rSlash - r/Maliciouscompliance I Let My Stupid Boss Lose $2,000,000

Episode Date: October 30, 2022

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Welcome to our Slash Militius Compliance, where a stupid boss manages to lose $2 million. Our next reddit post is from punk Linux. Many years ago, I worked for a company that hired an incredibly obtuse financial department who took over when they were first organized. It used to be a loose collection of managers, but the year after I started, they went for a more organized and separate structure. To be fair, this story is more about my boss than myself. We had a travel team, a group of volunteers from sales and IT who would go in mass with

equipment and texts to do setup, displays, and network at trade shows. We had a booth, some sales guys would be there, and networking would commence. There was always a set of volunteers from the IT department because some of the shows would be in big cities and you'd get to attend vendor events, parties, and hang out with the sales guys who were mostly gay alcoholics for some reason and super fun. There was kind of a seniority in who got to volunteer, but nobody really complained and we rotated who got to go. You got to attend last year so it's my turn this year.

Okay, that's fair. The travel team lead was also a volunteer position, but typically it was someone high up, like a manager. Their job was to orchestrate equipment, rentals, expenses, travel plans, convention center fees, and shipping. They also ended up getting a lot of free stuff too from the sales team and from our partners, which they passed along to the travel team. All this stuff was basically a perk of the job for everyone involved. But when the new director of finance started, she put in some new and strict policies.

One, the travel team is not allowed to get reimbursed without explicit approval, and nobody was approved post event. 2. The travel team does not get a credit card of their own, or even a company card. 3. Travel teams get gift cards for a set amount, like $150, which are to be used for all expenses. However, places like airlines, rental agencies, hotel rooms, gas pumps, and toll booths don't accept gift cards. For no matter how early you asked for it, finance waited until the very last minute to get anything approved, which incurred a lot of unnecessary costs like expedited shipping, same-day rental penalties, or inflated airfares.

5. If they forgot, it was your fault or your manager's fault for not reminding them enough. So if you reminded them 4 times to buy the team airline tickets and it wasn't done, you should have done it 5 times, so it's your fault. This was all in response to the director of finances claim that it would reduce fraud, an issue that, as far as anyone could tell, had never happened. The director had this de-lorous ombridge approach that somebody somewhere might get away with something. She was a patronizing moron with a smug grin and this annoying hidwaggle when she downsprains something to you.

So we'll call her de-lorous. Before de-lorous, the travel team would just submit receipts and get reimbursed. Dolores put an end to that, specifically saying that the previous lead of the travel team was just gonna spend all the money on stakes and wine. He, understandably, told her to go F herself and quit the company when the dust settled. In his wake, Dolores used his free stuff from vendors as a shiny example of stolen opulence and shwag hoarding that she had put an end to. Oh, behold the mighty honest throne of airborne express stress squishies and free u-line catalogs.

That left my manager to take over the duties, and he had never done travel teamwork before, so he wasn't sure how it all worked and he didn't push back on Dolores at first until he was forced to travel with the team. He was surprised that he didn't have an expense account or corporate card, and when he asked for one, he got a gift card. When he tried to use it, it was rejected pretty much everywhere that he needed it for, except for various restaurants. He paid for everything else on his personal American Express card,

including stuff for the rest of the team. And he was rejected for reimbursements because he didn't ask for it beforehand. He was on the hook for $40,000 in various purchases from two separate week-long trips. Of course, he complained to top management. Dolores threatened to quit if she wasn't allowed to do her job and the top managers never had to deal with her before and We're kind of wishy-washy about being the bad guy here like well

She says that she let you use gift cards so when my manager said the gift cards were rejected Dolores said He's not trying hard enough. He's afraid of confrontation. He needs to be a big bully and fight back. But in the end, top management reimbursed him under pressure from the legal departments. After that, Dolores settled on having certain things prepaid for, like hotel, travel, truck rentals, and shipping. But they waited so long to do them that often they tried to get hotel rooms or truck rentals and shipping. But they waited so long to do them that often they tried to get hotel rooms or truck rentals the same day as a popular event so everything was sold out. Or they would book the

wrong hotel. Washington DC is not the same thing as Washington State. Or they waited so long to ship something that it would cost 250 bucks to send something overnight that would have cost 40 bucks to send it a week prior. They also didn't understand how much anything actually costs, and how we saved money by doing things ourselves. And in some cases, finance did everything wrong, so the team would arrive at the right hotel and find out that finance didn't submit an authorized approval for a card. And nobody could reach them, so again, people had to use their personal cards. Again, Dolores said.

