rSlash - r/Maliciouscompliance Smug Lawyer Loses $50,000 By Attacking Humble Farmers

Episode Date: February 22, 2021

r/Maliciouscompliance In today's episode, a lawyer buys a house out in the country. A local farmer had a deal with the previous owner to mow the lawyer's lawn in exchange for being able to use the hay... for his farm animals. The lawyer creates a contract that screws the farmer in the deal. The farmer refuses to sign the contract, leaving the farmer with 20 acres of unmowed land. The funny part? Now that the lawyer's property isn't being used as farmland, the lawyer doesn't get to enjoy farm land tax rates, and now has to pay $50,000/year in taxes! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Starting point is 00:00:00 Now streaming on Paramount Plus. Hey baby, I hear the blues. It's calling, toss salads, and scrambled eggs. Y'all know how this goes. And maybe I seem a bit confused. Yeah, maybe. But I got you picked. Ha-ha-ha.
Starting point is 00:00:17 But I don't know what to do with those toss salads and scrambled eggs. Kelsey Grammer returns in Frazier. Life's calling again. New series now streaming on Paramount Plus. Welcome to R-Slash, a podcast where I read the best post from across Reddit. Today's subreddit is R-Slash and malicious compliance, where an attorney tries to take on a humble farmer and loses big time. Our next Reddit post is from Winnery.
Starting point is 00:00:43 I used to work at a store run by a woman named Irene. She would buy a vintage and high end items, repair them, and then sell them in the store. We didn't have multiple sizes of things, and the only bulk items we bought were little trinkets and soaps, sometimes jewelry. One day, when Irene had gone out to get some supplies, this dickless couple walked in. The wife, who looked like vegan cat vomit rolled in crystals and hemp, was on the wrong foot the moment she opened her mouth. This Karen seemed to think that we were her slaves, that she was the queen of the world
Starting point is 00:01:13 and everything had to be in her size. Her husband, Vernon, would grant her an repeat what she said in a more nasally aggressive voice. It was the longest two hours of my life. We had everything organized by size and didn't have extras in the back. After explaining that to Karen for the 100th time, I was about to throw a purse at her head. This isn't my size. Why don't you have my size? I told her to maybe look at a larger size rack because obviously she was not a two. She was a six. No, no, no, I'm a two. I've always been a two. I was a two when I had my kids. I'm a two now.
Starting point is 00:01:53 Her husband repeated the same thing. No, she's a two. A two. A two. Irene came in while the happy couple was shopping and asked me what the problem was because I had that look. I explained the woman was being picky. me what the problem was because I had that look. I explained the woman was being picky. Eventually the woman stormed up again with a pair of pants demanding that I reader the size. I told her the size, a six, and she said, I am a two, not a six. Why do I fit into these?
Starting point is 00:02:20 Irene spoke up. Those are a six. If you fit into them, then you are not a two. Karen got silent, turned her husband and waved the pants around. Now listen here. I don't like the way you guys have been helping my wife. She asks questions and gets attitude. You should use your eyes and actually look at the tag and see if there's a problem.
Starting point is 00:02:42 She wants to know the size? Tell her the size. Irene agrees. Sure, I'll take a closer look. Irene puts the pants on the counter, pops out her glass eye, and holds it close to the tag. Still a six. I start laughing so hard I have to sit down.
Starting point is 00:02:57 The couple sputtered, wave their hands around like blind birds and stormed out. They let a huge mess that I had to help clean up, but only after I spent 20 minutes laughing with it about Irene and the other cashier Helen. Irene gave me money to get us all coffee, we closed early and cleaned up the store. Irene was the best boss I ever had, I was sad when I had to move for college. Our next reddit post is from W Fry. Where I work, there's a semi-strict dress code that needs to be adhered to so we look
Starting point is 00:03:25 presentable when going to customers houses. The minor details are more or less negotiable depending on who's our manager for the day. We have a normal manager we see almost daily, but if he's off for if it's a weekend someone else subs in. The day this happened was a Saturday, and our regular manager was off, so the duty manager for the day happened to be Mr. Hardass. Whom no one liked, and he made it his life goal to make all the texts miserable. When we walked in the door, we had to pass through the manager's office to get to our meeting
Starting point is 00:03:54 area. My coworker Tim walked through the door of the manager's office, and his uniform looked fine except that his shirt was untucked. The following conversation took place. Mr. Hardass said, your shirt was untucked. The following conversation took place. Mr. Hardass said, your shirt should be tucked in. Absolutely, and I'll do that when I set my gear down and go to the bathroom. No, you need to show up for work ready to work. Not show up and get ready on my time. Okay, let me set my stuff down and I'll go right to the bathroom and tuck it in for you.
