rSlash - r/Maliciouscompliance I Turned a Customer into a Zombie!

Episode Date: September 19, 2021

r/Maliciouscompliance OP works at a grocery store that's on a military base. One day, a woman comes in and tries to pay off her store credit. OP's computer says that the customer is deceased, so he informs the woman that she is dead. The woman is understandably confused, but is excited when she realizes that dead people don't have to pay off debts! She makes a new account and OP starts calling her "zombie!' Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to R-slash, a podcast where I read the best posts from across Reddit. Today's subreddit is R-slash malicious compliance, where a racist gets instant karma. Our next Reddit post is from Woolrun. I live in a German-speaking country, and we're known to be very strict about closing times and time limits at our government offices. I happen to witness some fine malicious compliance in one of these offices. I work as an engineer, and I went to an office it's dealing with formal requests regarding government issue assignments. If you want to get one of these assignments you have to bring in paperwork and person up to a specific date.

Because of the form and many things that happened in my industry it's quite common to bring in the paperwork on the last possible day. It was close to closing time and I was waiting for someone when a woman entered, obviously in a rush, hitting to the counter where paperwork has to be submitted. The counter was empty at the time. As she's rushing across the room, her paperwork slides out of her arms and falls to the ground, spreading all over the place. As she was trying to put it all together, a man who looked middle eastern tried to help

her, but when he touched her, she let out a shriek and told him to get back where he belongs and not touch her paperwork. This was obviously a racist remark telling him to go back to his home country, which is quite a common statement here. Without a word, he stands up and then moves over behind the counter that the woman was hitting for. When she finally finished picking up the paper, she hits the counter, realizing that he's the guy behind the counter. Just as she reached him, she put up a clothes sign, and he pointed to a clock that had just reached closing time. Her face went blank as she stammered to please make an exception, but she surely knew from the beginning that this was a pointless request. If she had let him help her, then I'm sure he would have let her put in the paperwork. Our next reddit posted from username. This one happened a few years ago

when I worked in corporate for a large subchain that's currently seen better days. They had purchased a taco chain, and part of my job consisted of going around the country to help open up these new restaurants. Now, this subchain is not known for corporate luxuries, so I didn't bat an eye at the daily food expense allowance when traveling, which was $42 per day broken out by meal. They gave me $8 for breakfast, $14 for lunch, and $20 for dinner. So you couldn't even skip breakfast or lunch to get yourself an all-right dinner. But okay, I usually stayed in hotels that had a complimentary breakfast buffet, and I often skip lunch and work straight through the day, so my expenses were often close

to $20 per day. Now the problem comes when, during one of these trips, my dinner came out to be $20 and 5 cents. This was before the cash tip, mind you, which I paid out of my own pocket and didn't expense. I didn't think much of it because, hey, it's a nickel, and I didn't go over my $42 spending limit anyways. Cut to the end of the month after submitting my expense report. I get a call from accounting that went like this. I'm looking at your July expenses. How did you want to handle this? Uh, I did handle it. I submitted everything. No, you went over on one of your dinners.

Would you like to send in payment or have it taken from your payroll? I'm sorry, what total are you talking about? You spent $20.5 on dinner XYZ, which is a $5.00 overage. Okay, so, I owe you $0.00? Yes. Okay, so I owe you five cents? Yes! You can take that for my payroll, but please do it over the next five pay periods. I'd like to split up the payments for budgeting purposes. Are you serious?

Are you? Following her true nature, she took one penny out of my next five checks. And after that, I made it a point to spend as close to $42 a day as humanly possible for every other trip that I took with that company. Down in the comments, really forgot says, having worked in payroll, I can guarantee that it costs them more than once into process that payment. So good job. Our next Reddit post is from Creepy Analyst. I moved from Pennsylvania to Michigan a few years ago, and I only go home once a year or so.

A few years back, I transferred the vast majority of my bank account money to Michigan. But my Pennsylvania bank was giving me a hard time about closing the account, and so I withdrew all my funds except for $1.31. I haven't touched the account since then, so two years later, I got a notice for inactivity stating that I'd be charged $5 of my account remained inactive for two years. I spoke with three different people on the phone, but they wouldn't let me close out the account without incurring a fee. And since I'm never moving back to that town, I refuse to pay them or add money to the

account. Cue malicious compliance. So I have to interact with the account once every two years or else I pay five dollars. Fine, give me one penny please. When I was there in person last month I withdrew one penny from the account so now it's good for another two years. The attendant definitely gave me a weird look but at this rate my account will remain open for the next two years. The attendant definitely gave me a weird look, but at this rate, my account will remain open for the next 260 years. Our next reddit post is from Phil Drill.

