rSlash - r/Maliciouscompliance I Got Paid $250k/year to Do NOTHING

Episode Date: June 23, 2024

0:00 Intro 0:10 Paid for nothing 5:32 Comment story 6:48 Zero overtime 13:19 The fence 16:02 Comment story 18:22 Due date Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to r slash malicious compliance, where someone gets paid $250,000 a year to literally do nothing. Our next reddit post is from without denisnedry. I have a very good friend who maliciously complied her way into getting paid for essentially doing nothing for 19 months. It was a government job, no surprise there. She and her colleague worked in a state office that kept track of plague cases among prairie dog towns. What? They were super busy trapping and testing all summer, but once winter comes, prairie dogs hibernate so they ran out of work. They told their boss via email that there was no more for them to do that season and their boss responded by telling them to stand by for reassignment.

So they did. For months. They didn't want to be accused of theft by just clocking in and leaving, so at the very beginning they organized some storage spaces. Very slowly. They cleaned their office several times and organized paperwork. That sort of thing. Initially they slept in turns so someone was always available if anyone came to check

on them, but when it became obvious that no one was coming, they stopped bothering. By summer the following year, when the Prairie Dogs came out of hibernation and she thought that her work might resume, the whole office, all employees in every department received an email from someone high up informing everyone that this particular department had been cut. I don't know if the project got unfunded or if they got all the necessary data from the previous summer or if that particular pet project of some politician was forgotten about, but somewhere along the line, the state fishing game acts the project for whatever reason.

Nothing was mentioned in the email about my friend's job status, so her and her coworker continue to go in and do nothing. She would tell me about making a giant binder rubber band chain and roping two office chairs together facing each other to turn them into sleep seats, making a nest under her desk, and moving the large copying machine out of the cabinet and sleeping inside of it. They made sure the security people saw them periodically throughout the day and they were on camera so anyone above them paying attention would have noticed but no one ever took the time.

They dodged the folks in the other departments for fear that they would get told on and they just minded their own business. They rarely interacted with other employees anyways. Eventually, my friend ran into her boss at a show and she asked my friend where she had found new work. My friend didn't lie and said that she still worked there. Where? The boss asked. Where you left us? My friend said, you should have seen her face when the lady put the pieces together and realized what was going on. The jig was up, and she and her colleague were let go that following morning via email before they went inside.

Because the- Hahaha. Because they had technically worked there for so long, I think two years was the threshold. They both got a little severance package. In case you were wondering, they did get to keep their paychecks since 1. They had proof they informed their boss they had no work and she clearly saw the email and responded. 2.

They still showed up to work. 3. They did exactly what they were told. And 4. It wasn't their job to make sure they actually had work to do. They both qualified for unemployment to boot. Neither of them used the unemployment since they both had been feeling like the gravy train was sure to derail any days, so they had new jobs lined up. Alright, OP adds an edit of all the

things that her friend did while she was working. And I didn't think I was going to include it because it sounded boring, but these are actually pretty funny. One autumn, my friend and her colleague decorated the shared nap hiding spot, a walk-in storage closet with miniature Halloween decorations, and then they reenacted scenes from Hocus Pocus. My friend spent a lot of the time editing Wikipedia for grammar. My friend learned to knit. Then she learned that she doesn't like knitting.

Her colleague downloaded plans from the internet on how to make a personal flying device, think Jetpack, and tried to make it with office supplies at 1-16th scale. They knew that it wouldn't fly, they just wanted to see if they could build what it would look like. During Christmas, they wrote all new jingles about how bored they were. There were 14 completed songs in total and they recorded them on a little mini tape recorder that she still has. Her colleague went to night school and did his homework during the day. By the time that they were finally let go, he was just shy of becoming a paralegal. He did

finish school and went pretty much straight into a job and all these years later he's now a real estate attorney. Good for him! My friend claims that she and her colleague invented Uber and Lyft. That is, they worked out a solid plan for a non-taxi ride service that would work based on ordering a car via the internet. This was before smartphones. My friend wrote to a bunch of serial killers in prison and told them how disappointed she was in them.

