rSlash - r/Maliciouscompliance Dumb Manager Ruins Her Own Career

Episode Date: August 6, 2026

0:00 Intro 0:08 Experience 3:00 Review 5:59 Days off 8:28 Group project 12:37 Sick days Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to R-slash malicious compliance, where a stupid manager ends up screwing herself over. Our next Reddit post is from Tragic Words. A few years ago, I worked at a company as the manager of some key administrative staff and had a chance to serve up some malicious compliance. At the time, I had four employees, a generic employee, a rock star, a new guy, and an idiot. He couldn't be fired as he was related to some very senior managers. Nepotism at its best. We work closely with the operations team where one of our responsibilities was to perform certain tasks,

without which the entire operation would grind to a halt. At the time, there had been some expansion and a second shift was introduced. Thus, the idiot was hired. Like any time something new happened, there was a lot of teething issues. At the time, idiots and generic employee were covering the new afternoon shift, while I had the new guy learning the ropes on the morning shift with Rockstar and the generic employee and the idiot on the weeks of mornings. There were some problems with introducing a new shift,

and the operations manager did as most managers do when something isn't going right. Pass the blame over to our end. One thing I really didn't like about the operations manager was she was the type to go behind your back and be nothing but smiles to your face. At the time, the operations manager wanted my rock star employee on her shift, because he was the type of person who would constantly go above and beyond to make things happen, as in fix her problems. Instead of asking me if it was possible, the operations manager went to our boss's boss to complain that everything that was going wrong

was due to my department and how she needed my most experienced employee on her shift. The next day, I got an email from the boss with my operations manager, my boss, and her boss copied. Please ensure that your most experienced employee is on the afternoon shift to help the operations manager. I was a little annoyed. I must have spent 10 minutes just looking at that email, my temper consistently rising the entire time, until it finally dawned on me. The operations manager wanted my Rockstar employee, but the request was for my most experienced employee. What operations manager didn't realize was that my idiot employee had started two months before Rockstar and a few years before generic employee. Suddenly, I was in a great

mood and must have had the biggest shit-eating grin on my face as I typed my reply. Hi, boss. We are, of course, happy to help Operations Manager with the multitude of issues that is happening within her shift. As such, Idiot, my most experienced employee, will spend the next eight weeks working only on her shift. My boss and I had a great laugh over it, as it was essentially career suicide to complain about Idiot. There was nothing the operations manager could do but grin and bear it. Our next Reddit post is from Hopla Fish. I'm a 29-year-old guy, and I recently quit my job as a specialist at a small planning and design firm somewhere in Germany. The place was a mess. The pay was a joke, the leadership was completely unpredictable, and they expected me to do the

job of a fully qualified project manager without the pay or the support. The turnover was crazy. Three of my colleagues quit around the same time, and during my four years there, my boss went through five different assistants. I eventually packed my bags and moved to a different city for a fresh start. A few weeks after my last day, my former boss texted me. He casually asked me to please leave a review for the firm on a popular local job review site, basically our equivalent of Glass Store. He genuinely thought that we parted on great terms and assumed that I would drop a five-star rating to boost their terrible score. I just rolled my eyes and ghosted him. Fast forward a few days. A few ago, I checked the company's page and saw three brand new 4.5 star reviews posted in the same week.

They were so obviously faked by management. They all used the exact same HR buzzwords. Great work-life balance, amazing health benefits, which was literally just 15 minutes of stretching on Wednesday, lull, and basically praised all the exact things people usually complained about. At this point, I remembered his text. He wanted a review. Fine, let's comply. I sat down and wrote out a brutally honest, mathematically precise view. I kept it completely professional and entirely subjective, so they couldn't legally sue me to take it down. I gave them one and two stars in almost every category, explicitly mentioning the lack of support, the horrible communication, and the heavy workload. But I didn't stop there.

