well.
One day, when I came to one of my shifts, I suddenly felt like something was off. The hall is packed more than usual, even a few people are standing while playing bingo because all of the chairs & tables are occupied. By that time, I know that the cafeteria is going to be busy, so I waste no more time & get to work on lots of prepping & boiling hotdogs.
I was prepping extra because I’m anticipating the dinner rush. During the prepping time, my manager suddenly came to the cafeteria, and without hesitation, she told me to drop whatever I’m doing, and go out to the floor to help her sell tickets. I told her that I just got here and my plan to prep extra for the dinner rush, but she wouldn’t budge.
Even the words of the main chef were ignored. She told me that I have prepped enough and to stop wasting time.
Well, who am I to question a manager’s decision right? Cue malicious compliance.
I happily obliged her order, took the tickets off her hands, and off I go. Not a minute after I got to the floor, I saw the very first customer, coming to the window of the cafeteria, and I was immediately thinking, let the games begin (the customers VS manager, not the bingo).
From the floor, I can see into the inside of the cafeteria, and my manager, who didn’t get a chance to leave after telling me to go out, has to serve the customer because the main chef is taking over my duty to prep. However, like I mentioned earlier, the main chef is an 80-year-old senior, so her taking over my duty is almost impossible.
Here’s the list of my duties during prepping:
- Refilling condiments bottle from the heavy gallons
- Refilling sugar from the big bag
- Cutting vegetables for hotdog toppings
- Carrying cases of water & sodas to be chilled in the fridge
- Brewing coffee & tea
- Boiling hotdogs
- Stacking doughnuts
- Handling transactions
- Sweep and mop after closing
Here is the main chef’s duty:
- Making hoagies & salads
- Monitoring my tasks
I’m literally doing all of the heavy lifting because I’m physically capable. She is not. She is even having trouble handling transactions because her eyesight isn’t good. It takes her a short while to determine certain dollar bills. Anyway, that one customer at the cafeteria becomes two, then after a few seconds, my prediction was correct. After I made it down to the end of the gym floor, I turned back, and there is now a long line of customers in front of the cafeteria.
I can’t hear what’s going on because the end of the gym floor is pretty far from the cafeteria, but I can judge by the silhouette of my manager’s body movement and the customer in front of her that things do not look good. I think my manager saw me looking at the cafeteria because she’s clearly waving at me, assuming telling me to go back.
We don’t have a microphone in the cafeteria.
However, instead of walking back in line at the second column directly back to the cafeteria, I started walking to the furthest corner of the gym floor from the cafeteria, pretending to sell tickets when all I’m doing is chatting with a player during the short break. The player was my favorite customer as well and she did buy a few tickets from me.
Right after I made the transaction, the bingo caller started to make an announcement that they’re going to start again in 30 seconds. I took a quick look at the cafeteria and it looked chaotic. From the looks of the silhouette, it looks like my manager is having an argument with a couple of irate customers. Again, I’m just assuming that my manager isn’t quick enough to get the order out before the game started.
I was chilling there, for about 25 seconds, watching the chaos unfold, before the bingo caller announced that he’s going to start in 5 seconds. Immediately, all of the customers in line have disbanded and go to their original place, hungry and thirsty and still irate. I started walking again and I see that my manager has now disappeared from the cafeteria and started walking towards me on the floor, looking disheveled. Calmly, I asked if everything is okay in there.
She looked mad, but she knows better not to explode in front of all of the players, and just told me as calmly as she could to go back to the cafeteria. I tried poking the bear by asking her what to do with the tickets because I still have some. She just snatched it off my hands aggressively along with the money, but from the shock of her aggression, I accidentally dropped everything to the floor.
Imagine playing 52 catch, but with money and bingo tickets. Before I could offer my help to pick everything up, she just growled at me silently, to just go. Alright then.
When I’m back, it was a mess. There are some water bottles and soda cans rolling on the floor, the main chef is sitting down on the chair looking exhausted (I really feel bad for her), coffee pots are empty, condiments are smeared all over the table, and so on.
It’s pure chaos. Luckily, I know the routine well enough to recover the situation, and at the next break, I was prepared well enough to handle the wave of customers, even the previously irate ones. The main chef has recovered enough too. Fortunately, most of the regulars already know me, so they’re nice and patient with me, instead of my manager who didn’t know as much as me about the cafeteria.
After the wave is over, I took the time to prep again for the next one, and suddenly my manager walked in. It looks like she calmed down just enough to compose herself to…approach me? Instead of walking away, she’s coming at me? Hoh Ho! After seeing the state of recovery I just pulled, she asked why I didn’t come back when the cafeteria was busy.
I told her that I didn’t know, I was too far, and she told me to sell tickets, so I assume that I’m not allowed to come back until I sold everything. She didn’t really have much to say after that, took a bottle of water, and just left. The main chef and I just started laughing silently after the manager left.
Never underestimate the pettiness of a teenager… well, at least me when I was a teenager.”
19. Non-Flexible Break Time? Well, If You Insist
“Many years ago, I worked for a very large company with a fairly powerful union. I was serving as a grievor (read: complaint department) for the union at the time, though that’s not a huge part of this tale.
I was, at that point, working in a part of the campus that was exceptionally dirty at all times.
Part of my daily tasks was to walk around looking for giant piles of carbon dust dumped by machinery and shovel them into barrels and dispose of them. These piles of carbon were safety concerns because carbon dust is highly flammable and obviously the goal was to minimize the amount of loose carbon dust floating around, so I needed to remove it as soon as I was aware of its presence.
Not an easy job, but I was super into fitness at the time and I kind of enjoyed the physical part of this job. Now, given the environment, when I was on shoveling patrol, I’d be in full head-to-toe PPE. So tyvek, gloves, respirator, safety glasses… a pain in the butt to put on and take off. In general, once I started a job I’d prefer to finish it rather than removing my PPE for 15 minutes, just to get fully suited back up and go back.
So, on this fateful day, I was cleaning up a particularly obnoxious and large pile of carbon. My watch buzzed alerting me that it was break time, but I figured I had 15-20 minutes left of work, and it would be a huge waste to strip down just to suit back up in new gear for another 15-20 minutes. Naturally, I opted to finish the task.
About 30 minutes later I was done, out of my safety gear, and washed up to sit down for a 15-minute break in an air-conditioned break room. Absolute bliss
Then, as luck would have it, no more than two minutes later, as I’m minding my own business eating string cheese, one of the supervisors walked in and asked why the heck I was in the break room off of break time.
I told her about the carbon spill, and how it didn’t make sense to leave the job unfinished and waste equipment when I could just finish the job in one go. We also generally prioritized cleaning up potential safety hazards in a timely manner.
I was informed that I was being written up for not taking my break at the correct time and that I was forfeiting that break by missing it.
I told the supervisor she couldn’t legally take my break time due to her deciding to change the policy, so she graciously allowed me to finish my remaining 10 minutes.
I couldn’t really fight the write up because technically we did have set break times, and the practice of moving break times was unique to the particular building I was working in due to emergency safety hazards requiring attention (this building was close to a century old, sometimes there were floods, carbon dumps, oil spills, etc… the catastrophic issues like that were our domain) and was informal, so we never had a written agreement allowing us to move breaks as needed for urgent jobs.
So, shortly after, the 5-6 of us working in the building were all called together and informed that under no circumstances could we take our breaks outside of set times. In case of emergency, we required verbal permission from a supervisor to do so.
Famous last words.
