rSlash - r/Maliciouscompliance Take My Money? I'll Take Your Job!

Episode Date: August 1, 2022

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Welcome to our slash malicious compliance where OP cleverly turns a pay cut into a pay race. Today's episode is sponsored by Honey. I don't know about you, but I do literally 100% of my shopping online. Because of COVID, I pretty much have to shop online because yeah, I don't want to catch COVID and die. But on top of that, I read stories for a living, so I can't afford to sound like this for three weeks straight. Don't you hate it when you get to checkout and you don't have a code to put in that little promo code box? With honey, you never have to leave that box empty. Honey is a free shopping tool that scours the internet for promo codes and automatically

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reddit postage from Timothy when I turned 14 years old I got my first summer job and I had one of the best bosses that I'd ever had John I recently found out that John who I considered my mentor and my friend passed away although it's been well over 20 years, I still use the lessons that I learned and the work ethic that he passed on to me. So this is the story of John versus the new president of the company. Before I get to the story, I need to give some background and context on John. John was the textbook all-American boy. He had attended a prestigious boarding school somewhere in New England and eventually attended Yale back in the late 50s and 60s and wasn't only a scholar

but a three sport athlete. He played football, he boxed, and he was a captain on the track and field team. Fast forward to when the story took place, and John was still in phenomenal shape despite being in his late 60s or early 70s. John opted to move out to the country and start a family to follow his passion, which was teaching at the local high school and coaching high schoolers in various sports. Obviously, he was a high school football coach,

taught track and field, and he was an outstanding shot put athlete and can run the mile in many other long distances. Since he was a teacher, he had the summers off, so he became a lifeguard at the local town beach, eventually becoming the captain of the life guards. Over time, he developed the standards at the town, county, and state lifeguards had to pass. John was eventually hired to run the lifeguards and manage an entire private beach club instead of working for the town beach. One of the biggest challenges of this was that John now had to report to the President of

the Beach Club. I started working for John as a helper on the beach and then eventually as a lifeguard. For the first couple of summers, things went great. The President of the Beach Club took pride in having the best staff and making sure that lifeguards were well paid. And to his credit, safety was of the utmost priority. This private beach club certainly catered to the more wealthy clientele,

who wanted a nicer club instead of going to the public beach. Some of the club's amenities included lockers, cabanas, private parking, and a very nice restaurant that served great food and drinks. This was also one of the few beach clubs that had the ability to serve alcoholic beverages. One of the great policies that John instituted was that any returning staff member from the previous summer automatically got a raise. This pretty much ensured that staff would return the next summer, which avoided a lot of

expensive retraining. What was even better was that if you returned multiple summers, you still got an additional race. For most summers, this was a dollar or two. For example, when I started at 14 years old, I was making $7.25 an hour. This was back in the late 90s. By the time that I was in college, I was making almost $15 an hour. Typically, the club's president serves for a few years, and then when his term was up, a new president was ushered in. Upon taking office, the new president loudly proclaimed

that he wanted to ensure the club had fiscal responsibility, and that he would personally be going over the books with a fine-tooth comb. This new president's first order of business was to cut everyone's pay all the way back down to minimum wage and fire most of the lifeguards. As soon as the lifeguards realized their wages were cut, most of them wanted to quit. But luckily, John was able to cut them on board with a promise that he would take care

of things. And now, onto the malicious compliance. John agreed to have his staff take a pay cut, but he convinced the new president that any lifeguards with additional certifications would get $2 an hour on top of the base minimum wage. The new president obviously didn't consider that any of these lifeguards would put in the effort, or that it was feasible to get any certifications in time for the summer seasons, so he agreed.

Now keep in mind, John literally established the process and the curriculum for becoming a lifeguard, and he personally trained and hired most, if not all, of the trainers in the town and county. John was also a volunteer fireman, and he knew all the EMS personnel and not surprisingly had either taught them in school or hired them as lifeguards in their past lives. John quickly called in favors from every trainer and certifier across the country who were more than happy to repay all the favors that John had done for them in the past.

