Malicious Compliance

[REPOST] Years ago, I was the CTO of a software company that was perhaps the worst run company I've ever seen. It was run by a "chairman" who used to be a flight engineer, and who had no experience at all in the software industry. One day, in his expansive wisdom, Mr. Chairman decided that we were going to give his friend (a local pastor) an office. I was ordered by Mr. Chairman to make it impossible for anybody ("Even you!!!") to access any of Mr. Pastor's files (because, y'know, privacy and stuff). I attempted to point out a couple of problems with that scenario, but was immediately shut down and ordered to do what I was told.

Now, this particular person had... well, let's call it a quirk. When anything went wrong with his computer, his solution was to format his C: drive. (Yeah, I know...) The inevitable happened, and Mr. Chairman ordered me to restore all of Mr. Pastor's files from the backup (which we normally did... ahem... religiously). I looked at him innocently and said "What backup?" It took possibly five seconds for steam to begin pouring from his ears, and for him to start screaming, "YOU MEAN YOU DIDN'T DO A BACKUP??? WHY YOU....!!!!" and so on. I waited for him to finish, and then asked him politely how he proposed that I do a backup of files that I'm not allowed to have any access to? The silence that followed was glorious.

I have a story that kinda fits! Never shared this before, but I'm sure many people have experienced something similar.

Anyway, this was long ago in kindergarten. We had one teacher who, for some strange reason, hated it when kids went to the toilet. She'd track who went to the toilet and ask us kindergardeners things like "didn't you just go when I came in" or "why do you always need to go when I'm teaching".

Oh and this is necessary context for later - our classrooms had louvered, transparent windows along the corridor, and the windows were usually kept open, so you could look in easily from the corridor.

Some of us figured out that it was easier to hold your crotch and make a pained expression every time we needed to go. We'd just say "I really need to go" and hop around and she'd relent. But after a few too many people did that she got angry and declared that nobody could go to the bathroom twice in her class and started writing down the names of kids who went to the bathroom. If your name was on the board you couldn't leave the classroom again.

So one day, one of my brilliant classmates asked to go to the toilet, then brought his workbook and pencil out with him. When he came back, he stood outside the classroom listening to the teacher.

Our teacher asked him to come in. He said "but if I come in, I can't go to the toilet later."

Of course the teacher made him come in and changed the rules after that. But I'd like to think this kid became a lawyer.

[REPOST]

The car accident was of the side impact variety and it was brutal. This was in the days before airbags and seatbelt laws. One second I'm driving and the next I'm halfway out the passenger window watching blood run off my head to pool in the glass of a previously closed window. Another second ticks by and I'm in the ER receiving thirteen crude stitches for eleven inches of wide open scalp. I lost more than two pints of blood and a large patch of hair. I also lost my favorite white fishnet t-shirt, but that's a separate tragedy.

That Friday of a Labor Day weekend was how my name shows up in the newspaper list of "Labor Day Weekend Accidents." Tuesday comes and I go to class at the local college. Being a teenager gave me the gift of immortality. There I was, fully ambulatory, just four days after a serious car accident. For the sake of propriety, I'm wearing a hat to cover the fresh injury. It was a whitePanama hat with a bright 80s style hatband. As this was 1983, everything was 80s style, but that's a separate tragedy.

Hobbling along, I make it to Sociology just as class was beginning. I take a seat at the back of class and settle in.

The conversation went something like this:

"Excuse me? Could you remove your hat please?" The teacher had her own sense of propriety. My hat didn't fit with proper classroom attire.

"I was in a car accident," I replied.

Did she hear my words or was one of her rude students muttering another in a career-long list of excuses? Likely the latter was the case.

"Take the hat off. You cannot wear that in my class," indicated she was not happy with my hat. Not at all.

Well, okay then.

Off comes my hat. Roughly a third of my hair had been shaved off. The wound was pink and puckered. The seam had a line of dried blood in it. The wound began an inch beyond my missing hairline and continued back, branching into a 'Y' shape. The surgeon's instructions were to keep the wound clean, dry, and unbandaged. Lucky for all in attendance, my mother had washed my scalp the previous day. She used the word "gore" at some point to describe what was washing off.

Imagine you're one of my classmates. Whatever you would say at that point would be something I heard from my classmates and friends.

"Ahhh, you can put your hat back on," said the teacher.

Not before a little malicious compliance, I won't.

"But I can't wear hats in class," I replied. "I mean, I can do it, but not if I'm breaking the rules."

"Please put your hat on."

"Okay. If you insist," and the hat went back on my head.

My advice is not to engage in malicious compliance on the first day of class. Not in a course where the teacher gives essay questions. That was the only 'C' I received that semester, but that's a separate tragedy.

[REPOST]

This is a little long. Sorry.

When I was in college, I worked for a mobile carrier in a mall. For a young person, it was great money. I was the assistant manager, which was a fancy way of saying I was in charge of most of the store paperwork.

[A few months before]

One morning, I opened by myself and a guy approached me asking for a specific phone and kept balking at the price, asking if I could "cut him a deal though". I was confident we were BY FAR the cheapest in the area, so I told him "If you bring me a better deal, I'll be it!". The guy does another lap, talks to other stores, and comes back. "Come on, there is nothing you can do? Can I just get a case?". I smile and say, "Sorry that's the best I can do today, but can I get your number in case we get a sale that brings the price down? (This sometimes actually did work). His entire demeanor changed and he handed me paperwork out of his bag and showed me his Id. He was from corporate LP (loss preventions). Apparently my store ranked top in the state for "excessive discounts" and "excessive waste". He then hands me a document showing all of my "friends and family" discounts. So I flip open my phone (YES IT STILL FLIPPED) and showed him all the names on the list are in my phone, thus ARE friends and family. He thanks me and says he'll stick around to talk to my boss and one other team member.

