rSlash - r/Maliciouscompliance I Got My Stupid Boss Fired by Obeying Him

Episode Date: April 25, 2023

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I am based out of a city that's more than a two-hour train ride from our head office. At the time, I was working in a team that had members working remotely all across the state, looking after policy, process, and quality assurance. Our old manager had gotten himself promoted for being genuinely brilliant in his role. So our new manager, Steve, was hired in from the glorious world of banking, and he was here to whip you lazy public servants into shape. A few days after he started the job, he told all of us in a teleconference that he wanted all of us to be in the head office by 8am tomorrow morning for an all day in-person team meeting.

He wanted to see us in meat space to size us up, understand what we were doing, and see where we weren't keeping up with the private sector. As I mentioned, due to the nature of the work that we were doing, we were spread all across the state. So, in-person, whole team meetings were rare, and if they occurred at all, they were booked weeks in advance. We were all adept at video conferencing long before COVID. Some of us tried to tell our new manager that almost none of us were in the same city

as him, and to be there on such short notice would mean travel expenses, meal allowances, overtime, etc. He didn't seem to care, and told us in no uncertain terms to just be at the head office tomorrow at 8 a.m. before abruptly hanging up. Now I should explain something. I'm one of a handful of union delegates in our departments. I know our agreement back to front, specifically the sections dealing with travel, allowances, and overtime. So, I engage malicious compliance mode. months, specifically the sections dealing with travel, allowances, and over time.

So I engage malicious compliance mode. If Steve wanted us there, fine, but it'll cost him. So I quickly emailed my team about what Steve had said, requiring us to be in the head office at 8 a.m. and what to do. Because we'd have to travel outside of our normal work hours, our workday clock started ticking the moment we left our homes and only stopped once we got back home. Some of our team traveled overnight. They were entitled to overtime to travel, a dinner allowance and accommodation for the night, and all the same upon returning. Since I was only traveling the next morning, I was entitled to a breakfast allowance, lunch allowance, and if I got home after 9pm, a dinner allowance too. So I left my house at 5am to catch the only train that would get me there in time.

The train was running slightly behind, but I made it in time. So my first 3 hours of my work day were down, and I'd done zero work. After a brief period of introducing ourselves to Steve, he proceeded to spend the next four hours telling us all the things he did at the bank. How he made so much money for them, where they'd sent him as a holiday bonus, how we're all stuck in the past in public service and how the work he'd seen was an up to private sector standards. He had all the cock sureness of a finance bro who had always failed upwards because others had picked up his slack.

By 3pm, the entire team was into overtime pay territory, and Steve was still just warming up. Another 3 hours go by, with Steve verbally patting himself on his back, deeply in love hearing his own voice. But all I can hear is, cha-ching, cha-ching! Steve decided that 5pm was a good time to finish up. He stopped mid-synons, looked at his watch, and unceremoniously said, that's all for today. Go home now, and walk out.

After me and a few of my co-workers gave awkward shrugs to each other, we all packed up and started to make our separate ways home after doing no work all day. I got to the train station pretty quickly, and I saw a train was leaving soon that would get me home around 8pm. Or, I could catch the other train and get home closer to 9.30pm. You know what? No matter how fast I ran, I just couldn't catch the first train. Shoot! I guess I'll just have to catch that second train, which means I'll be on the

clock for another hour and a half, plus have my dinner paid for. Such rotten luck! I submitted my claims the next day. Four and a half hours at double pay rate. My train tickets, my taxi fares, two and from the train station, my breakfast, lunch, and dinner. For just me alone, it was close to $500. The rest of my team followed sued and insured they claimed everything too. Steve tried to deny our claims, but he quickly learned that, unlike in the world of banking, most public servants are union. And we'd raise living hell if he denied our award-guaranteed allowances. His all-day Steve Fess symposium blew a good $6,000 whole in his budget.

Needless to say, while Steve was our manager, he never required us to attend an in-person meeting again. Video conferencing was just fine. He only lasted six months before, quote, leaving for new opportunities. He just went back to his old job at the bank. I guess he was the one who couldn't keep up. Also, down in the comments, we had this story from FatBloak. Some banks are useless at saving money. Back in the 90s, I worked at a subsidiary of a very large U.S. multinational bank.

We were losing like $2 million a month. Every second meeting, our VP would fly from the UK to New York on Concord for a meeting and fly back via Concord on the same day. Each flight was $4,000. The meeting was to explain to the big bank parent why we were losing so much of their money. I once suggested to the VP that he could just use the newly installed video conferencing suite and he looked at me like I'd shit on his shoes. Metrolinks and crosslinks are reminding everyone to

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Our next reddit post is from Signsaving. This happened about a decade ago, but still within the realm of the internet. I was a technical writer for the government, and I had been slowly transferring our old employee handbook into a modern and actually useful document. My boss wanted the whole thing printed out on her desk the next morning. This was the Monday of Thanksgiving weekend. I printed out the 200 or so pages and just had the links to various websites in bold. This took about an hour, and I left it on her desk before going home that night. She calls me into her office on Tuesday

afternoon, and proceeds to yell at me at how stupid I am. Do you honestly think that people can just go to a website when it's on paper? No! Apparently, I need to print everything out. I calmly tell her that all these links go to websites that are pretty dense, so all together it'd be about 10,000 pages. She says that she doesn't care, and it needs to be on her desk first thing Monday morning. Mind you, this is now Tuesday, and we usually had some of Wednesday off before Thanksgiving. I wasn't really planning on working on Thursday, which was Thanksgiving, or Friday, because I had applied for leave