As you can probably predict, a few weeks later all 5 employees from my department present were called for emergency removal of a combined oil and carbon spill.
This is very heavy, very dirty, and fairly dangerous work. The entire factory had to stop production until we got this cleaned up, the plant manager was actually shoveling alongside us to try to move everything along faster.
30 minutes later I realize it’s less than 15 minutes before we have to go on lunch. I mention this to my coworkers, to which we all grumble.
I explained to the plant manager that we have been told that we CAN NOT work over our lunch break without permission or risk write-ups, so I was going to make a call to get permission.
I called every supervisor we had in those 15 minutes. Not a single one answered. Apparently, they’d all gone to lunch together and didn’t want to be bothered. I came back in and told the crew I couldn’t reach anyone.
They all tried calling as well, and nothing. The plant manager called our supervisors… they didn’t even pick up for him.
So, we apologized to the plant manager, and we went to lunch, leaving the plant down for an additional 30 minutes.
By the time we’d come back from lunch, we’d still been unable to reach any member of supervision. We finished the job, cleaned up, and went back to our usual tasks as the production started back up.
Apparently, the plant manager did eventually get a hold of the supervision team because they showed up FURIOUS at us for going on our lunch, up until I reminded them that they’d already written me up for moving a break without consent previously. Apparently the plant manager and head of manufacturing absolutely TORE into them for not answering any calls for over 60 minutes and causing production to halt.
They quickly decided that they would no longer be enforcing that rule, and gave us discretion on when and how best to take our breaks after that.”
18. I'm Too Out Of Touch? I Won't Be Coming In To Help
“My malicious compliance took place about 20+ years ago. In September I accepted a retail job in a small local shop to pay my bills until I could get into a local hospital that offered better pay, benefits, and flex hours that would be compatible with going back to college spring semester.
During the interview, the manager brought up that the company likes to promote from within and they would be happy to start me on a path to Assistant Manager (AM).
I told both the manager and AM that I didn’t intend to accept any of their offers for promotion because I was going to be returning to college in the spring. They hired me and I started nearly full-time hours right away. Occasionally they would make a comment about promoting me and I would repeat the same as I did when I interviewed, not interested.
The job offer from the hospital came shortly before Thanksgiving so my two-week notice had me starting my new job the first week of Dec. This meant the retail store would be in the hurt for coverage during the busy month of December. I offered to stay and work evenings and weekends until December 30 because I did want to provide them with coverage and hey, it would be extra funds in my pocket for running a till for 3 hours a night and on weekends.
I specifically said Dec 30th because before getting the hospital job the manager was a jerk and made sure to let me know I would be working NYE and NY Day. He liked being a jerk about things like that.
When I gave my notice the manager was so angry. He said ‘We promised we would help you get promoted to an AM position.’ I responded that from Day 1 and onward I have told you I am not interested in being promoted as my goal is to return to college.
I explained I was taking the job with the hospital not only for better pay & benefits but because it would allow me the flexibility of changing my hours when I return to college in the spring and each following semester.
Surprisingly the manager did let me finish my two weeks but refused my offer of staying until Dec 30. His reason for refusing my offer was because I was going to be ‘too out of touch.’
So the very first Saturday of not working at the store, I get a call from the AM asking me to come in to help. The AM was a pretty cool guy, and he said the manager was the one who asked him to call me. So I told the AM ‘Please tell the manager that I would love to come in and help, but I’m afraid I’m just too out of touch.’
I am a believer in not burning all bridges, but this was one bridge that needed to be set on fire.”
17. Billed By The Hour? Then I Want The Full Hour
“Years ago, I worked in the head office of a national corporation. Although we were all salaried employees, everyone had to keep a weekly timesheet. We had to account for everything we worked on so our department could bill the appropriate team or group for our time. This was a company-wide requirement, so it wasn’t just a case of our leaders micromanaging. The least time you could log was a 15-minute increment.
Every minute of every day couldn’t be billed to other departments, so we had a code that was billed to our own team’s budget. This was used for general tasks not specifically attached to any ongoing projects, like checking emails, status meeting your manager, training and development, and even filling in the timesheet. Management emphasized that we should use our team code as little as possible.
I later learned that the less time billed to our team’s code meant a bigger pool of bonus pay for our whole team at the end of the year.
One of the internal services that regularly billed our team’s code was IT. Any time we needed computer support, they’d send an agent who would troubleshoot and fix the problem. When the work was done, they’d get us to sign a work order so they could bill our team.
No big deal.
About a year after I joined the company, the IT department changed their billing protocols. While every other group in our company would bill you in 15-minute increments, IT decided that they’d bill in 1-hour increments. No idea how they sold that to the VPs, but no one objected. So, if IT only took 15 minutes to solve my issue, they’d still bill my team’s code for 1 hour.
It didn’t take long for my bosses to notice that our team’s code was being billed a lot more than it had in the previous months, but no one connected the dots and tied it to the new IT billing practices.
Here’s how my next encounter with the onsite IT agent went:
IT: ‘All done, please sign this invoice.’
Me: ‘This invoice is for 1 hour’s work.
You were only here 15 minutes.’
IT: ‘New policy, just sign it.’
Me: ‘I’m sorry I can’t do that.’
IT: ‘I don’t have time to argue. We’re really busy and I have to move on to the next ticket ASAP. Tell you what, I won’t bill you for this visit. But next time you’ll have to sign regardless of how quickly we can solve your problem.’
This happened a few more times and I continued to object to any bill that didn’t reflect the actual time spent on my issues. They kept agreeing to give me a free pass ‘this time.’ After about the fourth or fifth time, the IT agent finally stood his ground.
IT: ‘You have to sign this invoice.’
Me: ‘I’ll gladly sign it in 45 minutes, once you’ve been here a full hour.
Feel free to pull up a chair and sit down.’
He was clearly frustrated, but he decided to call my bluff. He sat down. A minute later he pulled out his laptop and started working on something else.
Me: ‘What are you doing?’
IT: ‘Getting caught up on a few things while I wait out the hour.’
Me: ‘Oh no, this is my time.
You’re not allowed to work on anything else for anyone else.’
IT: ‘What do you expect me to do, just sit here and do nothing?’
Me: ‘Yes. If you want me to sign that invoice, then you will sit there and do nothing until the hour is up.’
This guy was stubborn, so he did indeed sit there for the rest of my hour.
I signed the invoice, and he went on his way. I shared this story with my colleagues, and they all decided to do the same the next time they needed IT support.
This went on for about 1 week, then IT changed their tune. They no longer asked anyone on my team to sign off on any invoice unless the job actually took 1 hour or longer.
It turned out that they were generating so many billable hours doing this to every team across the company that dealing with our malicious compliance wasn’t worth it. They chose to service our team for free rather than give up those other 45 minutes they could bill to two or three other departments at 1 hour each.
That year our team saw nice bonuses when we had a massive surplus of funds in the team’s budget.
I heard the IT team made out like bandits on their bonuses, while many other teams saw little to nothing. The next year the whole internal billing system was overhauled. We didn’t have to account for our time anymore and IT stopped issuing anyone invoices. All billing was managed at a more senior level.”
16. Work Overtime And Get You Transferred? Sure, Why Not?
“So years ago I was working for a popular restaurant supply chain as a forklift driver. I held many positions there over the years but took a step down from management to work at a nicer store for the same pay.