Since smartphones aren't really a big thing at the time, the LP guy starts talking to me about my job, and I ask him a little more about what exactly flagged our store. Turns out the other two people he wanted to talk to had more than 30% of their transactions marked with that discount code and our store seemed to "lose" lots of inventory. Store practice was that if you open an accessory and it was damaged in shipping, you just throw it away and grab another one. Turns out there is a process you need to follow. He showed me the form and said "you really should be between x and x a month to be considered average.

He then interviews my boss and co-worker who couldn't prove that their discounts were accurate and they were let off with a stern warning. From then on, I took on the responsibility of tracking inventory and warning the team when we were getting close to the monthly limit. Like a miracle, cases stopped breaking for the rest of the month with these announcements.

[Fast forward]

I open by myself again one morning. I older gentleman approaches me and starts screaming at me about being a "heartless bastard" and asking "how the hell can you do this to people?!". I look at him puzzled. "Sir, I have no idea who you are, so you can't possibly be mad at me specifically. Lets go sit over there and have a quick chat". As soon as we sit down I look at him and he starts crying and shaking. "I don't know what to do. I'm gonna lose my house". He goes on to tell me his son had gotten 10 "free" phones from my store and the monthly bill was roughly $800 plus tax. "sir, if your son started an account with us, there is nothing I can do without him coming to the store." The dad shows me a photo in his wallet and explains that his son lives in a home because he's too old to take care of him. He's visibly disabled. He was already barely getting by paying for his house plus his son to be taken care of. My heart dropped as I figured out what had happened. My co-worker had sold the phones to his son while they were on a "mall outing" with his group home.

Furious, I go back to the store and void the entire order. I instruct the dad to bring me every phone he can find. Anything not in the store that day would be marked as stolen. I write up the inventory report and mark all of those phones stolen for the time being.

Co-worker comes in and I say, "don't bother clocking in. I saw your order from last night. Just know that it's voided. If you pull ANYTHING like that again i'll make sure you're fired. Take the rest of the weekend off". He argues for a moment, but leaves.

25 minutes later (and early for his shift) my boss shows up saying he heard what happened. I show him all of the paperwork and explain what I did to solve it. Irritated, he looks at me and says something like "you know you can't do that right?". He then argues with me that I had no right to void the order and "the contract was the contract". Confused and angry, I say "look, I will not sit by and allow people to be taken advantage of like that". To which he replies, "If you don't like the way we do things here, you can leave." Shocked, I walk back into the store where he tells me HE is taking care of all of the paperwork to "fix" my mess. Quietly I rip up my inventory report with a smile and tell him i'm leaving for the day.

I call a friend who said, "why don't you just get an IT job (what I was going to school for). He then calls a recruiter and sets up an interview for the next morning. Boss's little push gave me the drive to just go for it. I nailed the interview and get the job. My now ex-boss texted me shortly after and said "Hey OP, you're late." to which I replied, "no, I don't like the way you do things there". Silence.

[Fast forward a few months]

Both the boss and the co-worker were fired for theft. You see, with the unexplained "missing" phones and with no one watching inventory, LP quickly took interest in the store again. Turns out the "broken" cases were actually team members GIVING AWAY inventory to close sales. So when I was there "balancing" inventory and giving warnings, it was letting them know just how much they could steal and get away with it. Without me there they just did whatever the heck they wanted. From what I hear, they were escorted out by security and all.

So in the end, I was pushed to start the career of my dreams. They have a record.

Thanks for sticking with me, sorry it was so long.

This story sort of fits here, just trying to add content.

Some backstory, my old school used to provide new uniforms every year for certain athletics teams. For some reason staring two years before all uniform ordering was decided by the head coach for a completely different sport. He had a reputation for ordering all the girls teams the skimpiest clothes he could find in the catalog.

My sport had a boys team and girls team under one coach. The boys team were issued knee length shorts and jerseys, the girls team was given skintight spandex leotards. ( I think he knew a girl on our team really hated the things because he stopped ordering them as soon as she graduated) The first year we just sucked it up and wore them. The second year my coach dug out old uniforms from storage for the girls team and while we were required to wear the official uniform we just wore school branded clothes over it for competition.

So next season rolls around and there is a new rule, the girls team are no longer permitted to wear any clothing not part of the official uniform during competitions. Also the new uniforms include a pair of shorts that are slit all the way to the waist band. The boys uniforms have not changed. These are the official uniforms and we have to order them for the teams, but there is no rule saying the boys can’t wear extra clothes so the boys team put down their clothing sizes for the skimpy shorts and the girls ordered the knee length shorts in their size. The boys team competing in the uniforms caused enough awareness that all uniform decisions were handed back to the individual sports coaches.

[REPOST] I used to be an assistant golf course superintendent. One day my boss had me spraying chemicals on the fairways.

As I was spraying, some of our employees were having an issue with their machine. I stopped to help them and my boss pulls up and starts flipping out on me saying if I'm spraying fairways, that's all I need to be doing is spraying fairways. Not anything else. Okay, no problem.

A couple weeks later, the exact same scenario happened. I was spraying and some employees needed help. I ignored them and just kept on spraying. Their machine was broken down for nearly half an hour in the middle of the fairway during play before my boss rode around again and saw.

He came up to me livid and was saying that if I'm spraying fairways and I see someone needs help, I need to be able to break off and help them, that's part of being a manger.

I told him I didn't understand, because two weeks ago he explicitly told me to ONLY spray and reminded him of how he got mad when I did exactly that. He just stared at me for a second and then drove away in his golf cart. He came back a few holes later to apologize and says he did remember telling me that, and from now on I should just use my best judgement. uh-duh!!!

[REPOST]

Back in the 1980's I worked for a sporting goods company as a catalog designer. Small company, privately owned. I was the entire advertising department. I created four catalogs a year - these were responsible for most of our mail-order sales (pre-internet) to the tune of around $700K a year.

