Reddit's Best Stories 2022 - r/MaliciousCompliance

hey guys something a little bit different today i've compiled all the best malicious compliance stories if you like this compilation style of video let me know welcome friends to another r slash malicious compliance video you know in my eyes there's only one thing worth complying to and that's when people like me plead and beg could you please hit the like and subscribe buttons down below that said our first story of the day is by exacting muesli 6. teamster forced me you will pay me i drive for a freight company we own 13 terminals in five states what we pick up today will deliver up to 600 miles away tomorrow there's two job classifications line hall drivers and city drivers line hall drivers bid these line hall jobs and are paid by the mile plus all the on clock time is paid by the hour when a driver gets to his destination the company pays for the hotel i am designated a city driver we do the pickups and deliveries plus all the loading dock work we're paid by the hour overtime after eight hours important later we operate in the north where winter weather can ice the road no matter how bad the weather our drivers are sent on their run unless the highway patrol closes the road which is what happened the line hall drivers were called to stay home because of this because these drivers had to go on their runs the next night they lost a day's pay in the contract for line hall drivers with no deliveries coming through there was little work the next day when i got to work the next day the manager forced me and two others to make road runs to get the freight through while they can't really force us it's nice to have a change once in a while so i did it i started 8 30 am and was assigned to drive to a terminal 200 miles away continued to another terminal 80 miles from there then 250 miles home dot regulations are as follows you're allowed to work 14 hours including breaks with 11 hours being driving time it took me 6 hours to cover the first 200 miles plus half hour on duty at the first terminal the 80 miles to the far terminal was a nightmare cars and trucks in the ditch with glare ice making uphills difficult three and a quarter hours to make 80 miles they had shipments to go back with me that had to go gee their city drivers had the same slippery road as i did so two and a quarter hours on duty waiting for a load for me to haul back the math said nine and a quarter hours driving time plus three and a quarter hours on duty waiting time plus one hour break time equals not enough hours to start the 250 mile four hour in good weather drive home they put me in a hotel for the d.o.t mandatory 10 hours off duty the roads were better the next day i made the 250 miles home in 5 hours 45 minutes to service the truck and finish the dot log sheets and i was done i told the boss they had to pay me on the clock for all of the hours from when i punched in yesterday until when i punched out today with less than one hour break time we only clock off for a quarter hour lunch drive time plus on duty time plus 10 hours paid in the hotel 28 and a quarter hours with everything over eight hours paid at time and a half seven hundred and seven dollars and fifty cents for getting her done they refused to pay me the overtime and paid me like i was an over-the-road driver 530 miles at 48 cents per mile 254 bucks and 40 cents plus the on duty time of four and a quarter hours at 20 dollars per hour 95 bucks the total being about 350 dollars teamsters have a grievance system for pay disputes i filed my grievance at the 350 line hall pay and how it doesn't apply to me as i was forced as an hourly employee i am entitled to time and a half for all hours over eight they owed me 358 extra dollars i won basically what the malicious compliance breaks down to is they in their contract are not paid to do long haul work so the people changing things up and saying you have to do this work and then just going okay is a malicious compliance because they're going to be on the hook for way more money owed to op than they ever expected because they can't just change how they pay somebody that has a contract with them regardless of the type of work they did if your employer was trying to change the work you did without realizing that if you did that work you would get lots of bonuses do you think it's fair game for that employee to stay silent about how much they're going to be owed and take the job anyways let me know what you think in the comments down below our next story is by angela johnla keep the drill inside at all times got it i'm working in a diy store on day shifts at the moment the blue and white one for any brits reading one of the tasks is to fasten dividers into the shelving these are wood shelves basically pallets suspended between two beams so this requires screws and a drill the drill belongs to the team leader and it's a decent one that cost him a bit so he's weary of leaving it unattended especially as the general public are thieving gets i've lost more than one knife to light-fingered customers we're in and out of the aisle so he has one rule the drill does not stay there unattended it is to be in the line of sight of one of us at all times i really really need the loo but neither of my co-workers are in sight and they're in the opposite direction to the lose which i definitely need to reach sooner rather than later so the drill stays in my sight firmly grasped in one desperate mid as i scurry off to the staff door tucked against my body as i manipulate the lock at my feet as i sink onto the throne with a sigh of relief and when i finally emerged and returned to the aisle the drill dangling from my hand naturally they'd needed it while i was gone and if i'd been allowed to hide it behind something it would have been there but i was told it had to be with one of us so with me it was i had to drill all of them in front and back instead of just front i think a good way to combat this is take it every time you go to the restroom maybe start saying it's a comfort thing maybe seek out the drill every time you have to go to the restroom then maybe they'll realize maybe it's a little over dramatic to make sure it can not ever leave your eyes but to play devil's advocate i kind of understand if it's a really good drill that they paid for out of pocket you don't want to lose it to some well thief our next story is by an anonymous poster only respond to calls you tell me to no problem boss dude i work in industrial maintenance specializing in the automation side of things robots plc and hmi stuff but frequently respond to other machine downtime regardless the facility i was at for this story did radio dispatching via the maintenance team lead he kept track of who went where and what machines were the priority team lead was a screamer at people he thought he could bully and would often tell us how lucky we were to have a job there which will lead into a pro revenge story for later posting i didn't just burn that bridge i blew it up while walking away and not looking back at the high order detonation anywho having finished a call i saw another floor tech under a machine struggling to get a hydraulic pump and motor in place so i stopped to help soon after i get dispatched to another downtime call i responded that i would be about 5 minutes to get there as i was helping this guy i didn't tell you to help him you only go to calls i tell you to okie dokie there dude he had a habit of assuming things and taking actions for granted so i knew it wouldn't be long until i could help him step on his own richard a week or two later i get sent to take over a call from the off-going shift i got to the machine x-14 and before i could even get a solid turnover he pulled me off to go to a higher priority downtime this continued the rest of the shift i would get done and he would send me to another call wash rinse repeat at this place any machine that was down for two hours or more due to the breakdown had to be escalated depending on how long about six hours the head mother freaker in charge of regional operations had to be informed every day at six hours into shift all the floor level managers and supervisors had a chicken poop finger pointing meeting with the planned head mother freaker in charge to update down times root cause and subsequent shipping disruptions during the meeting the richard had in question called me and asked hey what did you ever do to get x-14 running my response i didn't get it running you pulled me off before i could get a proper turnover and never sent me back i only go to calls you send me to remember i could feel the anger radiating through the radio but the diq was busy trying to explain itself to the plant supervisor yes he did try and blame me i don't and never have given a freak about playing that game so i used the so-called open door policy the plant manager had to let him know what happened and pointed out there were 30 plus witnesses due to him yelling his instructions to me over the radio he tried to retaliate in his way but that culminated in the aforementioned pro revenge story which i'll post in the next week or so basically this guy's just terrible at dispatching and doing their job properly they were willingly just moving op from job to job without ever making sure that anything actually got done no leniency no attention to detail just half hazard and kind of witchy our next story is by helical twist malicious compliance backfire have a jerkle colleague who started the same job two weeks before me he was and still is a bully he had a multiple hr complaints in the two weeks before i joined and since he attempted and still attempts to use his two-week seniority to act as my manager he gave keeps access to information and would exclude me from shared projects he excludes me from conversations too after many meetings with management and hr the conclusion is that behavioral change won't work and we'll have to accept him as he is so i agreed to this with my manager and said fine i'll keep out of all the projects he's excluded me from and only speak to him when spoken to she agreed two weeks later management calls me to a meeting to discuss my recent lack of commitment and motivation they extended my probation a second time for it i referenced our agreement and all they said was yeah i didn't think of that it's good we have these conversations to support you through your probationary period management also told me that because i work later hours than said jerkle that it's making his job more difficult i said i'll come in earlier then we have flexible hours and she responded oh no the policy says you can start when you like so don't change so which is it for reference i only come in one hour later than this guy but apparently so much work is already done by him in this period and there's nothing left for me there's always work left for me because he's the one that assigns it i don't know what it is about this two week guy but i guess because they have slightly more seniority they're kind of taking their side but it definitely seems like they're very one-sided they just don't want to rock the boat at all and that's coming at the cost of upsetting op in their experience i think for op's sake they better just try and make sure they have a fallback plan just in case because it seems they're willing to extend their probationary period and kind of throw them a bit more under the bus rather than deal with the issues that the two-week older guy is generating and our final story of the day is by not yours my own sure i'll transfer you to the store this happened years ago when i was working in a call center to put myself through uni i worked in the call center for a major family entertainment company we had multiple brands under the company umbrella and the one call center managed calls for every store nationally unless you already had the phone number for a specific store saved and they weren't available online anywhere there was no way you'd get through to a store without speaking to us first we handled all bookings cancellations refunds inquiries etc for every store we were able to handle about 99 of inquiries without involving or bothering the stores the reason the call center existed was to make life easier for both the staff in-store and the customers it could be very busy and noisy in our centers and by speaking to us we could quickly and efficiently handle bookings and inquiries without store staff being distracted from other work and without the customer on the phone having to deal with all the background noise and being put on hold while staff deal with issues in the store we were upfront about the fact that we were a call center and most customers didn't care we were not outsourced we were employed directly by the company and based at their head office so in many ways we were actually in a better position to help them than the stores as if i really wanted to help someone i could actually go straight over to bob from marketing and ask about the terms of the latest deal or ask jane from finance to fast track a refund occasionally you would get a karen that would complain that they just want to speak to the store directly but most people were pretty good the rude customer one day i get a phone call from what i thought was just an average customer she clearly didn't hear my intro where i say thanks for calling company name national contact center she wanted to book a birthday party for her child at one of our bowling alleys and was perfectly pleasant throughout most of the process this was a very last minute party booking just over a week out so we already had a lot of bookings in the system for the bowling lanes she tried booking online and wasn't able to because there weren't enough free lanes next to each other for the party i was able to move some bookings to different lanes in the system back end for her and free up enough lanes for her booking birthday party calls were slightly longer than regular bookings as there's a lot of variables to go through and unlike regular bookings we have to take a deposit because of this we actually used the same website booking system to make birthday bookings that customers could use themselves online instead of our usual backend system that we use for most bookings that's because it automatically takes us through all the questions and the deposits step by step it's also important to note that when you use the online booking tool it creates a temporary booking in the system that lasts for half an hour this is to ensure that no one else can swoop in while you're booking and steal your spot if you complete the booking within the 30 minutes it's yours and if you don't it frees up the space for someone else to book i go through the entire booking process with the customer and get to the very last step the deposit as usual i read out our policy regarding taking a credit card payment over the phone and something within her snaps it's as if she only just realized she was speaking to a call center however i suspect it was simply because she didn't want to pay the deposit she says why am i talking to a call center when i rang the store i say you actually rang the call center as we don't publish numbers for the stores this is to ensure a smoother process for you and make sure our staff and store can be focused on the customers in front of them she says i don't care i want to speak to the store directly i don't want to speak to a call center in india i'm white with not even a hint of a different accent but she just assumed because we're a call center we're based in india i'm simplifying what she said as unfortunately i can't remember exactly what was said but she was extremely rude and racist and her arguing went on for a while to the point that i took a short break from the phones after i hung up and my manager had to ask me if i was okay i tried explaining that her booking would need to start again if she was transferred to the store but she didn't listen and demanded to be transferred the malicious compliance i did exactly as the karen asked and transferred her to the store i spoke to the store manager before completing the transfer and explained the situation and he was cool with it looking in our back end i knew that there was no way she'd be able to make her booking until the 30 minutes was up as the temporary booking created by the system was still there eventually i move on to other calls and forget about her until two hours later when she calls back wanting to book again this time she's rude from the out immediately demanding to be put through to the store i waste her time reading her the official statement about how i can help her with all the inquiries etc she demands to be put through and ultimately i ask why as i won't transfer without a reason and even though i remember her and know the reason i want to hear her say it i take great pleasure in telling her that unfortunately we're fully booked on that day as someone else had booked out the only lanes we had available in the meantime of course this answer was unacceptable to her and she demanded to be put through to the store again i transfer her and speak to the same manager again who tells me that he couldn't book her because of my back end booking from earlier so he advised her to call back later to book she asked him for the direct store number but he refused to give it meaning she had to call me back and i got to inform her that the party would no longer be happening all because she had to act like a kieran honestly there's really not much more to add to this story it's exactly what it should have been opie was helping them throughout every step of it and it was going to go smoothly and then all of a sudden the gears in the karen brain got unstuck and started rolling again and they latched on to something that didn't matter at all which was why am i talking to a call center it's like lady just finish your booking worry about the call center after or something but yeah probably just didn't want to pay the deposit and wanted to argue make an individual ticket for each case so be it set up we have been having constant issues with a certain service acting nonsensically for like a week now we forwarded it to the ones responsible for it shall be called l2 for simplicity and anonymity and receive their confirmation that they're working on solving it unusually we also got info that even though the issue appears for masses of people and they all get the exact same issue it is individual not systematic so we should collect and forward each case to them this is an unusual situation to say the least furthermore i see that my earlier tickets on the matter are now on l2 waiting status years of experience tells me that this means we'll sit on it until the system in question gets decommissioned then ask if the issue still persists that is not hyperbole so there i was yesterday 1800 hours or so crunching mail when i realized that two-thirds of our inbox is filled with this now no one actually wanted to bother with recording tickets for it since it was obviously a bogus request shrugging i drew up a template for it and started pulling them in and submitting the tickets and mass by about 20 or so i get a call from l2 highly unusual they mention the mass of tickets and ask me if i know that they know about the issue already oh certainly but my instructions are to follow your request and submit each of them for individual resolution i can forward you the info we got before i start submitting the next batch if you'd like no no no that won't be necessary keep up the good work and so i did amusingly by 7 30 the next morning we got a confirmation that they suddenly and miraculously managed to fix the issue i'm sure the thinly veiled threat of 100 more tickets had nothing to do with their sudden haste extra they still managed to screw it up and say that one case was resolved i notify the client then five hours later also say that that one is not resolved after all you gotta love that they were willing to just bury and sit on this problem i imagine as long as the entire thing still worked enough they'd try and just delay it and ignore it as long as they possibly could if you're working at a place with some software that had a very annoying bug you submit it to your support and they try and basically sit on it like this would you be willing to sit there and just submit it over and over and over and nag them until they finally fix the issue so that you hopefully don't have to be annoyed with it anymore or would you be kind of in the as long as i'm getting paid i don't really care mood let me know what you think in the comments down below our next story is by kitten disguised do it in your way so we cheated i'm a uni nursing student and on top of our own professions education we also have to take compulsory language classes chinese and english the tutors teaching these classes were not from our own department but from the language departments and boy the chinese tutor was awful as freak his teaching was nowhere near good but the worst part is with the assignments and tests where he would give us the work it offered very vague and limiting instructions that didn't help much when we tried to ask him to be more specific and give clearer instruction or to give marking rubrics you never gave straight answers and just try to dodge it but after the work was done he would nitpick every little thing and grit us really low we were all very frustrated about it but had no way to resolve this one day the teacher said that we had to take a quiz on translating classical chinese to modern chinese which i don't know what good it does to our profession but okay since we'd learned that in our prior education in high school anyway not a big deal before when we learned it in high school we were taught to translate it word to word and very literally for the sake of tests and exams but it was never the only way to translate as you can also interpret according to the meaning rather than to the words which both ways work anyway we asked the tutor what he would expect and he again dodged it and only replied just do it in your way and it'll be okay and so we did in our own ways and some in a malicious compliance way a few days after the quiz took place we were all informed by our department's head that we had a cheating issue within our class and stating that academic integrity is held highly and that they have no tolerance towards such things turns out that the tutor accused half of our classmates around 50ish people of cheating because their works were similar and all the suspected students were sent to see the department's head for explanations and discuss disciplinary actions two of my best friends were also sent that way and i was able to hear this hilariously idiotic story so the tutor accused several students