Starting point is 00:04:22 No, you're gonna tuck it in right now before you walk another step into my building. Right now? Right now. So my coworker did is instructed. He unbuttoned his pants and pulled them all the way down to his ankles and proceeded to smooth that his shirt
Starting point is 00:04:40 and then reach all the way down and pull his pants all the way back up and rebutton them. From there, he immediately walked outside and called the HR hotline and told them his manager on duty just forced him to undo his pants and semi-strip in front of him in his personal office. And he wouldn't allow him to go to his bathroom to tuck his shirt in. That he felt weird and uncomfortable to be around Mr. Hardass and didn't know if he had any ulterior motives. None of us are privy to what exactly happened from that phone call on. But we do know that Mr. Hardass got laterally moved from being a tech manager to the safety
Starting point is 00:05:14 team where he was no longer in charge of any subordinates. And beneath that, we have a similar story from Cheese Guy. I had not really a similar experience in high school, but I was in the vicinity of someone that did. One of our instructors was a stickler for the dress code, and tolerated absolutely no backtalking, including what many would call vital information. For context, this took place in 1999. One of my classmates was wearing a t-shirt that was inappropriate, and the instructor told
Starting point is 00:05:43 her to get rid of it. This was a class where everyone was required to wear an undershirt beneath their t-shirt that was inappropriate and the instructor told her to get rid of it. This was a class where everyone was required to wear an undershirt beneath their t-shirt. So it was assumed that she had one on. As it turns out, she did not have one. Thus, why she was wearing her t-shirt, but the teacher wouldn't hear it. She attempted to go to the locker room, but he told them to get rid of it right there. So she did. That instructor didn't last through the end of the week and neither did the student. The student was back the following year though. In this story, I know that it might seem unfair that this girl got suspended for something that her teacher made her do. But she deserved it because she committed the one sin that no school can tolerate, showing her shoulders
Starting point is 00:06:26 to other boys. Our next Reddit post is from Vampire Wolf. I worked for a multinational company 10 years ago as the regional management running a 2A radio repair shop on the customer's main site. I had 6 direct report texts and an admin assistant. The text rotated, but the admin assistant and I were there every day. Because they worked 200 to 250 hours every month in that office, for only 160 hours of salary, I had a few things there as you can imagine. Two and a half years into working there, I had annoyed my boss and I drew the short straw,
Starting point is 00:06:58 so I was one of four people he downsize that year. I expected it months earlier when he let the first one go, but I wasn't gonna worry about it. One Monday, my newest tech was late in not answering his phone, and he came in 90 minutes late with my boss and HR in the vehicle. I guess today's the day. As part of the Exit interview, they got all my personal property, and oh boy, time for some fun. Most people leave with one box. I ended up with 5. Coffee pot, Toaster oven, microwave, my coveralls and boots. Oh, and my shelf of notebooks. My toolbox of electronic tools, my soldering iron, etc. By the time I was done
Starting point is 00:07:38 boxing my stuff up, they were missing two well-equipped desks, a microwave of 40 cup coffee pot, and I no-USB serial cable to connect to the battery conditioner. I found out from my admin assistant that my boss had to spin just shy of a thousand dollars to re-outfit that shop that week before going home. Your Hone could use a little extra. A bit more. Or maybe a whole lot of. Add some extra. To your holiday gatherings when you add ice cold Coke to your cart.
Starting point is 00:08:16 Coca-Cola. Real magic. Embrace the holiday season with a Starbucks Red Cup in your hands. Your favorite festive sips are back and it's time to make every moment just a little more magical. Whether it's enjoying some meat time by the fire sipping a Toasty Chestnut Prairie Lentill latte, spending an afternoon with friends on the skating rink, sharing peppermint mocus, or closing up for family movie night with hot chocolates and caramel brulee lattes.
Starting point is 00:08:43 There's a holiday flavor to savor for every moment. Sharing the joy and sip on some magic all season long with the Starbucks app. Our next reddit post is from us Po. So this didn't happen to me. It happened to an attorney who I work with regularly as part of my job. He moved from a very high cost of living area
Starting point is 00:09:02 to our rural community. He sold his two million million house, paid off and inherited from his grandparents, and bought 50 plus acres with a huge house in a bedroom community that has a lot of dairy farms. He always used to say how much better it was living here, both in terms of lifestyle and monetarily, because his urban $2 million house had property taxes and excess of $40,000 a year. Now in addition to his huge house, his property had about 40 acres of fields and 10 acres of woods.