She never received a reply. And in case you're curious, my friend got a glowing reference from the state job and went on to work at our city zoo and then got her certification in wildlife rehab. She now works as a public outreach coordinator for a big cat sanctuary. No, she does not miss her old job of either juggling plague-ridden prairie dogs or being bored out of her mind. Down in the comments, we have this story from Night Manager. A guy I worked for sold his company and joined Big Blue, a consultant firm in his company's

field. He was assigned a mentor to help him transition from being an individual entrepreneur into a member of a large organization. He was to journal his feelings every day and then join a weekly group session to discuss. After a couple of weeks, the mentor stopped attending. They all continued to meet, and a couple of weeks later, they reached out to the person in HR who hired them all. That HR representative had left the company. They reached out again to a higher level manager and they were told to continue with their

current assignments and someone would contact them. So my friend continued to stay at home and just write in his journal. It took 18 months before the company realized what was happening and laid off the entire group. This guy was making $250,000 a year for keeping a journal about how messed up this large organization was, and how an individual owner would never allow this to happen. Man, I'd love to see that guy's journal entry. Day 416! I'm still bored, but I'm still getting paid, so I don't care.

Our next Reddit post is from DT2. I work as a manager in a call center. I'm nowhere near the phones and generally don't interact with customers. Rather, I'm the knowledge repository for my staff and I handle communication between our team and the client company that we provide support for. We're a technical support team, not a sales support team. And the devices that we support are very complex consumer electronics. Most of the time, the people that we talk to are professional installation experts and

we rarely speak to customers first-hand. In short, my job is to know our policies like the back of my hand and to know the products that we support better than anyone except for the people who made them of course. A secondary part of my job is to coordinate our online chat team, which is generally pretty hands-off other than right as the shift ends when I generally jump in to monitor any active chats and make sure they close up quickly. This means that I can log anywhere between 0 minutes of overtime to an hour of overtime each day, but typically it's just like 15-20 minutes of overtime. My direct boss knows all about this, and he's generally all for it.

One day, however, the guy who was in charge of all the support teams sent out a memo that management should never be getting overtime. I brought this up with my boss because this would seriously impact my team, who arranged a meeting with the big boss. My big boss proceeds to tell me that no, I cannot rack up any overtime hours. Fine, I'll get out at a reasonable time every day. I have zero issues with this. So the next Monday, I log out right when my shift ends.

Turns out, three of my guys had to stay there for an extra hour due to last-minute chats. On Tuesday there was nearly the same story. This continues all throughout the week. We're bleeding overtime hours for support staff with most of my team getting nearly one hour of overtime per day. This goes on for a full pay period when the big boss comes back and tells us that we were told to reduce overtime hours and that somehow we racked up even more overtime hours than before. My boss backed me up and told the big boss that, no, actually we were told to reduce management overtime hours and that I had indeed not racked up any overtime.

The big boss asked why overtime hours had increased and I mentioned that I stayed behind that extra time to make sure that my team had support that they needed to get out as early as possible. My big boss goes, well, that makes sense. Keep doing that, but add any overtime to your Friday lunch so that you don't rack up overtime. I explained that I can do this, but I'll still probably get a bit of overtime on Fridays since the end of the shift is obviously after lunch. Again, this is cool. Taking long lunches is nice. This works well for a few weeks, and I'm making sure that I zero out on my overtime. But I knew that it was only a matter of time before

they regretted doing any of this. We were approaching the busy season and getting more and more long chats and phone calls. I made sure to get the big boss to email me clear instructions about what I was supposed to do. Sure enough, a week later on Monday, I'm there for a whopping hour and thirty minutes trying to get one guy out the door. Tuesday I'm there for an hour extra. And Wednesday, an hour fifteen. And to top it all off, I'm there for a full two hours on Thursday. It was an awful week for last minute chats.