of cheating because their answers looked similar and the students were confused because the quiz was not complicated and what on earth was he expecting out of a simple translation of a small paragraph surely there would be a lot of similar usage of wordings here and there the head was not satisfied with the reason and went on saying that if they'd not copied each other they must have copied it somewhere else on the internet it was coveted time and we did the quiz on zoom some of the students said uh yeah we certainly did some research on the internet because we were not told not to which they were completely right because the tutor never said you're not allowed to and according to the tutor's instruction they could absolutely do it since it's their way the head was still not satisfied and said that the students should have put in citations and references if they had done any research online however the students defended themselves to have done their research with a dictionary some with multiple different dictionaries and that's why their wordings were similar how and why would you cite so many different dictionaries on a simple paragraph translation us students have never been asked such stupid things and clearly the department head had no actual idea on what was going on she was just listening to the tutor side of the story while refusing to believe that the students had not cheated this argument went back and forth between 50ish students and the department head for hours until another department head a cool guy decided to intervene and told the students to go home as he understood and would try his best to explain the situation to the other department head later as we heard it was actually not the first time that the cheating scenario had happened the exact same tutor had made similar accusations towards a previous batch of students on the exact same quiz as well somehow it didn't cross his mind that it was his problem and maybe he should just change the quiz format once and for all as the tutor received all of the backlashes from false cheating accusations he was trying to cover his butt and announced that cheatings were interfering with the gratings and so the quiz result was avoided now everyone needs to take the new test that didn't involve translating this pissed everyone off and the students not being accused were angry too at their time being wasted since none of this would have happened if the tutor had used the new test instead of that buggy translation quiz and he was trying to shift the blame to the students in the end he mellowed down and suggested the involved students take the test in order to redetermine their grades while the others could take the test on their own free will he never brought up the term cheating again at the end of the term the language department asked me to do a survey on the teaching quality and i gladly obliged giving the worst possible score and commenting on how bad the teaching was so most if not all of these people had just learned within the last year or two how to do exactly what this test was and the test more or less is take the sentence hi i live in a two-story house and just write that sentence in another language why would you be all that surprised when everybody puts down hi i live in a two-story house but just in a different language it's not really a question that would have a very subjective answer unless people just don't know how to do it our next stories by wave lindsay must notify manager to use restroom before i get into the story i realize there are jobs where notifying your boss when you leave your desk or post is a normal practice however that was not the case at this job we had top secret clearances and handled collateral secret equipment and sensitive encryption key material on a regular basis they assumed we were adults and generally treated us as such also the fallout isn't juicy sorry but the story's funny to me i was an airman in the air force working in comsec it's difficult to fully explain this job to people who have never done it but the short version is glorified inventory management with penalties for messing up including but not limited to prison time we were working out of a temporary facility and not all of us in comsec could fit in the secure room so we were spread out in multiple offices myself and my direct supervisor shared a small office while my ncoic manager was in a different one one day i did what all civilized humans do at least once a day and went to use the restroom i came back my supervisor said sergeant smith i honestly don't remember her my ncoic name but that they were looking for me so i went to her office i said yes ma'am you wanted to see me they say why weren't you at your desk i say i was just using the restroom ma'am she says you need to be at your desk at all times and when you're not you need to let me know i said yes ma'am at the time besides email for computer communication we were using skype it was common practice in that office to send quick messages to each other using skype so i made sure to let her know every time i left my desk using skype just as she ordered me to every bathroom break every drink from the water fountain i even notified her if i was leaving my desk to come talk to her after she told me to come talk to her every single time i left my desk she was notified ma'am i'm getting up for my desk to grab a form 16 from the printer she says where are you using a printer in a different room i say i'm not but i have to leave my desk to retrieve it that was the last straw she had enough she told me to stop telling her when i leave my desk except when i leave for lunch from my experience reading all these stories it seems that they're probably just a bit of a control freak probably irrationally upset in one moment that they weren't right there they become quick to assume you should just tell me anytime you're gonna leave the desk not realizing there's a lot of opportunity to say hey i'm leaving the desk i'd say a decent analogy is on snapchat or twitter maybe turning on notifications for a friend that chats or puts a story up multiple times a day you might be interested in it but after a few days maybe a week you realize i don't know if i want three to four notifications that they posted a story item every single day although maybe that's not the best analogy because some people do and our final story of the days by 11 new rules are going to cost you your business i worked for a manufacturing company operating hot foil printing machines for the first six months everything went smoothly i was working two machines like most of my other co-workers working hours were 8am to 5pm with an hour lunch break although nearly all of us came in early to set the machines up and left late after cleaning up the machines at the end of a run usually 15 to 30 minutes extra per day the owner then decided he wanted to retire and sold half of the company to a larger firm with the intention of staying on another year before selling the other half the new company insisted on all workers not office staff clocking in and out as well as increasing the workload by pushing production goals the machine they used to clock everyone in and out was the cheapest they could find and nobody knew how to set it up so it shifted the cards into the right place to print the time so times would often be printed on top of one another or our out time would be printed on the in column etc big headache for the office workers trying to sort out the mess from 30 plus workers each week to start everyone carried on as normal clocking in when they arrived and clocking out when they left a week in and everyone on the production floor is called into the office there will be no unarranged overtime being paid and everyone must clock in and out at the right time was the message from the new boss 15 minutes of down time just to tell us that okay then we would all arrive at our usual times and start to queue up waiting for the clock to tick over to 8 am then everyone would punch in took around 4 minutes for everyone to use this one machine if a run wouldn't be completed before clocking out at lunch it wouldn't get started so around 11 45 the production floor started to get quieter at 11 55 it was almost silent while everyone queued up the clog out for lunch at 12 o'clock 12 55 everyone queuing up again to clock in at 1 pm 4 45 pm would bring in another quietening a week later we all get called into the office again some people were not putting in their full hours they were clocking in a few minutes late and or clocking out a few minutes early each day and this was not acceptable for the new boss also we had to make sure the cards were printed in the correct position so it was easier for the office worker who dealt with the wages to calculate our times no mention of fixing the clock machine so we diligently set about making sure the cards were printed correctly end of queue and clock in at 803 okay clock out at 203 after three months production was so far behind that they had to start asking workers to come in on weekends to clear the backlog of orders that were waiting pay a time and a half for those first four hours then time in three quarters for any hours over that nice for those who could do it a month later and the new boss was losing so much money they had to make cutbacks how by getting rid of workers and no overtime so now they not only couldn't complete the orders but were asking the remaining workers to work harder and run more machines i was one of those made redundant i heard from one who wasn't made redundant about six months later that the company folded a month after that as workers quit due to unrealistic pressure and they were so far behind on orders that the customers dropped them as a contractor the owner never did get to sell the remaining half and retire as planned i don't know if the old boss was like completely hands off or just really unaware of what was going on here but considering it wasn't a travesty when they sold the initial half you kind of wish that they would have spoken up and saved the day before it got to the point where they lost the other half of what they could have sold but i guess we're not really sure what that dynamic was like one thing's for certain the new boss was just not good straight up ran that place into the ground did you even read them i had a mid-level english class at my college in utah that was online and over the summer most summer teachers are almost always adjuncts and teach remotely from other locations typically out of state or hours away i knew something was up when the syllabus said you can use american english or queen's english just be consistent i'm dyslexic and didn't know so at the time so english was a struggle the semester before this is not because i couldn't grasp english my native tongue but all the reading was hard and comprehension was a challenge not all online classes were created equal you can't take an in-person class scan in a few documents and call it a day most people don't even scan the image as well so chunks of paper can be missing completely if uploaded properly i can take the files to a web-based read out loud program and i could follow along as a robot voice reads me the content her files were poorly scanned photocopies and were jpegs this meant my program wasn't any use so i'm struggling with her class and i'm about halfway done with an assignment with about 20 minutes till it's due so i go to a file corrupting website to make a seemingly large version of the same file to turn in but the website will make it impossible to read this would give me a buffer between turnin which would be on time in the system and when the professor emailed me saying the file had an issue opening and i could send another copy of my now finished paper some teachers caught on but if you only do it a few times it can save you turn around for an email was about 3 days from the professor and as her emails came from a uk extension they came at odd hours the uk is about six hours ahead of utah for reference did i mention that while nearly a hundred percent of teachers gave you to 11 59 pm local time to turn in an assignment she did a conversion and made assignments due at 11 59 pm united kingdom local that was right in the middle of my night classes but she didn't care so i waited for the anticipated what's up with this file send another email but none came checking my grades she had given the assignment an a i had similar issues in the next assignment and she gave that one an a2 cue meme of krunk saying oh yeah it's all coming together after a while i didn't even bother to do my work at all if you weren't going to bother reading it why should i bother doing it i only did the first four or so assignments some at home quizzes and the midterm test mandatory on campus i aced it for everything else i just renamed the corrupted file in the needed format and submitted it as i was turning it in on the same day it was due it didn't draw suspicion and the a's kept coming in the final was a 10-page paper summarizing the content we learned i didn't want to push my luck so i started it and got about four pages in the summer semester ends a week before fall semester begins and as was the case with nearly every fall there was drama to deal with that took my time and attention i blinked and it was the day the paper was due i was still at four pages so i corrupted it and submitted it better than a half done paper or so i thought at the time the paper got a zero no warning no communication no anything it brought me from an a to a c minus which for english wasn't a passing grade as far as credits needed so i emailed the professor but her semester in the uk had started so she wasn't emailing back so i went to the department head and emailed him a week or so in the fall semester he finally got back to me thanks for hurrying dude not like i'm freaking out here he said he was able to get a hold of the professor and figured out that the reason the final got a zero was she couldn't open it so now we fall in our integrity sword zoe so i made an appointment with the department for an in-person appeal and met the department's associate head the entire time she was being polite and understanding but wouldn't move from the file not being able to open she whipped around the screen to show me something and i noticed one of our tabs was canvas our online classroom program do you have my canvas info they say yes can you open files i previously submitted they say yes go back to the assignment before the one that the teacher gave an a and open it for me downloads file they say it won't open what about the week before that maybe go two weeks back obviously none of the files are opening i can't remember exactly what was said but i offered to show proof that i was never contacted about bad files and there were no comments on my submission saying that she was having an issue i basically told her if the professor could get paid for pencil whipping my grade i should be allowed the same courtesy the associate head had a slack-jawed look said she would discuss the matter with the powers that be and get back to me while my grade on the final never changed my overall grade rose to a b i wasn't required to take any more english classes for my degree but i checked and the uk professor wasn't in the schedule for the next summer's list of classes may not be malicious compliance but i sure did feel malicious while i do think it's kind of annoying that the teacher was not consistent if they're going to just kind of fudge the grades a little bit op was still attempting to cheat the system through and through do you think op deserved the zero on that final let me know what you think in the comments down below our next story is by reubenlip14 can't leave 15 minutes early once lost one hour of free work every day this was for a summer job in college me and my roommate worked about a 15-minute drive from each other in the same general direction from home so we carpooled one week i'd drive drop them off at the front door at 8 30 go to my office park at about 8 45 and it would be almost 9 by the time i got to my office parking lot wasn't that close and the building was big i'd then leave at 5 and it was about 5 30 by the time i picked him up the next week he'd drive and drop me off at 8 30 pick up at 5 30. we were being paid to work from 9 to 5. this was office work nit working on individual projects so the exact times we were in the office didn't really matter anyways so the result of our carpooling arrangement was that every other week one of us would end up working an extra hour every day i had no problem with that because it saved gas parking fees and made the commute more pleasant one day my friend asked if i could leave work 15 minutes early the next day as he had an evening commitment and had already cleared it with his boss i said it should be no problem and asked my supervisor hey do you mind if i leave at 4 45 instead of 5 tomorrow instead of agreeing he said no because we have set times and we have to start at nine and finish at five and not one minute earlier or later so i complied with that the next day we both drove individually so that my friend could leave early but the rest of the summer whenever i showed up at 8 30 i read a book till it was 9 and stopped working at 5 on the dot and either read or just stared at the wall while waiting for my ride not letting me leave 15 minutes early once cost him about 2 months of having free productivity for an hour from me every day if somebody is giving you extra work and working hard and doing good work for you you shouldn't nickel and dime them when they ask for one short thing one time all you stand to do is upset them and if you upset them surely they're not going to be very motivated to keep giving you more work and extra work i would feel personally slighted just like op and probably do the same thing this next story is by cadet garlic 9690 company policy requires a call off two hours before my shift okay i'll be your early alarm recently i've been dealing with health issues and a covid scare after being exposed to someone who recently tested positive my boss has been very vocal with me by constantly asking me to do half days and or begging me to come back the next day for some background i work with children i've also shown multiple signs of covet over the past week so i'm working on finding a time to take a test my boss is way more concerned about me going back to work because of our short staff rather than making sure i'm healthy enough to be around the kids needless to say it's been frustrating yesterday morning i called up my boss at around 7 am an hour before my shift started to call off another day because i was still showing symptoms she was obviously angry about it and decided to give me a lecture on how company policy states call-offs must be two hours before your shift okay so i would have to call her at 6am before the building even opens up for the day not to mention her shift doesn't even start till 7 30 so i would most definitely be waking her up early i try to be respectful of her schedule but i guess company policy doesn't allow that last night i set an alarm for 5 55 am to check on my symptoms and see if i need another day sure enough i'm still sick i called my boss at 6 am sharp and waited for her to pick up she finally answered and in the most groggy voice asked what i was calling for i told her i was calling off again to take care of myself to schedule my covet test again her response i kid you not was something along the lines of why would you call me this early i know this is kind of mundane compared to other posts here but i enjoyed giving my boss a taste of what she's been putting me through for the past couple days maybe now she'll actually let me take care of myself for once there's definitely no playing around to be had when somebody has a covid scare especially when they're working with children you don't want to pass that to the kids because the kids are definitely going to spread that around to at least their parents i know for the boss it's probably pretty stressful to be so short-handed and people are still calling off but you gotta bite your tongue and deal with it because it's a pandemic i imagine they told op they had to stick to the policy to i don't know try to discourage them from doing so maybe but only stood to make things even more annoying for both the boss and op this next stories by undecided mn can have white rope lights to celebrate christmas okay get ready for the color explosion about 20 years ago my wife and i had just gotten married and we rented a condo where all the windows and sliding doors faced the parking area my wife to celebrate our first christmas as a married couple put a white rope light on the railing of our two-foot grilling area it was a nice little gesture that night we went out to dinner and when we came home found a letter under our door the letter read all holiday lights must be removed immediately from the exterior portion of the condo christmas or other religious lighting is against hoa policy and failure to remove can result in fines and other legal actions my wife felt horrible and i couldn't believe it the owner of the condo had left a copy of the hoa regulations and i found a nice little loophole apparently they could regulate lights on the exterior balcony grilling area but not lights inside the condo game on i took my wife immediately to the big box hardware store and picked up two fake christmas trees about 2 000 colored lights a light ball and whatever holiday decoration i could find our condo had three windows and a sliding glass door i filled up each one of those windows with lights criss-crossing around the inside of the perimeter of the window and one had the led ball hanging in the center the sliding door had the christmas tree and full view completely covered in lights and ornaments also the sliding doors were full of christmas lights my electric bill must have tripled when you came into the parking lot of the condo complex you saw a beacon of light full of christmas spirit you probably could see the condo from orbit and nothing could be said by the hoa snitch apparently at the next board meeting a proposed rule change was brought up to limit the amount of holiday lighting being shown through windows it was quietly pointed out by another hoa board member that was an attorney that you probably could not regulate activities inside a person's dwelling i moved out before next year but i never received another notice i'm definitely not a lawyer so i can't really argue about the legality of policing what you can and can't do inside your house but i would say if it's something that faces the outside it might be a little bit more negotiable kind of like how if you're in your living room with