We sent the catalogs via bulk mail using a mailing service - this let us send them for a much discounted rate. To do this required the use of a bulk mail permit, and placing the permit info on the mailing area of the catalog. Technically it's called a "fiche."

Enter a new boss, call him Ron. I was #1 - the only one - in my department. For some reason the company owner hired Ron as a favor to a friend. From day one he was micromanaging, questioning everything, and screwing up my very tight schedule. This was BEFORE computers were common. EVERYTHING was by hand. Literally typing out copy and reducing it on a photocopier to fit. Developing the photo film myself, making prints, etc. The actual printer had to add screens to the photos so they'd print, burn metal plates, and so on. All time consuming and expensive. Deadlines could not be missed. So I was stuck with several 16 hour days come crunch-time.

I was complaining to the owner, but he really couldn't care less. I really wanted to stick it to Ron and the opportunity presented itself. Constant threats of "my way or you're fired" were getting to me. The latest pre-summer catalog was done (summer was our BIG season.) I had to give him my mock-up (photocopied sheets stapled together) of the final catalog for his approval - a new step added after he demanded it. He looked at it and sent it back with several pointless revisions. And a note to remove that "ugly permit box" because it was not needed. Where he worked previously stuffed their mailers in envelopes - the envelopes had the fiche, but their mailer did this last step. I simply asked him to initial the changes as this was the final approved version and was going to the printer the next day. There was no time to check it again. So he did. I knew it would be a total mess and it's something I would NEVER would have done in the past.

50,000 catalogs printed and shipped directly to the mailer. The day they arrive at the mailer the boss gets a call from the sales rep. "We can't mail your catalogs." Boss storms into my area of the building and is literally screaming. Ron is now pissed and yelling at me, joined by the boss. I swear - spittle and froth, vein bulging screaming. Minimum two week delay, wasted money, lost sales. I explain what happened, the threat to fire me, and showed the owner the changes to the final copy. Initialed by Ron. He was going to give Ron a 2nd chance until the bill came in from the printer. They had to stamp 50,000 catalogs by hand. We had to rent their permit, since that's what was on their stamp. Rental and labor was almost $8,000. Adjusted for inflation that's $20,000. Plus our early summer sales boost was off by almost $50K from previous years. Or $200K adjusted for inflation.

Ron WAS fired. I was left alone after that.

[REPOST]

Way back in the early 2000's I found myself working freelance as a result of the dot com implosion.

I found a gig sub-contracting for a contract a large company in San Diego had acquired from another company. They wanted to build a reliable delivery platform for the cell network. In those days cell data was 2G & 2.5G at best, so this wasn't as easy as you might think.

The division of the large company ran a satellite message platform, and the CTO of that division had no interest in this project, which is how I ended up with it.

Interestingly enough in the dot com implosion I had been let go by a company building a VAN overlay on the internet, a very similar problem. Since the second version of a product is always better I just took the lessons I learned and applied them to this project.

That included heavily relying on this "new thing" called open source software. It took my small team about six months to build and deliver the platform and both the customer and the sales people were very happy with the result. But the CTO of this division was not.

He had turned down the project based on his assumption that it would be a long and arduous task. So he demanded a code review with me and my team. He was very explicit, he wanted to see every line of code in this project, and we were not to leave anything out. He was sure we were somehow faking our results and was going to "get to the bottom" of this, as there was no way we could have delivered in six months.

So we assembled our source into a zip for him. First the code we wrote. Then all the source for the open source libraries we used. Then the source for the libraries those libraries used, an so on recursively until we everything. We ran all that through a formatter (to make it easier to read) and ended up with about 800MB of source files. Which we sent off to the CTO.

The initial code review date got moved back, and rescheduled for a month later. We sat in the meeting waiting for him, and he arrived about 15 minutes late. He stood in the doorway and looked at us and finally asked his only question - what did we use to pretty print the source.

I started to say we used a script we wrote but he cut me off, said fine and left the room. We ended up doing work for that large company for 10 years and never again were we asked to a code review.

[REPOST]

This happened a little while ago, but I still think about it sometimes.

I was a supervisor of a small team (who were great at what they did) and one payday had three worried staff members thinking payroll had cocked up and given them too much money - they hadn’t.

One of my guys came in 5 minutes late and got “caught” by one of the other managers. Who told my boss and it got round to me.

“I want you to check their clock ins and clock outs and let me know so we can dock them any time they weren’t in on time”

Now - I don’t care, they were a great employee, got a tonne 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 didn’t sit right with me.

Two things weren’t in his favour right now - one - he was being a tool and two - I’d already got another job lined up which he didn’t know about. So I didn’t care.

What next? I did as I was told and I checked. Couple of minutes here or there, nothing major. I then checked all of the extra time they worked since they’d started and added it all up. Made sure to take out anything they’d already claimed as overtime. Logged it in the system and approved and sent it over to finance myself.

Then I checked my other guys times as well and did the same thing.

Turns out - my guys were damn helpful, and helped out other areas when they could. The Overtime went over certain time limits and tipped over from 1.5 times pay to 2 times pay.

It added up to a lot.

I delayed it a couple of days to make sure it all went through and double checked with finance to make sure all was good. Then I called a meeting with my boss to let him know everything and hand him a letter.

He was not pleased.

Worth it.

[REPOST]

This one is from decades ago, otherwise it would get me in deep doo-doo.

I worked as a truck driver in the mid-90s. The company I worked for (can't name them here, but their favorite color is orange), decided to try out a new pay package. The details were complex, but it basically replaced the standard pay-per-mile with a set weekly salary, and not a good one. The new package was instituted on a small scale trial. The company quickly realized that they could make a lot of money if they didn't have to pay their drivers, and the package became the company standard.

Because of the complexity of the package (please don't ask), it took the drivers a few weeks to figure out we were getting screwed. Then we started fighting back.

