rSlash - r/Maliciouscompliance How I Outsmarted My Stupid Boss

Episode Date: April 19, 2024

0:00 Intro 0:08 Solve your own problems 4:10 Rude customer 5:47 Walking as a sport 10:00 PTO 12:03 Dig 14:11 Boxes Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to r slash malicious compliance where a stupid manager learns an important lesson. Our next reddit post is from kookabanis. A little over a decade ago, I worked for the local hardware outfit as a store manager. I took the job because it was local, it paid okay, and it was supposed to be relatively stress-free. Unfortunately, the reality of it was that the assistant manager, Colin, was a dickhead with an inferiority complex who had it in for me because I was more qualified than he was, even though I had absolutely no interest in climbing the corporate ladder or taking his job.

The job itself was over-tasked and under-staffed and things were only getting busier because there was a building boom happening in the area at the time. As a result, I quickly ended up being run ragged every day to keep up with a constant influx of goods and outgoing orders. To make matters worse, the overall manager, John, decided to reassign my two off-siders as delivery staff, leaving me on my own. When I protested, I was told to, solve your own problems. I somehow kept up with the workload just barely

But I knew that this wasn't going to work in the long run So I continued in my attempts to get more staff in my area Even just getting one more employee to work under me would have made a huge difference I tried reasoning with John saying what if I get sick or injured? How will you get the orders done then? His solution was that he would have some of the casual staff from the front retail area fill in if that happened. I laughed in his face and said those people couldn't find their own butts using both

hands. It probably wasn't the best way to handle things. Once again I was told, solve your own problems. Okay then, fine, I'll do just that. The job got more difficult with each week. Colin reared his ugly head to make a fuss about stock not being checked in on time, and I seriously considered rearranging his face and told him so. He decided to take an early lunch, read, run away, and hid from me in his office for the

rest of the week. That was the day I realized I had to get out of this place. As for solving my problems, well, obviously I was looking for a new job. I answered an ad for correctional officers and attended a meeting for applicants. Then I sat through the psych test, the interviews, and I was finally accepted for training to begin in one month. Perfect timing! The next Monday, I walked into John's office and gave my two weeks notice. John was absolutely appalled that I would consider leaving such a good job. He tried offering me a raise of $1,000 per year.

I laughed and said that my starting pay at the other job was already $15k more than what I was getting here and I walked out. Now you would think that a smart manager would immediately take steps to cover my position and begin training a replacement. Nothing happened for the next week and a half. Until on my last Thursday, John finally showed up with a replacement. It was some entirely forgettable teenager who plainly had no chance of keeping up. I trained him as best as I could for the two days that I had left, then I said my good

byes. Two months later, I walked in as a customer, flushed with my new money. The place was an utter mess. There was junk everywhere, unprocessed goods still in sealed boxes, pallets of sheeting just dumped in the truck yard and no one could find anything. The original guy I trained was nowhere to be seen and four new young guys with haunted looking faces were madly scrambling about trying to sort their stuff out. No one knew where anything was, where anything went or even how to do a basic invoice check. It was a total disaster, which brought a warm glow to my evil black,

told you so, heart. Upon seeing me, John quickly pulled me aside and asked if I could help out and show the new guys what to do. I took great pleasure in reminding him that I had repeatedly warned him this could happen and that not only did I no longer work there but that he would have to and I quote, solve your own problems. Our next reddit post is from Shadykins. I work in a grocery store that includes a post office station. It's in the middle of a community and a lot of our customers are regulars. It was a day just like any other and I was serving on the store side of things when the last customer in the store came up, a woman and her granddaughter. We were chatting away, the granddaughter was showing me her most

recent toy, and the grandmother was telling me what they were off to do that afternoon. As I was handing over the change, a woman stormed past towards the post office. At this point, the grandmother grabbed something off of a nearby rack and added it to her items. I proceeded to scan the item when the other woman at the post office pipes up, EXCUSE ME, she said in a very rude tone, I was here before them. I responded that I'd be with her in a minute and that these customers were here before she came into the store. I was particularly pissed off at this Karen's attitude given the fact that she had behaved in such a way, without a real reason, in front of a sweet little two-year-old girl who's very impressionable.

Anyways, I scanned the grandmother through and said my goodbyes, waving and smiling as I always do. I then made my way to the post office, where this woman hit me with the line, Customer service dictates that you serve me first if I'm here before them. I calmly smiled and told her, Customer service also dictates that I can reserve the right to refuse service to anyone. Her face dropped, still furious. She asked, are you refusing to serve me then?