your blinds wide open and somebody's walking down the street and they look over and look and watch inside your living room technically i think you're judged as being in the public view so maybe there is something the hoa can do in regards to that kind of stuff and our final story of the day is by psychotic writer sue me okay i will my nephew bought a car transmission on the well-known auction site a few days later he received a crate he opened it and it was full of junk parts just some old brake rotors and junk to have the crate way with the transmission would have weighed of course he contacted the seller and they claimed they sent a transmission and refused to do anything my nephew got a bit heated and an argument ensued and the seller finally told him if he didn't like it sue him now the good part said nephew's older brother just happens to be an attorney pretty convenient nephew calls brother explains the situation and the brother says he'll look into it comes to find out the seller was out of state the selling price was large enough to be a felony plus with the shipper selling over state lines it turns into an interstate commerce violation which is a federal offense he sent the seller a typical lawyer letter full of legalese but pointing out the issue of a possible felony and the interstate commerce violation mind if you had the money back in a few days and of course no charge from the family attorney i think the one takeaway i really got from this is it pays to have a good lawyer in the family that's for sure sure would be nice if you're in the heat of a legal issue where you could just call up my cousin vinnie and he'd come over and save the day for you also anybody that tries to scam people over like ebay or anything like that they deserve to get sued and they deserve to get reprimanded pretty harshly at least in my opinion no phones allowed at work tell them to call me directly i work in healthcare where phones are to not be used while on the floor caring for patients etc for privacy whs reasons which is fun and understandable most of us have our phones on us or in the break room and don't use them unless on break or away from patient care areas none of us check our phones while busy and if they do we'll always get called out for it by other staff we were all recently in a meeting where we were told we were no longer allowed to have our phones on us as it was a distraction and against policy meaning not to be used unless we were out of the unit or off hospital grounds a few people piped up and said they had young kids in care where their phones were the direct communication for the carers or if there were issues at home that they needed to have their phone to have quick contact if needed even if it was left in their handbag and could be checked on breaks not only that but we have a half hour unpaid lunch break where we should still be able to use our phones as we see fit but this was also denied as it's still in a healthcare setting and could cause whs issues being work health and safety risks now i know working in healthcare and personal mobile phones don't mix as it really is against policy however the issue with denying us complete access was a total overreaction the issues with requiring quick and direct contact with home or other outside work contacts was brushed off and we were told if the issues were that bad at home we shouldn't be at work many people were a bit taken aback by this saying a lot of the home issues are resolved by a quick text back and not allowing us access to our phones while at work was a bit unreasonable our manager said if that is the case we can give people her direct work number and for contact to go through her and she'll relay the message to us or give the phone to us to talk to whoever is calling so cue malicious compliance we all gave her at home spouses carers schools etc the direct work line to call for any reason if they're unable to get in contact with us directly and the phone started ringing continuously first was a lady whose husband needed approval for a big financial decision at home the next was a vet calling to tell a co-worker their dog needed to be put down i got a call from my children's daycare saying my son had been bitten and was bleeding mandatory reporting policy there were other several phone calls within the span of a few hours with my manager running to find us to relay messages or pull us off the floor so we could speak to the callers wasting more time than if we were allowed to shoot through a quick text or take a quick phone call while on our breaks the next day we were told we can have access to our phones while on break and to please tell our home contacts to stop calling the manager's phone it took a few days for everyone to get the message meaning there still were many unnecessary calls coming through but it made it obvious that the need for communication lines to be open at home was important you know i was kind of thinking about stuff like this the other day when even as recent as the early 2000s and all throughout the 90s and before that when there wasn't a cell phone a rule like this is probably fairly reasonable but nowadays phones have become so synonymous for that instant form of communication not just for reaching out to a buddy or for slacking off but also when there's a really dire situations going on it's the go-to tool to be able to help and cover those things so just for that reason alone i think it's extremely unethical to prevent somebody from having access to their phone i think it's fine to have restrictions on when they can and can't use it obviously but if somebody has a potential emergency going on they deserve to have that phone there so they can address it if needed what do you guys think do you agree let me know what you think in the comments down below our next story is by outer juice you need an adult to enter go find one nothing too crazy but when i was 15 i traveled to the final four with my grandfather to watch kentucky play they lost but there was a fan fest going on at the convention center it was an awesome indoor baseball field tons of basketball hoops and just all you could imagine it was great i went alone that day and got to the front of the line for the entrance band and the worker said can i see your id you need to be 18 or older to come in or need an adult to sign for you op said my family's not with me today grandfather has a bad leg and he didn't come i don't have anyone to sign the worker says well you need an adult to sign and you got a line behind you go find one ok cue malicious compliance go find an adult you say okay i went to the nearest kentucky fan i could see and said hey sir could you be my grandfather for the next 10 minutes new grandfather said i would love to you're a kentucky fan we went to the line and i said i found an adult and she rolled her eyes and said fine and he signed my paper and i got in fun story great guy go cats i mean they literally did say go find an adult if i was an op situation and i wanted into the game i probably would have done the exact same thing stop go back and look around for the nicest looking older person say hey i'm here all alone because my grandfather had a bad leg i need an adult to sign for me could you just sign the paper for me so i can get in and have some fun what kind adult would say no to that i feel like if a teen came up to you and asked for help in that regard you'd have to be kind of soulless or like a true karen to be like no no no i'm not related you need somebody you know this next story is by adorable peanut useless rule leads to malicious compliance the stories from when i used to work at a gym the owner of the company hired a new operations manager who made everyone miserable she made rules that made no sense and would not listen to why they weren't functional for example she made mandatory meetings that we were forced to clock out for also she made a new rule that morning shift employees would be required to work seven days a week as opposed to five days a week because she really didn't care for my morning shift co-worker and myself one day she announced a new rule stating that front desk employees would have to go over the intercom twice an hour to remind gym members to put their equipment away i informed her that everyone wears headphones and would not hear these announcements and she said she didn't care and to do it anyway she told our manager to write a script for us to read from as she believed we were too incompetent to come up with our own way of phrasing it well seeing as this was now required i told her i would absolutely make these announcements twice an hour i would pick up the intercom phone and in a very dull confused voice i would stumble over the words on the script while sounding out the longer words it would take me about 45 seconds to read a two-sentence script since she believed i wasn't very intelligent i just played dumb and acted like that was the best i could do my co-worker began to do the same thing realizing she couldn't say we were reading it wrong on purpose the members of the gym hated this manager and got a good laugh out of our petty antics torture needless to say we were no longer required to make announcements after one week please put the weights back when you're done with them thank you our next story is by rusty bathtub order me to buy your kids expensive gifts for christmas okay then so my brothers and sisters basically ordered me and my wife to buy their children our nieces and nephews expensive gifts for christmas because according to them we were well off we're not really we're just financially responsible but since they asked for it and it's already on the budget we decided to be vindictive this year so for the most amazing christmas our nieces and nephews will each get five dubs of play-doh which sticks to everything five kilograms of multi-colored kinetic sand which gets everywhere five tubs of gooey slime see all above five packs of easy fill water balloons age-appropriate nerf gun and safety glasses this should be a fun christmas update one well this blew up oh man i should have asked first before i ordered the stuff you guys have such diabolical ideas i think this could be the start of a new christmas tradition depending if my siblings remain naughty or nice for those suggesting legos we already gave a few small boxes of them a few months ago as giveaways for our son's birthday these should complement them nicely for those suggesting a drum set or noise makers i left them out intentionally it would be a bad idea since my sisters work nights at the hospital i don't want them to lose sleep during the day and affect their jobs at night when lies are at stake sleep is important you don't mess with it for those saying that these are not at all expensive exactly you demand someone expensive gifts you get cheap and annoying ones instead but will the children care no they'll think it's the best christmas ever my wife told me to buy us a couple of those automatic nerf guns from the money we save from the gifts you know for protection also we will not be including the water balloons as i was reminded that i do not want a repeat of the great impromptu water balloon fight of 2018 which i may or may not write about but it would fit snugly in r slash entitled siblings also no glitter it's too much dang it that last one was gonna be exactly what i said the glitter is the worst thing you could possibly do do you guys have any other ideas of diabolical gifts you could give these kids that would just wreak havoc on the house but in a fun innocent kid way i'd love to hear your thoughts in the comments down below what would be great is if the kids on christmas opened up their nerf guns then op and their wife go out to the car and come back with that big machine gun with like 50 bullets loaded just leave that house covered in nerf darts after that point you will never stop finding nerf darts in the most random places this next story is by xtile xx i work in a warehouse we're allowed to have speakers but not headphones for safety reasons last week i was informed of this rule and sent home early because i was wearing earbuds i completely understand the rule after thinking about it but my supervisor plays favorites and allows our forklift drivers as well as team leads to wear earbuds i'm not a forklift driver and i don't work around them but was informed we could not have them because you need to be able to hear your surroundings and told to buy a bluetooth speaker if i wanted to listen to music fast forward to today i purchased a speaker and it arrived mind you almost every speaker in our facility is a small one like 100 watts at most i purchased a 30 000 peak 900 watt rms double 15 inch sub and double three inch tweeter combo with its own amp the speaker box itself is the size of a concert cabinet stack about five feet tall and weighs over a hundred pounds my boss was both not impressed and impressed as i walked in his jaw dropped now they're trying to rewrite the speaker rule but there's no way they'll ever do it as his boss assures me for productivity reasons and also his boss encouraged me to turn it up when he told on me i was able to hear my speaker blasting wake me up before you go go by wham over a hundred yards away over all the machinery at half volume is this fitting for the sub as my first submission absolutely fitting for malicious compliance i feel like this is the equivalent of that scene in the movie where people are standing around and a lightning bolt strikes down and the entire world just seems to illuminate into daylight opie wheels in their mega speaker sits it down and the entire warehouse just gets blasted with wake me up before you go go and our final story of the day is by vln tnwbr won't let me turn in my exam and tell me to check the work sure just for some context this story took place in germany so english was taught as a second language when i was in 9th grade i had a bit of a problem with my english teacher she hated me probably because of my accent and choice of vocabulary were more american than british english this was because i have relatives in the us which i used to visit almost every summer here in germany all the english teachers i had were taught in british english but were required to accept other accents as long as they were mostly consistent she was the only one that really disliked my english to the point where she wouldn't call on me in class even though i knew the answers this knocked down my participation grade but my final grades were still okay because i exceeded at exams one of those exam situations i still remember years later the exam stood out to me because a lot of the assignments were riddled with spelling mistakes or the occasional grammatical error it was also very easy so much so that i was able to finish what was supposed to take 90 minutes in about 45 i wanted to hand it in and enjoy some free time before my next class but she wouldn't let me said something along the lines of it being impossible to finish this quickly and that i'd surely missed something she asked me to check the work again before submitting notice how she didn't say check your work i noticed i went back through the exam my work and hers i did catch some errors i made and corrected them but i also marked every one of her mistakes i could find with a red pen it felt great handing in that paper it felt even better when she returned the graded exams she was visibly angered but couldn't really do anything about it without exposing herself she was even more annoyed that i got a 100 percent let me just say that although this is a really good revenge and also deliciously petty they kind of were right though because you said that you did go back you checked the work and because of them you got that 100 percent i mean to be granted it probably would have been in the 90s anyways but they did ask you to check your work you found some errors it's both a malicious compliance and amazingly petty at the same time just overall such a satisfying thing to see happen don't underestimate history fanboys this one's honestly more funny than anything but i pity the professor that had to mark this guy's midterm so i had a history class last year where for the midterm my professor wanted us to write a mini essay on a question she would give us she said make it at least a thousand to fifteen hundred words now there was this guy in the class who thought he was already an expert on the subject you know the type he's the guy that would well actually the professor when she would start to explain something and went as far as to say she was wrong about a topic she had a phd in and had been teaching for 30 plus years eventually she stopped his rants and wouldn't let him start debates and arguments in class because they were taking up time so when we got this midterm someone asked if there was a maximum word limit and she said no you can see where this is going this guy decided for his midterm he'd just include every fragment of information he hadn't gotten the chance to say in class all for this one question when we got our midterms back she made a joke that some of us gave really detailed answers she even told us that someone wrote way more than expected the word count ten thousand words i'm doing a master's dissertation this year and my minimum is twelve thousand words so this guy for a midterm in an undergraduate lecture that was meant to be a thousand words wrote an almost master's thesis length answer to one question because he was peeved the professor wouldn't let him rant in lectures anymore needless to say our next project had a maximum word limit here's the fun frame of reference for anybody that wonders just how long 10 000 words is if you take op's entire story here this guy's 10 000 word malicious compliance is 34.5 times longer if i were to read through this guy's story we would be sitting here for over an hour that said if you were in class and you had a classmate who liked to well actually or create many debates about whatever subject and just waste a long period of time in that class would you appreciate running out the time like that or would you hate it because you just want to try to get through everything you can with the teacher let me know what you think in the comments down below our next story is by an anonymous poster don't want to pay us for the whole trip noted i worked for a job that required a bit of travel often an hour plus which isn't long but five days a week with often over an hour to and from overnight kinda got old fast anyway the company was supposed to pay us 50 something cents per mile from our homes to the location we were also supposed to drive a maximum of 50 miles that second part went out the window first job location after realizing they were paying most of us 300 plus dollars per week for mileage they decided to change it we're only going to pay you from your home to the closest location let's just say the next week had a less than bare minimum needed for the job and they changed their tune real fast it's short but sweet so i think what i'm gathering here is basically people stop showing up because it's not worth it why drive all that away if they're not even going to pay you enough to cover anything you're seriously gonna go from paying enough to make it just worth it for some people to okay we're only going to pay you absolutely the bare minimum well yeah i'm just gonna stop showing up forget it you had one thing going that was keeping me there and now you took it away so i'll just look elsewhere keep the money this next story is by love the yankees another expense account story i was working for a large tech company that had a co-op relationship with several colleagues we would hire undergrads for a semester in addition to drawing a full salary they earned college credit while these co-ops were responsible for their own living expenses we agreed to pay for their travel to our site at the start of the semester and back home in the end one year i hired a pair of twin brothers jack and joe they drove the around 600 miles from their home in a single car and shared a hotel room and route when they submitted their expense reports jack reported the hotel room and joe claimed the car mileage they each included the cost of their meals since the amounts were within the company's policy no receipts were required the accountants had no problem paying for the meals or jack's hotel room but they rejected joe's mileage they found a website that said the distance from joe's hometown to our city was only 535 miles clearly joe was trying to cheat the company joe came to me terrified that he was about to be fired he had a printout from google maps that showed the door-to-door distance was exactly the 602 miles he had claimed i knew better than to argue with the accountants in hq i told joe and jack to resubmit their expense recounts but each should claim the 535 miles and the price of the hotel room a week later they received their checks i love that the company was trying to be super frugal about mileage so they turned around and just doubled that amount honestly i'm surprised if they went to the effort to verify the 600 miles that they wouldn't have made a stink about both of them double charging the 535 but maybe whoever's just focused on the mileage and the value for that mileage and not the actual charges our next story is by your milk is spoiled delivery requires 12 a minimum worth of food no problem this just happened and while it's not as great as most stories i see i thought this was just pretty funny i have enough pizza hut points to feed an entire football team for free and wanted to get a pizza delivered for my lunch the pizza hut is literally a mile away but i'm working alone and can't close shop to go get it i get a checkout and it won't let me send through my order because it has to total at least 12 dollars before taxes and delivery so you have to spend at least 17 to get something delivered i just want my pizza but i guess that's too much to ask for cue the malicious compliance i sometimes order a half a gallon of sweet tea with my pizza which cost 2.99 so i ordered my free hawaiian pizza and five half gallons of sweet tea guess i won't have to buy any tea for a hot minute not too spicy but i thought it might give some people a laugh honestly i think if there's any last to be had i think pizza hut's getting the last laugh in this story i think it goes without saying any drinks that they sell at these pizza chains are almost always marked up pretty well even with the free pizza they probably made money off of those five half gallons of sweet tea this next story is by an anonymous poster chef wanted me the only pastry chef on duty to do the ice cream stand when we had a party of 30 booked for the events room wanted to get this story off my