A couple of things you need to understand about a truck driver's work week. There are 4 lines on a DOT (Dept of Transportation) logbook. Lines 3 and 4 constitute the hours we can work daily, and weekly. 10 hours (Now 11) driving/day, 70 hours driving and other duties (line 4) / seven day week. In order to maximize our income, we put as little time as possible on line 4 (for which we normally did not get paid), and logged the maximum legal speed on line 3 (driving), even if we couldn't actually drive that speed (due to weather, traffic, terrain, etc). While this was of course, illegal (and impossible with current electronic logs), It wasn't a secret. As long as your logbook was neat, and showed you driving at or under the speed limit, the DOT inspectors wouldn't give you a hard time about it. They had more than enough work with the drivers who were wildly abusing the rules.

Once we were put on salary (weekly earnings drop of about 33%), We had no incentive to "cheat".

Examples: A run from Portland OR to San Francisco CA is 635 miles. You could log this as one day at 550 miles (55mph x 10 hours), leaving you 85 miles (85/55= 1.75 hours logged) the next day. That would leave you 8.25 hour to drive on day two, after your delivery. Of course the reality was quite different. There are some 300 miles of mountains along the route. With 45,000 pound load, you only averaged about 35 mph through them. And anyone who has lived in the San Francisco bay area can tell you how likely you are to be able to drive 55mph at 8 AM. Under the new pay package, we logged it as it actually happened. The result being that I would arrive in San Francisco in time to make my morning delivery, and be out of hours to run for the rest of the day, for which I had to be paid. Not only did the company have to pay me to sit for the day, They had usually booked a load for me for that day (it took awhile for the load planners to catch on) that either had to be covered by another driver, or lost entirely.

Now all those things we had glossed over in order to keep moving got tossed into the company gears. You lost three hours throwing chains and driving across mountain pass at 25MPH, and now you can't make a Friday delivery (so sorry, no more hours to drive) and the receiver isn't open on weekends? Not my problem.

Cargo receivers didn't care much for it either. A lot of them would use the threat of not being unloaded in a timely manner to force drivers into abusive situations. I can remember with great fondness, telling a number of them I didn't care if they EVER unloaded me. I got paid the same either way. THAT got back to the company, but as long as I was complying with DOT rules, there was nothing anyone could do about it.

Also removed one of the big hammers the company would use to threaten the drivers, that is a reduction in miles dispatched. Fleet managers sure didn't like that aspect of the pay package.

All this occurred six months before my three year anniversary with the company. At the three year point my 401K vested, and I got my last two weeks of vacation pay. I figure during that six months I just about broke even on what I lost in wages. The salary pay package lasted about a year, before all the problems it caused forced the company to return to pay-per-mile. Writing this story out has reminded me of all the other things this company did while I worked there. I will save those for future posts.

[REPOST]

About 5 years ago, I found myself as a 2nd shift supervisor at a small manufacturing plant. We had a line of 8 machines with 4 others that could be added to the end of the line with a series of pipes and blowers.

It all started when my boss (Plant Manager) said "I don't really read the report that you send to me at the end of the day." He was trying to get a 2nd, much larger, plant running to make our small plant redundant and increase our capacity by around 8 fold so he decided not to even be involved with the small plant. Okay cool!

Well, the company wasn't doing too hot. We had a ton of demand, but the orders were so large that we just didn't have to capacity to fill them. I, along with about 5 other people worked 8 weeks straight from the beginning of July to the end of August with only 2 days off during that 8 weeks and as salaried employee at $30,000 a year and not eligible for OT. I was not a happy camper.

With the plant running around the clock, a lot of preventative maintenance was being neglected. I went to the Plant Manager and said "hey, if we don't shut down for a day or two and replace the bearings in the rollers in the 6th machine in the line, they are going to freeze up and the motor that turns those rollers is going to burn up."

He said "just fix it, but don't spend any money."

So at the end of the night, I put in my daily report that if the motor burned up, I would ask Maintenance to pull an identical motor from one of the machines that were not connected to the current line configuration, and that way we could finish this order and to please respond if he wanted to do something different and CC'd the head of maintenance on the email.

I never heard back from him so after about a week, the bearings froze up and the motor quit working.

I put my request in to Maintenance and they pulled the motor of the machine not being used and replaced it to finish a major order.

The day we were finishing the major order that we had been working on for months, the plant manager walks up to me and the head of maintenance and says "you all need to hook those 4 extra machines up and start on the next order as soon as we get this one out the door."

Maintenance head and I look at eachother, then back at him and I said "sorry, we can't do that. We don't have a motor to run the last machine. I sent you an email about it a few weeks ago and you never replied that you wanted to do something different. It is probably around $10,000 for another motor and we can hook it up tomorrow if you overnight it."

Well, Plant Manager blew a major gasket because we all knew the company was on its last legs.

4 days later, the CEO called a mandatory meeting at 4 o'clock on the last day of the pay period and let the entire staff go.

I got unemployment and took it easy for a few months before starting my MBA and getting into data analytics.

[REPOST]

Many years ago, I worked at a company that did phone tech support for a particular piece of well known business software. After outgrowing the building we'd been in, the company moved to an enormous warehouse building they'd renovated into offices and cube space.

The new building had separate parking areas for visitors (of which we basically had none) and employees (who had to park in the rear).

As part of the move, they got a new security crew, who had very specific ideas about access security.

First, the entrances were keyed so that you had to badge in (use your ID to unlock the door). This included the visitors' entrance -- reception had to unlock the door for visitors).

Second, all doors except the front guest entrance and the rear employee's entrance were switched to exits only, and didn't have a badge reader to unlock the door from the outside.

Third, they forbade anyone from permitting "drafting", aka allowing someone else to enter behind you, so that you had to badge in to enter. Several people got write-ups for allowing people to come in after them, just to make that point.

