rSlash - r/Maliciouscompliance Karen vs MMA Fighter

Episode Date: September 29, 2022

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Welcome to our slash malicious compliance where we have a real life co-broke high story. Today's episode is sponsored by Honey. We all shop online. Every single one of us. So you all know what I'm talking about when I say there's that little promo code field taunting you at checkout. Don't you just hate to leave it empty? Well, with Honey, you never have to leave it empty.

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And by getting it, you'll be doing yourself a solid and supporting this podcast. Get honey for free at joinhoney.com slash rslash. That's joinhoney.com slash r slash. That's joinhoney.com slash r slash. Our next reddit post is from Meltdown. This story takes place in the 90s, which was a very different world to live in than what we have today. It was sort of in the middle of the turning point and parenting between borderline abusive tough love and the advent of participation trophies. My karate instructor at the time was kinda like Copa Kai. Not cartoonishly hard-assed, but honestly kinda leaning

in that direction. I'll call our Sensei brass balls. Sparring was like contact, and while you were encouraged to actually hit each other, you were, of course, expected to pull your punches. Also, everyone were full-sparring gear. Pads, cup, mouthguard, everything. So it wasn't like we were beating each other to death or anything. But if you drop your guard and take a sidekick straight to the gut, you'll probably be on the ground for a bit. Karate is a contact sport, and we fully treated it as such. Anyway, another part of that environment was that only winners got promoted to the next belt. As part of your belt test, you had to do a kata to demonstrate your technique and also

win a light contract sparring match. Kumite rules against another student who was also up for a belt promotion. Only the winner was promoted. So one weekend, after demonstrating my form and winning the sparring match, I got promoted. Let's call the other kid Greg because he was a good guy. Greg's dad, douchebag, is just losing his mind. Greg was just totally cool with it, like, hey, congrats on the win. Guess I need to work on my defense. But douchebag was not having it and started yelling at brass balls

about how Greg deserves something for getting beaten up. He says that he pays X amount of dollars a month for these lessons so he expects some results. Blah blah blah. And to be clear, Greg wasn't in any way beaten up. I hardly touched them. I simply got eight points ahead because he didn't keep his guard up. So brass balls is like, you're insisting that Greg deserves a ribbon for losing? Okie dokie are da chokie? And that brings us to our malicious compliance. brass ball steps into his office, shutting the door behind him. The whole time Greg is like, Dad, stop it, you're embarrassing me. This is why I live with mom. But douchebag apparently thought that he had managed to intimidate this big,

bad karate teacher into getting his way. So he was just on cloud nine until the office door opened and brass balls tucked a scrap of red ribbon into the belt of Greg's G with the word loser written on it in marker. douchebag is speechless, sputtering like a fish out of water before brass balls deliver secuda grá. Don't worry, I made one for you too. Then he hands Duschbag an even bigger scrap of red cloth with loser written on it.

Duschbag was just completely deflated, realizing that he had been beaten at his own game and there was no way in hell that he was beating brass balls at his. So he just kind of mumbles and leaves. The funniest part is that he took his loser ribbon with him. Greg, however, wore that handmade loser ribbon to class every single day until he finally passed that test.

He completely owned that loser ribbon and turned it into a source of motivation. I have no idea where Gregg is now, but good on you man. I hope that you're still owning your failures and getting stronger from them. Our next reddit post is from Breeder Joey. I'm a 30 year old guy and I work as a cleaner in a school for special needs kids. I'm good at what I do and I take pride in coming in every day to make sure that both the kids and the teachers who work there have a clean and safe environment to work in. Before I started working at this location in April 2022, they've had a lot of bad luck with hiring cleaners, because the branch were in technically falls under specialized cleaning and not general cleaning. In the first four

months of 2022, they've had 15 cleaners at all disappointed, stop showing up or were fired for some reason. This has caused the general custodian of this special needs school, my direct supervisor, to be skeptical of any new cleaner who comes in, which is fair. Now, I like to give 110% at work. Whether that's smart or not, I'm not sure, but I like to leave my work knowing that I

gave it my all. As a result, when I saw the weekly task list, I knew that it would leave the school very messy because not everything would be clean correctly. Imagine a kid's desk that had a single eraser on it. According to the online course that I took, that disqualified the entire desk for cleaning. I wouldn't be allowed to clean it. Furthermore, if a chair wasn't at a desk, I'm not allowed to sweep or mop under it because it's not the cleaner's job. As a result, I could meet all the requirements that my company set for me, and I could leave the students