My job is 12 hours shifts with a flexible start time. You have to show up before 7, but you can start as early as 6 if you want, and most people opt to show up before 6.30. The last person is usually in before 645. We let people go home at the end of the shift on a first and first out basis. In theory, you should be able to go home after you've worked for 12 hours. But in practice, there's usually a disparity of arrival times between the outgoing shift and the incoming shift. For example, I may have started at 615 as a fourth person in.

And I'm relieved by the fourth person in on the next shift, but that person might not show up until 645, making me stay 30 minutes late. I can't complain to that person because it's there right to show up at 645. I talked to my supervisor about this because it had been happening pretty frequently. She said the company won't pay for the extra time because, according to her, it's my choice to arrive earlier than 7 and that's just the risk I've taken being early. She also said that she's not willing to move any people around to cover my role to get me out on time, even though they regularly do that to let people take unscheduled bathroom breaks into due training. She said it would be different if I wasn't relieved

by 7 because someone was really late, but before 7 they just don't care. The solution, I now show up at 6.59. I am always the last one in. I leave later than everyone, but I'm also guaranteed never to work a single extra unpaid minute. It also means the person I relieve has to stay late because, again, the last person usually shows up before 6.45. It also means that I usually get relieved earlier than 12 hours. I still have to stay in the building until I reach 12 hours, which is tracked with

badge cards. But ultimately, they're still paying me for 10 to 15 minutes of wandering hallways or reading a book. So basically, they went from regularly stiffing me 15 to 30 minutes of pay to regularly having to pay me to do 15 to 30 minutes of nothing. Back in my old job, before I became a YouTuber, I took a great pleasure in calculating how much money my employer was paying me to poop at their office every day. After working there for a few years, they were literally paying me thousands of dollars to poop on the clock. Honestly, those were some of the most satisfying poops I've ever had in my life.

Our next Reddit post is from PG Liberal. I used to work for Aves, think Walmart, but on US military bases. I worked at the customer service counter where people would come to do various things, such as pay their store credit card bill. During this time, the casualties coming in for my rack in Afghanistan were pretty constant, and shortly prior to this interaction, I got briefed on what it meant if I saw the deceased card. I got the feeling that we had several customers who died in Iraq, and Aves put this policy in place because they likely didn't want the bad PR from trying to collect debt from widows.

Which I mean is a good idea. So if a customer was deceased, the card was closed, all debt was written off, and all automatic payments were cancelled. Well, if you've ever worked or dealt with Aves, then you understand that they're incredibly incompetent. Well, one day I'm working and a woman comes up to me and says, I'm Miss Jackson and I would like to make a payment on my star card. I said, that's fine, can I see your ID or star card?

She gave me her star card and I asked, and how much will you be paying today? She said $1,500. I opened her account, and in big, bright red letters, her account status was deceased. Her balances were all zeroed out. Confused, I asked her how much she owed on the account, and she set approximately $4,000. Thinking that maybe I opened the wrong account, I asked to see her star card again so I could enter the exact account number. She gave me her star card.

I got the same status that she's dead and she owes us no more money. And I said, Ms. Jackson, I have good news and bad news. To which she gave me a frustrated look and said, what's the bad news? I said, apparently you're dead. She laughed and said, I feel very much alive. I nod my head and go, I agree, you do appear to be alive. Then she says, so what's the good news? I smile and say, he don't know us anymore money. What? Per our policy,

if a customer dies, we close their account and write off their debt. Concern, she says, well, is this going to get sent to collections? Where you pass do? No, I wasn't. Okay, let me call my manager. So I call my manager and ask, if a customer is declared deceased, do we send their debt to a collection agency and he says, no, it's written off. So I relay this information. She starts to smile and then says, so can I use my star card? I said no, it's been closed, but if you want to open another account, you can. So we opened another account. Yes, it worked, and yes, she was approved. I dealt with Miss Jackson several times over the next year because she liked to come in person to make the payment. I nicknamed her zombie, a nickname which she embraced. When she would approach me, I would say, ah, the zombie is back.

And she would smile and joke and say, be nice, or I'll eat you. We kept it as an inside joke, and my coworkers were always confused. So for clarity, the malicious compliance that I allowed the system to say that she was dead, and I didn't attempt to correct it. So I'm trying to imagine what would have to happen in order for this customer to be mistakenly labeled as deceased at aves. And here's my operating theory. A manager and someone else were working at the store. The manager asked an employee, hey, employee, did Miss Jackson come pay off her debt? The employee who wasn't paying attention said, she did. And the manager thinks to himself, oh, she's dead, that's a shame.