Fourth, and the reason for the story, you had to badge out to prime your badge so that you could badge in. For fire safety, you could exit by any door without badging out, but if you did, you couldn't unlock a door to re-enter, and had to walk around to the visitor's entrance to have reception let you in. Because the front and rear entrances were around 500m (1/4mi) from each other, it was easy to have to waste 10 minutes getting back in the building if you forgot to badge out, and in 40C (100F) weather for much of the summer.

The explanation we were given was that they needed to know how many people were in the building in case it had to be evacuated. Of course, that information was on computers that were only accessible inside the building, so....

After the first couple days, during which I, and nearly everyone I knew, had locked themselves out at least once. I realized what I had to do.

Starting on day 3, I'd enter the building, and, immediately after getting through the doors, smack my badge against the exit reader to prime it to let me re-enter. Every time a coworker saw me entering the building, they'd ask me what I was doing, which I'd happily explain.

Within a couple of weeks, I didn't see a single person coming though the doors who didn't swing around and smack their badge against the exit reader.

And at the beginning of the next month, security sent out an email that they were no longer requiring exit badging. I like to believe that it was my doing, although it's also possible that reception was sick and tired of dealing with having to deal with the lunch return rush, and constantly let the smokers back into the building. (never mess with reception).

TL;DR they required us to badge out if we wanted to badge back in, so I badged out immediately on entering, and started a trend.

[REPOST]

When I went traveling this year and cancelled my home internet, the company said if I don't have a paper proving I'm leaving to go abroad at least a few month I would have to pay substantial cancellation fees. Said proof could be either a rental agreement, a work contract or a university enrollment.

Since I'm just traveling in different places without settling, I had neither of those.

Cue malicious compliance: I figured they probably don't really cared so I took the Wikipedia page for the internet (so it's a least one page long) in Greek (so it's a different alphabet), removed all the latin characters (DNS, IP, HTTP, ...), put "Rental agreement" in Greek on top, my name randomly in the first paragraph and signed at the bottom.

A few days later, I got an email saying the cancellation fees were waived

[NOT OC - REPOST]

I used to work for a big local fastfood chain in the Philippines. I worked as a dinning crew there and my job was to serve the costumers. I was just fresh out of high school back then around 2016.

Our store operated from 6am to 12 midnight and one day, right when we were about to close down for the day, a woman, in her mid 20s came in with another girl. This woman was a bit tomboyish and just looking at the way she moves, I can tell she was a hotshot. After she got her order, she and the girl she was with sat at the seat at the most isolated corner of the dinning area.

After a few minutes, her order came out and I served it to them. It was one spicy chicken and one classic chicken both with rice and drinks.

Just a bit of context, our spicy chicken is actually just your regular chicken sprinkled with very hot chili powder.

The tomboy, who clearly is the one who ordered the spicy chicken for herself took a look at the chicken and at the most alpha male energy she could muster to impress the girl she was in asked me to return the chicken to the kitchen and make it spicier.

I just wanted things to be done so I can get back to cleaning so I just took the chicken back to the kitchen and asked the fryman to add more spicy sprinkle to it. The PC (the one in control of the whole kitchen) interrupted and offered to make the chicken spicier instead.

Apparently when the tomboy made their order earlier, they were very rude to the cashier which pissed off the PC because the tomboy acted really arrogantly.

I guess this is where you cue malicious compliance.

The PC got a plate, put on some plastic hand gloves, placed the chicken on the new plate and poured all the content of the shake can on the chicken. The chili sprinkle on the shake can was going to be disposed off after the shift ended anyways so the manager who was watching everything didn't really said anything. The PC then proceeded to roll the chicken around on the bed of spicy sprinkle and by the time he was finished, the chicken which entered the kitchen with a golden brown color was now reddish. It just looks like a lump of chili sprinkles.

I brought the order back to the tomby and her girl and left them be and went out to clean the glass panels. It was near closing time so I was in a hurry to do my cleaning. After about almost half an hour, I. Saw the tomboy left. She was beat red, as if she just had a fight with someone. There was no commotion so I doubted that was actually the case.

I went back inside th collect the dishes. When I got to their seat, I ended up laughing when I saw the tomboy's plate. On it was the breading of the chicken, some chewd up chicken that was spat back into the plate and a ton of chili sprinkles around the table. She clearly tried to shake off the excess chili powder but wasn't too successful in doing so. The chicken was also only half eaten.

[NOT OC - REPOST]

This happened a few years ago, I was a data and reporting analyst and did all the ad hoc reports for the company. My boss, we'll call her Kerry, was a useless, she was one of these people that was always late, left early and took days off at short notice. The only thing of value she did was all the regular reports - sales, revenue etc. We suspected she got away with it because she was having an affair with her boss, we'll call him Stewart.

Our CEO was a fairly decent bloke, he'd look for ways to cut costs and would pay regular bonuses for the best cost saving initiatives. Kerry was very keen to submit ideas and encouraged us all to automate our tasks so she could try and take the credit for the savings.

On one of her skive days, which coincidently Stewart was "sick" as well the CEO was desperate for the sales report my boss does. I said I'd give it a look and see if I could get it done. Normally she'd spend 2-3 days doing it each week but the CEO wanted it that afternoon. A quick inspection of the data showed it would quite easily be automated so I knocked up the necessary script and got it over to the CEO who was super impressed that not only had I got it done in a couple of hours but also that it could be updated whenever he needed it. He asked if I could also look at the revenue, churn and a couple of other reports. Over that afternoon I automated everything my boss did.

Both Kerry and Stewart were back in the next day but were immediately summoned to the CEO's office before being suspended and sent home. Turns out the CEO knew they were having an affair and all the times they were sick or late or had to leave early was so they could sneak off and have sex. He'd not done anything about it because how important these reports were. Now they were automated he was able to get them suspended and later fired for gross misconduct for all the time they'd taken off. I also got a nice bonus out of it.

TL;DR: My useless boss encouraged us to automated our work so I automated all her tasks and the CEO fired her for.

