rSlash - r/Maliciouscompliance "GET ME A MANAGER!" "I am the Manager!"

Episode Date: October 6, 2022

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Welcome to our slash malicious compliance where OP causes his entire company to go bankrupt. Our next reddit post is from Billy the goat. I used to work for this hellhole of a job. I was a calibration technician, and my job, along with the two others we had, was to keep our tools and robots in the plant in line with our customer specifications. Failure to do so would allow our customers to pull out of their contracts with no legal ramifications. So this was a really important job. Anyways, we were behind on Calibration's big time. This was mostly due to the fact that the lines refused to give us a tool to calibrate the machines because they didn't want it to affect production.

And my so-called supervisor had no spine and kept telling us to work around it. For reference, we had to calibrate 6,000 different tools and machines, and almost 3,000 of them were overdue. So yeah, we were in trouble and this was a ticking time bomb. One of our customers called and said that next Monday they were coming in for an inspection, which you would think would be an, oh shoot moment, but no one seemed to care. I volunteered to work that weekend so that I could calibrate all the customer's machines and avoid this sh** storm.

But my boss told me that he couldn't approve any overtime without a detailed list of what I planned to do. I told him that I couldn't give him a list ahead of time because I had no clues which tools were where or what I would need to replace, but I could log everything as I went and give it to him on Monday. He said no, I had to either give him the report now or I couldn't do over time, so I didn't. Next Monday the customer comes in. Within an hour of being there, he realizes that almost all of his tools and machines are 4 months out of date. He immediately shuts down production since those employees home and pulls their contract. Because now he had to recall 4 months' worth

of product. The company starts slamming down on my department, to which I just looked at my boss, laughed, and then quit, because F that. One of my friends who still worked there after I left told me the customer renegotiated the contract much more in their favor, meaning the company got paid way less per product. And the company took a loss in profits that year, because that customer told all the other customers what happened and things really hit the fan. They ended up selling the place after another year. Our next credit post is from

Big Heckna. This happened years ago. I had just started working as an independent electrician and one day I received a call from a new customer. He was one of those people who flips homes in lower income neighborhoods. I'll call him Todd. Todd asked me to meet him at a vacant house that he recently bought to give him an estimate for a full rewiring job. He was 30 minutes late, so I was already unimpressed with him. Upon entering the house, which was right after a rainstorm had passed through,

we found an inch of water covering the hardwood floors. There was water pouring out of small holes in the columns on the front porch. Everything was soaked. Instead of showing me around, Todd called his business partner and brother and spent the next 20 minutes cussing him out for not fixing the roof. I'm standing around listening to this man, baby,

rage on full display. The whole time I'm thinking, there is no way that I'm gonna work for this guy. His fuse was way too short and his anger was out of hand. I gave him a price, which admittedly was the, I don't wanna do this job price, and I didn't hear back from him until months later. Todd called me later that year. He explained that he had found an electrician from three states away, and he had paid the electrician with ceramic tiles instead of cash. The problem now?

Well, he needed an inspection from the city electrical inspector. I agreed to meet the inspector for him, which I would bill him for. I went back to the house about 20 minutes before the inspector showed up, and I saw numerous issues. When the inspector arrived, we walked through the house together. Every issue I saw, the inspector also saw. He pointed them out, and every time I agreed with him that the work was enough to code. The inspector kept looking at me with a puzzled expression.

After we did a complete walkthrough, I finally explained to the inspector that I didn't do any of this work, and I was hired to get him to pass the inspection. He asked me if I thought that he should pass the house and I told him absolutely not. So I got paid for my time, I got paid to repair all the violations and I formed a strong relationship with that inspector who was always lenient with me on all my future jobs. So this reminds me of a lesson that I've learned in life. I heard this phrase from someone else, but in my experience it completely ranks true because I have been burned so many times that I've just I've learned my lesson. And here's the lesson.

