rSlash - r/Malicouscompliance Dumb Karen Wants a No-Cheese Cheeseburger

Episode Date: March 6, 2023

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Welcome to our slash malicious compliance where a Karen gets exactly what she asked for. Our next Reddit post is from Where's My Chin. I work in technical theater design, and I was approached by a writer slash producer, Jane, to direct her show after I'd been recommended to her by a mutual friend. Jane had been working on the script for a couple of years, and it was her baby. The script was actually pretty good, and the cast she had already hired was awesome, so I agreed to do the job. The show had already begun rehearsals

before I was hired, as the previous director had suddenly quit. After one rehearsal, I immediately realized why. Jane was an absolute nightmare. She had no idea what she was doing. She had never produced theater and knew nothing about any aspect of live event productions, blocking, lighting design, et cetera.

However, she also wanted to control and micromanage everything. A majority of my job consisted of her freaking out about something I'd done. Then me spending 20 minutes explaining to her why that had to be done. The cast hated her and she made every rehearsal miserable. She wasn't interested in watching the scene to see how good the actors were. She would spend every rehearsal buried in her script and getting upset each time an actor missed a word, or if they said

them instead of they or other minor easily fixable things. The only reason the cast stuck around is because this woman did have some industry contacts and she was inviting them all to the show. She constantly ragged about it and she said that she would share all of her connections with the cast so they could benefit from the show. About two weeks before Tech Week, I realized that she hadn't hired a lighting designer, booth operator, stage manager, or anyone at all to run the show. She had been expecting me to do it all once the time came. I almost quit on the spot, but I ultimately stuck in because the cast was so great.

And I knew the show would never happen if I left. Jane would never be able to do anything on her own. I ended up calling in a couple of favors and somehow we got everything done. The show actually turned out great and the audience loved it. She had paid a guy to professionally film two performances and she got some really great

stuff on tape. After the show ended, the cast asked for a list of emails and numbers of the industry professionals that were in attendance so their agents could follow up. Jane betrayed them and refused to share any info about her contacts. She said that she didn't want them bothering people she knew. I was furious, so I sent her an email saying, you need to share that list. It's what you promised. You owe it to them.

She replied, this is no longer any of your business. Your job is done. I don't want you to do anything related to this project ever again. Cue malicious compliance. One week later, she sent me an email. Apparently, she was trying to raise funding to do the show again and she had entered the video that she recorded into a prestigious online theater festival. The audio didn't turn out great in the recording.

She realized that she didn't have any of the sound effects, the marked production script, the Q-Lab show file, the projections, the blocking notes, nothing. I'd done all the work and I had all the files. She had never asked to see them before. If she wanted to replicate the show, she'd need these things. Otherwise, she would have to pay someone to start from scratch. If she wanted to fix the audio, she'd need all the music and sound files. She demanded that I send her these things

immediately. I replied, per your previous instructions, I'm not to do any more work on this project. My job is done. Then I deleted everything. She was royally pissed. Her realizing that she had nothing tangible to redo her show almost made it worth two months of painful rehearsals. Our next Reddit post is from Perseminling. A few years ago, I worked as a cashier at a fast food restaurant. I don't eat fast food, so I don't know how it is with other places, but with this establishment, nothing was free. You want sauce with your tacos?

That's 50 cents please. Substitute your sour cream with guacamole. Sorry, you have to pay for that. You went ranch with your salad, that'll be extra. All of these prices were very prominently displayed on a giant menu in the middle of the lobby, by the way. Now, I was paid minimum wage, so neither me, nor any of the other cashiers cared at all about any of that.

It also made the prices ridiculous because a lot of customers naturally wanted add-ons. So usually, we wouldn't charge for most of those things, but we could only get away with that when our manager wasn't in the front because she was really strict. She was a yell at you in front of the customers for giving away a free sauce type of person. On a slow day, an older woman walked in and ordered a salad. By the time she got to the register, she'd loaded it with a bunch of extras. To be completely honest, there was no rhyme or reason to what I chose to charge people for.

It really depended on my mood. Her salad was pretty excessorized, so I felt like I had to charge for something, but I was having a good day, so I just ring her up for the salad, some extra guacamole, and that's all. It was something like $12.50. She immediately started to complain about the price. I explained to her that it was $11.50 for the salad and $1 for the guacamole. That's ridiculous.

It shouldn't cost that much just for a salad. Even $11 is way too much. I'm sorry, ma'am, but that's the price on the menu. Why did you raise the price so high? A salad shouldn't cost that much. I tried to explain that I was only a cashier and did not, in fact, control the menus. But she was having none of it and only grew increasingly rude.

Then she dropped the classic dreaded line. Can I speak to your manager? I hesitated, looked her in the eye and said, you don't want to do that. No, get your manager right now. So I went to the back and told my manager there was a customer who wanted to speak with her. She came to the register with me, looked at the salad, looked at what I rang up, and immediately started going off about how I didn't add the salsa, the chips, the house dressing, etc. I was used to this, so I just stood there and stared at the customer as my manager screamed at me.

The customer stared back, dumbfounded, as my manager took over the register, corrected the order, and left without acknowledging her at all. The salad came out to be around 1650. The woman paid and left without another word. Our next reddit post is from Normal Plantane. We have a hybrid policy at work. Two days on site, three days work from home. We can't pick the day that we work from the office. This changes every month. Most of us are on salaries, so work can go on

until late night or end after hours. On days that I have a heavy workload, I prefer to work from home and go to office on another day. One day, all three members of my team decided to work from home because we had a heavy workload. This is the only time this has happened since the office opened a year ago. The manager got pissed off. She sent us a patronizing email. In her email to us, she said that she would count this as us not working that day. We decided to ignore her until we got an email from upper management copying my manager's words.

