rSlash - r/Maliciouscompliance My Boss Forced Me onto Zoom while Breast Pumping

Episode Date: June 27, 2022

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Welcome to our slash malicious compliance where OP attends a work meeting, topless. Our next reddit post is from Happy Giraffe. I'm a project manager and data scientist. I manage lots of different public health related projects. There's one project in particular that includes a really demanding team from a federal government department. I recently returned back to work from maternity leave. I work in my office three days a week. On these days, I have to pump breast milk at regular intervals for my baby. Luckily, I have my own private office, and I can usually just keep working on emails, reports, etc. while I pump.

I have a hands-free wearable pump, which is convenient, but still definitely obvious that I'm wearing it. It pokes out of my shirt and it's not exactly silent. Recently, we had a Zoom call schedule during one of the times I needed to pump. Instead of missing the meeting, I figured I would just keep my camera off so I could wear my pump and still participate and listen. Heck, I was even in my office and not working from home. I felt like I was being a pretty committed employee. The meeting starts and a few people have their cameras off.

The lead makes an announcement. I just want to remind everyone that our expectation is that you'll have your cameras on because this is not a virtual meeting. This is a simulated in-person meeting. Whatever that means. I sent a quick private message to explain that I was paying attention but pumping, but I got no response. Instead, he just said, again, the expectation is that all cameras will be on. So, fine. I turned my camera on for this meeting of about

20 people. The camera isn't aimed at my chest, but the top of my breast pumps are clearly visible. I unmuted myself so you could also clearly hear the pump and just said, thank you for your patience, I wish you suggesting my breast pump. The meeting continued awkwardly with several other team managers letting me know privately that it was fine to turn off my camera, but at that point, really, there was no point in turning it off. At the most recent meeting, the announcement was, please turn on your cameras if you're comfortable doing so. Opie, if you really went on rubbing into their faces, then next time you could do the exact same thing.

And when they say, oh, no, no, no. Opie, you don't have to turn on the camera unless you're comfortable. You can say, oh, but I am perfectly comfortable. What do you mean? Our next reddit post is from Chief Steward. My former employer uses a points based system to track attendance. If you're late but you called in beforehand you lose half a point. If you're late but you didn't call in you lose one point. Accumulate enough points and you're fired.

There's a set of train tracks crossing the street that leads to this facility. Occasionally, trains will stop while blocking this crossing. If you're caught there in the last few minutes before you're supposed to clock in, you have a decision to make. Wait or go around. Either way, you might be late. Sometimes you'll decide to go around and then the train clears the crossing so the people who waited get in before you. Sometimes you'll wait and watch through

the gaps in the train cars as people who win around pull into the parking lot while you're just sitting at the block train crossing. To be clear, going around involves taking a lot of secondary country roads as well as a few field access roads. So you literally never know what kind of road conditions you're gonna find if you go that way. Those side roads may even be entirely unusable during the winter months when snow covers them. One night, on my third shift, I was stopped at these tracks and I decided to wait. Eventually, the train moved on. I raced to the parking lot, used my key card to zip through the turn styles and ran to the punch clock. My clock in time was 10.30 p.m. They had these biometric punch clocks that read your fingerprints to clock employees

in and out. Sometimes these clocks just won't read your fingerprints. I get to the punch clock and it says 10.30, so I'm golden. This punch clock tracks hours and minutes, but not seconds. I entered my employee ID number and placed my finger on the sensor. Three beeps, failed read. Try it again. Three beeps. Try it once more. Three beeps.

Nope, I am not trying again because by this time the clock was likely to tick over to 10.31 in the middle of reading my finger. When I got to my assigned work area, I told my team manager what happened. He said don't worry about it, he would manually punch me in. I should have listened, but I'm a warrior. In the morning when the front office people started showing back up, I went to the attendance office to confirm that my situation was all good. Apparently, I scanned my keycard at 10.30pm and 22 seconds.