They can't just accept what the hotel desk convention center union are dumb minimum wage bunny at the Tollbooth tells them they have to fight back. We can't spoon feed and cuddle these guys because they're too scared of conflict. Have you ever had to fight with a Jersey Turnpike toll booth collector? Yeah, neither had she. After two of these disasters, my manager said, just stop. Stop volunteering for these events. I will not approve time off for it. He declined being travel lead for future trips because he just couldn't afford it. This was an unpopular move at best, but he told us, just wait, let her do things her way. He was a master at malicious compliance, and with no resistance, Dolores went into fifth

gear with a smug grin. Now we're going to act like a real company. This leads to the next issue. Some of these trips were in major cities like Chicago, New York City, Washington DC, etc. Dolores said, people are just going to use these events to get the company to pay for a drinking vacation. Management was like, uh, yeah?

We wouldn't get volunteers otherwise. Well, Dolores did not like that idea. So she decided that she would hold a staff lottery and you could enter your name and she'd have a drawing on who got to go to be fair to everyone. This fairness, by the way, seems awfully slanted towards her own staff, which we'll get to shortly.

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sure to point out, but she didn't grasp the entire reason that we went to increase our business. We had to send IT folk for setup or sales folk for schmoozing, but that concept never made it past our ears into our brain. Well, since those IT and tech folk who already couldn't go didn't want to pay for it, we didn't volunteer. So, the travel team ended up being composed of other staff members who had no idea how to work, act, or deal with trade shows, which was a horrific expense disaster. Imagine the administrative assistant for marketing on the 5th floor winning a ticket, only to find out that she had to pay for everything. Plus, Dolores always

sent one of her own to keep an eye on everyone, but none of them knew how trade shows worked either. They only knew how to cow-tow to Dolores and her control issues. What's a union fee? What is Corkage? No, we didn't approve some union to give us power. You plug your booth stuff into an outlet or something. They won't let you. Who's they?

Well then, stop using TV screens in the booth. You don't need them. We don't sell TVs anyways. Did you know that if you have a conflict with an event center union and you decline their health, they charge you anyway at max rates? Yeah, Dolores and her team didn't know that either. And let me tell you, paying those guys a few thousand bucks ahead of time is a lot cheaper than just letting them charge you fines afterwards.

Oh, she tried to fight back because she's not afraid of a little conflict, but she lost. Heavily. Ironically, despite deluristating otherwise at great length, all the non-IT and non-salespeople who went actually thought that it was a company paid vacation, which kind of made it a self-fulfilling prophecy. The fact that they actually had to work was surprising at first. Then, afterward about that got around, nobody would enter into the lottery, so now they had no volunteers. So then Dolores assigned the job to interns. Interns! I could write an entire novel from that disaster alone.

Imagine sending a bunch of college kids to Vegas telling them they had to pay for things and putting them in a job conflict situation where they were guaranteed to lose. Also, I'm sure many laws were broken. Dolores then had to send along shopperones to Manajid, who were more of her finance department flunkies. And our company ended up paying massive fines for various issues, including paying bail for the interns. Because the interns got into so much trouble.

Dolores started hiring room monitors for the hotel, and fully legal adults had to go to the show. Work the entire day at the show on their feet, then check back into the room. She also put four to six people to a room, too. Like they were in a high school band or something. She even bought breathalyzers to make sure that nobody was drinking. And these were adults. She treated adults like this. This was brought up by the sales team as a PR nightmare, and my boss said, just wait, okay, let her hang herself. The first year of this, the travel team's expenses increased by over 4,000%.