Every night we were supposed to separate our pallets by type and leave them in the back, a lot of drivers failed to do this. Recently we had gotten a new management trainee who when closing the store began to blame me for this. So one night after I had finished up and separated my pallets I had my department manager take a photo in front of them giving a thumbs up to show to the manager when he inevitably blamed me for bringing an unseparated stack.
Sure enough, I got a call to the office with the new manager saying he had seen me bring an unseparated stack to the back on camera. I pulled my phone out and said ‘the only stack I brought back was this one’ showing him the photo.
He got angry and said he had video and he didn’t care. He walked with me to the back room and there were a lot of unseparated pallets.
He told me to organize them and I told him I did my job and I was going home and if he had any problems contact the store assistant manager who had made it clear I was not allowed to work any more overtime as I was getting too much already. The new trainee begins screaming in my face so angrily that he is spitting all over me saying ‘I don’t care he’s not here right now and I am not afraid of him.’
I then said ‘Sure, I’ll do the pallets tonight’ and spent the next two hours separating the pallets.
The next morning I walked in and right up to the assistant store manager telling him exactly what had happened. He said ‘don’t worry about it I believe you and he is being transferred to another store’.
Sure enough, he got transferred to the store I came from 25 miles away where he already said he’d kill himself if he was ever sent there.
He got fired about a month later.”
15. Don't Yell At An 8 Year Old, It Might Cost You Your Roof
“Many years ago I was in the Boy Scouts selling popcorn door to door throughout my neighborhood.
My mom and I stopped at the neighborhood scary house, the only detail about it that will be notable later is its mossy and sagging roof. The house didn’t appear to have a ‘no soliciting’ sign so I decided to face my little 8 y/o fears and go knock on the door.
My mom waited at the end of the driveway as I walked up to the door.
As soon as I knocked something caught my eye and I looked up to find a partially obscured ‘No Soliciting’ sign, one that was in no way observable from the driveway. I froze and waited until someone answered the door in favor of doorbell ditching the owner. The door whooshed open to reveal a scraggly middle-aged man who pointed at the sign and yelled.
Man: ‘DO YOU KNOW WHAT THIS MEANS?’
Me: ‘Yes?’
Man: ‘THEN LEAVE.’
I ran down the driveway crying and never sold another tin of popcorn. By chance, our elderly neighbor’s son, we’ll call him Dave, was in his mom’s driveway and saw me crying as my mom and I walked home. My dad was working outside that afternoon and Dave came over to catch up with my dad. Dave asked my dad why I had been crying and he told Dave about the guy yelling at me.
Dave just so happened to be a high-profile contractor and realtor out of state but had grown up in our town so he made some calls. Within a month the city determined that the house’s roof was a danger and they had to get a brand new one, easily a $5k+ expense just for yelling at an 8-year-old.
I doubt the scary guy ever made the connection but whenever I passed the house a smile would cross my face.
Thank you, Dave.”
14. Assign Me To Make Balloon Animals? Okay, I'll Just Do My Job
“Way back, in the long long ago, in the before times, mid-level chain restaurants would have these people walk around to make balloon animals for kids as they waited for their food. I was a teenager and needed money, so I did this for a while. The restaurant would pay this agency and they would tell us what restaurant to go to and when.
The key to this story is that we were not paid. On an average night, I’d make around $50 in tips over 3 hours, on special nights it could be as high as $200, but if there were no customers I’d make nothing.
After working for several months I must have fallen out of someone’s favor, and I got assigned to a restaurant in the business district. I have no idea why they wanted someone making balloon animals there.
The key audience was kids and I never saw anyone there under 30. The first night there I made $5, which wasn’t even enough to cover mass transit to and from the location. After being assigned there twice in a row I complained but was told that if I didn’t go I’d be banned from any more assignments.
Cue the malicious compliance.
The next week when I was assigned there (which was the third time in a row) I waited until there were a couple of guys at the bar that were tipsy.
I go up and ask if they want balloon hats, no charge. They were hesitant, but I promised they’d be good. They agreed, and I got to work.
I broke out all of my skills to make these hats that were clearly people in a cage. The people were all pink and had prominent bubbles on the chest and derriere. An inflated balloon tied around the waist made for a bikini bottom, and a carefully tied balloon in their hand made for a bikini top.
They asked what it was and I told them a dancer in a cage.
They. Loved. It.
I got a $20 tip, but more importantly, they went to every person in the restaurant to show off their dancers-in-cages hats. They demanded to talk to the manager to tell him how awesome it was. The super, up-tight, fundamentalist manager.
Manager was majorly annoyed and told me to go home early.
Agency called, ticked off, but I used my most innocent voice to tell them I was just making what the customer asked for, and I didn’t know they’d make a scene. Agency said ‘well, they banned you from ever coming back.’
The next week I was back to another $17/hour location.”
13. Microsoft Windows Is Free? Sure, I'll Install A Free Trial Version
“I worked in a computer repair store as part of my internship and encountered an unreasonable lady. The job was simple; the lady wanted to reformat her computer because her computer was acting up.
As part of the standard operating procedure, I need to inform the customer of service being rendered and the final cost where they will sign it off in the case of any dispute. In a bid to get the best bam for her buck, she adamantly requested that we upgrade her Operating System from Windows XP to Windows Vista without additional cost. I kindly advised her that it’s more of a downgrade than an upgrade.
There are additional costs involved if she wants to purchase the license for it.
The lady went into a rage and said that I’m trying to scam her because Windows is supposed to be free. I decided to call my manager and after some discussion, my manager decided to let her know that there’s a trial version of Windows Vista which we can install for her but she will need to purchase her own license later on.
I wrote on the form stating that we will do a reformat on her computer and install a trial version of Windows Vista, which I repeatedly told her that once the 30 days are up, she won’t be able to use her computer properly.
She promptly signed it, came back a few days later to collect her computer, and even gave me a smirk as a sign of victory.
Sorry, Madam, you are not having the last laugh here.
To nobody’s surprise, after 30 days or so, the lady called in and complained about why her computer was no longer working and demanded that we send someone over and fix the problem asap. My manager took the phone, explaining to her that we had warned her about the dangers before she signed it off. The lady was very furious on the phone and hung up on my manager afterward.”
12. Keep All The Accidental Tickets? Sure Thing
“So I work in a food-to-go department in a semi-large grocery shop. Up until a couple of years ago it was owned and run by a real jerk of a man, let’s call him Boris.
He was picky, arrogant, rude, etc. He was only in for a couple of hours a day but would then be monitoring the CCTV and calling in every 5 minutes to tell someone to do something. And even worse, a couple of the managers would brown nose very hard. They’d side with him, say we were sneaky in our own department and probably were stealing.
Anyway.
In my department, we would serve people their food and they would put it into their cart and have to pay for it along with all the rest of their groceries at the checkouts. We didn’t handle money. We would just use a computer that would tally up all their items and produce a barcode that we could stick on their food. Now the way the computer worked was anything we typed in, even if we ‘canceled’ it out, would still be transmitted to the check out system so the shop could record what and how much of each thing is selling.
This meant though that items people never actually bought were still being transmitted and recorded as sold but no transaction or money ever followed. For example, someone comes to food-to-go, orders several different items, and I tally it all up, only for the customer to change their mind and not want the food anymore (price put them off or any other customer is always right bull crap) or sometimes customers just wanted to know how much a certain combination of food would cost, so we’d type it all in regardless of if they go through with it.
This meant that Boris thought either the customers were shoplifting food or we, the staff, were stealing (I don’t understand that logic but I digress).