I tally up all my overtime for my lunch. Five hours and forty-five minutes. Plus, an hour for my normal lunch. Normally, I work four hours, take a 1 hour lunch and then another 4 hours. So that Friday, I came in and explained the situation to my boss that I had to only work for 2 hours and 15 minutes the whole day. Because I was doing exactly what the big boss told me to do. So an hour into my shift, I go on my 6 hour and 45 minute lunch. While I'm enjoying the most of my day siesta, the entire business is burning down. Chat is so busy that we have people waiting 30 minutes to

speak with someone. Calls are so busy that we have 15 calls waiting. On calls like this, I normally jump in to deal with the backlog because I'm very good at my job. Now, at this point, I couldn't save this shift by myself. No way. So, my lunch ends. I get back in, settle down at my desk, right as the rush is clearing up. The damage was already done. The rest of the day was fairly manageable.

Right at the end of my shift, I check the chat and notice that there's no queue, so I immediately log out and thank my team for working so hard that day. Then Monday comes. I get to meet with the client that we support, Big Boss and my boss for our weekly meeting. The client is furious that on Friday, one of our best assets was on a super long lunch break and the Big Boss puts me on the spot and asks why that was. My response was rehearsed.

According to company policy established and agreed upon by you, I am not to accrue any overtime hours. Any hours worked over 8 hours within the work week must be made up during my lunch break on Fridays. My big boss tried to deny it, but that's when my boss stepped in and was like, wait, I got an email about this. He pulls up the email that Big Boss sent and shared it on the screen in the meeting. The client is pissed. And the corporate representative begins ripping Big Boss a new butthole over the phone.

After ripping into the Big Boss, the corporate rep speaks to me, telling me to accrue as many hours as needed to make sure that my job is done, and that if my company wants to retain this line of business, Big Boss is not to interfere with my generally very successful management without consulting them and myself. Since then, every single time the big boss has tried to mess with my work, the corporate representative has had my back. They are extremely happy with my work and they know that I do a great job. Heck, they even pushed through a large raise for me when my big boss was blocking my boss's attempt to get me more money.

Man, this is the universal truth in corporate America. Management is expendable, but the workers are invaluable. And yet, management seems to think that the opposite is true, that management is all important and the little peasants are expendable. Our next reddit post is from Kid Enmore. About 5 or 6 years ago, I built a fence in my backyard. I talked to my neighbors and we decided on a good place to build the fence. We knew approximately where the property line was based on some survey pins, but we were both too cheap to pay for an actual surveyor.

So we shook hands and I built the fence. It was a great deal for my neighbor. I paid for everything and built the fence, and all they had to do was give me a thumbs up when it was done. Then, a year later, they sold their house. That meant that I got a new neighbor. More specifically, I got Anne. Anne was from the big city.

Anne was a realtor. Anne had flipped 8 houses in 12 years. Anne loved this new house and planned on staying for a long time. And Anne had a dog. Her dog, Razzy, was a German Shepherd mix that spent most of the days outside while Anne went to work. Razzie was aggressive towards kids, animals, insects, and any plant that waved in the breeze. Razzie also, according to Anne, loved to chew on furniture.

That's why Razzie stayed outside so much. About 6 months after Anne moved in, I saw a surveyor walking around in my neighborhood and he was paying special attention to my backyard. The next day, Ann showed up at my front door with a stack of papers and asked me if I was going to pay her for the nine inches that my fence was encroaching onto her property. I explained the handshake deal with my last neighbors, but she was having no part of it. She wanted the fence moved or she wanted money. No discussions. She had spoken to her lawyer friend and she was

perfectly happy to take me to court over the fence. She told me, I don't know how you guys do it out here in the sticks, but where I come from, we follow the rules. So I got rid of the fence. About a week later, Anne shows up at my front door again. She wants to know when I'm going to be building a new fence. Turns out, without my portion of the fence closing in her backyard, she hasn't been able to let Razzy out unattended for fear that he'll run away or attack something or get hit by a car. She also told me that she can't keep him in the house all day while she's at work anymore. Her furniture and carpet are all but ruined. I told her, well, Anne, I'm not going to be rebuilding the fence. I don't want any legal trouble and the best way to stay out of trouble

is to not build near your property. The look on her face was priceless. She made some half-hearted attempts to put up some bamboo fencing, but Razzie tore through that stuff like wet newspaper. Eventually, I sold my place and moved away. I took the old fence panels with me, and I still look at them every day when I let my dog out in the morning. Down in the comments, we have this story from Haya Bankranger. When we were looking for a house, we got accosted by an old lady who was the neighbor of a house that we were looking at.