Then just hyped up as deceased, and that was that. Our next replies from federal ant. This happened several years ago, when my ex-sniper going through a heated divorce and custody battle. While we were married, we had a couple of conversations about how rich people hide their assets to avoid paying taxes. I've never had enough assets to do this, but my wife somehow got the idea that I was and told her attorney that I was laundering money and hiding income.

I couldn't even afford my own attorneys, so I represented myself. Her lawyer wasn't a total butthole, but he was clearly out to get me. And he talked down to me like I didn't deserve to breathe the same air as him. One day, I got a letter in the mail from him requesting an updated income declarations form and three years of financials. It had a huge list of things to include.

I own a communications tech company that was in super startup phase back then. Money was already tight. I was trying to get this business off the ground with no financing. I was finishing to get this business off the ground with no financing. I was finishing my MBA with scholarships and loans, so paying for copies in postage or driving this 30 miles to his office meant eating peanut butter and saltines for a week, so I called them to explain my situation. He all but called me a liar and didn't believe that

I couldn't afford it. I was put off by that, and I said that I was taking time away from business that I needed to handle, to which he replied, and I'll never forget this. Well, according to your income declarations, you're not that busy. What do you do all day?" He then said that if he didn't get these documents, he would consider my previous filings as fraudulent. He would tell the judge, contact the district attorney, and also alert the state tax agency in the IRS. It was probably an empty threat, but I'm no lawyer.

EFax is one of the services my company provides, and at the time it was relatively unknown. So I asked him if he had a fax machine. He said, yeah I have a fax machine. What law office doesn't have a fax machine? And then, suddenly, I got an idea. Okay, I said to him, I'll put together in fax whatever I can. Okay, mother-eifer, you went three years of financials, you got it. I scanned a PDF every receipt that I could find. McDonald's received from five years ago. Effet won't hurt to include it. CVS received, it's three miles long, perfect. They get the $1 off toothpaste coupons too.

I downloaded every bank statement, credit card statement, purchase orders from vendors, and every invoice I sent to clients. I printed a PDF the entire three-year accounting journal with monthly, quarterly, and annual balance sheets, cash flow statements, and profits and losses. Not only did I PDF three years of tax filings, but I also PDFed every single letter

that I received from the IRS and the state tax agency, including the inserts advising me of my rights. It's a while, but I was a few days ahead of the deadline. I made a cover page that was black background with white lettering. Whenever I could, I included separator pages in all caps in the biggest boldest font that would fit on the page in landscape. For example, all receipts from the year 2001, or all taxes from the year 2001, etc. I merged everything into a single 150 page compressed PDF and sent the document using my

eFAC system. Every hour or so, I received a status email saying the facts failed. Huh, that's weird. Well, they are getting this document, so I changed the system configuration to keep trying it infinite number of times until it successfully went through. It was weird that I was still getting status email failures. I'll just delete the failure emails and keep this success one after it eventually goes through, I thought, problem solved.

Two days later, a lady from his office called me and asked me to stop sending over a faxes. Their fax machine had been printing non-stop. It kept getting paper jams and running out of ink and they had to keep shutting it off and back on so they could print. I explained that her boss told me to send this by a deadline or else he would call the district attorney and the IRS. Since I didn't want to get a call from the DA or the IRS, I would keep sending it until I got a success confirmation. I suggested they just not print until my facts complete, but she did not like that. She asked me to email the documents, and I told a little white lie that my email wouldn't allow an attachment that big.

Unless her boss agreed in writing to cancel the request, or agreed to reimburse me for my cost of print and ship, I said that I would continue to fax them until they confirmed they received every page. She put me on hold and the attorney got on the line. He said to forget sending the financials. I said that I would need that in writing, so I'll keep sending the fax until he sends that to me. He said, please stop faxing and I'll send it in writing. Then I said, you send it to me in writing and then I'll stop. There was a long moment of silence. Then click. About 20 minutes later, I received an email from his assistant with an attached sign letter

and PDF that I no longer needed to provide my financials. The letter then threatened to pursue sanctions in court or sue me for interfering with their business. Every time I saw the lawyer after that, he never brought up sanctions, lawsuits, criminal referrals or financials again. That was our slash malicious compliance, and if you liked this content, then be sure to follow my podcast because I put on new Reddit podcast episodes every single day. We read a podcast episodes every single day.