rSlash - r/Maliciouscompliance I Embarrassed a Millionaire & Ruined His Business!

Episode Date: November 29, 2021

r/Maliciouscompliance In today's episode, OP is a sound technician at a recording studio. He has a rather interesting interaction with a expert producer who wants him to complete a rush order. The situation is a little fishy, but OP is a professional so he does his best to make his client happy. A few days later, the hotshot millionaire who was bankrolling the production shows up, and then it becomes clear how OP helped to destroy a millionaire's business. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to R-Slash Milicious Compliance, where OP completely embarrasses a stuck-up millionaire. Our next reddit post is from Tapioca Fumble. I'm an audio engineer. About five years ago, I was working at a very high-end facility with some amazing equipment. The studio looked beautiful, and it was quite amazing. Most of my time at the studio was spent recording musical artists and mixing their tracks. I was booked for an eight hour block to mix and pre-recorded tracks that a producer was going to bring in. To clarify, mixing a song means taking all the individual instrument recordings, balancing volumes and applying effects. After a song has been mixed, it's sent to a mastering engineer who puts the final touches on it and makes it ready for distribution. In most cases, especially if

it's through a record label, the mixing engineer and mastering engineer are two different people, since they're two different art forms that utilize different technologies. I like to research my clients before they come in, so I poked around online and I found out very quickly

that the producer coming into the studio was a very accomplished producer whose work was some amazing artists. I was thrilled because I had never worked with the producer of this caliber before. I made sure to get as much information as possible from the studio manager so I could come into the session well prepared. My manager afforded me an email from the producer saying they were just mixing a few songs. I asked if I was getting an assistant engineer to help, and my manager told me that they actually requested that I don't have an assistant. That was a first,

but I shrugged it off. I got to the studio early, and I prepped for as much as I possibly could. The producer and the band that he had recorded arrived, so I started getting files in such for them to start mixing. As I'm doing this, I started to see a lot of red flags. The producer brought in 10 songs that he needed mixed and mastered today. Typically, I'll mix 2 songs in 10 hours, maybe 3 songs if I'm rushing and not taking any breaks. Furthermore, he wanted it to be mixed on our large recording console. You know, that giant desk with all the buttons and faders and such, essentially bypassing the computer. I let him know the following.

1. Mixing 10 songs in 8 hours is going to be very difficult. And that I'm going to have to sacrifice quality moving that quickly, and that I'll do my best to mix these songs all in one day. 2. I am not a mastering engineer, but I do have some mastering experience, and I can give him some mastering work that'll suffice. I'll provide the files so they can send them to other mastering engineers as well. Three, mixing on a console instead of a computer means that it will be way more time-consuming. Since I would be turning physical knobs, pushing physical buttons, connecting gear with cables, and keeping track of all this. It also means that if they want any edits or changes after today, they'll need to book the studio for at least 2-3 additional hours so I can set up everything exactly how it was.

I figured that since the producer had worked with such amazing artists before, that all this would make sense to him. I got the impression that either he didn't care or more likely didn't realize. He was very nice, but quite dismissive, and essentially told me to mix it on the console. To add to my stress, I started finding all sorts of mistakes and issues in the recording that would take more time to address. Despite this, we worked really well together. I felt I gave him more than enough information about my concerns, so I complied with his requests, knowing full well that he was going to face a plethora of problems

down the road. I got to work as fast as I could. The producer was quite eccentric, but we got along nicely, and he was thrilled with some of the tricks that I was pulling out of my hat to address all these issues. At the end of every mix, I would take copious notes on what physical buttons were pushed, what cables were connected to what, etc. I did this for every client that I worked with, just in case they ever wanted to come back and make edits for their records. Normally, I would have my assistant do this, but they specifically asked me to not have an assistant around. I was able to get through each of the songs, somehow. I was honestly impressed with myself. The song sounded good, but not good, because I didn't have enough time to make them

good. They were happy with the mixes. The producers seemed quite surprised they sounded the way they did, so I took that as a compliment. We ended on a good note, so I thought that was the end of it. A few days later, I get booked again for two hours. We normally don't book two hour blocks, it's just not worth it. However, I agreed to the two hour block because there was another eight hour session booked directly after, so it worked

out perfectly. The studio manager didn't quite understand what I'd be doing in those two hours. The client was very vague, and he wouldn't answer any of our questions about what they wanted to happen during those two hours. I show up for the session, and the producer from a few days before was there. Before I can even say hello, a car that costs more than what I make in two years comes whipping through the parking lot. A guy jumps out of the car and begins barking orders at me. I realize that this must be the executive producer.