chest since it happened yesterday so i'm a pastry chef at a fine dining french restaurant where i work the pastry section usually i'm not busy and do a myself for tomorrow and then closer to 9 or 10 pm i get busy with desserts we had two event rooms where one of them had booked an ice cream trolley for which i had made the ice cream prior i was expecting a waiter to stand at the trolley and just serve the ice cream since it's not that hard but the head chef had other plans i told him earlier that i had a lot to prepare for tomorrow's service as well as prepare 30 plus desserts for the second events room where all of the desserts had to leave together he was fine with it at first but a few hours later he came over and told me to do the ice cream trolley anyway i was thinking to myself whatever not my problem anymore as 8 15 pm struck i dropped everything in my station and strolled over to the events room and started serving ice cream for an hour and a half all i did was chat people up and serve amazing ice cream when i came back i saw a grill chef scrambling to make desserts and the head chef nowhere to be found i went to the events kitchen and i saw the head chef struggling to make 30 desserts with the sioux i took a smoke break and headed home since my shift ends 10 pm sharp opie did absolutely nothing wrong opie just complied and it turned out to be malicious it's not opi's fault that when the head chef told them to do something else they said hey i've still got a lot to do here it's gonna be a lot of work they tell you disregard it go do what i told you to do all right but you're gonna be the ones thinking our next story is by throw oh wait no we won't talk to anyone except for the name on the account this took place about 15 years ago and involved a large corporate banking entity i forget the name of it but for the sake of the story let's call it fels wargo it may not truly be malicious compliance it took some creative thinking outside the box prompted by their own phrasing you be the judge there are important parts that come into play one my spouse and i were young and dumb financially we both had bounced a few checks on our own checking accounts they were closed a few years prior two fels wargo offered a way to rehab your checking account history they offered you the opportunity to pay them an additional 10 dollars a month to have the right to have a checking account they restricted the release of funds and made life difficult to even have a checking account but if he played by the rules you could graduate to a traditional checking account after a year three i participated in the opportunity checking and graduated my account my spouse had lived without a checking account for a few years and wanted to try again four i took my spouse to felsworgo we specifically explained their previous history and specifically asked for the crappy checking rebuilding account we knew my spouse needed to start at the bottom five the manager of the branch enters the basic information and declared there was no need for the rehab checking account they qualified for the regular account we asked again to be absolutely sure yes no rehab needed here's some starter checks your atm card will be in the mail in a week gladly took an initial cash deposit of 500. fast forward a week we get the atm card call to activate it your account has been closed why we determined you have bad checking history previously we go round and round about how we covered this disclosed it up front and asked for the checking rehab account you'll have to go back and open that account if you want it we can't change the account so they're closing the account because we needed to have the rehab checking account the one we specifically asked for and they refused facepalm my spouse didn't know what to say so we got on speakerphone i started asking questions so will you pay the outstanding checks and refund the rest no we won't pay any checks you'll be charged for return checks from your merchants my spouse wrote three checks totaling less than a hundred dollars very few places accepted starter checks they have the funds in the closed account to pay them where's the issue we don't do that at this point they became flustered nobody seems to ever have the funds or the audacity to demand them to pay checks written in good faith they had no answers on how they refused the checking account we requested and would have been okay to have they didn't think they had a responsibility to notify us the account was closed and how dare we challenge their policy they didn't like how i kept pointing out how there wasn't a single thing we did wrong but they think they're not responsible for the return check fees so they decided not to talk to me any longer they hung up we call back repeat finally they offer this gem we won't talk to anyone except the name on the account click their only possible choice to avoid a difficult discussion where they own their mistakes was clinging to not letting someone else ask questions with the account holder's permission they even refused to let me tell my spouse what to ask and respond to my spouse directly can only talk to the name on the account okay so i called back miraculously in 60 seconds i now identified as a different person thanks for calling felsworgo may i have your name spouse's name long pause you aren't spouse's name sure i am ask me anything name social security number address mothers made a name date of birth verified it all as the name on the account long pause no you aren't spouse i say why do you say that they say because you're a man wait a minute that's why you closed my account because i'm a man i'm pretty sure that's against ecoa maybe reg b law stating discrimination on gender is illegal banks can't reference gender or other protected classes to close accounts please hold a manager finally comes on we have a little back and forth about who i identify as but seeing as how i'm not doing anything except demanding they pay checks on my spouse's account written by my spouse with funds in their possession there isn't much they can fight but they finally agree to pay the three checks from the funds in the account they didn't want to even in the end but the name on the account demanded it fall out they had to do the right thing after wasting hours fighting it i don't blame the employee for thinking so and so is not so and so especially if they were the ones on the phone with op earlier when they were saying they weren't the spouse but if they answer all the security questions don't they kind of have to accept it i guess it eventually got there anyway and our final story of the days by ww76kh the grinch who won christmas the owner of the company is cheap he'll buy himself a new plane but cheap out on the employees he drove off our project manager with his antics this year i need the company card to buy a christmas tree for their fun reception area if i don't decorate then nobody else will either it's been that way for years and i enjoy decorating so no skin off my back normally i would grab the card from the project manager but this year i needed it from the owner who didn't like the idea of buying a tree even though every year he says how much he loves the decorating every office purchase is an absolute haggle with him whatever be difficult i have all the time in the world no decorations have been put up all the fake trees in town have been sold out and every week we get closer and closer to christmas with no decorations employees have asked and clients with lots of money shiny new plane in the future money have asked what happened to the decorations you guys usually do such a great job op has a real flair for this and you guys are lucky to have her around it used to be so boring around here before she came along guess who just got told to go buy a tree me christmas may now commence to be fair it doesn't really shock me that new plane guy is being overly difficult about buying stuff like a christmas tree for decoration to me it seems like most people in those kinds of situations are very very frugal even if it's something that's like relatively cheap or not necessary but just helps the experience they'll try and fight you on it a little bit yes let me tell you all about chemistry this is the word slash story of my sister i have a heavy background in chemistry i'm not very smart in anything else but i love chemistry and it's the one and only thing i'm good at i travel a lot so often i visit many different hair salons they ask me what i do i tell them the usual in this case it was a hairdresser named sarah who told me she knew chemistry as well it was a bit annoying because it wasn't the oh yeah i know a little bit of chemistry we have to learn a bit of that to know what chemicals we're mixing that i get no it was oh yeah i'm definitely a chemist too it may seem complex but we had to learn so much in hair school that we eventually pick it up like it's nothing for example we're taught about oxidation and stuff i should be getting at least a bachelor's with the stuff we learn it's pretty easy to learn yup i was annoyed because she was basically dismissing the years i went to school learning or even those who hold the bachelors in chemistry who spent a great deal of time learning even the complex fundamentals like i don't tell the hairdresser oh yeah i know so much about hairdressing it's so easy like you just go snip snip here and then that's it i'm such a hairdresser teehee i respect their craft and that's why i pay them to do what they know best seeing you know chemistry because you know how to mix similar chemicals similar as in properties like different brands of lighteners as opposed to chemists who work with a very wide range of reagents and about oxidation is like saying you're a mechanic because you know how to change your windshield wiper and not to pull the e-brake when driving anyways the clan in the chair next to mine goes oh wow you guys know chemistry sarah looks at her and says oh yeah it's a few things you gotta know but yep i'm definitely a chemist you can call me a trained chemist at this point it's not that hard to pick up even when you gotta multitask as us hair ladies do isn't that right opie okay she wants me to add to the convo so i responded with what a typical college student would learn and explain lightning as an example to the client i talk about electrons their properties and reductive versus oxidative reactions taking place in the hair how a reaction can be kinetically favorable but not always thermodynamically so i throw in some random sorta related crap that anyone with a bachelors in chemistry would know etc etc and finished it off with right sarah of course the clan looks at sarah and sarah looks bewildered and has no idea what i'm talking about after we finish my subpar haircut i tip and she gives me the cold shoulder oh well i gave you what you asked for there's definitely way too many times where people see somebody doing a job that they think is probably easy to pick up like maybe art or music is a good example people will see artists or musicians who are really good at what they do and they can make really awesome pieces in maybe an hour or two and just because they're so quick people will go oh well that's going to be cheap to pay for right when in reality you're paying for the expertise and experience of the person it's not really the best analogy because this is more about actually knowing more than somebody else but it's kind of tangentially related and it kind of popped into my mind have you ever been guilty of feeling a certain way like this about somebody's job whether it's art or chemistry or maybe something like psychology have you ever thought oh this job must be so easy i could probably do that when in reality there's surely a lot more classes and training and expertise you have to gain to ever do something like that let me know what you think in the comments down below our next story is by five frog margin tugboat billy shoots himself in the foot billy was a tugboat captain i worked for for about a year he was a bit of a hick and not especially adept at anything but driving a tugboat and a barge he also had a big mouth and the personality of a rattlesnake although every other captain and first mate at this company was from the same general area none of them really liked billy not even his own first mate late at night in the wheelhouse the first mate would often tell me stories about some of the dumb crap billy said and did over the years he only worked with him for about five years or so but they'd all had known each other for years in this fleet one of his most often told stories was about billy shooting his mouth off in some bar years before i forget what the initial argument was about but it ended with billy telling a small group of guys how stupid they were and not surprisingly getting his butt whipped but bad his beating was so bad he not only wound up in the hospital doctors discovered it affected his mental ability somehow i'm cloudy on the details but billy fought with the u.s coast guard and had to prove that he was still mentally capable of holding a captain's license it took a while maybe as much as a year but he won and went back to work it was a few years later that i started working for him until i quit a year later three years later i found myself near first mate's hometown having just gotten off my boat he picked me up and we went out for supper before he dropped me off at the airport nice way to catch up on what the old crew was up to as it turns out about a year earlier billy had smashed into a dock a little too hard and damaged it it was enough damage to require the coast guard to be notified and a long story short billy was found to be at fault and was going to have fines levied against him and or pay for the damage as billy was never too smart to begin with he actually tried to fight the coast guard's decision on the grounds of he can't be held responsible due to his diminished mental capacity that resulted from his assault years earlier you guessed it the us coast guard maliciously complied with his defense and promptly made him surrender his license and with it his livelihood first mate said he got a job selling used cars i never really liked captain billy it's kind of funny how hard captain billy fought to keep their job only to then immediately pivot to the one excuse that he fought so hard to keep his job over as a way of trying to cover his butt you can only have it one way or the other captain billy enjoy the used car selling this next story is by vroom vroom 26 destroying a homework policy so my high school geometry teacher i really did not like him and he did not like me but i was good at math so we couldn't really say much about it for example i once wrote on a test a square has three sides to test what he'd say he marked it as incorrect but i argue that a square has four sides which means it must have three sides so i didn't say anything incorrect and he just awarded me the point i was the worst i know anyway he assigned a nightly math homework but would only collect random assignments and grade them i'm a math teacher now and i totally understand this it's a way to make sure we were doing the work allow students to slip up once in a while and also a way to cut down his nightly grading to this day i think that's fair but this is where he made a mistake at the end of the semester he would choose one day to hand in any missed assignment from the quarter and he would grade it for full credit he called it amnesty day so me being a 14 year old did no geometry homework for the entire semester and turned in all 10 assignments to him at once on amnesty day granted it was a brutal night to make up 10 assignments but was so worth not having homework all quarter he was so mad about it yet according to his policy he has to grade them all for full credit he's never had that policy since and has cited me is the reason why to this day almost 10 years later he references amnesty day of february 2011. i'm just thinking about how nice this teacher was in giving amnesty to the kids allow somebody that's suffering in that class or just not doing very well the chance to make crucial makeup work and because one person was super lazy and gained the system nope no more all future students just have to suffer it's a bit of a shame really our next stories by whitewing2611 they wanted me to pay so i gave them what they asked for this is a very short story but i felt much better after i was at college learning hairdressing and they made us charge every client we had which made it hard to find models we had to make sure we were all paid up before we could do the exam for that particular module eg so many ladies haircuts paid for before the cutting exam etc this college was a nasty piece of work they constantly belittled us called us names nightly or made things harder for us it even led to me having a mental breakdown just before this incident i'm not even exaggerating it a little bit a week after i came back from this they started with the mean girl act again anyway i had about 140 south african rand i had to pay them before i could do my exam so i said stuff it i raided the house and found every cent piece i could find and paid them in 5 cent and 10 cent pieces i regret nothing i don't like confrontation but seeing the look on her face and her exclamation when she saw my clear plastic bag of sense watching her have to count them out one by one made me feel very warm and fuzzy inside just my small act of rebelling but oh did it feel good honestly anybody that pisses you off and then demands money back from you just giving them mountains and mountains of cent pieces is probably one of the best feelings ever although i feel like a lot of times if you try that they might just refuse to accept it and demand a better form of currency no you can only use bills even though there's really no policy probably stand there and argue well i'm paying you exactly what you asked for doesn't matter what form of currency it's legal tender our next story is by hal nietzsche why don't you just mind your business okay i will so my mother-in-law was pulling into a parking space at a big blue store and the person parked in the space in front of her was starting to back out of the spot and had left her cart there so my mother-in-law went to grab it and just use that for her shopping the woman had left her wallet in the seat of the cart though so my mother-in-law flagged her down and got her attention the woman immediately started going off at my mother-in-law telling her to mind her business and that the cart was fine where it was so my mother-in-law decided to take her advice she told the woman fine i'll mind my business your wallet will be at customer service and then walked away by the time the woman registered what she had said parked again and went into the store my mother-in-law had already dropped the wallet off at customer service where there was a long line and warned them that she was pretty nasty apparently when the woman went to get her wallet she started to make threats and was threatening to call the police if anything was missing the manager told her she would not be doing that and that it was her own fault she left the wallet in the cart honestly this woman is incredibly lucky because if op's mother-in-law was even remotely less caring they could have just made off with the wallet they got yelled at when trying to return it some people might just walk away to begin with but i guess it is kind of easy to get flustered if you think they're trying to yell at you for leaving the cart there or something and our final story of the day is by baby driver 17 impatient customer pays for short temper in celebration of me recently reapplying for my old high school job to work while i'm in school i wanted to dig up this gem of a story it's not as intense of a story when compared to a lot of stories here but i feel like this happens all the time in grocery stores i have several stories from this job similar to this one this story happened some years ago while i was 18. i used to work slash now work in a pretty pretentious part of town the typical wasp and soccer moms love to come to my grocery store i work in the department that takes customers orders and shops for their groceries and then they come to pick them up one policy we have is that if a customer orders an item and it's out of stock we'll offer a substitute item and honor a price change if the requested item was cheaper than the replacement item one customer that was not a regular placed an order one day i shopped the order and lo and behold there were several items out of stock it's standard to call the customer to let them know of changes on their order before finalizing them so i called this customer to let them know the changes i was going to make with them if it was what they wanted this is how it went i said good afternoon customer i was just letting you know i completed your order and there were some out of stocks we're out of the store brand cereal so i grabbed a name brand one we didn't have any store brand milk so i had to grab an organic carton of milk and we were also out of the mini cans of soda so i grabbed a pack of full-sized ones instead the customer says that's great and all but i don't want the prices of anything to change i picked the items i chose for a reason i say yes i understand that's why we have a policy that we match the customer says i don't care how you complete my order i do not want you changing the prices of any items i say okay that sounds good i'll have your order ready in 15 minutes see you soon cue malicious compliance the items that were out were all store brand so they were significantly discounted compared to the items i substituted them with if they were less irritated on the phone with me and heard me out i was going to let them know that i was more than happy to price match their items to be the same price as the ones they requested not more expensive it feels like a punishment to the customer to charge them more for something being out of stock the customer was so short and rude on the phone with me i was not doing them any favors instead i was following the instructions they gave me and then went to the cash register and finished ringing up the items since they were very serious about not changing the price of any of their items i rang everything at full price when they got to the store this is how it went down good afternoon here's your order i just need a signature to confirm that you received your order the customer says why is this so expensive i didn't order this many groceries why did you charge me so much for the milk and soda i say when we spoke on the phone earlier you insisted that i did not change the price of your items so when i substituted the out of stocks