If you think hiring a professional is expensive, wait until you hire an amateur. And I say this as literally right now, out on my deck, I have people coming to like completely redo my deck because the first people who did the deck before I bought the house mind you, did it completely incorrectly. So all the rainwater leaks through the deck and into the wood and it's causing like mold and rot so they have to redo the deck so that it doesn't leak. So instead of just doing it correctly the first time, now you gotta pay the professional anyways to do it correctly but also pay the bad person to do it wrong the first time. No big deal, it's only $20,000 for a new deck, which of course if I don't pay will cause

even more damage to my house because of all the water leaking through into the wood. The joys of home ownership. Our next reddit post is from dumpster fire. This happened today. My husband and I have been car shopping because I was in an auto accident at the beginning of summer. Our car was totaled in the accident and it's been a long process. We finally decided on the automobile that we wanted, got all our paperwork completed and

had our financing all worked out. All we had to do was sign the paperwork and drive away. The dealership is 90 minutes from our house, so we took the kids out of school early and my husband took off work after lunch. We wanted to make sure that we were home in time to keep our typical school night schedule going. We get to the dealership and are agreed upon time. We did one more test drive and

we were ready to sign everything. Then the game started. All of a sudden, the finance office wasn't ready for us. Then, after an almost two hour wait, they were ready. The finance person started by trying to upsell us and all the add-ons that dealers try to sell you. We told her that we didn't want anything extra. We just wanted to look at the numbers, read the paperwork, sign it, and head out. Due to all the waiting, we had a limited amount of time to get this all done and still be able to get home in time for the kids' bedtime routine. So the first thing the finance officer does is pull out a different set of numbers that

we were originally given and agreed to. All of a sudden, there's a dealership fee for selling us a car at this time of year. Nearly a thousand dollars for this nonsense. Then she states that if we don't like this fee, we can leave because they have people begging to buy cars from them. So my husband and I stood up to leave. She then tells us that we can't leave because she's already printed the forms. I laughed at her and told her to go out and get one of those beggars to buy it.

So far, the finance person has called twice, and the sales person has called four times. I guess they weren't expecting someone to get that far and then walk away. Man, as an American, it kind of stresses me out that basically every single transaction you make is completely non-haggleable. However, you can haggle on your two biggest purchases, your house and your car. So Americans spend their entire life getting very little experience on haggling on prices, but then when you get to these insanely expensive car and house purchases, suddenly you have zero haggling experience, but you've got to haggle for like literally thousands of dollars.

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Free plans have limited functionality. Our next Reddit post is from Woolie's Mudcake. This happened a few years ago when I was around 18. I worked at a large chain that sold automotive parts. The store had a roughly equal number of male and female staff, and since this was the automotive industry, the women seemed to get a decent amount of men, and women who would ask for one of the boys to help them. I was out back loading stock onto a trolley to run to the floor when one of my female co-workers and mind you, she's worked here for seven years at this point compared to my three months

of employment. Comes and finds me and asks me to help a customer. I ask her why she needs help because she usually knows more than I do considering how long she's been working here. She explained that she was standing at the service desk and a guy came up and asked her to get one of the boys. She tried explaining to him that she's more than competent to help him, but he insisted that a man needs to help him.

After hearing this, I decide to screw it. I may as well have some fun. I tell her to follow me back to the desk where he was waiting and just let me sort this out. I get to the customer and ask what he needed. He explained what he was after, so I just kind of stare with a puzzled look for a moment. I look at the customer and say, I'm sorry, I actually don't know how to help with that one, and I turn to my coworker and say, actually, she's an expert in that field. She knows more than I do, and I'm sure that she can help you. He looks annoyed and asks for another one of the boys, and on cue, one of my other male

co-workers who had overheard the entire conversation walks over. The customer looks at him and asks for the same thing again to which he replies, Oh, actually, she's an expert on that, she's probably the best person to ask that question to before wandering off again. The customer begrudgingly got her help on the matter and walked out without talking to anyone else in the store. Down in the comments, we have this word from a Jumotron. I used to work tech support for a major computer company about 15 years ago.

It was about 50% men and 50% women staffing the phones. I was seated next to a woman who took absolutely zero flak from anyone. She got a call from a customer in his late 50s who kept demanding to speak to a male colleague since it was a tech question and he wanted to make sure that everyone understood the issue properly. Her reply was, I'm sorry, none of my male colleagues are available, but if you get your wife on your phone instead, I'm sure that we can solve the problem. That was one of the best laps that I had at that job. Our next reddit posted from Torkeram.