To tackle this issue we were told to start recording every single time items were input into the system but no food was actually making its way to the checkout. Every time someone wanted to know the potential total we’d print a ticket.
Every time we mistyped or pressed the wrong button or a customer changed their mind or wanted to add on more or remove something. We printed that ticket. By the end of the day, there would be dozens if not hundreds of tickets being recorded.
Every day we brought an a0 page covered, front to back, in stickers to the office for the manager to go through.
Their heart sank every time. They had to painstakingly go through the sales and cross-reference with the codes of the tickets to make sure there were no stolen goods. This was an added job, that was not quick, on top of an already huge to-do list the managers had in there. Sometimes several days or a week’s worth would collect before they got to it.
A few months in and this new process was abandoned. I don’t know how they got around it but another 6 months later and Boris sold the shop.”
11. My Supervisors Were So Dense, They Forced Me To Do Less Work For Them
“I have a tale of an incredibly inept supervision team, myself as a union president, and a bizarre series of events which results in me being unable to fit more than 4 hours of actual work in my 8-hour shift… all because I did exactly what the supervision told me to.
To give a little back story, supervisors tried to give away my job while I was forced out on short-term disability, found out they couldn’t, and gave me explicit instructions to attend a meeting every day that prevented me from being able to work for half my shift.
I was working at an absolutely filthy factory on the campus in which I was contracted. I worked there for a number of years, but then began to develop issues with my lungs.
As filthy as the job was, I’d actually liked that position, but I decided to bid on a different position at a much less risky facility. Part of this move is that I began to float between buildings as needed, which was incredibly convenient for my union work. The only negative is that for whatever reason employees at that building had a different shift negotiated into the contract, meaning I had to be clocking in at 6 am every morning.
I am not a morning person so this was almost a deal breaker, but I reasoned I’d have more flexibility in my university schedule if I switched, so I went for it. I scheduled my classes according to this schedule change and worked there for a bit over a year with no issues.
The only small complication is that I was one of two people who staffed this building from my department, and the other lady had suffered a serious medical event and was off on leave indefinitely… leaving me alone most of the time.
That was fine, I was able to keep up well enough, at first.
I was really into fitness at the time and had been going to the gym every day after work and class, so generally, I had no issue with the physical labor at the previous building, and no issue running back and forth between buildings at this new site. I also had to drive between locations to assist with other tasks, but that wasn’t an issue either….
Until I suddenly began to get dizzy spells I couldn’t quite put my finger on. I was alone on site so I couldn’t slow down, so I just powered through. The first time I fainted I actually didn’t know for sure that I’d fainted, I actually assumed I’d tripped and ate crap on the cement so quickly I just couldn’t process it.
The second time there was a witness, and it became a whole deal, ambulance called and the works. I couldn’t explain what had happened so I had to go out on short-term disability until I got clearance from cardiology to return to work (yes, it was just run-off-the-mill POTS, but I wasn’t allowed to return without clearance, per the contract).
I wound up being out for about 6 months, and I wasn’t happy about it, so when I was finally cleared to return, I was informed that they had given my job to someone else, and I was starting at a different facility I definitely didn’t want to be at, and at a different shift.
This was a problem for multiple reasons, firstly I’d scheduled my classes based on the job I’d been hired for, not whatever shift they decided to ‘give me’ when I returned. Secondly, they couldn’t give away the job of someone out on short-term disability without the consent of the person on disability, and I had definitely not consented to this change. Thirdly, they DEFINITELY couldn’t change my shift without my consent, this was especially well protected in the contract.
Unfortunately, the girl who’d taken my job was a new hire, but had bid for my position through the appropriate process and had done so to be on a shift that allowed her to not have a disruption in her childcare. Switching shifts to the job they’d unceremoniously shifted me to would mean she wouldn’t have anyone to take care of her child after preschool.
I felt for her and decided I would grieve the matter and make sure we both walked away from the situation with what we wanted. After a lengthy negotiation, a lot of swearing and threats (mostly from me to the supervision about what would happen if they pulled this crap ever again), I negotiated that I would permit the girl to keep the job I’d been in previously, but only if they met my demands at the new facility.
Firstly, I was going from a generalized labor position to being… an office cleaner. I told them no, I wouldn’t do that, as it was a downgrade of my role. They would have to find me a position in my role and I would not be engaging in the role of the cleaners, if they needed to hire more cleaners, then that was their problem.
Secondly, I insisted I would NOT change my shift, it was non-negotiable. I didn’t care if I was the only person out of 50 starting at 6 am, it wasn’t going to change. Thirdly I caught wind that they’d moved the girl to my role, despite her not being paid for the labor role… they’d paid her just over minimum wage as a cleaner to do labor duties.
I insisted they give her every penny of back pay she was due for the work she’d been doing, but this time at the proper rate. In the end, supervision had no way to argue it, and while I wasn’t happy, it was a small victory. Then I had another fight…
This facility insisted on having set break times honored. I didn’t have a way to argue this as break times were mentioned in the contract, but we didn’t have specific language allowing for flexibility.
The first time I encountered this was my first day, as this was the only facility that also had a mandatory beginning of shift meeting.
I arrived at work and clocked in by 6 am, and by the time I had my lunch in the fridge and my lights turned on and machines unplugged for the day it was ~6:25 am… and I had to walk close to a mile through a building (I could slightly shorten this if I cut through an alley) to the main offices for the 7 am shift meeting.
Initially, I thought that seemed absurd, and I had asked for permission to not attend as the walk alone ended up being close to 40 minutes round trip, not including however long the meeting ran. I was told I absolutely could not miss this meeting, and she was really smug about it too. I asked her if she remembered my hours, but she rolled her eyes at me.
I mean, ok, if you insist… I did try to warn you.
So, as instructed, I was forced to attend this understated meeting AND honor my strictly scheduled break times. My day ended up looking like this:
6 am arrival and lights turned on/equipment unplugged 6:25 am, walk between buildings for shift meeting 7:00 am, shift meeting 7:20-7:30 am, return to work location 8:00 am, break.
So the entire first two hours of my shift I was unable to get any work done.
Nothing. After my break, I still had to prep all equipment, check equipment for safety, replace any parts needed (often very time consuming), check and organize my work orders… and then I was on lunch at 10 am.
So by the time I had my lunch break, all I had time to do from 7:15 to 10 am was get my equipment ready for the day. Things I would have normally done before my first break, but… I was told I had to attend that meeting and didn’t have time to start a project before I had to take my lunch.
My supervisors came over a day or two later, absolutely spitting with rage and ready to write me up. Unfortunately for them, I’d written out the entire schedule.
As they’d told me, my break times were nonnegotiable. It was also nonnegotiable that I had to attend this shift meeting a building over. I asked if they remembered the explicit instructions they gave me in this regard… for some reason they looked absolutely thunderstruck.
They had inadvertently ordered me to accept a schedule that prevented me from getting more than about 4 hours’ worth of work done. The kicker was that they couldn’t take it back without setting a precedent that exceptions could be made at that location. I could see the cogs trying to turn as they tried to figure out if there was a way to punish me, but I had only done exactly what they insisted I had to.
So, yeah, I did as I was told, and they inadvertently gave me a job that prevented me from doing more than half a day of work, but I had to be paid for the full day regardless. It also allowed me a lot more time to work on union paperwork as I wasn’t constantly getting in and out of PPE, and was able to catch more of their contract violations being closer to the main office.