i didn't alter the prices of anything organic milk is more expensive than our store brand conventional milk and the soda's more expensive because it has more larger cans in the box if you feel this is a mistake i'm more than happy to run inside to fix this for you the customer visibly annoyed says no it's fine give me the pen i'll sign i say no problem we hope to see you again soon the following week they placed another order and they were much more friendly and receptive to our help this is great and all but i do feel like it's very petty you don't really know what's going on with them maybe they were deep in a very stressful thing so maybe they were acting out a little bit doesn't really excuse it but you just never really know it might have been the person's worst day of their life and if your employer ever caught a win of something like that happening they would not be too receptive in basically creating such a negative experience that most people probably wouldn't want to do that again over just picking the items up themselves have to be the one on the phone okay then this is a tale for my days in working at a gas station the manager was this crusty and frigid woman who looked like she sucked on lemons as a normal thing when i started she said that if anything ever happened and had to call such as if you were sick you had to be the one to talk to her personally it couldn't be a family member or a friend no exceptions a couple of weeks into the job and my co-worker had a slip and fall when doing some of the janitorial work around the bathroom it didn't seem that severe at the time but she was definitely having issues still the boss needed to be called so i handed the phone to my co-worker because she had to be the one on the phone ultimately an ambulance was called and my manager showed up and started chewing me out for my lack of common sense i remind her of the rule and shut down the conversation after that if you found yourself in that situation with a manager chewing you out for doing such a thing would you try and point it out how ridiculous their policy had been from the beginning to them maybe ask them if they slipped and hit their head should i have not have called at all maybe reconsider your policy let me know what you guys think about this policy in the comments down below our next story is by the true facts man locking a kid out with a snake when my dad was a kid his mum gave him two rules no friends in the house when no adult was home and if when you're playing outside you see a snake go inside immediately you can guess where this is going he was playing outside with a friend and saw a snake so he went inside and closed the door on his friend and the snake he probably didn't mean to be malicious but you've gotta admit that's pretty harsh i can just picture op's dad there was a kid slowly closing the door like i'm sorry man my mom told me to run for your life you can still make it out of here chunk luck this next story is by mike mojc try to pile on more work to increase your bonus not gonna happen i oversee a team of a dozen folks when it's fully staffed we had a fellow move out of state for school a lady retired to care for her grandkids when her daughter got sick then three people promote up within the organization all within four weeks time so almost half the team suddenly became unavailable while i'm involved in the recruiting and onboarding process management up to three levels above me tends to be a bottleneck each time someone lets me know they were moving on i informed management and gave them a running total we're at 84 staffing we're at 66 staffing etc ads were placed first run interviews conducted by me and a team lead second interviews recommended to the next level of management and that's where the process suddenly stopped for a week then two then three it commonly takes two to three weeks after higher to bring a new person up to speed to start being productive and perhaps eight weeks for a new person to reach 90 to 95 percent of median productivity goals the existing team was ready to pull together and work harder to keep up with the work but i took each one aside and coached them that the heavy workload they were under was not their problem to solve yes customers were complaining yes other groups in the organization were getting frustrated that our team wasn't getting things done in a timely fashion i encourage them to work efficiently and well but to not put in extra unpaid time or contribute their own resources to projects and if anyone was insistent in their complaints regarding the team's productivity send them to me and i would explain the situation middle and upper minglement across the organization started vocalizing about how little work was getting done when i played the uno reverse card that hey all we need is adequate well-trained staff and we'll be able to keep up and managers 1-2 and probably exec 1 all have potential interviewees on their desks for almost a month now i started getting the stink eye from those folks i found out later that one or a couple of those folks that i report to and were also the next rungs in the hiring ladder had proposed the idea that this team could run just as well a little leaner so they arranged to find out oopsy daisy metrics indicated that organizational goals weren't met because of their decision but i was able to provide the stats that prove the team's individual goals were met and that in many respects per person efficiencies were improved my team members got their bonus middle management failed to achieve so no bonus for them that year i think it never fails to be one of the most disgusting things when you find out some kind of higher up minglement thinks their team could work a little leaner if everybody just worked that much harder so they try to squeeze the team into both working harder and working with fewer hands it's no surprise that works started piling up and everybody started getting stressed out minglement that works like that doesn't deserve to just not get a bonus they deserve to get replaced this next story is by five frog margin this is less malicious compliance than anal retentive compliance but i kept my job and the villain got punished i hope you enjoy it some years ago i got a job tinkering a barge a barge is basically a floating container that gets towed around port deport tinkering means to load it with fuel or whatever product you carry and discharge it in another port there were two other tanker men but we worked four weeks on two weeks home i'd worked two weeks with one of the other tankmen two weeks with the other i was pretty new to tinkering but i'd been working on boats for a few years and enjoyed it there was little i liked more than getting on a ratty rusty boat and chipping rust and painting till the boat was looking sharp but i was a novice tinkerman and this boat was an odd looking sharp rust everywhere storerooms a mess dirty inside and out the two other tanker men were of the opinion they were tankermen only meaning they did nothing but tinker the barge despite their job titles being deckhand and tinkerman they felt chipping and painting was beneath them and did no other work both of them were from down south one occasion i'll call gumbo and a black guy from mobile all called darnell for my first trip they both took a dislike to me darnell mostly because he was lazy and just wanted to hang out on the stern and fish once i started busting butt around the ship he knew he had to start doing something and he didn't like that gumbo however he really hated me he considered himself a barge captain a title that didn't exist except in his mind and saw me as a threat to his imaginary throne by gasp improving things it wasn't just the boat i got all the old load plans of the places they were cramming them organize them by fuel amount and put them in a binder that way when the customer said please load 68 840 barrels for us i would flip to the closest previous load to that amount and we would see how much to put in each tank to match the amount as a result load started getting closer and closer to the requested amount making the customer happy gumbo and darnell tended to just wing it but being new i was a little anal retentive about doing it properly when i'm in unfamiliar territory i tend to be anal retentive to the point of ocd to make sure i get it right also i really really did not want an oil spill on my watch this went on for months me getting more and more comfortable with tinkering and annoying the other two by organizing store rooms cleaning and organizing lockers and generally making the boat a better place heck i was even cooking strangely there weren't too many accolades coming my way and thanks to the assistant engineer jim bob i found out why you see when big boss would come it would tend to be when i was home gumbo and darnell were bad-mouthing me behind my back harping on my lack of experience magnifying small errors and concern trolling that they were just trying to be safe even worse all the changes i made they took credit for it wasn't opie cleaned out the paint locker it was we got the paint locker cleaned out jim bob often worked extra hitches and was a witness to everything jim bob was a good guy but from a poor town in louisiana dropped out of high school at 15 and was functionally illiterate his illiteracy kept him from advancing and as he was the only crew member to befriend me i helped him out with his job showing him all kinds of tips to streamline things like putting an excel spreadsheet on his work computer that allowed him to quickly track and monitor fuel and lube use after a while he began relaying to me what was happening behind my back his exact words you and i are like brothers so i say to you as a brother they're out to get you i kind of figured this was going on as they both begun to play the passive aggressive game we in the industry call playing freak freak so i knew i was the odd man out about this time one of the barges pumps went out and the first thing the mechanic said was it was due to lack of maintenance meaning tanker men weren't lubing oiling or greasing the pumps at crew change big boss came down to chew us all out and like a fool i said i had no idea we were supposed to do these things naturally a hundred percent of the blame came down on me for this and my response was humility asking what needed to be done big boss made out a maintenance plan that the pumps would be serviced every two weeks to be done with the tankerman returning with a log of the work done to be completed after what jim bob told me i decided to adhere to a compliance to the point of obsession i would know those pumps so well i could teach a course on them as i just returned that day i went full on ocd doing every check measurement fluid level twice and logging at all i asked jim bob what kind of grease and how many squirts to use i counted the squirts and logged them he had all the grease so i had to get it from him i logged all of my maintenance in the logbook not only that jim bob had all the grease in the engine room so i had to get it from him i logged that too one tube marine grade number two three four five whatever jim bob and i also went over to the pump with a fine toothed comb and found every one of the grease points i added that list to the maintenance log finally i noticed that whenever i came back the log book which was really just a handful of pages set aside in a crappy notebook we kept in the crew area hadn't been updated since i'd left it occurred to me i was the whipping boy gumbo and darnell really thought they had me where they wanted me and didn't do freak all on the barge months later one of the other barges had a minor fire due to overheating about three days before i was supposed to arrive company hired a third party to check all maintenance fleet wide and ours didn't do well big boss came down with notes to ensure we were following the protocol he laid down big boss asked if we'd been doing the required maintenance at this point i'd been freaked by these guys for over a year and had calmly practiced my response to any question when big boss asked if we'd been following the protocol i replied that i did it within a day of my arrival every six weeks darnell mentioned that the pumps were so dry when he arrived it looked like they ain't been greased in months i replied that i could guarantee they'd been greased at least once every six weeks as i was the one that greased them then darnell made the mistake of saying something that set the whole situation of flame okay well if you say you'd been doing maintenance okay they just look to me like they're starved for oil i say i get them the day i get back every time i even log my work do you darnell says log it where where do you log it drunkbutt captain says i never got a request to log anything i say in the maintenance log big boss requested months ago gumbo and darnell say what what log is that the logbook tended to be ignored by the other two and usually when i got back it was buried under newspapers and xxx max i walked up to the tray underneath the tv and pulled it out i casually flipped to the maintenance logs section and showed them the places i'd logged the work i'd done as an added bonus i actually started an entry for the next guy so all he had to do was fill in the numbers stuff like name date serviced hours run oil amount added filters changed yes or no naturally it was all blank as an added bonus i had made sure to not wash my hands before log entries so i couldn't be accused of pencil whipping due to the greasy fingerprints i sat quietly while big boss gumbo darnell and the captain read the maintenance log consisting of my entries and my entries only me and jim bob just watched each other expressionless both gumbo and darnell tried to cover for each other claiming they'd seen the other doing the required maintenance but big boss was no dummy where'd you get the grease and filters from i see no record of transfer from the engine room to the barge darnell said well we get the grease from jim bob all the time i've asked for at least four five tubes am i jim bob all eyes on jim bob jim bob did the most amazing thing scowling at darnell he stood up threw his coffee cup in the trash and walked to 20 feet to his cabin the slamming of the door was like a judge's gavel coming down i took the dark path big boss i'm sorry for any problems after what happened in april i've been obsessed with ensuring the pumps were properly maintained on my watch i'm happy to show you where all 17 grease points are and my routine for servicing them i know the pumps backwards and forwards at this point he said op that won't be necessary i've seen all i need to he snapped the logbook shut and told the captain we'll talk later and disembark the vessel without another word there's no sexy ending here gumbo got transferred to the punishment boat the worst boat and barge in the fleet and got written up for arguing with the captain on his first god darn hitch last i heard we got a new tinkerman bizarrely a cousin of darnells but i was pretty confident at this point and took the lead in training them darnell was a always be on the winning team kind of guy and let me take the lead we wound up with a pretty good crew hard working hard partying just how i like it when they hired a new captain he was a guy that had come up with big boss which is why he got the job and he told big boss you know op is about the only guy worth a crap on here i still have the eval he wrote for me it's on my darn linkedin page the fact alone that op completely complied to this guy's request while the lazy guys completely forgot and op went to the extent of every time leaving in blank categories for these guys to just fill out and they still couldn't do even just that is the icing on the cake this was a great story transfer to work with my best friends i was in high school 90s and was working part-time in a grocery store i was hired for the produce department all of my friends worked the front line mostly bagging for cashiers and retrieving shopping carts i've always been an overachiever at work and i actually liked my job my supervisors were all cool and i was doing the job for extra spending money after school so i wasn't heavily invested in it because i also delivered newspapers in the morning like i said overachiever the only thing that sucked was having to work weekends one day i forgot my hat or maybe i just didn't feel like wearing it that day because i recently dyed my hair green and wanted to show it off i don't remember but i do know that there was no specific code about hair color in the handbook and hats were only required if you were prepping food or in a section like the deli my direct supervisor liked my hair and said i fit in great with all the veggies and i should focus on stocking all the green stuff that shift she was sure the customers would enjoy it we both laughed and i did my job the juicy stuff anywho a couple hours later towards the end of my shift this grumpy general manager let's call him bob was not happy i forgot my hat and decided to grill me about it we happened to be in front of the customer service desk at the time he went on and on for a while about young people and poor work ethic he was really on it about how lazy kids are so on and so forth now keep in mind i always did my job well never had any complaints or anything like that this was the first time ever getting a speech from a boss like this eventually he got around to it and flat out asked me where's your hat oh well uh g bob i think i forgot it at home you forgot it at home how could you forget it you see this is what i'm talking about what if i took your paycheck home and forgot it there now i was not sure if he wanted an answer so i stood there for what just felt like an eternity just looking at him while my teenage brain was processing everything well bob asked again now i knew he actually expected me to answer so i said excuse me bob um i don't understand his face started to crinkle with anger the customer service ladies were watching intently enjoying the show what don't you understand well doesn't accounting handle the checks i mean you don't actually do anything with them he started to look even angrier at this point but i was too dumb to care so i went on i mean that's my understanding so i don't know how my check could even get to your house unless you stole it or something from the accounting people the customer service ladies bust out laughing he looked at them sharply and told me to go home and think about what i did and i would be lucky if i still had a job i wasn't sure if i was being fired or not i really was in some kind of shock so i asked you mean i get to go home early tonight again the customer service ladies chuckled while trying to look busy i went home a little upset but tried to look on the bright side i got home early did my homework and relaxed i went in for my shift the following day only to find out i was taken off of the schedule sorry i don't see you on here looks like bob changed the schedule you're not on until next week just then bob strolls on over with this i gotcha now look on his face and i knew his game so i smiled and said oh my god that's great it'll be so nice to have a little vacation i said smiling then i thanked him this really worked him over i guess he couldn't actually fire me so he was trying to make things bad for me so he said oh one more thing i don't think produce is right for you i've decided to move you to the front as punishment for insubordination i've already filed the paperwork bob really the front are you sure he had a smile thinking he won well that's fantastic all my friends work over there and that's the position i originally applied for thank you so much i'll see you in a week i left with the biggest smile on my face when i finally came back all the front managers officially welcomed me to their team i was already quite friendly with many of them because i would help out up there from time to time i was still getting my higher pay rate from produce and best of all bob never bothered me again i got to goof off and work way less than before some of my fondest memories of that place are when i would just hang out in the parking lot with the other baggers generally having a good time never got any other complaints there either i love this story because everything bob tried to do opie absolutely refused to let them get their satisfaction out of it op really took the situation and gave it the complete when life gives you lemons treatment if a boss was trying to shift you around or rile you up would you be the kind of person to still keep a smile on your face just so they can't get satisfaction out of trying to bully you let me know what you think in the comments down below our next story is by the flaming heads hr can't help with bullying hmm i used to work at a hotel that is part of a very large hotel chain the management at my hotel as well as more senior management was all about nepotism if you were related or friends with someone in upper management then you had some amazing career prospects ahead we got a new food and beverage manager who was a golf buddy of the gm and the executive chef we'll call him houston houston had previously managed a number of top restaurants in the city including a michelin star restaurant strangely though he seemed to change jobs every 6 to 12 months we soon found out why the position he moved into oversaw three food and beverage departments with around 300 staff all up very quickly we found out that as well as not realizing that we weren't fine dining houston was the most horrible pig of a man that i've ever had to work with he was a very tall large man who would use his size to physically intimidate other staff and managers he would shout at anyone for any perceived mistake reeler imagined that he saw he was very handsy and often made seedy comments to the attractive young waitresses management would often attend events and eat and drink with guests while also making sure nothing went wrong at one of these events he got one of the young women in sales so drunk an ambulance had to be called and she had her stomach pumped he was just a horrible human being as you can imagine everyone from kitchen staff to waiters to managers were making complaints about them i know that one manager had gone over the head of our gm and was slowly elevating the issue to higher and higher levels of management heading towards national level the response that our hr department was sticking to was that houston had been hired to shake things up apparently they had expected a certain amount of friction to occur and had essentially been told to ignore any complaints that came their way they had taken things through the proper channels and followed the correct procedures there was nothing