For background, the executive producer is essentially the guy that this must be the executive producer. For background, the executive producer is essentially the guy that knows nothing about the process, but he has the money to fund it. It's just a fancy name for the person who pays for everything. As he's barking orders at me, about 10 more ridiculously expensive cars pull in. I learned that the executive producer brought possible investors for his new record label into the studio to listen to the mixes and watch the executive producer manage a production team. After the executive producer greeted all of his investors, he instructed everyone to go

into the studio. I tried to get him alone to talk to him in private, but he responded, I'm going to do all the talking, you're going to do all the work. He clearly wanted everyone to see how good he was at managing a production team. He asked me to pull up the first song to play for his investors. I told him that if he wants to make any changes to the songs, I need at least 2-3 hours to set everything up before we can make changes. I also said that I can't even do that today since I have another client coming in in

2 hours. As I'm saying this, I see the lower producer behind him smiling, clearly getting a lot of satisfaction from this. The executive producer literally turned red with anger and started yelling. I honestly couldn't even understand half of what he said. When the executive producer stopped yelling, the producer cutely said, I told you so. That's when I realized that the producer had actually been the one who maliciously complied with the executive producer.

This is my favorite part. The executive producer handed me a $100 bill and said, you have 10 minutes to set it up. He did this in front of his investors. I'm not sure what he was thinking would happen. Some of them literally laughed out loud and walked out. I was sick of it, so I maliciously complied knowing that I could never set it up in time and making the executive producer look bad in front of his investors. So I went to set it up, pocketing an easy hundred bucks.

As I was setting up, one of the investors came up to me and asked if I was actually able to set this up in 10 minutes. I told him it wasn't possible, so he turned around and walked out. About 10 minutes later, they all left, because I didn't have everything set up yet. Later that week, the producer came back to work with me some more, and we had a great working relationship from that point on. I talked with the producer about the whole thing, and he said the executive producer hired him to help get his record label off the ground. The executive producer apparently didn't listen to anything the producer advised him on, and treated him very poorly.

So the producer decided to just comply with whatever the executive producer wanted, knowing full well that it would never work out. He got sick of the executive producer's antics and just won it out. The producer had informed the executive producer about everything that would go wrong before they booked me for the mix, and the executive producer completely disregarded him. The producer told me that the executive producer didn't want an intern or an assistant at the studio for the mix because he only wanted high-end music production people there. If a assistant is in their title, then they don't deserve to be there.

It turns out that all the investors pulled out, and the band sued the executive producer for copyright infringement, which is a separate issue that I have no info on. Oh, oh, Pee, it's all coming together. This... Oh, oh, P, it's all coming together. This is why the producer didn't want you to work on the computer and he only wanted you to work on the analog machine because he knew that if he worked on the analog machine, not only would you produce worse music because it was more time consuming, but also in the follow up meeting, it would be literally impossible for you to

do your job without first making all those high class millionaires wait around for like one or two hours for you to plug everything back in and twist all the knobs to the right locations. Ope. Ope. That producer was basically like a grandmaster chess player playing chess against someone who thought that he was playing checkers. Our next reddit post is from the hot shop pilot.

I work at Best Buy. We've been selling a lot of fire sticks recently. I sell over 10 a day because the local cable company has been discontinued and the company is now streaming through Fire Sticker Apple TV. Anyway, when you try to sell Apple products, headphones, Samsung, streaming services, etc., you're inundated with prompts to enter the customer's email addresses so they can get spanned with free trials. Nobody wants them, so we just close the prompt to keep bringing up items.

Well, I found out yesterday that Best Buy has changed their system to not allow you to ring up a fire stick without putting in an email address to get spanned with Apple TV free trial emails. If you click out of the prompt, their system will remove the fire stick from the order and not let the customers purchase it. Nobody wants these free trials, but I have to put in an email, so it's time to send these emails to corporate so that they can get spammed. I've been looking up corporate emails to send them spam free trial emails that customers

don't want. I typed them into the register and tell the customer. I have to input an email so I picked a best buy corporate email so they can see what it's like to get these spam emails that they try to force on you. OP, I'm going to tell you this trick and everyone else out there because this is one of the most invaluable like life hack websites that have ever come across. 10 Minute Mail. It's a website that will just create an email account that only lasts for 10 minutes and then it deletes the account. So if there's some website that you just want to sign up for one thing, you go to 10 Minute Mail, sign up, it'll send the confirmation email,

click this link to sign up to the account and then you click it and then that's it. You do the thing you're going to do on the site and then the email gets deleted and then you can just forget about it because you're never going to get spammed. 10 Minute Mail.com. It's an amazing website. Our next Reddit post is from Stewart's obscenity. A few years ago, my wife and I purchased our first home in upstate New York. We weren't moving far, just two towns over, about a 20 minute drive.