and teachers with a beautiful workplace. This went great for a while. Now for some reason, my supervisor has been getting way more critical of my work. If he finds that I miss the smallest speck of dust, or a tiny drop of spilled coffee, then he's blowing up my phone with text messages saying that I need to do things differently, or telling me first thing when I come in that I have to take my job more seriously. This morning he told me, just try and stick to the planning and the correct methods. So I told him I would. So I started following official protocols completely to a T. I followed every stupid cleaning

technique that I knew would leave the classrooms and the bathrooms in a horrible state. Trashcans need emptying? Nope, not on my list. One piece of paper on a filthy desk? No longer my problem. Spills in the hallways? Looks like mopping the floor isn't on today's task list. Sorry, the entire school looked horrible.

I had to hold myself back from doing more because I hate leaving work unfinished, but I was finally done. I approached the teachers of the classrooms that I had to clean the day beforehand, explain the situation, and promised that the next day I would give their classrooms a proper cleaning, because I realized that they and their students shouldn't be the victim of my malicious compliance, so they agreed. They even agreed to give their signature on my task list to sign off that they think that I did all my work correctly. Naturally, my supervisor did not like my work today. We had a good heart to heart for a moment.

I told him that I really appreciate that he wants me to do my work appropriately. After all, it's what they pay me for. But I wanted to show him and the teachers that I go above and beyond every day and that the terrible job that I did today is what I was supposed to do. I also let him know that the constant badgering was incredibly unmotivating. That it really put a damper on my spirits. I told him that I would go back to doing my work normally again tomorrow and he said that he appreciated all the work that I usually do and will try to be more flexible and put more trust in me. So all's well that ends well, I suppose.

I just want to make sure that these special needs kids have a clean school to learn, laugh, and play in. I'm going to be honest, Opie. Your boss sounds like an idiot. You're the first decent employee in like five months who goes above and beyond and he criticizes you for it? Why? Our next reddit posted from NeonChimp.

So I work at a place that rent storage units and we have this one customer who's a crusty old B word. He wants to complain about everything. In fact, he complained about stuff that just straight up wasn't true. And when presented with a printout of evidence that he was lying, he called us a bunch of sons of bees unleft. Anyways, today he came in for a payment, and when I gave him his total, he became belligerent, stating that he's always paid a certain dollar amount, and he will not pay a cent more.

Now unfortunately, we had to raise prices back in January. It sucks, but I'm not the owner, I'm just a desk monkey, so I don't ask questions. I did, however, personally fold and stuff all the envelopes with the notice that we had to increase our rent, so I know that he got the notice. This guy has never paid the increased rate and is falling behind. Today I was blessed with, I'll be speaking to a lawyer about this, which frankly is music to my ears. Every time he wanted to complain, I responded with, you've threatened legal actions, so I'll only communicate with you through your attorneys. After a few times of this, I think he realized that he screwed up.

Guess who called up less than an hour later, all apologetic wanting to make a payment? I happily took his payment. Hopefully, he won't pull that stunt anymore. Business notifications getting out of hand, buried under an avalanche of customer emails, texts, and social media messages? Keep your edge with Thrive Small Business Software and never miss a message again. Thrive offers one solution to communicate, market, and run your business, but simply small businesses run better on Thrive.

Get Command Center for free today at thrive.ca. That's THR-Y-V dot CA. Terms and conditions apply. Free plans have limited functionality. Our next reddit post is from parciesca. At one point in my career, I worked for a large telecom. We did tech support for their VOIP product. Their documentation was lacking and I worked in their escalation team. To make things easier for me, I built my own website with screenshots of the

interface of their device, along with common routers to explain what to do for analysts who called me. I mostly just did this to make life easier for me, but it was significantly better than their documentation, so many of my coworkers used it as well. The company has a temporary to permanent contract with a union that says that if anyone was still employed after three years, the company had to make a permanent position available for them. I was nearing my three years, but I was already planning to quit to go to college. One day I came in and I was immediately called in

to meet with the managers. They pulled the corporate playbook combo move. First, we did a random audit and we found that you used your computer for personal use. We're giving you a letter of warning for that. Sign here. Second, we're giving you a personal review right now. If you have a letter of warning for that. Sign here. Second, we're giving you a personal review right now. If you have a letter of warning, the highest rating we can issue is needs improvement, so we're giving you that

rating. Sign here. Third, your contract states that if you're listed as needs improvement at any time, then your job can be completed. This isn't a termination, we're just simply calling your contract complete early. Security will walk you out. So, after they walked me out, I listened to happy music the whole drive home. Why, you ask? Well, the documentation that I created was on my website. It wasn't sanctioned by work, and it was on my own website, so it had proprietary information that I shouldn't have. But also, their traffic didn't benefit me because I was no longer employed.