I’d like to think that I made their lives just a little bit more nightmare-ish, and it was in large part facilitated by their screw up trying to mess with my work location and hours, and failure to notice what they’d done to my schedule by ordering me to hike a country mile for this meeting. I worked in that position for the last few years I was there, and it was a running joke the entire time.”
10. Wanna See What Happens When You Take A TA For Granted?
“I’m a TA at my university. Alongside grading papers and taking office hours (OH), my job is to oversee how papers are set (checking for errors, randomizing the options, adding editing according to what the professor requires).
Since the start of this semester, students have been coming to my OH on the last day, a few hours before the submission of every assignment, and so many of them together. It’s almost impossible to manage them. They are never done with their work and start so late. I understand that it’s their university life, and they wanna chill, which is fine. I just told them to come to OH early on.
There are 3 sections each week, and they get 1 week for each submission. It’s really not that hard to go to any OH 3 days before the submission, instead of everyone piling up 7 hours before the deadline. This kept going; they didn’t listen to me at all, and I was frustrated helping them. I should’ve stopped and just generalized the whole thing, but I don’t like jeopardizing anyone’s submission, so I take a look at everyone’s work individually and help them out with the mistakes, but by the last assignment submission before the exam, I was extremely annoyed.
Here comes my vengeance. I was setting up the paper, and I really wanted to see these students fumble during the test. I didn’t increase the difficulty of the paper or anything (I don’t even think I can do that), but what was under my control was checking the questions, options, and their order, and invigilating the exam.
I got to the exam hall early and distributed the desks and chairs as far apart as I could and kept moving throughout to ensure no one could copy, and I wanted to watch the color drain from their faces.
Now, to the important part I left out: Of the 50 questions they were supposed to write on a Scantron (OMR) sheet, the right answer for questions numbered from 23 to 36 are all ‘C’s, and all the other options are evenly distributed over options ‘A’, ‘B’, and ‘D’.”
9. Too Hot Or Cold? I'm Just Doing What I'm Told
“So I work in HVAC and we were doing some relatively minor ductwork on an old factory building. An architectural firm had bought the building which was already being used for office space, and being an architectural firm they of course wanted to make some changes. The big change was cutting out a piece of the second floor above the downstairs lobby to make a more open inviting space.
This impacted the ductwork for the first floor, hence us being there to move it.
Everything was going pretty smoothly for us but there was a guy from the firm who was very hands-on with the subcontractors and very picky about exactly how things got done. 1 issue he had with our work was with a basic return air grate we put in. He didn’t like the looks of it so we swapped it with one he liked. No problem.
Upstairs was the main office area and he was obsessed with having nothing exposed. Power wires, thermostat wires, Ethernet, etc. The problem with that is, that the buildings in the area are old mills and factories and are made of brick with huge timber beams supported by solid metal columns. The common way to deal with this is to run your wires as neatly as possible, exposed. There were some interior sheetrock walls so for the most part everything got re-routed through there to appease the no exposed wires rule.
The issue: the building has forced hot water for heat on the office floor and while we had the central main thermostat on an interior wall, there was a separate zone of baseboard along an outside wall with a zone head that needs to be wired to a thermostat to work automatically. He didn’t want to see that wire. I explained the wire needs to be attached to work correctly and suggested re-running the small brown wire along the corner of the brown wooden beam so as to be practically unnoticeable.
Nope! No exposed wires! A little more back and forth with the same answer. Ok, everything else is done so I cut the wire, pulled it off the wall and we’re out of there.
Wintertime, we get an extra cold week. Firm calls us, ‘Hey this area of our office is real cold!’ I go out and show them how to manually open the zone head so it heats when the main loop is heating.
Things start to be warmer but still cool enough for the heat to be on. ‘Hey, this area is too hot!’ Go back over and show them again how to turn the zone off manually.
Next year wintertime. ‘Hey, this area is too cold!’ I go out and open zone head and tell the office manager that this will be the last time doing this for free.
Next time will be a $100 service call to move the lever. Manager questions why we left it like that and I get to explain that their guy (who didn’t seem to be around anymore) instructed me to remove all exposed wires so that’s what we did, and we could put it back for $x.xx if they wanted. Not sure what they ended up doing but that was the last time I went over there.”
8. Be Nasty To ESL Folks? I'll Do Everything You Hate
“I was a freelancer for a media company that maintains a database for their videos, photo galleries, other digital property, as well as a separate bit for contracts and the like. One of the clients who struck a deal with them to utilize their IP was represented by a woman with serious bullying issues, let’s call her Boomer. She rarely seemed to understand anything that was being said on the conference calls.
So, I suppose to feel important, she acted like the grammar police and would interrupt her own boss’s business partners and stakeholders in mid-speech if they said something slightly different than how she wanted to hear it. Sometimes she did this multiple times in a single call. The worst was when she abruptly corrected ESL folks (like the group from India, the project manager from Germany, or the account rep from Hong Kong).
Really any stakeholders from any non-Anglophone country who were still learning English.
But on top of the grammar policing, she had a special fixation on correcting ‘violent words’ and phrases (examples to follow). Now, this is something I would support to a degree, as I try to avoid that language myself when I have the presence of mind to do so. There have been fair-minded movements for years now, all basically calling for a reduction in this type of language.
But Boomer never conducted herself in a way that was respectful of anyone about this. So for me, it’s not about the nobility of someone’s cause. It’s about how you treat people.
When someone casually said ‘shoot me a note’ (very common to hear) Boomer would interject: ‘wait, why did you just say that?’
You could hear a pin drop; the proverbial tumbleweed would roll through.
It’s hard to convey the total rudeness in a post. But this is tangible stuff. She would then pontificate briefly on why such phrases were unacceptable, and it’s a ‘shame we have not moved beyond this language.’ And then suddenly it was crickets again like we are supposed to go back to the topic at hand. Like she didn’t just treat someone like scum for saying a very common phrase.
It’s such a disruption and she never apologized a single time. The first few times this happened people were stunned. People from all countries of origin, and, all age groups: the other boomers, the gen-Xers, the millennials, and the younger folks.
This also extended to hunting-related words, the phrase ‘shooting fish in a barrel’, and harmless phrases like ‘deer in the headlights’. When anyone said this stuff, she acted like she was being given carte blanche to be an entitled bully with anger issues for 45 seconds.
Even the group I worked for, who got regular royalties checks from her boss, hated this. When she wasn’t pulling these stunts, she was silent except for terse, distracted, soulless replies and only when absolutely necessary. So to understate it politely, she earned only negative feelings from everyone.
This came to a head. It turned out that the company was helping with a lot of her syndication and sublicensing docs and even cloud management free of charge.
(They did not have to do so and it was not in the contract. This had been unofficially grandfathered for her by one of the senior sponsors.) The operations guy who did some of this grunt work for her finally got insulted by one of Boomer’s direct callouts — he said something like ‘we need a developer who can hunt down the root cause’ and she snapped as usual. So he categorically refused to do the work, meaning she would need to pay extra or get database access and do it herself like all the other clients.
I saw a fun opportunity here and seized it. I volunteered to handle it for her myself until I could set her up with the necessary access, at which point she ultimately ‘would use the same screens I use’. She readily agreed, and this is where I think malicious compliance comes in. We made a customized interface for me to use… and then gave her access to it.
They were, technically, ‘the same screens I use’.
There was a Brazilian IT guy who hated her more than anyone, and a girl in the Creative department who commiserated with our cause. I sold them on my little plan, and one evening we made it happen:
There was a duplicate web GUI that had been created for testing or something but was now disused. We decided to grant her access to this GUI, not the (production) standard one … but with key verbiage and icons of ‘violent language’ we knew she’d hate perforating the entire thing.