According to HR, that's a tardy with no call. I was to be issued one full attendance point. I reiterated that I was 22 seconds late because the train was stopped on the tracks completely beyond my control. She advised me to either leave earlier or to get a cell phone so I could call a head next time. Well, what I did instead was every single time I had to go into work, I would just call in a head of time and say that I might be absent just in case something comes up before I leave for work. So basically, I had every intention

of showing up to work, and if I clocked in on time, it was no harm, no foul. But if I didn't clock in on time for whatever reason, the phone call covered me. The first few days I did this, the attendance office was amused. After a few weeks, they became annoyed. And after months, data apparently complained enough, and I finally got told to stop. Apparently, since I called in too early, it messed up their system because the system wouldn't flag the message as new by the time the next shift started. This was great news for me. From then on, every morning before leaving

the premises at the end of my shift, I used one of their phones to call an absent for my next shift that evening. They tried to write me up for insubordination, but the labor union slapped it down. Pointing out that the collective bargaining agreement specifies the latest that we can call in, but not the earliest that we can call in. Cue a huge grin across my face. I never forgot that my team manager tried to do me a solid though. If I was actually going to be late or absent for some reason, I would call his desk line directly to let him know. Even long after I finally got a cell phone, I continued doing this. I found out years and years later from some union reps that

upper management never got over this. It drove them nuts and they got beat at their own game by something so simple. It didn't bring the walls crumbling down, but it was a persistent, enduring source of frustration and impotence for them. And really, knowing that you can cause management all of that frustration with just a 22 second phone call each day, that's the kind of thing that gets you out of bed in the evening. Our next Reddit post is from Dan JCB. I was a supervisor of a small team, and one payday I had three worried staff members thinking payroll had messed up and given them too much money, but they hadn't. One of my guys came in five minutes late and got caught by one of their other managers,

who told my boss and it got around to me. He said, I want you to check their clock and and clock out times and let me know so we can talk to them anytime that they weren't in on time. Now I don't care if that employee was late, he was a great employee who got a ton of work done and always stayed late if they needed to finish things off. Also, I don't want to even think about if that was legal or not. It just didn't sit right with me. So two things weren't in my boss's favor right then. One, he was being a tool. And two, I had already had another job lined up, which my boss didn't

know about, so I didn't care. So what next? I did as I was told, and I checked the times. There was a couple of minutes to scrap and see here or there, nothing major. I then checked all the extra time my employees had worked since they started and added it all up. I made sure to take out anything they'd already claimed as overtime. I logged it into the system, approved it, and sent it over to finance myself. Then, I checked over my times with my other employees and we did the same thing. We added up a lot of overtime. I delayed it a couple of days to make sure that everything went through and double checked

with finance to make sure everything was good. Then I called a meeting with my boss to let him know everything that I found. He was not pleased, but it was worth it. Man good on UOP. I read so many stories with obnoxious, selfish, like penny-pinching bosses, so it's really nice to see a story of a supervisor who actually looks out for their workers. Our next reddit post is from Garfischwoosh, so I used to work for a large retailer in the UK.

I worked there for about 12 years and I became a manager. When you want to become a manager, they make you jump through a thousand hoops, do a whole bunch of training, and then do the job for six months without any extra pay. I did all of this and was finally officially signed off as a manager. After I was officially given a job, I got my pay raise, but I was never given a new contract. I asked multiple times for a new contract and I was ignored each time. Fast forward about nine months later and another large retailer started hiring lots of managers and was poaching a whole bunch of staff. I applied for one of those jobs because they were offering

$8,000 more than what I was currently making but for the same work. I got the job and I went to hand in my notice. Managers have to give a four-week notice whereas general assistants only have to give a one-week notice. So I decided that I would follow the exact terms on my contract and provide them with a one-week notice rather than the four weeks they wanted. Suffice to say they were not happy with, and I got called into the office to ask why I only gave one week's notice. I explained that, per the term to the last contract that I signed with them, this is all that I was required to give.