Most of them waived the training fees and expedited the training sessions for the lifeguards because they wanted to promote safety for the community. So before the summer season even started, all the new lifeguard staff had become certified in pretty much every single possible certification that existed at that time. I mean, I'm talking crazy, complete overkill and unnecessary certifications for a regular lifeguard. We got certifications for EMS, EMT, CPR, life-saving ocean and pool rescue techniques, Certified swimming instructor, certified food inspector, after all the club had a kitchen,

Certified county pool operator license, certified sanitary inspector, because after all we'd have to clean the bathrooms. We even had one guy who got a scuba certification. I could go on and on about all the certifications we got. The lifeguards not only went back to their original wages, but in most cases went well above what their previous wages were. At just 18 years old, back in the 90s, I personally went from making 15 bucks an hour to 27 bucks an hour. All due to John's certifications and trainings. It took a month or two for the fallout to happen. The new president tried to back out of the deal, but John was smart enough to have a contract

in place. And there was nothing the new president could do besides whine about it. He ended up resigning from his position to spend more time with my family at the beach. We rarely saw the new president around that summer and I think he eventually stopped coming all together, opting to join a different club. John made nice with the new president and explained his philosophy on training and keeping staff. The new president agreed and some of the senior staff ended up coming back with a promise

of their original wage. I heard a few weeks ago from mutual friends that John passed away in his sleep of natural causes at the ripe age of 91. He was still working, although not as much as he had in the past. I think it was mostly busy work because he was just that type of person. Every morning he would take out the lifeguard's rowboat and get some exercise in. After all, he was a certified rowing instructor. RIP, John, you were the best. Our next reddit post is from Yellow Triangle. Summer is here, and temperatures are approaching over 85 degrees on the hotter days. I'm located in northern

Europe, which means that 85 degrees is hot for us. And to top it off, the humidity is off the charts. Leave a cold beverage out on the table for a minute or two, and it's condensing as hard as I am sweating. There's going to be puddles underneath both of us. We don't have an air conditioner at my office, and we probably never will. When the weather gets like this, our office turns into a steam sauna, and there's nothing that we can do about it. We survived the best that we can by wearing less clothes.

At normal temperatures, we wear typical professional clothes, but when the temperature rises, it's typically light dresses and skirts for the women and shorts for men. The unspoken rule was to keep the designs professional. No bermuda shorts, no bikinis, and no clothes with searing colors. You know, just normal common sense. However, this year suddenly shorts our problem. If you've never experienced the glory of arbitrary rule changes before, I envy you. So now onto the malicious compliance.

We got a new manager at the start of the year, and apparently this new manager has new manager ideas. Without warning a couple of days into steam sauna season, the new manager decided that shorts were unprofessional, and he ordered all the men in the office to go back to wearing heatstroke inducing long pants. No meetings, no talking with people in the office first, no different alternative. Just here are your new guidelines.

Have a nice day, kind of situation. He just sent out an email at the end of the day and said the new rules were to take effect immediately. Now, I was none too pleased by this, and the next day I found out that neither were the rest of the men in the office. Mostly because each and every man went from being uncomfortably hot to now sporting his own little steam oven. And in the privacy of his pants, steaming a two buns and two eggs combo.

Grumbles were had all around. During the first day after the rule change, I found a moment to press the new manager for the real explanation. As such things have a tendency to do, we had a bit of a back and forth, but finally I was presented with his real reason. Shorts are unprofessional because nobody wants to look at Harry Manlicks. I honestly didn't know what to say to that at first because how do you argue against stupid? As I went on with the rest of my day, I tried to figure out how to get this insane rule changed,

because I sure as hell wasn't going to suffer more than necessary during this entire summer. I went to my friend to get his take on it, and to no surprise, he agreed with me. He said the new manager was just power tripping, and that he changed the rules for no good reason. Now the question became how to get under his skin and pull him down a peg or two. After a good 30 minutes, my buddy helped me cobble together a plan and I went off to set it in motion. First, I got written confirmation on the reason for not wearing shorts. Basically, I got the new manager to confirm over email that shorts weren't allowed because

they were unprofessional and because of Harry Manlicks. So that evening, I set my plan into motion, getting ready for wearing shorts to work the next day. When the next day came around, I peeked into the office wearing shorts. In no time at all the new manager was on my case, and in typical new manager style he chewed me out in front of my coworkers. While he did this, I was fighting the urge to not let a grand surface on my face. I think that humans are amazing in many different ways. One of which is that we don't always pay that much attention to the details of mundane things, and as

such, we can gloss over them easily. But once your attention has been drawn to something, you basically can't ignore it or unsee it. Once the new manager was done stroking his ego, I couldn't hold back my smile anymore. With the biggest grin on my face, I pointed to my legs and said, But I shaved my legs. I think that broke the new manager for a full 10 seconds. He just kinda stood there, taking it all in. He looked down at my legs, then up at my face, then down at my legs, and then back up at my face.