and I was looking forward to a nice, relaxing, long weekend. But, okay, I asked for and got the request to have everything pertaining to the employee handbook online in a printed format. I also had real work and real deadlines. Yeah, she was my boss, but I was also responsible for reports to Congress which had real-world deadlines. On some of these, if I missed a publication date, our agency had to pay $100,000 a day

in delay fees, or you would piss off a congressperson which is never a good idea. By this point, I was really getting sick and tired of my boss's request, which took me away from my actual work. So, I was printing and printing all the rest of Tuesday afternoon, and then Wednesday. I had to go to the website, print, click on the next link, print, etc. On Wednesday, we got a congressional letter. Had we not gotten that, I might not have done what I did. I got overtime approved pronto to take care of this request, so I did have to work on Thanksgiving. As I was doing that, I kept on printing and printing. I used up every sheet of paper in our 14 story building. I kept researching the response for the congressional, printing, going to the next floor to carefully

get that packet of paper to tuck under the appropriate page, etc. I had piles of printed off papers in about 20 different conference rooms. I could have done the congressional report in about 8 hours, but it wasn't until Monday. And all of this printing took a good 24 hours of work. So I put in for 32 hours of overtime over the course of Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, and got it done. By the end, I had two stacks of paper,

each about six feet high. I was way under my estimate of 10,000 pages, and it was closer to like 30,000. Keep in mind, I had at least five printers going non-stop for four days straight. I stacked these two massive piles of paper in my boss's office. I got rid enough with a disciplinary hearing and everything. The charge was malicious compliance. I kept my job only because I did have her request in an email.

Down in the comments, someone asks, did nothing happen to her for her? I don't care stupid request, and O.P replies, she got promoted. Uhhhh, of course she did. Of course she did. Naturally. This woman's idiocy resulted in, I don't know, hundreds, thousands of dollars in wasted paper, wasted ink, wasted over time, just because she didn't want to click around on a website and the company's response is, I like your initiative, lady, let's give you a promotion. Oh my God.

Sometimes when I read these stories, it really does feel like the number one thing you have to do to get promoted as management is to be incompetent and petty. Our next reddit post is from Seeing as my hobby. For context, I'm a woman. Also, my sister and I are both adults now and safely moved out. As long as I could remember, my sister, who's two years younger than me, would come up and hit me for no reason and often start fights with me.

My parents started telling me that I would just have to hit her back because I'm stronger, so she would stop when she realized that I would hurt her worse. Fast forward to me being 16 and my sister was 14. We're sitting on the loveseed in the living room with my stepdad across from us, a sleep on the couch at 3pm. My sister hits me because I won't get up and get her a drink. I hit her back. She screams because usually I don't hit her back. My stepdad wakes up and starts yelling at her for being loud and demands to know what happened. She said that I hit her.

He turns his anger to me and yells, If you want to mess around, you can write five pages front and back. I will not bite people. If it's not done before dinner, I'm going to take your phone and books. I clarified to him that I hit her, not bit her. But he got even more angry and screamed. If you think you're so smart, then write ten pages front and back. Then he went back to sleep on the couch. So I wrote five pages front and back.

On the first page, I simply rode. I will not bite people unfairly. On the second page, I will not bite people without consent. On the third page, I will not bite people without asking first. On the fourth page, I will not bite people because they're not food. I finished five pages before dinner and he read over them. He went red in the face. I thought I told you 10 pages he raged. You said 10 pages if I think I'm so smart, which I don't. I innocently replied. That's not what I told you to write. Yes, it is.

You said to write that I'll not bite people, and that's exactly what I did. At this point, my mom got home and overheard. She came to investigate, flipped through the pages and laughed. As my mom asked them questions, it made him even angrier and she ended up taking my side. We were both still chuckling about it as we started making dinner. Also, down in the comments, we had this story from BeGameYguy. So I have a younger sibling and they would cry randomly to get me in trouble by saying that I hit them. My dad wouldn't listen to

me and would just ground me for a day or more depending on his mood. So one day my sibling cries, my dad comes in and says, you're grounded for two days. So I slapped the shit out of my sibling. When my sibling asked me why I did that, I told him if I was getting punished for something, I might as well actually do it. My sibling never really cried to get me in trouble after that. Me and my sibling get along just fine now, but the younger days were vicious. Our next red-appost is from Lexipro. Nurses, for the most part, use a rolling computer that we call a wow, a workstation on wheels.

Typically, shifts are from 7am to 7pm, or 7pm to 7am. I, on the other hand, worked from 1pm to 1am. Every day, when I would come in, there would be a wow pushed off to the side that didn't work for some reason that was saved for me, but no one had called IT for. RIT was great. They would always come down within half an hour unless they had a hospital-wide calamity, but they don't magically know that a wow is down unless you call them first. So every day I would come in, drag the wow to the nurse's station, and call IT.

Typically this would delay me 20-30 minutes because I couldn't see any charts. My terrible boss threatened to write me up for taking too long. I pointed out that I was on the phone with IT. She did nothing except complain that it took me too long to start working. Well, you got it, Karen. I'd come in, push the offending wow into her office, and leave it. I'd be on the floor in time to start my shift. I wouldn't take a patient's assignment because I didn't have a wow. Instead, I would just help everyone else with their tasks. Starting IVs, wound care, splints, etc. Within a week, we had three new wows that we were told that we didn't have a budget for. And a note about how the entire

shift would be written up if she found a broken one without an IT ticket. She was let go for many reasons after a year on the job. We did not miss her. That was our 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. single day.