They were not happy, but there really wasn't anything they could do about it. Beneath that, we had this story from Hattix. My brother did the exact same thing. They trained him up, gave him the extra money, but never redid his contract. So he never got the other benefits, mostly mileage reimbursement and medical. His notice period also didn't change from two weeks to eight weeks. So when he handed in his notice a year and a half later, they said that he needed eight weeks notice. He asked them to

show him where it says that in his contract, and they all went quiet. Our next reddit postage from my posting name. Back in 2014, I was selling Ford cars. For those who aren't car buffs, both the Mustang and the F-150 were getting ground up redesigns for 2015, and Ford had just announced that there would be no Shelby Mustangs or Raptor F-150s for 2015. Instantly, we were fielding several calls a day about these vehicles and almost overnight, the inventory we had came with a 10-to-20-thousand dollar market adjustment due to high demand. Our general manager loved both of these vehicles and he traded for them whenever he could because he loved chatting about them with buyers.

So we had 21 Raptors and 6 Shelby still on the lot when I sold a Ruby Red Raptor extended cab at over $10,000 above the sticker last month. Due to the inflated prices, I was due about $4,200 in commission, but my check was $1,700 lights. Come the first Saturday morning meeting after payday, we were told that commissions on such vehicles would be capped at $2,500. Retro active to last month, per a previously ignored provision in our pay plan. There was much grumbling, but management stood firm, citing how incredibly easy Raptor and Shelby deals were.

Q. Militious Compliance. I talked to several other salespeople, and man were we pissed, so we colluded. So I whipped up an Excel sheet that would spit out a price that would give us an exact $2,500 commission. I sent it to every salesperson we had and everyone used it. It only took three sales before management figured out what was going on and called another meeting. This meeting was basically management just yelling at us and the entire sales staff calmly saying, remove the cap or you'll never see another sign buyer's order that exceeds that cap. F you!

The cap was lifted three days later. Down in the comments, we have this story from Ma33A. I had a friend who worked in an office supply store. He was given a commission cap, so he used to just work up until he hit the cap, and then stop. Now some work would naturally fall into his lap just from repeat customers and walk-ins. So he started saving up sales until the next month. By that, I mean that he would deliberately hold off on completing a customer's order

until the next month so the commission wouldn't be wasted. It used to take him a bit over a fortnight to hit his cap. He could have easily made the company hundreds of thousands of dollars more in sales, but he didn't see the point. Since he hit his commission cap each month, his scores were always high, so he looked like a dream player. Our next reddit post is from Typan. On this next post, OP works a normal day job, but he also volunteers as a firefighter during his off hours. I've been reading other stories about virtual meeting shenanigans, and I thought that I would add my own.

On my day off, I was attending a controlled burn, so I was out in the bush with a fire truck, suited up, and running around like a happy pyromaniac. I get a phone call from work. I answer, and I'm told that I must be present for a virtual meeting scheduled for 10 minutes from now for a training on a system that I already know because I've been using it for the past 6 months. I remind them that this is my day off and my manager speaks with the tone of, do it or you're fired.

Alrighty then. Strike number 1. The manager is late to their own meeting. The meeting eventually starts and I'm connected by my phone and Bluetooth earphones. My camera and mic are off because of the noise behind me and the other firefighters are having a chuckle at my expense. Then my manager insists that I turn my camera and mic on, otherwise they would mark me as absence.

Alrighty then, I stand in a spot where the fire would roar behind me, somewhat safely, and I turn my phone camera and mic on. My firefighter buddies go nuts with panicked radio chatter as the people in the virtual meetings see me fully masked up in firefighter gear, with the noise of the fire roaring up behind me and the sound of the pump and panicking radio chatter. I then end the call. My manager then begins to call me frantically because she thinks that she's just seen one of her better team members go up in flames. They never scheduled training on my days

off after that. I jumped ship to a competitor two months later. Opie, I think you took your manager's threat, do it or you're fired a bit too literally. That was our Slash Militius compliance, and if you like this content, be sure to follow my podcast because I put out new Reddit podcast episodes every single day.