The quick access bar that follows when she scrolls had these 6 beauties:
- ‘Report Crusher’ – this was the reporting system she would be using 2 dozen times per week. The icon was a vice with a paper getting smashed inside it. If you looked closely enough, the paper had the tiniest frown.
- ‘Document Hunter’ – instead of just ‘Search’. The icon was a bullseye getting hit with an arrow.
- ‘Shoot Us A Note’ – instead of just ‘Contact Us’. The icon was a speeding bullet with an innocuous, chubby-cheeked smile and baby-like expression.
- ‘Memo Cannon’ – this was my favorite little contribution to the whole thing. It was always just a broken link. It never did anything except take you to a unique ‘404’ message page with a teensy little line-art drawing of a deer with antlers, his tongue sticking out, slack-jawed, and Xs over his eyes.
I just thought ‘memo cannon’ was the funniest phrase I had come up with, and we knew it would stare at her in the middle of her screen for the next few years. The icon was a squat little cannon with a sparking fuse.
- ‘Troubleshooting’ – instead of just ‘Help’ … but the two OO’s were crosshairs!
- ‘Wiki change patrol’ – this was worthless since it just linked to a recent-changes page for a wiki full of deprecated docs that nobody consulted. But: the icon was a gendarme-looking guy smacking a huge baton into his palm.
It also featured these gems:
- The cancel button for the reporting system said ‘Kill Task’ instead of just ‘Cancel’
- We had a file de-duping routine. We changed the text for that button to say ‘Got time to kill?’ She didn’t have permission to access this actual function, but she would be seeing this button each time she opened any document in the web-viewer.
- There were a handful of spots where the IT guy put a splash of Camouflage coloration.
In the standard environment, these were all just dead spaces. He thought, I believe correctly, that camouflage would get her b***d to boil.
Before we granted her access to this wonderful Frankenstein, I permanently switched to the same environment/GUI so that I could say honestly ‘yes these are the same screens I use’ which is what she agreed to. I hashed together a walk-through in PDF that even a zombie could learn from (using screen captures from the new interface), passed it along, and that was that.
The fallout is a bit anticlimactic because I never got any calls from Boomer directly with feedback that I could savor myself. This is because she lured some gullible student to do the grunt work for her in an unpaid gig. So where I thought I’d be cherishing the apoplectic response first-hand, I actually wound up liaising with a disinterested teenager. But eventually, it did filter back to me second-hand, that when Boomer finally saw the screen, she was really livid.
She called the account manager and demanded changes. The AM and anyone else we knew was liable to get a call from her, had been prepped beforehand for this eventuality and had access to screen captures which backed up the idea that what she was seeing was the normal interface. Absolutely no changes whatsoever were made.”
7. I Need Approval To Help Someone? Okay, Got It, Boss
“I work in a law firm as a legal assistant, my boss does not like me. No clue why, she just doesn’t. I’m not unconvinced the only reason I haven’t been fired is because every attorney I support hardcore goes to bat for me.
Now one thing that infuriates me about their hiring processes is they do not in any way shape or form inquire about computer skills, we are, I guess you could say, tech adjacent to the type of law we practice. But I’ve also interviewed at many other firms that require a typing test and some sort of Microsoft literacy test.
I’ve come to be known as a computer whiz kid.
I’m not even that great, I’m really just good with Microsoft products. My middle and high school were a bit obsessed with us having computer skills so I was Microsoft certified at like 14 years old and while a lot of my knowledge base is gone I still know my way around an excel file. This is where I think my manager started to not like me.
Within a month of me starting I showed her up multiple times on how to do things but this was all one on one ‘training’ not like I called her out in a meeting. She would show me how to do something like say how to concatenate in excel. I couldn’t even tell you how she was doing it because it was so convoluted and cumbersome.
I asked if I could show her how to do it ‘properly’ and she said yes and then was stunned when I did it in two minutes vs the half-hour explanation she had given me.
Actually, the conversation went more like this: ‘I’ve actually had to do concatenations a lot at a previous job, I did it a little bit different. Can I show you and get some feedback on if it would be okay to use as I am more comfortable doing it that way?’
This repeated itself with several other things and finally, I just stopped making suggestions because it became clear she didn’t want to hear them. Cause why let someone help you become more efficient, right?
As my attorneys spread my skills to the rest of the firm I was starting to be asked to help with other peoples’ tasks so they were done quickly. Then other attorneys started telling their assistants to ask me for help.
I never minded as they always asked if I had time before just assuming I would help them. My manager caught wind of this and had a meeting with me and HR that I was doing unsanctioned and unapproved training (her words not mine). I brought up that people come to me, I don’t seek them out and she said but you need to run everything by me.
I asked if I had to do that if it was a thirty-second fix and she said yes. Okay, you got it.
So I did just that, someone asks me for help fixing a document header. Hey manager okay if I show so and so this? Someone asks me how to make excel columns all the same size. Hi manager am I okay to help?
Get asked how can I make it so when I copy and paste it’s in the specific format. Manager can I show them? And cover my bases I copied HR. Want to show I am abiding by the rules.
Multiple times a day. I’ll give her credit she lasted almost a month but I was PTO for one week. I was then told I am allowed to assist others with Microsoft products without running it by her.
By now I’m not asked nearly as much to help mainly because my knowledge has spread as I would never just do it for them. I would show them how to do whatever it was and send a follow-up email with the steps.
She still isn’t my biggest fan but can’t say I give a crap.”
6. Being An Engineer Requires Bravery When Your Manager Is Incompetent
“I’m a factory automation engineer with companies like Tesla on my resume.
At my current factory job, shortly after I joined the company, I solved a problem that one of our processes had been having for literally the entire 20 years this factory has been standing, because my specific educational focus in engineering school was centered around exactly the kind of problem this process was having.
I had permission from my direct supervisor and production management to implement the fix for this specific factory line.
The other lines were running well enough without it that I didn’t feel it was necessary to apply it across the factory. It was just this one line that ran like trash for whatever reason. So I fixed the problem I saw.
I did this for about 6 months and managed to fix problems with literally dozens of different processes across the factory.
All the while, I had no idea that there was a rule determined by our corporate engineering manager, that all factory processes had to run on the same set of control parameters, and that we were forbidden from changing the parameters that I had been running around changing.
I didn’t know this was a rule, and I never thought to consider that it might be a rule, because it’s an absolutely stupid rule, because process controls are supposed to be tuned individually to the equipment they are controlling. Every piece of industrial hardware is slightly different, even when the equipment is ostensibly identical. Without getting too technical, things like electric motors have subtle variations in the windings that make them respond differently to current flowing through them.
Heating units have slightly different thermal mass and other properties that make them heat up a little faster or slower. The automated controls for those processes have to use slightly different control parameters to account for these subtle differences in equipment.
But apparently, this manager read about corporate standardization in a book somewhere and decided that every line across all of our factories needed to run the same controller constants.
He had spent years in his own factory forcing his technicians to find a single set of parameters that worked across all his lines. Apparently, he managed to find a set of parameters that didn’t cause the equipment to catch fire, so in his infinite wisdom, he had spent the last 5 or 6 years shoving that mandate up the butt of all his technicians and subordinate engineers, so that he could report to his bosses that he had been putting the hammer down standardizing our processes.