She said, they put up this fence and it's too close to my house. If you buy it, I'll make you take the fence down. She would not shut up about the fence, and we literally couldn't have cared less. But based on her personality, we reasoned that if we did buy this place, we would have to deal with a nightmare neighbor that we'd be feuding with until she had a heart attack and died. So our realtor pulled the disclosures, and we're the kind of nosy people who know how to use legal searches, and the story that we assembled from reading them was this. The old lady was annoyed about a fruit tree in the yard of the house that is now for sale.

She didn't like that it dropped rotten fruit in her yard. There was a short chain link fence separating the yards and the tree was right on the edge next to the fence. She hacked off all the limbs on her side of the fence. This killed the tree. Uh oh! Uh oh! The owners of the house sued the old lady to replace the tree.

As part of her defense in the lawsuit, the old lady said that it was her tree anyway because the fence was hers and it was on her side of the property line. She said that since the tree was so close to the fence, it had to be hers. The owners of the house for sale hired a surveyor. Now previously, the neighbors understanding was that they had basically no yard on that side of their house. That the house was literally built on their property line. And they believed that because that's what the old lady probably told them when they moved in, but they never bothered to check. The

surveyor informed them that it was actually a zero lot on her side. So all the land that they thought belonged to her actually belonged to them. And that included the land that she was using for her garden. So they won the lawsuit, the old lady paid the state-assessed value of the tree, and then boom, in their permits for the property, they paid for a nice fence that cost almost exactly what they got for the tree. The fence was placed the minimum distance allowed by law from her house, which was 18 inches. So this time, the old lady was ready to fight that fight all over again just to get her 22 inches of yard back.

Our next reddit post is from PetitPeachPepp. I'm a 31 year old woman, and at the time of this story, I was pregnant and one week away from my due date and working full time in a school administration position. At that time, I did have the capability to work from home if needed. When I accepted the position, prior to my pregnancy, I was told by my boss, Ronnie, that it was very flexible as long as I got my hours in. I very rarely worked from home, and typically only did so for an hour or two in the morning if, for example, I had a doctor's appointment.

However, after I accepted the position, Ronnie told me that I had to try to limit my work from home days to two days a month, which is fine. But so close to my due date, I was experiencing physical hardships that made working on site more and more difficult, such as dizzy spells, a pulled tendon in my foot, and severe back pain. I was also scared of potentially going into labor while at work with it being so far away from the hospital that my OBGYN delivers at. To top it all off, my co-worker started asking more invasive questions about my pregnancy

that made me uncomfortable. All in all, it was not a fun time. I explained all of this in an email to Ronnie and asked for her permission to almost exclusively work from home until I went into labor. I said that I thought this was a reasonable accommodation and I work really well from home. Ronnie responded a couple of days later, denying my request to work from home at all and said that I needed to be there since we would be starting some of our busiest work in a couple

of months. But during those months I'd be gone on maternity leave anyways, so I'm not even sure why she brought that up. But she said that I could talk to HR about leaving options if I was truly having trouble working. Cue malicious compliance! I immediately went to HR and leaving options if I was truly having trouble working. Cue malicious compliance. I immediately went to HR and did just that. We talked about options and I found out that I could start my leave the very next day and

still be paid state mandatory leave pay for the extra time. I informed Ronnie that I would be starting my maternity leave the very next day because I had to take care of myself. She said, I understand you need to do what's best for you, but you need to understand that I need to do what's best for the team. So after that, my team had a rough time because in my absence, most of my team wasn't qualified to do the work that I normally do, and people had to keep wasting time trying to learn my tasks. I left detailed procedure notes and workflow lists, but I later found out that Ronnie had to pick up all the extra work

and a lot of it never got done because she didn't have time. But it was the best for the team, right boss? That was r 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.