I looked her right in the eyes and said, certainly seems that way. That's genuinely one of my favorite interactions with one of my rude customers to date. Our next reddit post is from Pilotlights. In high school, I went to an academic magnet school. Essentially, it was a public school ran like a private school. You had to have certain test scores to get in. There was no bus transportation since it was for the whole country. And it had way stricter dress codes than all the other schools in the district.

And they also had a ton of extra rules because it was a choice school. Now I was in the first graduating class. I was there the first year that it opened. At the time it was 5th to 9th grade and I started as a freshman. My second year there they completed construction on the elementary wing so at that point it was kindergarten through 10th. They added grades until my senior year when it was finally K through 12. As the school grew, it continued to add more policies.

My sophomore year, the school's second year of being open, they began a new policy where all students 7th grade and above had to be on a sports team everywhere. I thought this was really, really stupid. I hated it. I'm not an athlete. I was in other clubs and I was getting increasingly involved in my church. Being the mature 16 year old that I was, my initial plan was to join a team and have a bad attitude. Like an awful, evangelistically bad attitude so that no

one would have any fun. And this would prove to the school how awful this rule was. Instead, for all the lazy kids like me, the school started a school walking team. It wasn't power walking, just regular walking. We just had to walk around the neighborhood for about 45 minutes three times a week after school. I was fine with this, I didn't mind walking around. Of course, there was an adult coach with us, but since the whole thing was ridiculous anyways, my friend and I declared ourselves co-captains.

This mostly consisted of us telling the middle schoolers to walk faster. No one else considered us co-captains, but we did and that's all that mattered to us since it was all a joke anyways. So in my senior year, I was 18, working part time about 15 to 20 hours a week. I was super involved in my church, and my family was a chaotic mess of dysfunction that traumatized me in numerous ways. The school finally enforced the state law that everyone on a sports team had to have an annual physical on file.

I never really bothered with it since walking isn't really a sport anyways. Eventually, the school came to me and said that it was so late in the season that even if I got a physical, I would need to pick a different sport in the winter or spring because walking was a fall sport. I was basically just like, screw this, I had enough things to deal with in my life and I didn't want to put up with this BS anymore. I decided to do exactly what they said. I'd get the physical, but I'd do my best to fail it.

So eventually I went ahead and saw a doctor. As I was filling out the patient form, I answered truthfully. I didn't lie, but I didn't provide any context. Yes, I have a history of asthma, mostly from when I was a kid. I do have severe seasonal allergies and a history of seizures. See, when I was 13, I had a couple of dozen seizures in a day or two. No one knew what was going on and eventually I was diagnosed with epilepsy specifically having absent seizures. Since then, I'd been taking anticonvulsants every day. As far as I'm aware, even 20 years after that initial episode, I'm not

sure I've had a full blown seizure since then. It's literally the mildest case of epilepsy I've ever heard of. The doctor does a quick physical exam, mostly vitals and similar things. As she looks at my patient history form, she asks about the seizures. I explain that I was diagnosed with epilepsy, that I take anticonvulsants, and that I have a neurologist I see about once or twice a year. The doctor says, well, I can't pass you until I hear from your neurologist. I basically hopped out of the chair, happily said thank you, and walked out.

I never did contact the neurologist. Instead, I just gave the paperwork to the school. And that's how I, a relatively healthy 18 year old, got medically disqualified from the school walking team. This is a cool story and all, but what I want to know is why is walking a fall sport? Am I not allowed to walk in winter and spring? Do I have to start running everywhere in winter? Our next Reddit post is from FirstDisponder.

When I worked corrections, I requested two weeks off. I had been there for years and I accrued plenty of paid leave. It was given to me because I had put in the request months in advance for a personal event. The two weeks went by way too quick. I had positioned my two weeks off in between two weekends so that I could maximize my time off. However, during that last weekend of my time off, I had a family emergency come up that was quite serious, so I asked for another two days off to handle my situation. I was told by my direct supervisor that there was no way that she was approving that because we were only allowed to use 84 hours of leave in one continuous block, and she ordered me

to come in the next day or I'd receive a write up. I didn't argue because I knew that she was correct. So I showed up that night and reported for my shift and much to my surprise, my captain had called out sick. So a relief captain came in to fill her shift. I asked him to give me the next day off after my shift was over. He and I had a rapport given the number of years that we worked with each other previously, so he looked at the schedule and my leave. He said, you know you've got plenty of leave, right? I said, yeah, I know.

I just need some time to handle my business tomorrow. No, I mean, you've got plenty of leave to take and the roster is filled the next two weeks anyways. I said, yeah, I just got off a two week vacation, but I stopped because he winked at me and it finally clicked. We can only take up to two weeks off consecutively. Nothing says that we can't take off two weeks, then come in for say, an hour, then go home and take off another two weeks.