So in his eyes, I was messing up the whole factory by tuning those controller constants to match the hardware they were running on.
After trying to explain, ‘That’s not how any of this works,’ and getting about as far as that old lady in the commercial, I acquiesced to the manager’s very explicit and stern demands to put everything back exactly the way it was ‘supposed to be.’ I barely managed to avoid being fired on the spot by apologizing profusely for my mistake because I didn’t realize that there was a standard in place.
So when scrap and quality rejects at our factory doubled in a single week, and we lost about 70 hours of up-time because of jammed up processes (at a cost of about $10,000/hr in lost productivity), there was suddenly a big meeting demanded by corporate, to come yell at us for costing the company about two million bucks in one week between all the increased scrap and down-time.
At that meeting, I explained exactly the changes that I had been making to the processes over the course of the previous six months. I had charts from our historian for every single process before I made my original changes, after I made the changes, and after I was compelled under threat of losing my job to revert all the changes I made back to the original parameters.
I got the opportunity to explain to that engineering manager’s boss that homogenizing code and standardizing processes is a good idea on the whole, but that there are specific equipment parameters that need to be tuned individually for each process they are running on, and that these parameters often need to be re-tuned if something about the process changes in a way that affects the performance of that process, such as changes in materials, or natural wear and tear on components.
And I explained that while one factory was able to find a set of parameters that ‘worked’ across all their lines without causing catastrophic failures, most of those lines were actually performing quite sluggishly, and I demonstrated using our own plant’s data how similarly performing lines at our factory before my changes dramatically improved yield and up-time when the processes were tuned individually.
The corporate engineering manager got fired, and I got 40% of my annual salary as a bonus this year, along with everyone at my plant getting maxed out bonuses because of how well the plant performed this year.”
5. Want Us To Treat Customers Like Our Best Friend? Sure, We'll Do That
“Retail time, those were the days. I worked in the number 3 office supply chain in the country, small-flex as there were only 3 office supply chains at the time. Well, I had one of those District Managers that went to District Manager School and did all the District Manager things. You know, sending emails with random words in bold, different fonts, colors.. his emails read like William Shatner having a stroke.
The dude was a ‘company man’, read.. over-enthusiastic. Corporate had released a new policy about how we should set the standard for customer interaction, don’t just say ‘hi’ or ‘welcome to’ when a customer walks in, but treat them like you are happy they are there. Express interest in them on a unique level. If they are wearing a sports team hat, and you know the team, say ‘Hey, great game last night, right?’
The general idea was to ‘personalize’ the experience, don’t just sound like an NPC in a video game saying the same lines again and again to everyone.
Well, Mister District Manager guy, living close to our store, popped in the day of the store meeting where this was all announced, and decided to ‘encourage us’ and lead by example. That’s… actually pretty cool of a DM to do.
But, he also had a history of throwing tantrums, and we were like the Bad News Bears of the district, so it was more about treating us like little kids. It felt more condescending than anything.
Mister District Manager interpreted the new policy to be ‘talk to the customer like they are your best friend’. We role-played, and he would berate employee after employee to ‘get it right!’ Role-playing in retail is always awkward, and this isn’t a theatre troupe, they aren’t trained actors, and the majority of the staff is first-time-job high school kids and part-time college kids (I was the latter).
Our performances were not Hollywood. He wanted Hollywood. And me? I’m a sarcastic clown who loves having a little fun, the kind of guy that practices making ridiculous faces in the mirror so I can try them out on unsuspecting friends later. I LOVE an audience. Don’t give me an excuse to be ridiculous.
So the store opens at 8 am. Customers start coming in, and Mister District Manager is still there.
Watching our performance and rating us, but not being as loudly snide in front of the customers. Finally, it’s my turn, and he’s once again repeating out loud ‘Remember, you need to treat the customer like you would treat your best friend walking into your house.’ I recognize the customer who walked in, an old guy in his 60s we gave the nickname of ‘Reno’, and I know he heard every word Mister District Manager said.
Reno is one of our favorite customers. You’re about to understand why.
Reno walks right up to me. I say ‘Hey dude, what’s up?’
Reno says ‘you know man, same crap different day right?’
I say ‘Tell me about it, my district manager has been a real pain in the butt lately with some dumb new idea that’s probably going to blow up in his face.’
Reno laughs, ‘Sounds about right. Hey, I need to get some folders for a presentation for the Condo Association, know where those are?’
I say ‘Back of the store, find them yourself dude I’m not your servant.’
Reno says ‘fair enough. Think your manager buddy has figured out how stupid this is yet?’
I say ‘I don’t know man, he’s not that bright.’
Reno laughs, loud as he is prone to, and takes a step toward my District manager, gives him a big slap on the arm, the kind that ends with his hand gripping the arm up high by the shoulder, stares him in the eyes, gives his shoulder a small shake, and says, ‘I think he’ll figure it out, he doesn’t want to make the store’s best customer angry,’ and walks off.
Mister District Manager is beet red angry, if he were a cartoon there would be steam. He breathes and practically hisses through clenched teeth asking ‘just what the heck’ was I trying to pull. I do my best ‘Joey’ from Friends impression, ‘What? You SAID treat him like my best friend, and Reno practically lives here.’
I got written up again that day. Hashtag-worth-it.
So many times I should have been fired from that job.
Also, this was like 2004, so obviously, I didn’t get the word-for-word banter perfectly memorized. But that’s the kind of guy Reno was, and that’s the kind of employee I was, and that’s the setup we were given.”
4. Won't Give Me A Raise? I'll Limit My Output According To What I'm Being Paid
“A few years ago, I worked for a mildly successful healthcare provider. While the pay wasn’t good, the team dynamic was great and things moved along smoothly. But awesome boss left and now things sucked with the new boss whom we’ll refer to as Boss.
Shortly before that, I took a role that despite a decent-sounding title, was severely underpaid compared to anyone with a similar title even within the same company. Every year, I would lobby for a raise but every year, I get turned down for one reason or another – the company didn’t really perform well enough, you need to improve your skills first (but on your own time and expense), your bandwidth usage is too high (yes that was actually a reason given to me).
After too many failed attempts to get a raise, I decided it was Malicious Compliance time. I’m just gonna limit my output according to the scale of what I’m being paid.
I stopped using all the shortcuts to my task and just did them all the hard way (like why use an Excel macro when I can do the same thing manually?)
Need someone on that project?
Go find someone else. I’m too busy doing these things the hard way now.
Need an analysis? I’d state the obvious within a couple of sentences. Sometimes, I’d even just send a spreadsheet with the raw data and say ‘Here you go’.
Need this yesterday? I could have actually done this task in 10 minutes but because I’m not paid to do that, I’ll get back to you tomorrow.
The final straw was when they hired a Trainee to ‘assist me’ but somehow gets involved in projects and even spent a weekend modifying my templates without my knowledge. Come Monday, I got in hot water for not using their new templates. It was obvious that I was being managed out. Well, two can play this game. As it happens, while they were tweaking my templates, I was working on a new one of my own and they were quite similar.
Boss agreed to let me use the new one but that I should write a manual on how to use it.
Well sure I can do that. You see, Boss didn’t specify how detailed that manual should be so I just wrote something like:
Step 1: Open template
Step 2: Download data
Step 3: Copy chart to PowerPoint
Step 4: Send the report
No indication of which template to use, where to get the data, what to put in the slide show, or who to send the report to.
Also, I spent a whole day just figuring out which font to use because why not?