Around this same time, our local internet provider was running a promotion for new customers, offering 5 times the internet speed for roughly half of what we were currently paying. A couple of weeks before our move, I called the internet company to let them know we were moving and to transfer our service. I asked if it would be possible to receive the new customer discount with the move, and I was told in no uncertain terms that this was not possible. I insisted that I wanted the new customer rate and even threatened to cancel,

but they called my bluff, knowing they were a monopoly, and that I had no other legitimate option. Thinking quickly, I asked if it would be possible to get the new customer rate by simply removing my name from the account and adding my wife's name instead. The phone rep balked at the suggestion and even quoted from a paragraph from my customer agreement outlining how such a transfer from one family member to another isn't allowed. Then it

occurred to me. I asked the phone rep if he knew my wife's name or the address to which we were moving. After a brief pause he answered, uh, no? I then happily let him know that I'd like to cancel my service effective at the end of this month. He was adamant that any attempt to circumvent their transfer policy was a violation of my contract, but eventually he agreed to the cancellation. Two weeks later, after our move and a half an hour phone call, my wife signed up for our new, cheap, fast

internet. They jacked up our rates a couple of years later, but it felt so good to get just one over on the big bully. And down in the comments, we have this story from Vexanix. I luckily have a secret tactic that works every time. It's called my mom. Me and my sister have her talk to our internet service provider whenever our rates get too high.

She's old and she has no clue what she's talking about. I give her a printout of the other local company's new customer prices and speeds and tell her that mega bits and mega bites are different but both are abbreviated in B. And then she just goes in circles with the phone rep asking them to explain every little detail and anytime they mention speed she asks if it's mega bits or megabytes. And after about 2-3 hours our bill gets dropped down lower than the new customer rate for another year. I think it's because they'll get in more trouble for a 3 hour call than they will for the reduced price. Our next reddit post is from PDB. When I was 15, I started working for this particular clown who owned a fast food restaurant.

When I first started working, the manager assumed that I was 16 and I was given a red polo shirt to wear during my shifts. There was a hierarchy to the shirts at this restaurant. White was for anyone 15 and younger, you got a red shirt once you were 16 or over. Black shirts were for crew trainers, and the full button-down shirts were for managers. All the shirts were made of a decent fabric, except for the white shirt which was very thin, and practically see-through. About a month after I started working there, the manager called me into her office and asked why I lied

to her about my age. I told her that I had never once told her that I was 16, so I never really lied about it. She told me to hand in my red shirt and exchange it for a white one, which I did. I wore the white shirt for about a week, and that's when I noticed that after the first wash, the fabric became even thinner, and the shirt was practically see-through. As a heavy-set individual, if I'm not wearing an undershirt, you would have seen all my hairy, manly glory underneath this sorry excuse for a shirt. I asked since I had already been wearing a red shirt for a month, and the shirt colors really don't mean much. Could I get my old red shirt back? I was told it was company

policy to follow the shirt rules, and I was denied my old red shirt. Cue the malicious compliance. There was a rule stating that I had to wear my see-through company issued shirt for all my shifts, but there was no rule stating what I had to wear underneath that shirt. My dad had recently returned from Mexico and he brought me the most touristy shirt from his trip. There were four panels on this shirt. The first panel had a worm and a shot glass and said one tequila.

The second panel had a second shot, the same worm who was much drunker and it said two tequila. The third panel, the same worm, third shot, very drunk, three tequila. And as I'm sure you've deduced, the fourth panel shows the worm passed out and it says, Floor, I decided this was the perfect undershirt for a 15-year-old register worker to wear underneath his white shirt. I wore it for one shift before the manager came up to me. She told me how she didn't appreciate the fact that I wore such a vulgar shirt underneath my working uniform. I politely told her that nobody would know what I was wearing underneath my company issued work shirt if they weren't see-through. When I went to clock out that day, I had a brand new unused red polo shirt waiting just for me. I was told to wear the red shirt from that point forward and to turn in my white shirts.

OP, this is great MC, it is, but what I'm confused about is how did it take you a 15-year-old boy to point out how stupid this policy was? Because I would have to imagine that the first time they hired a 15 year old girl and she came in and you could see her bra through her shirt. Hopefully she's wearing her bra because if she wasn't it'd be even worse. Like the second that happened, I feel like the policy would come to a screeching halt. So how did that not happen first?

I mean, if I owned a business and I had a 15 year old female employee and she came in in a see through shirt, I would, I was straight up panic and I would send her home immediately. You know, actually thinking about it, OP, I suppose that instead of wearing that tequila shirt, you could have come to work in a bra and you would have created the exact same result. 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.