So naturally, I took the whole website down. From the start, I had configured the whole site to force refreshes anytime the page loaded so they couldn't use cash data. I got calls from my co-workers that night that suddenly the entire department had no idea how to do their job. And down in the comments we had this story from T-Snow Crash. I did something like this to a former landlord. I ran his website and the time came to renew the lease and he decided to triple our rent. I don't renew, find a better place, and took his site down. But I didn't

just take a site down. I redirected the URL to a review site with his two star overall rating and a bunch of horror stories from former tenants. He closed his offices a few months later and filed for bankruptcy not long after that. Our next reddit post is from Mayor's Signal Crash. There's a huge nationwide electronics retailer in the UK called Curries. They're known for having terrible customer service, but very occasionally having decent prices. I was in the market for a KitchenAid stand mixer, and my employer had an arrangement where I could buy Curries gift cards for a 10% discount. I was a bit reluctant to use them based on past experiences,

but I thought I would take advantage of saving a bit of cash and ordered my mixer online, delivery due in one week. Easy peasy, I thought. It was like 300 bucks before discount. Delivery day comes and goes. No mixer. The next day I call up customer service to ask what happened. After being on hold for about 20 minutes,

they tell me their product is out of stock, and I'll need to wait for their next delivery in 10 days. That's not too bad. I'm a patient person. 10 days later, still no mixer or update, even though the mixer is showing as in stock and available to buy on their websites. So back on the phone with customer service. More time on hold. This time I'm told there's an order backlog, and they couldn't tell me when it would be delivered so I asked for a refund. Unfortunately, in the UK, if you pay by gift card, you can only get a refund by gift card. At this point, I had no desire to ever use Curries again and was disappointed in myself for ever giving it a go.

I would have no use for a gift card, so I decided to give them a bit more time. Unsurprisingly, this did not bear fruit. A couple of weeks later, I used the online customer service chat to see what was going on. Again, they were completely unable to help or confirm when or even if I would receive my order. I asked what I was expected to do, and the bloke said something along the lines of, no idea mate, you would have to take it out with your board. Ha ha ha! Fine, it's malicious compliance time.

A quick trip to the company's house website gives me a list of all their directors. Another hour on LinkedIn, and I've tracked them all down. I proceed to send every director a summary of what has happened, and links the screenshots of the online chat that I had with the customer service rep. Less than a day later, I get a call from the CEO's personal assistant, apologizing profusely, and personally guaranteeing that she'll sort it out. By the time this all happened, the mixer had gone down by another 60 pounds in price, so she processed my order again and said that she would arrange for the accounts team to send me a voucher for the difference. She was genuinely

the hero of this story. The very next day, my mixer arrives. Happy days! A few days after that, I get a letter with a Curry's voucher. I thought this would be the end of my sorry arrives. Happy days! A few days after that, I get a letter with a Curry's voucher. I thought this would be the end of my sorry saga. However, as icing on the cake, they proceeded to send me 3 more 60 pound vouchers at random intervals over the next few months. I can only guess that their admin team is as useless as their customer service team. I spent the vouchers on a new oven, which unsurprisingly turned up late, faulty, and had to be replaced.

Our next red appost is from Kira's mom. Years ago, I worked as a director of communications for an IT company. One of my jobs was to finalize assessment reports for companies that we were bidding on. This one particular assessment was hidden by our brand new VP. She simply did not understand the way that people in Texas spoke,

and by the way, the client was located in Texas. I, having lived in Texas for 20 years, and knowing the board members that we were dealing with, changed some of the wording on the final report to make it more client-centric. When the VP found out, she had a hissy fit. She screamed at me that I should never again change anything that she wrote. Fine.

Well, several weeks went by, and a letter came across my desk address to a particular corporate president to set up a go see appointment. This letter was from that VP, and the president's name was written wrong. Needless to say, I let the letter go through exactly as written. For some reason, the VP didn't get the meeting. I overheard her say something about it to a colleague, and I sweetly said that maybe that was because she sent the letter to the wrong person. When she asked why I let it go through, I pointed out that I wasn't allowed to change her words. She actually conceded to feed, apologize for her previous outbursts, and said that she would never second-guess me again.

We're good friends to this day. 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. to podcast episodes every single day.