So I did just that, and he signed the paperwork saying, it's not my shift, F that B word. I handled my emergency literally the next day. It turned out to be not as serious as we thought. And then I enjoyed another paid two weeks off of work. It was great. To add to the bliss, I reported back to work to find out that the captain who had denied my leave was fired and replaced for some kind of negligence or something. Our next Reddit post is from Barjack.

This happened back when the earth was young and MTV still played music videos in the ancient age known as 1997. I was 13 and spending yet another weekend helping my dad with yard work and home improvement projects. I'm not really complaining, I learned a lot about home repair and rather than get a stupid teen job in retail, my dad paid me to assist him up until I left for college. Now just because I didn't hate it doesn't mean that I wasn't a 13 year old little turd

however. On this day, we were putting up a trellis in the garden so that plants could grow up it. It was a simple job. Sink two posts, cement them in place and fit the trellis between them. My dad gave me a post hole digger, which if you're not familiar with, looks like someone glued chopsticks to a pistachio shell so you could open and close it with a hinge. He showed me the spot for the first post and said, dig it as deep as you can.

So I went ahead and made a one foot deep hole, thinking that was probably enough to sink the six foot post that we had. He comes back and tells me, don't be lazy, dig deeper. In fact, keep digging until I tell you that it's deep enough. So that's when my malicious compliance came in. I knew that he would be away for about half an hour, so I went to town on this hole. I didn't stop for a break and just kept digging until the post hole digger fit in the hole completely and I couldn't open it to lift the dirt out. At that point, I taped a spade to a branch and made the hole even deeper.

When my dad came back, he said something like, let's see if you did it properly this time. And then he dropped the six foot post into the hole where it promptly disappeared. There was a momentary look of shock on his face. Then he started laughing. Like bent over, can't catch your breath laughing. To this day, I have never seen the man laugh as hard as that. When he was done, he told me, I guess you did what I told you to, but now we have to figure out how to fish the post out of the hole. Luckily, it was only a foot or so below the surface, and we

got it out easily enough. To this day, my dad still tells this story as a warning about giving vague instructions. Our next reddit post is from Missknockers. A bit of backstory. I divorced my ex a little over 9 years ago after 14 years of marriage. I won't go into specifics as to why, but suffice to say he was a lying, cheating jerk. Early on during our marriage, I tended to not be all that assertive until finally I had my fill and grew a backbone. He hated that.

He didn't like hearing the word no from me or in doing things my own way. So fast forward to a month after we were officially divorced. He was in his new place and I was in my house, formerly the house that we shared with our sons. But he still had a ton of his stuff there. Stuff I didn't even want even though I paid for lots of it, but stuff that I knew that he really wanted. He finally reached out and demanded, not asked, but demanded I send him his stuff.

He told me to just toss it all in boxes and send it over to him. His exact words. Mind you, he was only about 10 miles away from me at that point and he could have easily come over to do it himself. He didn't want to do that though because then he'd have to see me. Something he was actively trying not to do. Cue malicious compliance. Now a lot of what he had were collectibles. I won't go into details, but some of them were fairly expensive and fragile. So I did as he asked.

Correction demanded. I tossed everything into numerous boxes. Now some of the truly expensive items, I did take great care in packing them only because I knew that my sons would probably eventually want them. But for the stuff that I knew my ex really wanted and cared a lot about, nah. I just tossed it all in a box without a care in the world. Now, I did inspect everything and while I just dumped them in boxes, nothing was damaged by me. I also took pictures to prove it. So, once I closed all the boxes up, I told him to either get his butt over

here to pick it up or get someone else to do it for him. He got someone else to come pick him up. Now, I wasn't at the house when this person picked everything up, but my sons and my sister were. They didn't know how everything was packed. They only showed him the boxes. They told me that the person who picked up the boxes quite literally just tossed them into the back of his pickup without a care in the world and then sped away. Later that night, I got a call from my ex who started calling me a B word for destroying

all of his stuff. I told him that everything was fine before I closed the boxes up and I had the pictures to prove it. I said that maybe next time, be a bit nicer to me when making requests and I reminded him that he demanded that I toss everything in boxes but he didn't tell me to be gentle when doing so. I hung up on him and proceeded to enjoy my celebratory glass of wine that evening, hoping that he was enjoying the shattered remains.

That was r slash malicious compliance and if you liked this content be sure to follow my podcast because I put out new reddit podcast episodes every single day.