[NOT OC - REPOST]

I had a job years ago at a contractor that I HATED. It was 2 years of my life I will never get back. They kept promising me raises and bonus but they never really materialized. I actually did quit once because my wife was going to do a short term program across the country. We were looking to start over and we were just going to move there. They begged me to stay and said they would pay for flights and expenses. I eventually agreed, however later found out that they took those expenses out of my bonus. My boss, who made 5 times more than me, would always complain about how expensive I was (I made $45k a year). They kept pressuring me to do bigger jobs that I wasn't trained for and some ended badly. Finally, I had enough and I was done with those jerks.

I was able to find another job (my current one now) and I put in my notice. My new boss wanted me to start on the 1st of the month which was about 1.5 weeks notice. I had not problem with this but my old boss wasn't having it. He insisted on 2 weeks which, which with the weekends as closer to 2.5 weeks. I ended up starting on the 7th of the month. The only problem was that by the 1st, I had already handed over ALL of my existing work and literally had no active projects. Other than answering the phone and sending out people for quick service calls, I had nothing to do. I spend those few days taking extra long lunches, playing video games and even going to a local park and taking a nap. On my final day, my boss wasn't even in the office so I never even said "good bye" to him. I said bye to a few friends, had a 10 minute meeting with HR for an exit interview and never looked back.

[NOT OC - REPOST]

I promise I am the least petty person you’ll meet, but this “ask” just took me over the edge.

I work for a very large company, make very good money and work long hours often, which up until this point I’ve been totally fine doing. Night meetings until 10pm? Fine. Drive 2 hours to major plant multiple times a week? Alrighty. But this past week we had a global supplier team fly in from Japan. FaceTime at the plant is incredibly important. This means I need to be at the plant every single day for the next 2.5 weeks.

I have two bosses, a direct boss man, and the big boss lady. We’ll call them Joe and Jill. When discussing this trip from our global counterparts (25k each person), Joe and I talked to Jill about spending a couple nights in a local hotel so we could cut back on driving. She said “that’s not necessary, you guys can just drive. I’ll approve 1 night at a hotel so you can do relationship building with the Japan team.”

I might have lost y’all already with the crazy hours and long driving, but I could MAYBE get on board with this, if it wasn’t for Tuesday mornings. Tuesday mornings we have a couple critical global calls at the plant, and with the Japan team in town, we should really be there in person for collaboration. Myself, Joe, and Jill all agree on this. I pushed back on Jill and mentioned the Tuesday morning early calls. No dice.

Y’all, the meetings are at SIX AM. On top of this, we have Monday night meetings till 9:30pm. So I’d have to try to quickly fall asleep after the night meeting, then wake up at 3/3:30 and leave before 4 to be there on time. Driving 2 hours in the dead of night. In January. In Wisconsin. After maybe 5 hours of sleep, if I’m lucky. There are 3 Tuesday mornings with the Japan team in town.

So what did I do? I booked hotels Monday night anyway. Nice ones. Then proceeded to tell EVERYONE that I’d be local on Monday nights for relationship building. “That’s cool the company is helping you cut back on driving!” “Nah, they wouldn’t pay, but that’s fine. I’m just paying out of pocket.” I was honest, professional, but not shy that the company was not paying for this. I knew this would not look good.

The first Monday night my poor Joe was getting ready for the trek home and said “Hey don’t stay to late, it’s a long drive.” And I comfortably said, “Actually I got a local hotel, so I’m 10 mins down the road. But drive safe!”

The longest, pregnantest, pause.

“But, but Jill said we can’t stay local while the Japan team is in town…?” “Nah she said she wouldn’t pay for it, which is fine, I’m just going to pay for it out of my own pocket.”

YALL THE PAUSE GOT LONGER 404 DOES NOT COMPUTE

“Are you visiting a local friend or something?” “Nope, just for work. I just found it to be a SAFETY CONCERN to drive at night after just a few hours of sleep, so I paid for it out of pocket. Oh and I told the Japan team we can get dinner a few nights on Monday since I’ll be local.”

WTF IS HAPPENING, BUT BUT BUT JILL SAID NO

“Well… I can talk to Jill and see if we can cover it under company expenses since it work related. Have you booked yet?”

“Whatever you think is right. And yep, it’s booked and non-refundable.”

The next day I got an email from Jill informing me that if I felt so strongly that it was a safety concern to stay local on Mondays, to expense the 3 hotel days through the system retroactively. The same way I would if I forgot to pay with my company card. I 100% knew they wouldn’t make me pay (what should be) a company expense or punish me for making a good safety choice. Joe gets to stay local for the next 2 Mondays too!

The sugar on top? Every time I drive to and from the plant, they pay me about $120 in miles.

They could’ve literally booked me a cheap hotel for the same price. Instead they’ll be paying for my $220 a night in hotels of my choice which I specifically picked in a fun area and upgraded to get a shitton of rewards points.

Don’t cheap out on your invaluable employees.

[NOT OC - REPOST]

So I've been at my place of work (very large corporation) for five years now and before I started I have them the lowdown on my disabilities and yes, I will have more sick days than most, but I made clear from before the start and throughout that some days I won't be well enough to travel to the office but will be well enough to work from home.

Due to the business ops, all staff are provided a laptop which you can plug in at any desk or work remotely on visits or even home!

My managers didn't trust people to do work from home* and when it inevitably happened a few months in I let them know I am up for doing my work as usual, no problem, but I won't be able to physically commute to the office today.

just a note that my work was all business admin on a computer so I could perform my duties to the full same standard wherever I was.

My managers told me if I was not well enough to attend site, then I'm clearly not well enough to work so I had to take or sick day or else admit I am well enough to work and therefore well enough to attend site and get in the car now! They were adamant, despite my explanations proving otherwise, that it was all or nothing.