Turns out, most other people had a heavy workload too and whole teams with their managers were also working from home. My manager wouldn't know because she delegates her work to us. Anyways, she escalated the matter and upper management decided to agree with her. My team had a meeting and decided that if we're losing our paid time off, then we're using our paid time off. We sent an email to our manager stating that fact, including a list of things that she needs to do since we're taking the day off. We spoke to the other teams who did the same thing with upper management.

Then we logged off and switched off our work phones. Our manager had to do all the work herself. So I work from home from my job, obviously I record YouTube videos in my own home, my editor also works from home, and in my opinion, people who work from home are actually more productive. I get way more work done working at home than I ever did at the office. Of course, naturally, I care a lot more about reading Reddit stories, and I enjoy that more than writing proposals for corporate overlord so they can sell lots of things and make lots of money. The point is if your team

can work from home, they should work from home. Our next Reddit post is from Eddie Minion. 15 years ago, I worked for a local computer programming company that made automation software. Our company got bought out by a bigger national company and after the dust settled, corporate decided they were going to send a liaison down to our local office to learn how to do your things to be a better bridge between offices. As in, hey, new hires, teach our guy how to do your job

so we can let 75% of you go before next quarter. None of us were happy about that, but our new corporate overlord had spoken. A month or so later, here's our liaison fellow already to go. So, show me the interface, he said. Oh, that's when we all stopped, looked at each other, and grinned. You see, the reason it took us so long to bring new people up to speed is that we didn't configure new

projects. Configure and corporate speak means go check off the boxes on an interface until it does what you want. No, my good friends, we coded everything by hand. And our new friend here was not a programmer at all. This guy didn't know the difference between a for loop and a bubble sort, so as we were instructed, we started walking him through our code. Here's our such and such code. It's the most common when we use, and it's about 1500 lines of code in its base form. Didn't you guys say that

you had some default policies that you worked from? Oh yeah, but they end up being more trouble trying to customize them than it is to just write the entire thing from scratch. So anyways, up here is where we decide our global variables. To our friend's credit, he tried. Oh, he tried for days. And every time we thought that he was about to figure something out, we intentionally switched him up to an even worse set of code. When we hired someone, we required a computer science degree, six months of on-site gearing up, and another six months of shadowing before we would let anyone handle a project on their own. This poor guy got the full

years worth of training in one week. To his credit, on his last day, he flat out told us that he was sent down to learn how to replace us, but that he was going to tell them that we were doing a great job and if anything, our timeframes were surprisingly short given what we were doing. We ran that department for a good five years before the inevitable revolving door of upper management decided to bring in a new, easier to use, sweet. People are still complaining about, man, I missed the old software. It could have done this in half the time.

And instead of having a 5-man team keeping everything up to date, we now have multiple departments that still can't manage to fix a broken image link in the new stuff 10 years later. Our next Reddit post is from Mr. Waco. I'm a 33-year- old man who works in IT cybersecurity. My work has been on a big multi-factor authentication push to better secure our systems. As a result, basically every system or software that we use requires a phone to access. Like many other workplaces, my work doesn't supply phones to its workers unless they're sufficiently far up the leadership chain.

On Friday, my boss sends one of those directives that management bosses always send to try to be commanding. He tells us that personal device use at work is not permitted, and specifically, site's mobile phones is an example. CUME LITIOUS COMPLIENCE To comply with his directive, I uninstall the multi-factor authentication code apps from my phone that are needed for work, and I submit tickets to get the desktop versions instead. IT fulfillment's response?

Oh, what desktop version? The boss starts backpedaling, but at this point it didn't matter because the tokens for my applications were gone. For extra irony, my boss rushed the approvals for software installs, but he got stuck in the new software approval process that he created. The end result, I spent Friday browsing the internet while my boss runs around rushing software approvals for the desktop applications that we need. Well, yeah, OP, but the important thing isn't that you get your work done. The important thing is that he sounds important and commanding and tells the little peons what

to do. Our next Reddit post is from Wasting Tim Away. I used to work at a Tex-Mex restaurant. You know, the ones that charge like 12 bucks for a taco. I had a customer come in and she asked for two case ideas that were gluten free, cheese free, veganfree, hell. I don't know, everything-free. I told her everything that we normally put on it, and she said no to everything. So basically, all she wanted was our gluten-free

wrap with lettuce and tomato. Okay, that's fine, but if I put all the stuff in the system, it'll be $12. If you like, I can just get you a lettuce wrap with tomato, and it'll be like $2.25. I was even going to heat the bread up for her. I tried two times to explain this to her, and she interrupted me and said, I know what I want. I want the quesadilla this way, and if you can't understand this, then go get the manager. Also just to be clear, I know that you pronounce it quesidilla this way and if you can't understand this, then go get the manager. Also just to be clear, I know that you pronounce it quacidilla, I just feel like Karen's

would pronounce it quacidilla, kind of feels right to me in my head. So I understood her, got it and made the way she wanted and brought it out. She gave me a smirk and was like, see, I knew that you could do it. That made my blood boil and I was in shock that she was so dense. Once the bill came, she grabbed it, and before I could walk away, she yelled, um, excuse me! So loud the surrounding tables all stopped. Yes, ma'am, what can I help you with?

Why the hell is it $24 for my two quesadillas? Because the price on the menu was $12 each? Yeah, but I didn't get any of the included items. Yeah, but you ordered two quesadillas. Therefore, that's what you got charged for. She, of course, spoke to the manager who sided with me and the lady paid her bill. The full $24 for both quesadillas. I did not, however, get a tip.

Okay, my Spanish isn't super sharp. I know a little, but doesn't the quesadilla span for queso, which is just cheese? Is a queso, without queso, a queso, or is it just a dilla? That was our Sashmalicious Compliance, and if you like 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.