I used to be a server at a major restaurant chain that you see in every mall in the US, and my particular location just happened to be in one of the wealthier parts of the country. Because of that, a large percentage of the clientele wanted their dishes a certain way. There were some oddball regulars. Like this one lady who wanted to seize her salad with no dressing, but instead three whole lemons to squeeze on the lettuce. But like 99% of the time, they would just ask for regatonia instead of pinae in a dish, or red onion instead of yellow on a burger, or something of that nature.

The thing about this chain though, is that technically we're supposed to charge them for substitutions like that. So for instance, if a guest wanted a different kind of dressing on a salad, it might be like a 10 cent charge. Or if they wanted Swiss instead of cheddar on their burger, it would be like 15 cents. As a server, you were supposed to know all the upcharges, but because there were like 26 pages on the menu, it was daunting enough to just memorize what we even had. Well, mystery solved on this one. There's only one restaurant I've ever been to in my

entire life that has a 26 page menu, and that's cheesecake factory. Okay, so anyways. Obviously, no one ever charged for these things because what's an extra 15 cents on a $200 tab, especially when you're in the weeds and you're pretty sure the host stand wants you to have a mental breakdown. Not only that, but because rich people tend to be the stingiest mother efforts that you'll ever meet, we would never charge them because they would instantly complain if you did. Also, the restaurant's policy was essentially the customer is always right, no matter how wrong they were. We even had regular grifters who would intentionally order the wrong thing and then complain and get an entire free

meal every freaking time. So, one normal day I'm serving a table and someone asked for goat cheese on their salad instead of feta, which is supposed to be one of those 10 cent charges. I obviously don't add the up charge, just like I hadn't for any of the other countless times over the last three years. And like 15 minutes later, the new manager, Brad, comes along and pretty much choose me out over it. Keep in mind, this is Brad's second day on the job, and he came over from the other side of the country to replace our beloved former manager who left to manage

her own restaurant. The dude hadn't even introduced himself to me, and he comes out of nowhere to yell at me for not doing the upcharge. I explained to him why I didn't, and how it was pretty much a director from the general manager to not do up charges, because 99% of the time that would lead to a complaint and a free meal would follow. But Pradja's blah blah blah some more and tells me that I have to add the up charge or I would get written up. So when the next table, a party of 7 people that had a bill of $500 changes literally every dish I added the up charges, which totaled like $1 at the most. When I dropped off the check, they freaked out over all the up charges, even though I told

them about the charges when they ordered. So of course, they demanded to speak to the manager. Instead of getting any of the other managers I worked with for years, I grabbed Brad and made him deal with them. He ended up having to give them the $500 meal for free because he insisted that I charge them one extra dollar. But did he learn from this lesson? Nope.

So I did this over and over again to the detriment of my own bank account. Most people still tip me though, which was nice. And I got to watch tables routinely chew Brad out over these stupid charges. This continued for a month or so until he finally relented. And not too long after that, I was suspiciously fired for creating a hostile work environment while I was on vacation. Don't you know OP? Disagreting with your manager and making him look like an idiot is the most hostile thing

anyone can do in a work environment. You're lucky that he didn't send you to jail, OP! Our next reddit post is from Elking. I own an auto detailing business. During the height of the pandemic, I lost maybe 5% of my business because I mostly serve as high in cars owned by the semi-wealthy, or better yet, their kids. Anyhow, I have two employees.

One who's a supervisor and the other who's a trainee. I still work like 90% of the jobs to assist because they're both still in training. I had a new customer a year or so ago who wasn't happy and demanded of me to see the manager. I called over the supervisor who told the client exactly the same thing that I had told her. The client shrieked, Why are you just repeating what your employee said? He said,

Ma'am, that's the owner. He's my boss. She got mad that I passed her off to someone lower than myself. So I just said, you wanted to see the manager and he's the one in charge of the trainee when I'm not here, so he's the closest thing to a manager. That ended pretty quickly, lol. 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.