I didn't want to take a sick day as even though the first x amount were paid (scheme subsidised by the government), you only got so many per year before you didn't get any pay. But they told me not to work again by phoning me when I logged in anyway just to set my Out Of Office auto-reply on and reschedule a couple meetings (which were happening virtually anyway). So I took the day off, enjoying my rest and feeling much better as the day went on.

So this happens a few times and I keep complaining and even bring it to HR and senior managers but apparently it was my managers' discretion so wouldn't help me.

My days added up and sure enough the first 2 years of my employment I lost a few hundred due to too many sick days when I was not actually sick, just unable to physically get to work.

Then COVID happened.

No-one was allowed to attend site. Everyone HAD TO work from home. But due to all my complaining over the last two years I had heaps of evidence in writing from my managers (and essentially backed up my seniors and HR) that I was not allowed to ever work from home. So I didn't.

They were not happy but I held my ground. My partner was in her third trimester so I was looking forward to having all the extra time to help her and be with the baby. They logged it as 'sick leave' despite me stating and even getting a fit note from the doctor confirming I was fully fit and well enough to work.

Pay ran out within a number of weeks. I was pissed but semi-expecting it - didn't think lockdown would be so ongoing! But without pay it was going to be untenable for me going forward so I had to fight it and what I wanted fixing was my absence not being 'paid leave'. I gave them the alternative option though that I could work from home and, as my personal health and job circumstances had not changed, they would have to admit they intentially forced me to take sick leave unnecessarily over 2 years - meaning they would have to pay that back instead.

They did not budge so I sued.

They did their best to ignore the suit so I started building up my case formally including a Subject Access Request where they have to give me any documents, or even notes, held on the system that are about me in any way.** This included emails between my managers asking HR how they could fire me and HR apologising that they couldn't find legal grounds too unless I changed my story at any point - i.e. if I gave up the suit and continued working for them then they would view my lawsuit as fraudulent and terminate my employment. Anyway, this backfired on them as seeing this showed me that I could NEVER drop the case.

I won't go into the full logistics but when it went in front of a judge their lawyers were embarrassed and before the case was over they offered me a settlement to more than cover my lost wages. Even though I was never doing any of this to make money, but to just be treated fairly and respectfully as an employee, I decided to let the case finish and at the end, without me saying anything they doubled their first settlement offer with the condition that we agreed that we would all move on from the entire ordeal, I was allowed to work from home and after COVID continue to do so at my own, unchallenged, discretion. So I accepted.

TL;DR managers told me I couldn't work from home ever, tried to change that policy when COVID happened, and because of their own hubris and contradiction, ended up paying me large amount of money so they could amend their policy to what I wanted in the first place.

*Okay, I actually believe it wasn't trust issues in general but me personally, BECAUSE I am disabled.

**There's actually an exemption that you don't have to follow SARs if there is an ongoing legal challenge but luckily for me they didn't bother checking that!

[NOT OC - REPOST]

Good morning, all!

As much as I'd like to start this off by saying things like "Let me tell you a little bit about me", or "I'm so petty I performed at the Super Bowl Halftime Show in 2008" and then go into a diatribe about just how petty I could be, this is far from the truth. Perhaps in some alternate petti-verse where over a dozen college students were playing the part of (and absolutely nailing) whiny middle school students complaining about course requirements... or if they happened to begin to repeatedly harass me by way of being on ingrate-demo-mode, or spinning the wheel-of-you-suck-at-teaching to come up with yet another complainsult wrapped in a thinly veiled "question" about me and how I run my course....perhaps then I'd let nature take it's "course" and let my pettiness bloom, like a flower transplanted from an artificial habitat to a campus-bordering field, in the form of Malicious Compliance.

And wouldn't you know it? Somehow. Some way. Petty finds a way.

That being said, I really try to be a positive, supportive, caring, empathetic, far-from-sardonic college instructor. My clientele, as referenced above, are mostly college-age students who enrolling in what is basically a Pre-Algebra course my community college likes to call "College Math". I have the occasional young whiz kid who enrolls in my course to be super advanced. But for the most part, young adults in their 20s and 30s are who I teach, and Solving Systems of Equations by Substitution is currently what I teach them.

I have many students who struggle and require additional tutoring, and I'm always happy to oblige. There is this one student who I wish would show up to our makeshift tutoring group but never does.... let's call her "Mara".

Mara acts like she's the zhit. She seriously acts like we're back in high school, interrupt my demonstrations (miraculously, because I literally direct instruct for 3-5 minutes before I popcorn around the room and treat it like a very large standard tutoring session). "Mr. OP, my Dad says this isn't the way to solve it...", "Mr. OP, why don't you teach at ASU? (our partnering major university we transfer students to) What did you do wrong that youre teaching at this place?", the list goes on and on. For brevity's sake (ha) I'll make sure this story doesn't.

We have an exam that about half the class got a 90 or better on, followed by most of the rest getting B's, C's etc. I know that this community college, despite it's cheap cost, still has many students on full scholarship for one thing or another, whether it be sports, personal hardships, activities, etc. That being said, if I notice a student tanked the test I may just grade the thing on a curve to allow them to get the most points possible. This is what I chose to do for Mara, and she wound up with an 18/25 on her exam. I typed in the score, took a glance at her paper afterward and realized she actually missed yet another question, a major one, that would have brought her grade super super low. I decided to look the other way. Part laziness, part... being nice. Let's not say how much each part's worth, but they ain't equal.

So it's time to return the tests that I already had graded in the system when Mara starts up with her questions again. They are literally too tiresome to include. I will say her final piece, however: "Mr. OP, I noticed that you gave me an 18/25 on my last test, could I take a look at the test and see what I got wrong? I definitely didn't miss that much."

I tried to use inflection to let her know that she should probably just be happy with the 18, by saying "Yeahhhhh I thiiiiink I'd be happy with the 18 there kiddo"

Then she suddenly dropped a petty pebble at the top of a snowy hill...