they could do their hands were tied enter our story's hero so the bar in this hotel was well run by a short filipino man we'll call him john because there were rarely any real issues at the bar jon had mostly been left alone by houston john had never seen houston's bad side come out and never personally had a problem with him one day an issue did come up with a bar it eventually turned out to be a management miscommunication which was a very common thing thanks management but that was irrelevant at the time so houston decides that the problem is john's fault storms into the bar and while jon's serving and in front of the staff customers and a supervisor houston absolutely lays into john just like he has to every other supervisor and manager in his department already what the freak happened yesterday a group complained to me this morning that we hadn't charged their account properly sort your crap out and do your job properly next time and picture this with a large six foot tall man getting right in the face of a five foot tall filipino while yelling abuse at absolutely the top of his voice houston stormed back to his office john didn't take anyone's crap and he followed houston back to his office while they shouted at each other in front of even more staff supervisors and another manager houston obviously didn't back down or apologize because this is how he had operated for the last 6 months without any consequences jon went straight up to hr and told them exactly what had happened and as usual they told them there was nothing they could do that seemed like it was going to be the end of it that night john went home and got illegal advice from a friend following the advice he typed up an objective account of exactly what had happened and included names of all the staff who had witnessed the encounter this showed how many people there were able to confirm his story he emailed this to the entire management team including team leaders supervisors and other departments as well as each person in hr this eliminated deniability in anyone's account as well as keeping the whole hotel in the loop of what was going on the next day john took his written account down to the police station to file charges of workplace assault he received a document from the police to confirm that he had filed charges he then sent that document to the same mailing list of management and hr by the time he arrived at work that afternoon the gm had started an inquiry into the issue that he had previously been completely unaware of hr was claiming that they had no idea what had been going on either this was definitely the first they were hearing of problems with houston over the next few days everyone in the food and beverage department from team leader up was called into a meeting to discuss their experiences with houston at the end of the week houston was notified that he was to attend a meeting with the upper management and hr teams the next day the next day came and houston went into his office packed up his things walked into the meeting and slammed his note of resignation onto the desk hr agreed to an immediate termination of his contract and he walked out of the job that afternoon after he left my hotel he got a job at a small very average mexican restaurant as a sommelier he lasted about three months there a few months later one of the waitresses caught an uber home after a night out guess who was the driver these are the moments and situations where your eyes continue to get opened up to hr not being there to protect the employees but to actually protect the company they're just there to try to prevent employers from having liability in these occurrences now not all companies hr is bad but a lot of them exist not to help you but just to make sure the company isn't held responsible for something very serious this next story is by dramatic ad 258 i'm not worth the pay okay i'll find a new job this happened quite a while back management in the past was fine and great but suddenly started to change after an event with contractor after some time the upper management not my supervisor who was great began harassing those involved with the release of a contractor mainly manager a manager a would pull people into meetings and tell people that he pays them too much to not do their work granted the group i was with was a small team of four that worked 12 plus hours usually managing an entire data infrastructure and all engineering aspects one day i get called and was yelled at for being friendly with a contractor by saying thank you for helping me debug a database error manager a was having personal issues with contractor with which led to me being told i wasn't worth the amount of money they pay me i was told to leave if i wasn't happy they're under manager a i was the lead engineer and liaison to the iot division for this division i was in afterwards i called up supervisor and straight out told them what had happened and told them i'm looking now fast forward a few months i leave to a different position in the same organization under a different manager manager a is now in the hot seat because no one can manage what i was managing and lots of security issues are popping up since no one knew how to manage servers except for me in the division they ended up being forced to award a contract worth over 5 times the cost they paid me just for covering my work not all the extra they wanted coming down the line to put into perspective my salary was able to break well into six figures everything's failing and everyone keeps messaging and calling me for help and i just sit back and watch things burn from one floor down from my previous desk now i'm not all that smart on management and organization stuff but i feel like if you got one dude doing the superstar work and keeping everything held together it's probably in your best interest not to upset that guy like you know the one guy you literally cannot afford to lose you probably don't want to say if you don't like it here you can leave he basically said if you don't like it here then you can take five minutes to make a decision that's going to totally sink my entire division and our final story of the day is by toaster mops lazy group member wants us to do his part sure thing i just finished a big group project worth about 30 of our total grade the groups were selected for us so i didn't know anyone beforehand so like any other group there's always a slacker who just piggybacks off of everyone else's work this project spanned the entire length of the term and this lacquer just did the absolute bare minimum or nothing at all for each of our deliverables so here comes the end of the term and we have to submit our final report which had to include a video demo of our app and this made up a significant portion of the marks of course the slacker puts it off to the last possible minute to tell us he's not home and will be busy the day of submission our group was planning to record the last day because the rest of the project had to be finished to demo it so obviously i'm pissed cause this dude is just being a huge pain but i tell him it's all good man we'll just cover your part in the demo he happily agrees as you won't have to do crap once again here's the kicker in the requirements of the demo every member has to be in the recording or you won't get any marks for that portion clearly this guy didn't read the rubric and so he thinks he's getting a good deal if you didn't participate in the demo you get a zero for that portion bet this guy's gonna be confused why his marks are so much lower than the rest of us this is a great malicious compliance but it's also just the right thing that's supposed to happen this dude put zero effort in did not contribute to the group project they deserve to get lower marks they deserve nothing use the law to withhold my deposit well okay here we go this was a few years ago so some of the details are a little fuzzy but i smile every time i think about this i moved to california in 2010 and had lined up a house on a three acre property with a nice-sized detached barn we were on our rent to own to allow time to get settled and secure the loan to buy the property so we had a standard california rental agreement with the handshake agreement it would not be needed once we purchased the house a couple little things to fill in the female owner was a realtor so there was a reasonable expectation she knew what she was doing the husband was weird i can't explain it past that but part of the agreement was that we actually bought the horse that was boarded on the property and also had the detached barn full of their old crap with the agreement that it would be removed by the owners once we purchased so we move in things are going fairly good we have several cats at the time but keep the house cleaned up and we had one cat prone to accidents but for the most part we kept everything good sometime during the winter we have an issue with the septic system the owner proceeds to let it slip the septic was not put in legally and was not correct okay they still paid for repairs a month or so later a water line the husband installed to use for watering the horse broke and again found out it was not done correctly this time i was forced to pay for it okay cool once i found out about the septic i started looking for other houses and found one available and we were able to get it at this point i give the owner about two months notice we had done some improvements on the property including a tax shed for all the horse gear my stepdaughter loved horses and the horse was hers so almost immediately the owner's attitude changes and i realize we are in for a long two months we're slowly moving into the new house as we have time during this time the owner was randomly showing up without 24 hours notice california law attempting to show the house with zero warning and the best one she started inspecting the house before we were even moved out at this point we were about 75 moved the new house was on 12 and a half acres and we did not have a pen to put the horse and goats into one day i get home from work and we have to call a vet out owner's daughter who used to own the horse decided to give the horse and our two goats a year's worth of glucosamine supplements for the horse we ended up with a several hundred dollar vet bill so we sped up things and ended up clearing a few weeks early because of this there were a few odds and ends left behind including a wooden run to for the goats i spent about 500 on cleaning alone to make sure we got our deposit back i even brought in a professional cleaning service to finish the house up i spent many times moving from base housing while military this is common so we complete the final walkthrough with the owner and she seems happy she says she'll figure everything out and send me a check okay cool about four weeks after the original move out date i get a large manila envelope in the mail from the owner strange but okay cool i open it and she's trying to charge me in the neighborhood of 2500 dollars on top of the 2 000 deposit she's keeping okay lady let's see what you got in the envelope is about 10 small mailer envelopes and about 300 pictures of various things on the property and in the house along with a six-page letter outlining what i owe her for so i started reading a couple hundred for trash removal including a list of items removed and the receipt for removal several hundred for paint during the walkthrough i offered to paint the rooms we had painted one was an obnoxious cotton candy pink and the owner said no it was fine there's also a charge for close to three thousand dollars for brand new carpeting and high-end padding from lowe's as well as the receipt and also an itemized charge for labor i believe there were a few other items but i don't have the paperwork in front of me now my first reaction was pure rage i was seeing red i wrote the nastiest letter to her three different times and took a step back she had threatened to take me to court cue malicious compliance i pulled up california rental laws and at the time there was a great website that explained what an owner could legally charge you for so i sat down and i believe the entire letter i responded to her with was around 15 pages the highlights i was not responsible for the painting or labor associated with as i provided the final inspection that did not note any issues with paint color i was not responsible for the trash removal as she listed one item that was ours the plywood run to in the field and the items actually listed were all her personal items removed from the detached barn and it was not my responsibility i was not responsible for paying the emergency plumbing repair mentioned earlier and i provided the bill and the fact that it was emergency as it was flooding over half the property and making the entrance to the property impossible the best one was the last one the carpets so in her letter she mentioned a horrible smell of cat urine which she proceeds to explain occurred during the illegal inspections she also had provided documentation on the cost of materials including all her purchases the best part they were all dated prior to our final walkthrough no matter the result she was replacing that carpet so california law is very specific on what the owner can charge for carpets at the final walkthrough she was okay with the carpets but then changed her mind a few days later so i explained to the letter that i was responsible for roughly 1 30th of the cost of replacement as she graciously showed me the 10 year old carpet was good for 30 years so due to the fact it was normal wear and tear i agreed to cover that portion it was only a couple hundred now in her letter she threatened legal action as well so i put everything together including a final breakdown of what was owed to her and what was owed to me and it was close to fifteen hundred dollars i also informed her i was ready to take the case to court if she didn't agree with me as that was the next legal step about a month later she had 30 days to respond i get a check for 12.50 and a short note saying she expected this issue was considered resolved i have never smiled so much cashing a check let me ask you guys if you were doing a rent-to-own type thing and a short time into your time living there the septic just totally acts up you find out that the septic was not legally installed correctly but the owner goes no it's fine i'll cover the costs i'll fix it would that still be enough of a situation for you to give up and look for a completely different place let me know what you think in the comments down below and our final story of the days by hender goal disable an employee's innovative screen layout and video indexing application okay i'll do that too bad about those sales figures though this happened back in the days when companies had call centers in the us i'm old i worked for company x not its real name company x got a lot of its business from inbound and outbound telemarketing i worked for the branch of company x that set up and managed the call centers where their csrs worked the call center the story is about was pretty big hundreds and dozens of csrs sat in a big bullpen with x windows terminals at their workstations x windows terminals were basically just displays advanced for the time but all the actual work happened on servers elsewhere think of the terminals as just a screen keyboard and mouse that only ran the equivalent of a web browser a csr could sit anywhere in the bullpen and flip the on switch of the terminal to get the standard home page you weren't allowed to change the standard home page or anything else for that matter everything you did as a csr was via a script there was no deviation from the script allowed in theory and practice human customers are prone to going off script one of the apps i don't think they called them at that time but it's essentially the same thing an icon you could click on to do a thing was a video player that allowed the csrs to look up a commercial that a customer would call about this was an inbound telemarketing site think of it like a private youtube i guess the commercials themselves didn't have a ton of information about what the services and terms that were offered and the clipped voice overs that came at the end were hard to hear or interpret so the idea was that the customers would call and then the csr would find the commercial on the app and explain the offer to the customer hopefully leading to a sale the app was pretty buggy networks even local access networks didn't have a lot of bandwidth back then and video playback ate up a ton of it plus the descriptions in the video's metadata weren't always the greatest so csr and customer conversations tended to be long discussions like is it one where the little boy talks to his grandpa about calling during the holidays no is the little boy black or white oh it's a little girl and it's the grandma not the grandpa wait is it the one where there's a picture of a horse on the wall i'm looking at it right now it's a black horse no the horse is black not the little girl call times for those types of calls were abysmal add to that a very confusing home screen layout and the result was that sales numbers for the site were pretty bad enter jake which might be his real name because i can't actually remember it he was a comp sci major at some school that i also don't remember jake did not like the workflow of the mandatory slash standard home screen and he hated the stupid commercial video app so being a compsci major he did the logical thing he fixed it jake figured out that you could interrupt the boot up process of your workstation and get it to load its configuration from somewhere else i don't remember the exact method he used but the end result was a very efficient workflow that allowed him to walk customers through the process and a fraction of the standard or mandatory time jake also started writing up detailed descriptions for the commercials indexed by topic market where the commercials aired etc and even having the era's equivalent of tags an example picture horse or character grandpa he put all of that into a searchable database he created he somehow got that on his workstation as well the end result was that jake could take a call figure out what video the customer was inquiring about and walk them through the offering terms and conditions and sign someone up in five minutes where it took any of the other csrs 15 to 20. disclaimer i'm pulling those metrics for my butt the point is jake set things up so he was much more efficient than the others using the standard and mandatory tools eventually jake's cool new home screen got noticed by the other csrs they wanted their numbers for call duration and sales to improve as well so they asked jake how he did it and jake very kindly showed them how pretty soon a lot of other people were upping their game with jake's cool new home screen and video index database you know what happened next one of the bullpen managers noticed that jake's terminal always looked different from everybody else's that would not do the handbook specifically stated that employees were not allowed to change the terminal worse jake's video index database made it easy to simplify the script that csrs were required to use going off script was a huge deal managers had these headsets that let them listen in on any call and they could screen mirror any employee's screen jake got called into a meeting and let go i never heard what happened to him but i suspect he graduated from his compsci program and went on to do great things jake or whatever your name is if you read this sorry you got fired that was a pretty crappy thing for them to do i hope you invented google or something and are now reading this from the deck of your mega yacht i got called into a different meeting the topic being how do we prevent employees from hacking the workstations i was like this dude you just fired increased his efficiency in sales numbers by orders of magnitude shouldn't the first topic be how do we implement these same changes for all of the csrs my suggestion was not well received jake's hack would supposedly cost the company tons of money for retraining not to mention the salaries required of folks like me who were tasked to prevent other csrs from gasp improving efficiency it wasn't an approved standard legal hadn't reviewed it the folks who monitor ada had invented it it promoted reckless behavior and other csrs the script had been developed by a lot of people whose job it was to develop scripts it wasn't jake's job to develop scripts or apps it was jake's former job to read the darn script say the words on it and use the tools that were given to him i spent a lot of time and energy trying to convince my management and company x's management to use jake's improvements but the bottom line was i was told to just fix it and to obliterate all traces of jake's hacks i wasn't even allowed to keep a copy of jake's database so i shrugged my shoulders and did exactly what i was told to do with predictable effect call lengths increased sales rates sank csrs who were looking at nice fat bonuses suddenly he saw those become impossible and not a few of them quit customers started dropping off calls because they were taking too long company x probably lost a ton of business although i'd be hard-pressed to quantify it but it was cool because the bullpen managers were getting their fad bonuses for script compliance and i got a big pat on the back for figuring out how to lock down the terminals i honestly don't even remember how i did it probably just a bios password or something stupid like that in the end it probably didn't matter all that much company x moved all their telemarketing overseas and that particular call center shut down technology has moved on but i honestly hope there's someone out there hacking whatever workstations they're forced to use you can definitely tell that this is an old school call center or tech company i mean i guess it's just a call center but i feel like in the modern days employees are encouraged to look for any kind of efficiency boosting shortcut or work around or anything like that nowadays i feel like if an employee found something like that hopefully they would actually implement it because they realize how incredibly valuable that is i too hope that jake is sitting on some mega yacht somewhere being like i'm glad they fired me i went on to bigger and better things night shift manager suffers consequences of her own actions full disclosure the story happened around 2009-2010 i male 23 at the time had graduated college two years prior and was unable to find work in the great recession so i stayed on at my college job working in a grocery store at this point i had landed my first real