You could see him trying really hard to make sense of what happened while my co-workers snickered in the gallery. So, just like that, while we were still surrounded by the majority of the office staff, the new manager said that we could go back to how it used to be. I haven't suffered any retaliation as of yet, and it seems that it's not gonna happen, which is good. It's also the gift that keeps on giving, because I keep seeing the new manager's eyes darting down to my manly shaved legs every time that I interact with him. I find it absolutely hilarious, and I'm honestly considering keeping them shaved until it stops demanding his attention. I have acquired a new nickname in the office, which I guess is all in good fun. Many of my co-workers have started calling me Summer Lakes.

Down in the comments, I'm going to read this post from Sassman. Smooth move. Yeah, Opie, you really got yourself out of a hairy situation there. Our next reddit post is from Subject Add. Recently, our fantastic manager quit. One of the biggest things that he did for our team was he stopped the higher ups from meddling in our day-to-day lives. As long as we hit our target numbers, we could pretty much do as we please.

Do you want to work from home four days a week? No problem. Do you want to go on the road to meet a client face- face instead of over the Zoom or phone? Go ahead. Do you feel like closing all your deals at 2am every night and not logging in until 3pm the next day? Why not? Basically, do whatever you want, let the boss know, hit your targets, and everything was cool. You get the drift. Because of this, our team worked our butts off and constantly hit targets. With myself and a few others doing so well, we recently got promoted. However, our manager quit because he can't take this dress from higher ups breathing

down his neck about his management style. Even though we're constantly blowing past our target numbers, upper management isn't happy that he wasn't managing in their style. About a week after the manager leaves, the company hires on a new manager and pretty much an entire second sales team. The new manager is essentially just a yes man for the higher ups. Our super awesome workspace goes downhill and we're required to be in the office five days a week from 9 to 5. We're given a set seating plan and we spend our time cold calling, not relationship building. We do this for a few weeks and some of my

more veteran co-workers are not having the best time. Not only are we dealing with this worse working environment, but we also have to train new staff and the new manager on the systems in the product, meaning we have less time to sell than we have a meeting. The new manager starts going on and on about the new work system because it's going to increase sales which in turn is supposed to increase our commission. Now we get to the good parts. The hit obviously he came down for this meeting. She's been quiet until the very end when she pipes up.

She says this company has room for growth, is willing to promote internally, and she points out me and a few other older sales reps as examples. She then goes on to ask for the resignation of anyone who doesn't believe that her way will work by 5pm the next day. Me and the other veteran sales reps who are working under the original manager simply comply with her request and hand in our notice to quit the next day. We left the company with a sales team that consists of a manager who knows nothing about the product and a totally fresh team of newbie starters who have no idea what they're doing

and who won't get anywhere near our target numbers for a long, long time. Man, leave it to upper management. Oh, look at this. Everything's working perfectly and we're making lots of money. Better change things. Our next reddit posted from Cheese Lover. I have never liked iceberg lettuce, but growing up, that's what we got. Every time we had a salad, I begged my mom to use less lettuce. And after all my begging session, she said, when you make dinner, you can make it how you like it. I was probably five at the time. When I turned eight, I was allowed to use sharp knives.

My mom asked me to make salad for dinner because I was now old enough to help. I took one leaf of lettuce, chopped it up, and then put in about half a pound of cheese, every grape tomato we had, and lots of raw onion. When I put it down on the table, my mom said that it wasn't a proper salad because there wasn't enough lettuce. My response was, well mom, when you make dinner, you can make it how you like it. Needless to say, I was never asked to do the salad again, but I was satisfied that my family ate it that way because they had been bested. That was our Slash Milicious Compliance, and if you liked this content, be sure to follow

my podcast, because I put out new Reddit podcast episodes every single day.