That done, I filed for two weeks’ leave that somehow got approved (I reasoned Trainee is there anyway and if he gets stuck, he could use the manual).
On the last possible moment of the last working day before my leave starts, I handed in my two weeks’ notice – as per my employment contract.
Days later, I got a call from a work buddy telling me that Trainee is splitting hairs trying to comprehend what my manuals are talking about. Asked if I could maybe help (Boss was too proud and too annoyed to call me himself). Well sure I’d love to come over and help but I’m actually two time zones away now and too busy learning about my new job.”
3. You Hate K-Pop Music? I'll Play It Every Morning
“One of my roommates and I have a very good relationship, but somehow, I find her super irritating. She always complains about every possible subject, studies and works compulsively, and usually makes a lot of noise even though she asks the rest of us to be quieter. I know that my feelings towards her have to do with the fact that we have very different views because of our origins.
She comes from a Korean background and I am Latin American. Despite that, she is very aware and a fan of my culture and is able to speak Spanish fluently. I, on the other hand, know nothing about Korea and don’t understand much about her culture.
From the beginning, I was quite annoyed by the amount of noise she made while she was in her room, not because the noise bothered me, but because all she did was listen to the same reggaetón and cumbia songs over and over again.
No other genre of music, only Latino. Besides, our rooms are next to each other and I can always hear her listening to music. I don’t hate Latino music, I actually enjoy it, but at parties and with friends, not at 8 am out loud with the typical reggaetón bass pounding on the wall.
After that, I began to hate her cleaning and tidying habits.
The kitchen always has her dirty dishes and pots for days, the shower eventually clogged up because she didn’t take care to pick up her hair when washing it, her room (everyone has their own room, but hers is visible to everyone) is always dirty and messy, she dropped coffee in the microwave and now it smells like burnt coffee because she wasn’t able to clean it up.
Then I started to get tired of her habits, like throwing her shoes when she takes them off in the hall at any time of the day or night, stepping unnecessarily loud when she walks down the hall when she is in a hurry, slamming the doors or forbidding us to smoke on the terrace because she had an addiction and according to her the smell sticks to our clothes and makes it harder for her to get over it.
After a conversation, I found out that she hates the idol culture of Koreans and Asians in general and that she hated K-pop bands. She explained to me that one of the things she dislikes most is generic K-pop songs, that her sister used to listen to that genre at home, and that it drove her crazy.
After a long time out of my house, I started to play K-pop music in the shower and in my room every morning right before I woke up.
I know this won’t solve our cleaning/order/behavioral problems, but she moves out at the end of June, and I don’t really care that much. It fills me with pleasure to see her face of disgust and to know that she is in her room listening to BTS songs, but without being able to say anything about my musical tastes.”
2. Demand That I Reprint And Mail Out All Previous Bills? Sure Thing!
“When I worked at a call center for one of the Big Three Telcos, I was in the billing queue for this call.
The call starts off and the client is relatively nice and pleasant and is inquiring why the TV and Internet aren’t working anymore.
A quick glance shows no payments have been made for the last 6 months. He’s about halfway through a 3-year contract, ahem service agreement.
I inform the client he’s past due and at least the past due amount needs to be paid to get services restored. This is when he becomes extremely rude and starts to bluntly lid.
He calls nonsense because he’s never got a bill since he opened his account and never got any warnings or notifications of any kind. Which was a lie. He opted for e-billing and had an online self-serve account. My end showed all his logins for the previous month (logged in about once a week and added tv packages and upgraded his internet speeds).
He received email and text messages every month about his bill and asked how much his monthly bill should be.
After his add-ons and upgrades, I inform him of our salary before taxes.
Now he blows a gasket saying he was quoted X amount a month, and I said yes, and that’s the price you were paying until you upgraded your speeds, and added on more tv packages. He starts swearing about how I’m lying to him and asks for the minimum amount he needs to pay to get services restored.
Then, to make matters worse, his billing cycle is the next day and the new minimum, past due amount, goes up another month’s charges plus late fees, so unless he’s making a credit card payment (they go through instantly) today, he’ll have to pay more and he blows another gasket. He’s swearing so loud it’s distorting as buzzing on my headset and he says he’s going to get his grandma to talk with me.
I attempt to explain the situation to her, but she’s having none of it. Everything I say is a lie and I’m ripping off her grandson and he’d never lie about not getting a bill. As she’s the one making the payment today, she demands to mail out all his bills since his account was opened.
It’s a $3 reprint fee to cover postage and I’m still trying to save them funds trying to say that her grandson has access to view all his bills in his self-serve account in PDF format so it looks just like the one that comes in the mail.
She won’t listen and demands I mail them out and I inform her it’s a $3 reprint fee per bill per month, but she’s talking over me and saying what a rip-off and she’ll pay the $3 fee.
She must have assumed $3 for the lot of reprints not $54 for 18 months worth of reprints. And for good measure, and to ensure they receive all the bills, I go into his account the next day and reprint the newest bill.
I wish I could have seen the looks on their faces when they see $54 dollars in reprint fees when the bill arrives in snail mail and another $3 the next month.
I documented the entire interaction of the call, especially when I’m trying to save them funds to use self serve instead of reprints to cover my butt because oh boy, they called back to dispute the charges.
But my manager didn’t credit them and the only coaching I received from that call was to advise them $54 for the reprints in addition to $3 per bill per month but my manager was smiling and knew I deliberately left out the total while still giving them the price. I just didn’t do the math for them.”
1. Accuse Me Of Breaking Your Scissors? Okay, I'll Fix Them
“So today my mum screamed at me about her scissors, apparently I broke them. I didn’t, but my malicious compliance to ‘fix’ them probably didn’t have the effect she wanted.
So some background, my mum has a pair of fabric scissors. She says I can use them but only with fabric, and if they are ever used to cut something else they will be damaged beyond repair.
I don’t think that’s true but I’m not going to refute it, so sure, I won’t use them for anything else but fabric. After all, they are her scissors.
So I use the scissors to cut one of my old t-shirts for a project I’m doing. I notice they’re a bit dull and not cutting well, but I didn’t mind I just wanted to use the t-shirt as rags anyway.
I guess that’s what happens to 2 or 3-year-old scissors, she’s had them a long time but definitely hasn’t used them in a while. I was working in the garage, and my dad comes in to clean his chainsaw. He’s tidying up and takes the scissors back inside as I had finished with them and gives them to my mum. He tells her that he found them in the garage.
My mum realizes that I’ve used them and apparently decides to test them noticing they’re blunt. Comes to me, screaming aggressively, ‘Why did you break my scissors!?’
Doesn’t explain how they are broken, just keeps screaming at me and demands I fix them. I say, ‘If you can’t tell me how they’re broken, I can’t fix them.’
She says ‘Just use them! They won’t cut!! You used them to cut something and now they’re broken!’
Cue the malicious compliance.
So she asked me to fix her fabric scissors, because as she said; ‘they won’t cut’. So that’s what I did. I took a honing rod, and I carefully sharpened an extremely sharp edge on them. I managed to cut my finger on them just cleaning the steel dust off, didn’t even apply pressure.
I readjusted the slack in the joining screw and they were super smooth and insanely sharp. I give them back to her and warn her that they’re very sharp, so best take care using them. She uses them (testing them on a piece of paper… against her own rules for only using fabric). Realized how sharp they are, and gets a paper cut feeling the edge of the paper.
Says to me, ‘Well great now I’m scared to use them because they’re dangerously sharp!'”
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