job outside and had put in my two weeks notice but nobody knew but the day manager now anyone who's ever worked in a grocery store or similar retail environment knows that there's always a middle-aged woman with an outsized ego usually obese but not always running the evening shift after anyone with even remote qualifications has gone home it's practically part of the position to have a weird sadistic streak and to inflate yourself on the modicum of power the position provides i digress a similar aged fellow walter and i had finished our night's work being the industrious lads that we were if you've worked in this environment you also know this weird sadistic night manager will try to squeeze every single minute of work out of you as possible so as to make herself look as good as possible so walter and i are in the back room doing light duty until close which is about two hours away in walks sadistic night manager who starts going off about how we're stealing time we weren't we were doing my duty sweeping sorting etc i and farmer were hourly workers with an assigned nightly workload and we're on to our assigned light duty after finishing this goes over about as well as if i threw a cup of vomit at her sadistic night manager drags us out to the dairy case gives us a shopping cart some cleaner and instructs us to pull out the product clean the shelving and reset the product walter who hated sadistic night managers guts got this look on his face something i've never seen before and something i hope i never see again walter explained his plan and we both went and got about five more shopping carts each we fully pulled the case cleaned the shelving most importantly remove the tags to clean under them and oops that was our time for the night now there's about two thousand dollars of dairy that can't be out for more than a few hours max sitting in the aisle of the store with no one to put it back we tell sadistic night manager it's there and leave for the night the store is closing in about 10 minutes 11 p.m and sadistic night manager has 2 thousand dollars of dairy set to expire on our watch anyone who works in a supermarket also knows that the store managers watch the time clocks like hawks and everyone is hourly until you make a certain grade so there's only like two salary positions in a store usually gm and assistant gm sadistic night manager can't run up her time since she's a 40-hour employee eligible for overtime and now has to clock out and spend hours for free figuring out the planogram basically where everything is supposed to go since the tags were off i talked to the night shift guys every now and again and according to them she was there until about 2 30 to 3 in the morning getting everything back the way it was since she decided to be a jerk and decide that work we were doing wasn't good enough or didn't properly inflate her ego do you agree with op that every store has this sadistic night manager some kind of token manager that is just a nightmare to everybody around them honestly i've never worked retail and i still find myself feeling like op's absolutely right what about you guys let me know in the comments down below our next story is by r duncan g ex-wife wants to itemize and split the cost of everything so my ex-wife and i used to have a great relationship but she's become petty and somewhat vindictive these last couple months our relationship started going downhill after her daughter my ex-step-daughter broke into my house and stole from me and my new wife while we were on vacation together yes i invited my ex-wife and her boyfriend to come on vacation with us so it would be a family thing my current wife was completely fine with it not only did we invite them we paid for everything plane tickets rental house meals activities etc we've done this before and it was nice while we were on vacation my ex-wife's daughter broke into our house and stole from us we had to file a police report because some of the things stolen was medication and we couldn't get new prescriptions without filing a police report this upset my ex-wife even though we told her before we called the police and she said do what you need to do before this my ex and i would pretty much just buy what the kids needed while we had them every once in a while she'd ask me to split the cost of some things and i would i have never asked her to split the cost of anything prior to this but lately she's been asking to split the cost of just about everything fine whatever i usually get most of the things for the kids anyway about a month ago my son needed some new equipment for indoor lacks she asked if i would split i said fine when she took him out shopping they couldn't find everything so i bought most of it online i asked her what she bought and how much and i told her what i bought and how much it turned out she owed me for the split it was only forty dollars i would have let it go but she hounded me for a week over five bucks this pissed her off she'd be fine when i have to pay her but gets pissed when she has to pay me i only asked her for the portion of the split because she asked me to split the cost in the first place we argued back and forth and then she came up with a list of things we should not have to split and anything else we would split so i started to keep track of things that i paid for that were not to be split between us she gave me her list and what i owe her not a lot i owe her 80 bucks but when i gave her my list and her share she now owes me 425 dollars this might be kind of a weird analogy to bring into this but this kind of makes me think of like drawing voting districts in certain states to me it sounded like the ex-wife was trying to outline all the things that she probably wouldn't have to split money on very often only they didn't do a very good job maybe they got halfway into it and realized oh crap there's a lot of stuff that i'm gonna have to split that i just can't ignore going into it thinking they can avoid most of the expenses and push most of the costly stuff on op but the reality is kids are darn expensive our next story is by a lot of dashes and underscores my manager tried to be petty about me being late to work twice for valid reasons and it backfired i've had a migraine for going on over a week now i had a doctor's appointment scheduled for next week to get help with it and my doctor couldn't see me sooner due to the severity of it at times i was five minutes late to work twice this week literally five minutes when i'm usually on time both times were because i literally had to stop my commute to throw up due to the pain i informed my manager of the situation but because he likes to run a tight ship he demanded i pay 20 dollars for a doctor's note for those two days and get it before my next shift today twenty dollars is roughly what i get paid for two hours of work after taxes anyways i went to the walk-in clinic this morning before work i had to wait until today because today is the day we get paid and i was broke after paying rent on the first the doctor who i met for the first time blew all of my symptoms out of proportion migraine tiredness and red eyes from not sleeping well he said that i had to get tested for covet and self-isolate until i get the results since it's the weekend i probably won't get the results until monday afternoon here's the best part since i only work four days a week and i was scheduled friday to monday i'm eligible to receive two weeks of coveted benefits from the government in my country friday saturday being part of this week and sunday slash monday being part of next week the criteria states you're eligible if your schedule is cut by 50 so i'm getting a thousand dollars to have a long weekend at home when i would have only gotten paid 325 if i'd worked after i tell my manager this he said i have to come in because they're short staffed and nobody can work but me then he accused me of lying it felt great to say i'm sorry sir but it's the law you'll get your doctor's note when i see you on tuesday considering the runaround they gave you and telling you to come in even when you told them that you're legitimately sick and you have a doctor's note might be worth weighing your options to see if there's any other jobs that might be out there for you our next story is from an anonymous poster boss excluded me from a meeting about my clients ended up having to deal with a very irate customer so as always a little backstory to set the scene i was organizing private travel for ultra high net worth individuals generally focusing on european travel about a month ago i handed in my two month notice as i'd found a new role elsewhere after two and a half years of dealing with my narcissistic managers constant passive-aggressive needling and bullying quick introduction to the characters in the story narcissistic boss we shall call napoleon i'm sure you can make the connection there client will call dingo because he's australian but that bears absolutely no relation to what happened in this story so as mentioned a couple of weeks back i handed in my two month notice to leave the company and one of the first things napoleon asked me to do was to put together a full handover of my client list with a bit of an explanation of their likes and dislikes regular routes example margins for flights etc etc as i'm moving to a completely different industry this was absolutely fine and gave me something to do this handover went unacknowledged for about four weeks while i wrapped my stuff up and spent a lot of time sitting around doing saw it all wednesday this week napoleon decides right let's go and decide who gets which of op's clients then you don't need to come up op stay here and man the phones i had three flights that were already booked months ago that would be operating after i'd officially left the company so these were essentially free money towards targets for whoever gets to deal with them at the start of the next year napoleon being a narcissist and a greedy butt decides that the two flights with the biggest margin he'd take for himself and screw everyone else however had he had me in the meeting to discuss the clients he would have known that i was in the middle of a fairly difficult discussion with clientingo over a flight to a certain alpine resort at the end of december essentially we'd been told there were no landing options for the requested airport and they would have to use a different airport about 45 minutes drive further away he'd chosen the original one as his kids get carsick so he wanted to cut down the drive time i had been going back and forth with the aircraft owner trying to find a solution and while they were up in the meeting eventually broke the bad news to dingo but advised that we would offer him money off a future flight and therefore cutting our margin as an apology dingo did not like this and responded with a scathing email advising us of how awful this all was and how he was considering canceling the flight and he'd think about the options that i provided him and get back to me later that day cue malicious compliance napoleon comes down from the meeting and advises oh i'll be looking after dingo and so and so other clients from now on for you so i thought brilliant if he wants the margin and didn't bother to get the background he can deal with the fallout so i send over an email to dingo saying i'm so sorry for all the issues that you faced with this and i understand how disappointed you are please note i've escalated this directly to my manager napoleon who will now be dealing with this all personally from this point forward when napoleon saw this he responded um what are you doing you don't leave for another two weeks to which i responded you asked me to hand things over and advise that you'd be dealing with dingo so i've handed dingo over to you as requested any information you need is in the handover i gave you a couple of weeks ago as clearly you don't need any more information napoleon lost his crap with me and then had to spend the next two days groveling to dingo dealing with a very difficult operator and knowing that if he'd thought for a second maybe it might be useful to have him up here to talk us through the clients then he wouldn't have to be dealing with this while i washed my hands of what was becoming a fairly stressful situation and went back to doing various pointless busy work as i work out my notice frankly i think this is a lesson learned if you have an employee leaving your company under your watch you'll probably want them to lay out everything that's going on with their work to make sure whoever's jumping onto it can do a good job and especially if you're making a choice for people to choose what they jump onto it just makes sense to have the full scope of what's going on before they choose it and our final story of the day is by chris j1103 engineering manager enforcing start times backfires with complaints for context i'm an engineer in a radiation therapy department at a hospital one of my team's daily duties is starting and quality testing treatment equipment before clinical teams use it to treat patients our official starting time is six o'clock to allow treatment to start at 7 30. however myself and two others on the team have always chosen to start earlier usually around 5 30 to make sure everything got completed on time for the sake of the patience we never claimed over time for this extra half hour and still finished our shift at the time we were supposed to recently our manager who is not an engineer told us that we're no longer allowed to start work before six o'clock so we did exactly that we wait in our cars outside till 6am on the dot then we enter the building start the equipment and begin our work as a result at least one treatment machine is signed over late sometimes only as little as five minutes every clinical day because our testing sessions take as long as they need to this delay ends up meaning treatments are running behind before they even begin which does not go down well with clinical teams who in turn send no end of complaints to our manager asking him to allow us to start at the time we know we need to just so they can start shooting on time but this manager is a stubborn jerk who won't budge so we're stuck in the middle of wanting to get the machines ready on time for the sake of the patience but can't because of how long the tests we perform take as much as op wants to go out there and do this extra work for the patients the thing is it's unpaid labor and in the eyes of the law they wouldn't take kindly to that if it ended up in a court case all it would take is for those employers and managers to accept that 5 30 start time off the clock and for one employee to do that for a year get upset that they're not being paid for that half hour every single day for a year take it to court and not only that employee is going to get discovered for this but every other employee that starts half an hour early is all of a sudden probably going to get dragged into this and that's thousands and thousands of dollars all of a sudden that they owe not only the liability of it but you just deserve to work only what you're getting paid for it's a very noble cause for the patients but they should just rework it so it fits within the working time not have a situation where you have to come in early just to make sure everything doesn't mess up you cannot spend 50 on a haircut when i worked as an engineer at a canadian telecoms company i was deployed for several months in brazil after two months at a hotel at the business area of sao paulo city i urgently needed a haircut being the expensive business zone i was located there was a haircut placed next to my hotel and i decided to walk downstairs to get the haircut there they charged 50 u.s for a male haircut i had to pay and left when the accountant lady reviewed my expenses report she said you can not submit such an expensive haircut cue malicious compliance two months later i had to cut my hair again i took a 25 taxi to a barber shop in a mall some kilometers away cut my hair for 25 dollars enjoyed the walk and had dinner and went back on another taxi for 25 plus the two taxis i took earlier that day to go to the customer office when the accountant lady asked why i took four taxis on the same day my response was you told me i can't spend 50 on a haircut so i had to look for a barber shop in a cheaper area of the city she didn't bother me again from all the stories i've heard in situations like this these people are just fixated on the biggest numbers they can find and trying to get them as small as possible well they were able to bring that number down but there were just more of those lower numbers if you were on a business trip and you got a 50 haircut and you got yelled at for it afterwards would you feel any amount of guilt taking a taxi traveling around to get a cheaper haircut knowing it's going to cost them even more money this time around let me know what you think in the comments down below our next story is by jake no mistake want strict work hours okay can do i used to work in a mid-sized company in the engineering department one of the managers started to get upset because if he walked around at exactly 8 30 our start time everyone was not in their seats he felt that engineers were being too lacks with their time the edict went out that all engineers had to be in their seats exactly at the start time i told my boss that i was not planning on complying because i was a salaried professional and expected to be treated as such and that if they didn't trust me to put in an honest week's work then they should fire me instead of micromanage me the older and much wiser engineers took a different approach they all showed up five minutes early to make sure they were in their seats at 8 30 but also set an alarm for 5 pm and would literally drop everything they were doing exactly at 5 pm and leave the building is the manager having a meeting that was supposed to end at 5 but is running a little late no at 5 pm a series of alarms would go off and everyone would stand up in the middle of the meeting to leave does operations need technical support at 4 55 they have exactly five minutes on the phone with the engineer before he'll have to get off the phone is someone trying to discuss a work related issue at 8 28 better wait a couple minutes because no one in the engineering department is answering work-related questions for another two minutes needless to say the policy didn't last very long so from all the stories i've read it appears the best strategy to take is that if they're going to nickel and dime you with your start time and say you've got to be doing this at exactly 8 30 you turn around and say all right but i'm working till 5 p.m and not a minute later because if i'm gonna be in here working exactly at 8 30 i'm gonna be leaving at exactly 5 p.m you don't want to put that trust in me then i'm not going to hustle for you our next story is by turn your phone dummy i want a wi-fi point and i don't care how you do it don't care huh i work as the lone it guy at a school and we had a new deputy principal start people used to refer to him as the blue sky guy meaning that he would say all these amazing things that are going to happen but then don't do anything to set them in motion then of course get angry when it doesn't happen one day he says to me i want a wi-fi point in my office i said well there's one in the room next door and i can see that you have full bars on your laptop so there's no need for one he of course did not like this and demanded that i install a wi-fi point in his office the thing is his office was tacked onto the side of the building a few years prior and only had one network point that his desk voip phone was plugged into now anyone who works in it long enough can tell you that there is a second pass-through network part on the phone where you can plug in a network cable but then i would also need a power injector to power the wi-fi point and it would then be limited to megabits per second instead of a thousand megabits per second so installing one in his office was not only unnecessary but would also be slower for anyone who connected to it i try to explain this all to him and he just cuts me off i want a wi-fi point and i don't care how you do it so cue malicious compliance i screwed the wi-fi point to his roof and ran the network cable down the wall and sticky taped the end of the cable to the back of his desk where he can't see sure he had a wi-fi point but it wasn't plugged into anything about one year later he said i noticed that all the other wi-fi points have a light on and mine doesn't oh it's just that you have so many windows in here it can be hard to see the light he just left a few months later and the staff threw a mini party and then took the wi-fi point down and put it into storage his replacement has not had any wi-fi issues in the past two years i'm just gonna take a wild guess and assume this guy had no recollection of how internet or wi-fi or speeds worked somebody that's so stubborn and dead set that having a wi-fi point in the office is going to guarantee perfect connection like opie eventually chose to do sometimes it's easier to just give them what they want even though you know it's not the right thing this next story is by cucabonus get your poop off my property in advance this is not my personal story but rather that of a friend of mine and his neighbor retold with his kind permission i'm also not very technically minded when it comes to electrics so please bear with me and i shall explain as best as my layman's knowledge allows so i live not far from milla milla in north queensland up in the mountains in rainforest on my property i'm blessed with a strong mountain stream that never goes dry and was perfect for a small hydroelectric setup to produce power for my house now to place it on my property i would only get a small head of water meaning the hydro system would not be running at full capacity and produce a lot less power than it was actually capable of to ensure i was never left dry i installed two hydro systems which essentially meant i could now run everything as much as i liked to burn off excess power produced i mounted a row of heating elements from old hot water systems on the roof of my shed i could not feed excess back into the grid as apparently it's illegal to do this from hydra for some reason but is apparently perfectly alright from solar panels a pretty nice setup once complete and apart from a very small amount of maintenance i never paid a cent for power ever again i was on very good terms with my downhill neighbor and eventually we struck a deal to place the generators on my neighbor's property where there would be a higher head for my wear and the turbines would run at full