While I was at it, I contacted the platform support team and reported that three new 4.5 star reviews for manipulation, pointing out the identical wording and the fact that they were posted at the exact same time. Less than four hours later, two of the three fake reviews were nuked by the platform. The automatic spam filter probably caught them because my boss was dumb enough to write them from the same office and IP address. With his fake reviews gone and my honest one-star review dragging the average down even further, panic mode set in. How do I know? Because my ex-boss texted me again. This time, the message was full of typos, desperately asking if I could please leave a good review to help them out. He has absolutely no idea that I'm the one who tanked his rating

and reported his fakes. I left him on red again. The cherry on top? A buddy of mine who still works there texted me yesterday. He said my review perfectly hit the nail on the hit. He also mentioned that since the review dropped, management has suddenly been acting super nice and accommodating to everyone, out of pure fear that more people will quit. Our next Reddit post is from Indigo Wolf. I don't work for the best company. It's corporate, and the higher-ups have little understanding of what goes on at ground level. When I started, it was under a great manager that protected us from most of the

crap rolls downhill politics. He was promoted out of the store, and after a few misfires, we got a new manager. She is very loud. She will get in conversations with friends and loudly discuss controversial opinions and swear like a sailor. I've had a few customers quietly asked me why I hadn't reported her to the manager, then roll their eyes and express sympathy

when I said she is my manager. Anyway, there's a system in place for who to call when no manager is available. We're a tiny team, and most of us work solo. If the manager is coming in the morning, we call her the night before with concerns. If she's not, and it's the assistant, we call the assistant. Sure, no problem.

I found an issue that I thought was important enough to inform her right away instead of waiting until the next day that she worked. I took pictures and shot her a short text explaining it. I got back and this is the exact text. I need you guys to understand that unless the store's on fire or you're being robbed, you need to contact the assistant manager, not me, unless it's an emergency please. Four days later, she sends me a text scolding me for not doing my job, when it was, in fact, a managerial level job, not my level.

Then the following text a few minutes later saying, Oh, you did do it. Sorry, after she sent me some points in our store's good job system. I didn't respond. I was on the clock. Then she texted me asking what my pay rate was for my review. I decided to respond to this one, even though it's kind of, you know, her job to know. I started getting stupid texts from her, like, do you know where the scissors went?

And stuff like that. According to the precedent, she set, this was not a store emergency. and not my problem until I'm on the clock. I ended up deciding that I'll not be answering her if I'm not on the clock. She calls, I let it go to voicemail. She texts, I leave her on red until I'm on the clock. Now the company has made a no phones while on the clock policy as well. So I guess she can't text or call me while I'm on the clock either

unless she calls a store phone. Whoops, guess you'll have to come in in person on her days off if she wants to talk to me. Maybe she shouldn't have chewed me out so hard when I just sent her one text. Our next Reddit post is from Sensitive Nature. Long ago, I was a university student majoring in literature. Naturally, I had a schedule packed with literature classes, and this group project took place during a course entitled Madness in Classical Literature. It was fun, the professor was zaney, and the topics were rather interesting.

Then one day, the dreaded group project assignment arrived, where we were split up into groups of three and do a 30-minute presentation on madness in any era of literature. I ended up with two studious seeming partners, one of whom was emphatically invested in doing our project on madness in 1800s Scotland. She was persuasive, we were convinced, but when we told the professor, he kind of winced. Then he held us after class, asked us if we were sure, and she certainly was. And he kind of absently nodded and said that he would help us find a couple of sources since literature in 1800 Scotland is apparently more scarce than one would think. We ended up with permission to cover Lord Byron by association,

along with an incredibly long and dry text about some guy who's either hallucinating or having an existential religious experience with the devil himself. Now, I've read some boring texts in my day, but this piece was far in a way the most mind-numbing, collection of words my brain has ever scraped itself against. To make matters worse, it soon became very, very apparent that neither of my partners, including the girl who was gagging over 1800 Scotland to start with, had a single intention of doing any of the work for this project. They didn't even read the material, not even the relatively short Lord Byron poem. Whoa. So I just dove in and did

the entire project myself, including the required handouts that we were supposed to, to print out for the class to follow along with our presentation. That's when I decided to get petty. I didn't want to be that student who rats on fellow students, but I also didn't want my partners to get off entirely scot-free. So I memorized everything. I mean everything. And for the worksheet,