Starting point is 00:09:31 After moving to his new house, the attorney was approached by his neighbor, one of the local dairy farmers. The farmer told the attorney how he had a handshake agreement with the former owner of the attorney's home and property. The farmer would mow the fields for a hay two to three times per year and would harvest a sustainable amount of trees from the woods. In exchange, the former property owner got 10% of the chopped wood, which was more than enough to heat the house all year long without having to run the oil boiler for anything more than hot water. The farmer wanted to keep this arrangement going because it worked out well for both
Starting point is 00:10:00 parties for over a decade. The attorney thought the former owner was being taken advantage of and refused to do a handshake agreement, but he told the farmer to give him a week to drop a proper contract. The farmer was not overjoyed with the attorney making this more than a gentleman's agreement, but he agreed to come back the following week. The attorney decided that what would be fair was that the farmer should pay him $1,000 for each time he mowed the fields for hay, Since the farmer would feed the hay to his cows for free otherwise. The attorney completely ignored the fact that the farmer was using his own equipment in time to do the hang. Also, the lawyer said he deserved 50% of the chopped wood, not 10%. Or, at the very least, he deserved 50% of the revenue the farmer got from selling the
Starting point is 00:10:45 excess chopped wood. Once again the attorney ignored the equipment and time investment from the farmer. As you can guess the farmer refused. This all happened in late 2019 when the fields were rather bare and the supply of chopped wood for the house was full. Well here comes 2020 and how the field start looking like garbage. Because none of the other farmers will pay to hay the fields. In fact, after speaking with the first farmer, all the other local farmers are unwilling
Starting point is 00:11:13 to mow the fields unless the attorney pays them a thousand bucks per mowing. And of course, winter time comes and the attorney's wood pile is depleted. And he has to use the oil boiler to heat his entire home, costing well over 300 bucks a month in winter heating costs. Now we come to early 2021, tax prep season. The farmer, being a good citizen, informs the town that he didn't cultivate any of the attorney's land for the entirety of 2020, nor did he know of any other farmer who did the work.
Starting point is 00:11:43 Well, as it turns out, this is a big deal. Because in our state, farmland is assess to a much lower value than residential property, and additionally, it has a separate and lower tax rate. Previously, the attorneys' land had been zoned as farmland, except for the house and a few acres of lawn around it. So the town sent out an assessor and rezoned the entire 50 plus acres as residential, which more than triple the taxable property value and imposed a residential tax rate rather than the much lower farm tax rate. The attorney was quite surprised and furiously told me and everyone else we work with that
Starting point is 00:12:22 he was going to sue the town town because they now expect him to pay $50,000 a year in property taxes. So this guy moved into a house with 40 acres and his neighbor came to him and said that he would mo his lawn for free. All 40 acres And then this guy tried to nickel and dime him? What an idiot! Because in addition to paying that 50k a year, now he has to mow that lawn himself. Our next reddit posted from Otter Lieutenant Dan. So I was working for a small private ambulance company that ended up getting bought out by a larger corporation.
Starting point is 00:12:58 To folks that have done this kind of work, no, it wasn't the company you're thinking of, but this new corporation wanted to be just like them. So corporate sends out a directive that all employees must check their work email at least once every 24 hours. No exceptions. Now I'm a lowly part timer, so it would occasionally be weeks in between my shifts. The fun part is I usually played field supervisor on my shifts that I did work.
Starting point is 00:13:24 So in order to be in compliance with the corporate directive, I set my work email to update every day at the same time on my phone. I would then log my 15 minutes of email checking on my paychecks so I would also be in compliance with state and federal payroll laws. I also made sure to inform my many employees to do the same. Didn't check your email while you were on shift because you were too busy trying to figure out what made Grand Maws ambulance ride to the doctor medically necessary? That's okay. Just check it when you get home and make sure you put it on your time sheet, though. It took a couple of pay cycles, but eventually I got a call on my day off, asking why I'm logging 1.75 hours
Starting point is 00:14:01 on weeks that I don't even work. I explained that I was just following their corporate directive. I was told at that point that I was no longer able to log those hours. I told them to give me that in writing because it goes against labor laws. Needless to say, the directive to check email every day got revoked. Oh, but I did put down 30 minutes on my time sheet for the call because it took 22 minutes. Our next Reddit posted some crazy gruff. Up until fairly recently I worked as a camp bus driver in a major industrial area. My job was to pick people up from the camp and take them into the job site and drop them
Starting point is 00:14:35 off at a variety of drop off areas. Then pick up anyone that was returning to the camp for the rest period. Now there were certain designated areas for the buses to pick up and drop off. You know, a bus stop, and only buses were supposed to be parked in those areas. The issue was that people would keep parking their work, pick up in the bus area, and block us off. We kept asking them not to do that, and they kept doing it, and eventually it all boiled over when a higher up in the company reprimanded us for picking people up outside of the designated areas. We explained why we did it and the higher up promised to do something about it, but never did. The second time the higher up reprimanded us for picking people
Starting point is 00:15:14 up outside of our designated areas. My manager told the bus drivers that the next time this happened, we should just let him know via radio and then just leave. So that's what we did. Now we didn't just spring this on our passengers. We made sure that every single one of them knew that the next time it was blocked off, that the bus would just continue on its way and leave them behind. When I told my passengers, I heard a lot of laughter and I could tell that they didn't believe me. However, the next day it happened again.
Starting point is 00:15:44 There were pickups in our area once again, and like the good little minion that I was, I did as I was directed. Got on the radio to my manager, let him know what was happening, and left. I understand that there was a number of interesting phone calls afterwards, but we never had a problem with pickups in our area again. I can tell you, at the end of a long shift when a bunch of tired, exhausted, hungry people were ready to get home, but they couldn't because Billy Bob parked his truck in the bus stop, then Billy Bob would be getting a lesson about why that's a very bad idea from the other workers.
Starting point is 00:16:20 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. That was our 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.

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