She continues.... this time standing, walking toward me, and pointing her Cruella DeVille finger at me, saying

"NO! You can't just put WHATEVER you want for my grade, 18 out of 25 is not even possible!! I need to keep my GPA high because of all my scholarships!! You need to grade my test ACCURATELY!"

Enter PettyLicious Compliance.

I knew good and well that she did NOT deserve, by any stretch of the imagination, anywhere NEAR the 72% that 18/25 is. She didn't master 72% of the content. She didn't get 72% of the questions correct. I'll be honest and say that when I grade dozens of exams I tend to look at the most important questions on each test and ensure these are 100 percent accurate. I always pepper in some spiraling thinky-type questions, you know, stuff with rigor, but I don't grade against it. If I ever make an error in grading, it 150% of the time favors the student.

I took her particular course's papers out of my Blah-tache case, file through the exams and find her particular one, and look at it... quizzically... then I look back at here while my head is still positioned toward the paper. I'm trying so hard to give her an out...she wouldn't budge...

So I say "You know what? You're right... I did make an error... oh, crud, more than one.... "

I then behind my desk where the students couldn't see what I was lookng at I graded her paper right then and there. By this time I had memorized the answers to the exam without even needing to pull out the key, but I did so I made sure she knew I was grading it thoroughly... you know, ACCURATELY.

She wound up with a 14/25. I handed it back to her right then and there, and let her know that I had changed the grade accordingly in her gradebook. That 14 she got (one of the solutions to the system she just managed to solve for Y but not for X) turned her High C to a solid D. She looked through the exam, scouring it, looking like the toy man from Toy Story, using an infinitely increasing series of overlapping lenses to look for one miniscule error on my part. I also made sure I took a picture of the test before handing it back, so she couldn't pull the "See, I made it negative... it's right" sort of thing. She's done that in the past.

She quickly whipped out her phone to see how much this grade impacted her overall. She was livid without a direction to hurtle it toward. I could see that this act of Petty MC on my part was a little too far.... I actually feel bad for "Mara".

As she looked up at me I could see her eyes well up a little bit... it was that "too quiet" right before something bad was about to happen... My spidey senses were tingling (side note, this is why I hate Avengers End Game... Spider-man looked surprised at his death... he should have sensed it, right? But I digress). Before she started to take her clenched arms (that she looked like she was trying to remove the top of the desk from it's connected chair) and turn them on me, I offered a solution.

"Look. Mara. Remember you can do corrections on the exam for a fourth of the credit back, right? That will get you almost all of the points that you were gifted in the first place. Whaddya say?"

She sheepishly agreed, wound up with a 17.5 out of 25, and has yet to give me a hard time since... but I'm pretty sure my semester survey will suffer greatly.

TLDR. Adult student requested a grade change. I complied.

[NOT OC - REPOST]

I've posted in the past about a horrible non profit I volunteered with then managed the fundraiser for until 2021. After leaving, many of my staff reached out to me for help in various ways. I helped them because they're great people, and the board of the nonprofit were acting terribly, like Elon Musk wannabes with actual illegal treatment. The nonprofit sent a lawyer cease and desist to me about interfering with their operation. This was after I supplied old employees signed letters stating things like their promotion wasn't temporary, their raise wasn't just during pandemic lockdown, the bursary for the student didn't have an expiry, etc. I replied very harshly to the nonprofit and they back pedaled quickly and left me alone, which was annoying but still a win in my book.

A year later, I started getting notifications from their business Facebook pages that I created decades ago but was obviously removed from when we parted ways. I ignored it since I'm not on Facebook much anyways, and it didn't affect my life at all. It seems they ignored multiple notices from Facebook stating they had to have an actual human claim the business accounts, and eventually Facebook linked my account with the business account. Again, I didn't care and I figured their social media people would figure it out.

Now, I have their new social media person sending me (the business account) multiple messages a week begging for admin access to the platform. The old person didn't add them properly I guess, and then removed herself prematurely. I'm the only admin now, but I don't want to interfere with their operations and do anything about it. 😂

[NOT OC - repost]

This one is based on an experience my wife had at a previous job (around 12 years ago).

My wife (GF at the time) worked for a small IT recruitment company as a recruiter. The offices were quite small, situated on the first floor of an office block with no balcony or kitchen, or any place to really take a proper lunch break. So, my wife just sat at her desk during her allocated tea and lunch breaks and browsed her phone (her PC was locked from accessing any websites such as FB and such).

She found out that she was reported several times for being on her phone at her desk (something that was not allowed while working), but argued that she was on her lunch break and that she was not working and could be on her phone. She was then told that she cannot be on her phone at her desk as her colleagues can't know that she's on a break. She argued that there is nowhere to go for breaks, except for downstairs, and outside, a place where the smokers take regular breaks. But, nope, she was not allowed on her phone at her desk.

So, from that day on, whenever the group of smokers took a break, she would go downstairs and stand with them, browse her phone, and come up with them. This meant that she took breaks as frequently as the smokers did, and she was away from her desk far more than she was taking her previous breaks for.

It's small, but she felt a little victory inside. Luckily she didn't stay in that job long.

[Not OC - reposted]

When my son was in middle school, I was notified he had to be picked up because he was in violation of the school dress code. I asked what the issue was and on the phone was told “He’s wearing a shirt that shows nudity”.

I freak out and rush to the school, my mind whirring as to what he possibly could have worn…none of his clothes that I knew of had nudity on it.

As he gets in the car, I see “violation”. He wore a t-shirt with Bruce Lee on it from “Enter the Dragon”. When I got home, I called to confirm this was why they sent him home. Sure enough, a “topless” Bruce Lee’s bare chest sent someone clutching their pearls, apparently.

A quick stop to the craft store followed. Using puffy paint, I superimposed a lovely bikini top to cover Bruce’s man-nipples. He wore the shirt to school again and nobody dared say a thing, lol.