You heard me, 4,000%. Trips that used to cost $3,600 were now costing $144,000 or more. Often because of late minute fees and penalties, the travel team's expenses went from $110,000 a year to something like $2 million. Because stuff was so badly mishandled, we lost a lot of our booth slots and booth renewals, so we lost half of our trade shows and we looked like idiots to our clients. But the main reason that we went to trade shows in the first place was for networking,

so there was literally no reason to go anymore. The sales team pointed this out to Dolores multiple times, so she doubled down and canceled the travel team after just one year. Finally, top management got involved, who actually fought with Dolores for a year until she retired for personal reason is to dedicate myself to my family. Then, it took nearly two years to rebuild the travel team from scratch. People got corporate cards again, travel team lead became an actual job. So, when we finally

hired someone for that job, she handled all the financial stuff for us. So it was much better, and it saved the company a ton of money in her first year. And there was much rejoicing. Man, I don't understand why upper management was so reluctant to get involved, because it's like, what does upper management even do?

You've got a department that went from fully functioning to completely mismanaged and himraging money and they're like, oh, it's not my problem. Our next red it post is from TH Nielsen. Some years ago, I was driving pickups and deliveries for a trucking company in Denmark. Pickups and deliveries is the part of the transportation chain where you usually deliver small quantities to multiple customers on a route. Kind of like UPS or FedEx, but it's in a semi-truck or like a rigid box truck. It was nearing the end of the day, and I had to deliver a trampoline to a residential area. Mind you, this is in the European Union,

so things might be a bit different than in the U.S. regarding rules and regulations. It was a fairly newly built area with plenty of space, but I had to reverse in because there was no way that I could turn around. But no problem, the road was wide and so were the corners I had to go around. I put my semi-truck in reverse and started going backwards, and of course, I was delivering to the last house on the street. Now, the road was kind of uphill and was about six or seven hundred meters long, but everything went fine. When I finally got to the end of the road and got out of my truck to unload this trampoline, some guy was already standing behind my truck, yelling and swearing at me.

You're the biggest idiot on earth! How the hell could you even think of coming up here in a semi-truck? You could have run over all the kids in the neighborhood. For clarity, there were no kids outside at that moment. You have absolutely no valid reason for being here, so get the hell out of here right now. Instead of arguing with the person, I calmly asked him where he lived. He pointed at his house and said number 74. And low and behold, where was I delivering to? You guessed it? House number 74. So, very calmly, I told this man. Well, in that case, I have a trampoline

for you. Oh, the man said. Well, I would like it if you could. But, I interrupted. Since I have no business being here with the Sim I truck, I'll be waiting for you at the end of the road, and I pointed to the direction that I just came from. Mind you, this is a big model weighing about 130 pounds, so you might want to bring a wheel barrow. Oh, what a joy it was to see him coming all the way down the road with his wheelbarrow. And then trying to get this 130 pound trampoline up into his wheelbarrow and starting his long, heavy walk 700 meters uphill to his house again.

Priceless! Down in the comments, we have a similar story from PixelTash. My husband drives trucks for a living. He would do drop-offs in the fabric district of London's East End. These were tiny roads that went to the backs of factories, roads that had been there since before cars were invented. So he would drop his trailer at the entrance to the alley and then back the wagon down the alley to deliver bails of cloth to the factories. One day, he had just gotten into position to unload everything. And this

jumped up little knob in his BMW, started shouting and swearing at my husband about how he's blocking the alley, and the knob couldn't get his shiny BMW out. My husband started to explain that he was trying to make a delivery, and he would be 10 minutes at most once the factory men came out to get the truck unloaded. But the knob started shouting, do you know who I am? I own this effing factory factory and you're stopping me from getting to a very important client." My husband said, okay, sign here and I'll be out of your way. The knob signed the paperwork saying that he refused delivery and my husband drove off back to

his trailer to re-hook it. The knob in the BMW raced off while revving his engine and shouting at my husband as he went. No skin off my husband's nose, he had the sign paperwork signed by the owner refusing delivery. He finished the rest of his deliveries and went back to base. Note, this was before mobile phones were common or cheap. My husband's boss was going nuts because the knob in the BMW had been on the phone to them every 20 minutes asking where the delivery was.

My husband simply handed over the sign paperwork, explaining what happened, and clocked out. His boss went back to the office with an evil grin. My husband found out the next week that the knob in the BMW wasn't the owner, but the owner's son. And his dad made him pay personally for a week in delivery for the cloth that he refused delivery of. And they were late on getting the clothing order out, and they lost a small fortune. That was our slash malicious compliance, and if you liked this content, be sure to follow

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