I basically wrote down bullet points that revealed nothing about the text or their contents. The day of the presentation arrives, and I meet my partners in class and give them the worksheets. They're relieved that I seemed to, know what I'm doing and suspect absolutely nothing. Our time comes and we stand up in front of the class with them on either side of me. And I pass out the worksheets and proceed to talk about madness in 1800 Scotland from memory. Going into exhaustive detail on Lord Byron and whatever the hell protagonist from the other text, my partners were silently, gravely nodding along for the entire

30 minutes. I finished speaking and then came the Q&A portion of the presentation. My fellow classmates were encouraged to ask us questions about the era and the authors, and it lasted about 15 minutes. So I picked a student who asked something about the religious aspects of the dry text. I could have answered, but instead, I paused a long, pregnant pause and gave my partners a chance to answer instead, if they so wished. I let the excruciatingly silent seconds drag on every time, looking slowly to both of them with each question and taking my sweet time before jumping in. Within a couple of minutes, it became incredibly evident to everyone there that I was the only person in our group project who knew a single thing about madness

in 19th century Scottish literature. So sure, I did the whole project and let them think that it was fine up until it wasn't. Petty? Absolutely. But by God, if I had to read that awful story because someone else watched Outlander too many times, then I'm going to comply maliciously. I am happy to report that the professor pulled me aside after the fact and said that, given our performances, he'd be grading me and my partners separately. I got an A, and strangely, they stopped talking to me after that group project, so I have no idea what grades they received. Bad enough to cut contact, though,

bless. Our next Reddit post is from Russell. I'm a nurse at a large hospital. The floor I worked on was selected to be the COVID unit during the first and second waves. More nurses than not were catching COVID. So whenever I got an inkling of being sick, I would call out and get tested. Now, if I tested positive, then I would get two weeks off without penalty. But I tested negative and returned to work. I got called into the office and got a verbal warning because I had one too many sick days. I said to my manager, you realize that we're in a pandemic, right? She says, yes, I know that, but we still have to stick to the original policy. When we clock in, there's an electronic message that pops up on the time clock that reads,

during the pandemic, we need to self-monitor ourselves, and by clocking in, you're declaring that you're fit to work. There was no adjustment to the policy, even though we were a COVID unit during a pandemic. So I would either have to lie about feeling sick when I clock in, or call out and get in trouble. Here's where the malicious compliance comes in. I'd always picked up a lot of extra time in the sister department, not because I needed the extra money,

but because the hospital was always short-staffed. My manager didn't like the fact that I picked up extra time at the other department. She wanted me to pick up extra time in our department. So she said, as punishment, you cannot pick up extra time in the other department for 90 days, which was the length of my disciplinary period. You should be responsible enough to pick up extra time in your own department. Since I didn't need the extra money, I didn't pick up any extra time in that period.

I got called almost every day to ask if I could come in because they were short-staffed. One of the reasons they were short-staffed was because our sister unit was even more short-staffed, and the nurses on my unit were getting pulled to go work there. If only more nurses picked up extra time in that other unit, hmm. At the end of the 90 days, I was told that I could pick up extra time. her time in the sister department again, at which point I handed in my two weeks notice and told her I accepted a position at another hospital. She then tells me that because of my years of service, I need to give four weeks notice. I tell her, nah, that's just a courtesy. So I'll extend

the same courtesy I got when I needed to call out sick. That was our slash malicious compliance. And if you like this content, be sure to follow my podcast because I put out new Reddit podcast episodes every single day.