power easily providing enough electricity for both houses so we poured a new cement slab for the generators and ran a new feed pipe from my ware to the new generator site wired everything in and hey presto free power all around everything was good for nearly a decade until my neighbor finally sold the place and moved south to be with his kids at first the new neighbor seemed okay he'd been told about the power sharing arrangement but apparently had not grasped the bit about the generators being on his property they were down by the creek and in the forest so it may not have been immediately obvious where they were located unfortunately when he did discover them he appeared to take it as a personal affront and came storming to my door one night why are there two bloody great machines on my place with a pipe coming from your place i said uh do you mean my hydro turbines they say is that what they are why are they on my property i don't want them here you need to get rid of them or i will i say wait a minute those turbines are where our power comes from we can't just rip them out he says that's not my problem i don't want your crap on my land you have one week to move them or else the discussion went on some more as i tried to get them to understand why they were there and what they did as well as the original deal to share power because of where they were he was either too stupid or too rude to care so i finally agreed to move them the next day so the next morning i shut off the drive pipe disconnected the turbines and loaded it all onto my ute i then went to the original side of my property and reconnected the whole mess of course i had to use the original wiring setup to connect them which only supplied my house in any case there was now only enough power for one place anyway due to the lower head supplying less pressure all good and my place had power again by the evening my neighbor came home after work to a dark house and defrosting freezers and i went where the heck is my power i'm supposed to get free power on my place you can't do this i say as i repeatedly explained yesterday the deal was you get power in return for me being able to sight the generators on your property now that you force me to move them you get nothing in any case they now can only supply enough power for one house because of their location so i guess you're going to have to sort something out for yourself neighbors stormed off to buy a petrol generator in the coming week he had an electrician in to do a quote to supply mains power to his house wasn't happy with that as the house had been off-grid for a decade and would need extensive modifications to get back on grid they would need to put a new pole on in his property at his expense as well as a new fuse box around 15 000 he then got a quote for his own hydroelectric turbine but discovered he didn't have sufficient head on his property the salesman suggested he talked to his uphill neighbor me to see if he could run a pickup pipe from that property guess who came to my door cap in hand and very apologetic to ask if i would mind putting the generators back on his place so he could have power when i told him there was no way in heck i was going to do that he asked if he could have permission to run a drive pipe from my where instead i say gee i don't know if i want your crap on my land i eventually let him do it although i did make him sweat a bit first however there was a condition attached if he ever made trouble with me again that drive pipe was going to come out immediately haven't had so much as a peep from him since this guy moves into the house discovers on their property there's these giant machines they don't understand sure fair enough go to the guy and complain but as soon as op said this is what's giving your house power for free should have ended there this guy was obviously so narcissistic or argumentative seeing red or whatever that they just they wouldn't allow logic to actually process or get through to them i've read a lot of stories about karen's who act very much this way and our final story of the days by small of two pieces you don't have any well can you check in the back this story is from years ago when i was the assistant to the retail manager of a small mom and pop swimming pool supply store one of the many aspects of the job was inventory management i did the ordering and i would frequently audit the stock to see what was low what we had and make any adjustments in our computer for stuff that broke was taken by our service department expired etc i also had the displeasure of dealing with customers it was the middle of summer and as you might guess it's the busy season for pools i would typically work 60 plus hours a week with one day off frequently that day off would be a sunday one week then i wouldn't get another until the following friday so you can imagine that sometimes my patience was thin the store is hectic and busy when a customer comes in looking for something specifically what i don't remember but we had none on the shelf i apologetically told them we were out then they hit me with the classic well can you check in the back remember when i said i was in charge of inventory i knew we had none and i told them i was sure we didn't have any well can you check anyway you malicious compliance i put on my best customer service smile and say sure i'll check in the back in a few minutes so i'm mosey on back to the stockroom knowing full well it's not there i take my time and stroll through the stock catch my breaths from the business of the floor and enjoy the peace and quiet of the stockroom where there's no customers for just a little bit then i head back into the chaos of the store and smile apologetically again to the customer no sorry there's none back there the customer thanked me for checking and left disappointed but at least i got a couple minutes to myself honestly working in retail can probably be a very tiring thing if somebody excuses themselves to the back and just kind of takes a breather in there for five minutes or so i feel like honestly every once in a while it's kind of understandable i mean really there must be only so much you can take with all these people coming through you probably deal with cairns you work at a pool supply store so there's probably people bringing in weird murky containers of this and that do you have this pool toy how do i fix my water what do i do with this i imagine that can get old pretty quickly we need a urine sample i was a crna certified registered nurse anesthetist for those outside the u.s for many years in the military and civilian life i'm that job you handle narcotics and other controlled medications every day there's a record of every dose you administer and every bit you waste turn in for random analysis one day i was sitting in my operating room minding my own business when another crna and an anesthesiologist came into my room and tell me the clinical director of the department wants to see me i'm curious but not concerned i walk up to his office and am then escorted to the office of another department director and told to have a seat outside the office i'm getting a bit nervous now as there should be no reason for me to be here i'm left cooling my heels while i'm imagining worst case scenario a malpractice lawsuit but have never caused injury or death in my entire career i was actually pretty good being military trained now i'm working myself up to the point of physical illness nausea eventually i'm led up to the office to find several people in suits and a senior anesthesiologist they introduce themselves and are from the state's impaired physicians division and i'm being investigated for diverting controlled substances stealing my nausea and terror are immediately replaced by red hot rage i become calm and focused knowing you're innocent and being older and mature helps a lot as background i've never had to take a narcotic for anything in my life except the tylenol number three as a teenager when my wisdom teeth were pulled when i was an enlisted troop i smoked a lot of weed back then it was the 70s but gave that up when i was in my early 20s as urine is randomly tested i'm told my administration records for hydromorphone dilaudid was incorrect i'm really angry now and calmly ask okay now what i'm escorted to a bathroom where i have to give a sample of urine while being watched no problem back to the office i'm asked for a hair sample i pull my surgical cap off showing my almost shaved head i bicycled a lot and it was cooler i say we have a problem i then in front of the entire office ask for the scissors i drop my scrub pants and underwear grab a handful of hair down there cut them off place them on the foil used to ship it to the lab and say there's your mother freaking hair anything else they all look kind of shocked and go to an adjoining office leaving me alone with one person from the state i asked him if i was going back to work he told me they were discussing that i asked what he thought he said by my reactions he was pretty sure i wasn't stealing anything they let me go and the case i was in was over by then so i went home i started a week of vacation the next day i made the mistake of looking up drug testing stats looking at false positive rates and worrying about that for the week it took the test to come back they came back clean the problem was of my making as we had changed to a computer charting system and i had screwed up recording the drug in the recovery room as it was a different system this triggered an investigation by a pharmacist to see if there was theft she could have asked about charting instead of going right to the idea of theft fast forward a couple of months i'm asked to go to a conference room where i see the controlled substance pharmacist and all the anesthesia department heads since my run in last time i had become the most fastidious recorder in the department the pharmacist starts off by saying my narcotic records are still not correct i smile the smile of righteous knowing she's wrong i ask for computer records she's holding i look them over hand them back and say nope you're reading them wrong she wasn't looking at the post-op record where the dilaudid is charted in the recovery room i hand it around to the rest of the table and every other person agrees with me she goes pale and says well you also never turn in any waste and that's an indicator of diversion i said i give everything i draw up the chief of the department says i give everything also it's common she's really not looking well now i'd look straight at her and say if there is another meeting like this one or the last one i will be bringing a lawyer and i'll be suing you personally and trust me i have the time and resources to do that and i would have gladly spent the money to freak with her at that point my profession pays a very good salary and i would have eaten ramen every day to finance a lawsuit got up and left because i'm a vindictive petty passive-aggressive jerk from that point on i turned in waste narcotics every day 0.1 milliliters of every syringe i drew up the or pharmacist has to account for all that waste and it made his life complicated eventually he complained to my boss who told me he understands what i was doing told me my point was demonstrated and asked me if i would stop it i did several years later the accusing pharmacist was demoted from missing a crapload of fentanyl and never reporting it i was hoping she had bone cancer but i'll take that bit of karma if you found out the reason why you had to be taken aside having to take a urine sample and provide a hair sample on the spot and then show up for another additional meeting all happening because your manager just misread the reports would you give them a piece of your mind or do you think you'd be able to remain professional in a situation like that for me i don't know it might be kind of hard let me know what you think in the comments down below our next story is by calling lcars it's too hot in here yesterday it was too cold okay this is a story from many years ago told to me by my friend's father over 30 years ago my friend's father works for sears and roebuck for years he held all manner of positions throughout his career but at one point in time his job included supervising the operators that took your phone calls when you called in orders from the sears catalog as i said this is an old story anyway the operator sat in a room that was contained within the actual store right off the retail floor separated by a short hallway and an employee's only signed door this room held 10 or 12 women who all just took calls and recorded orders for products my friend's dad said they would constantly complain to him that their room was too hot or too cold often too cold in the morning and too hot on the same afternoon etc further some women would complain it was too cold while some others at the same time would complain it was too hot meanwhile the temperature of the store was centrally controlled and my friend's dad had no ability to have the temperature changed back and forth on any particular given day without the actual store manager's approval and what they did was set the whole store to a constant temperature anyway so basically my friend's dad would get all these complaints from employees that he was managing that he a didn't really put much stock in as there were no other complaints about the store temperature and b couldn't do anything about it anyway so one evening after the operator's shift was over and the store was closed he went over to the hardware department and grabbed a thermostat controller the old-school kind that just kind of sat on the wall and had an analog dial to spin and set the temperature wherever you wanted it he installed it on the wall in the operator's room but of course didn't connect it to anything the next day the ladies all come in to start their shift and my friend's dad came into the room good morning ladies i have great news for you i know you all have been uncomfortable with the temperature in this room for ages and you know how bad i felt that i wasn't able to do anything to help you well finally my requests to the store manager have been heard and the maintenance people connected a thermostat that specifically controls this room's temperature and they said as long as you don't run the ac below 68 degrees or the heat above 74 you can set it yourselves he pointed to the thermostat controller on the wall and everyone was happy one of them walked right over and leaned in and made it a little colder or hotter or whatever he reminded her that it would take about 15 to 30 minutes for the temperature to stabilize after the set point was changed from that day forward and for the five years longer he worked in that department he never heard another single complaint from them about the temperature this isn't really the same thing but this story reminds me a lot of stories my mom told me as a kid when she was working she would do some customer service stuff where you have to walk around from room to room and of course there was an employee break room in the employee break room there's an air conditioner and i guess a lot of people who worked for the company came from countries that were just way hotter so they're really used to warm climates and warm situations so my mom was describing it would be like 80 degrees in the break room and they would have the heat on meanwhile she's walking around from room to room helping people out so obviously high 70s low 80s would probably work up a little bit of a sweat imagine getting back to the break room sitting down and it's 80 degrees and the heat is on i felt so bad for her when she told me that story this next story is by lump kz won't pay for my breakfast well okay then spend 8 000 on a coffee machine in the name of equality let me preface this by saying this is not in the u.s but a smaller country in europe so a company our size is pretty big i worked for said pretty big engineering company with around 2500 employees spread around the world the main part of us i guess around 2000 works in our home country with the main bulk stationed in four big offices besides the big offices there's also some smaller ones scattered around the country i work in one of those in total we're 18 people employed at our office this is obviously not enough people to warrant a reception desk canteen i.t department and so on that means we get on by ourselves for the most part unless it's a bigger problem we can't solve in which case we have to call one of the main offices for help it's a bit slower sometimes but it's okay and we don't make a fuss this also means that there's some differences in how stuff is done in the different places for example in our office the office tasks ordering paper organizing the storage area arranging office get-togethers and stuff like that is just something we all do to make things run none of us mind as it's just small stuff that doesn't take a lot of time in the bigger offices there's people employed to handle all that stuff well one of our company perks is that every friday we get 30 minutes paid breakfast in the office in the bigger offices there's a canteen where they arrange the breakfast so the employees just have to waltz down eat and go back to work in our office we take turns going to the nearest bakery and buying breakfast then go to our grocery store and get stuff to put on the bread all in our own time before coming in we'll get the breakfast reimbursed but not the time again we didn't mind the arrangement and neither did the facility managers stationed in the main offices what they suddenly did have a problem with is that we have a habit of buying some morning cakes cinnamon buns or whatever we felt like that day might sound weird but it's a tradition where i'm from and it's delicious to go with the breakfast one day my boss got a mail from them with a list of what the breakfast could contain and nothing else and also a budget for each person because it had to be equal for all offices that meant we couldn't get our cakes anymore and neither cold cuts of meat for our bread both because it wasn't on the list and because we often went a little bit over budget the office was in an uproar i tell you don't mess with an engineer's breakfast so we comply and only buy the stuff we're allowed to but we hatch out a plan if they want it to all be equal all will have to be equal which means one all of us start putting 30 minutes each friday on the company as we're entitled to before we often just put a smaller amount of time down or we just didn't and the time disappeared to other tasks which the company could build a client's 18 times 30 minutes equals 9 hours each week of lost time already a lot more than what the breakfast cost extra 2 we ask for somewhere to put the time we spend collecting breakfast and cleaning afterwards as the other offices didn't have to do it themselves and it had to be equal three we make a list of other stuff we don't have that the other offices do we named every small thing that we could come up with including but not limited to i.t department receptionist kitchen worker to help collect and make the breakfast facility worker to keep storage stocked up fancy coffee machine what we had was an old school regular coffee maker other offices had fancy automatic ones with different blends and stuff i think around 15 to 20 bullet points of varying pettiness my boss sends the list to the main office and tells them we need this for all things to be equal as you wanted well we now have a fancy coffee machine costing around 8 000 to get installed because a new water line had to be drawn to where it's placed and a much bigger maintenance cost because of different blends cleaning and so on meanwhile we're all waiting for our i.t department to get set up but i'm guessing we'll get our cakes back before that happens you know it's almost scarily symbolic that the big guys in their giant offices with all of their luxury niceness start looking down at the little guys and start nickel and diming them on what they can and can't do no no no i know you have to go and literally get your own breakfast at the store but you can't spend three to five extra bucks per person now if you excuse me my eight thousand dollar coffee machine that i pressed one button on to make a cup of joe is done so i'll have to call you back it's kind of funny to see that they're actually making some concessions to these people but i think like op said i'm willing to bet they're gonna renege on all of this stuff it's gonna get to the point where they're like okay we're done trying to look like we're caring about appeasing you just have your darn breakfast cakes or whatever want to leave school early for a concert okay i can make that happen this true story is a family tale that usually gets told around the holidays each year for a laugh it involves my sister and my mom who happens to have a good sense of humor my sister not so much to give you some context my sister used to be very dramatic and vengeful meaning if she didn't get her way the whole family suffered her teenage wrath so sometimes my parents found out that was just easier to give her what she wanted hence my favorite malicious compliance story over 10 plus years back my older sister was a senior in high school and was very popular she arrives at school on a friday morning and she learns that most of her friends took the day off to go to a large mall where one of their favorite singers was going to be signing autographs herman or other friend decide they'll also leave school to join their friends at the mall so my sister walks to the school office where she calls my mom at home she didn't have a cell phone yet and asks my mom if she can call the school in a few minutes and make up some excuse so she can leave to go to the mall my mom said absolutely not and they argued back and forth enough that my mom finally goes okay i'll call the school and get you out but i'm going to tell them you have to go home because you pooped yourself well ladies and gentlemen my sister 100 did not believe my sweet mom would actually do this and said yeah sure fine and hangs up and heads back to class not 10 minutes later the school security guard comes running into my sister's class seeing hi mrs teacher i need sister to come with me right now my sister gets up and walks to the hallways where the security guard has a jacket for her and says you can tie this around your waist my sister tells me this is the moment she died she had called my mom's bluff and she lost and now to keep up with the act she had to play the game to be able to go to the mall she turned bright red and tied the sweater around her waist and walked back to the office at the office one of the female school officers had a pair of gym shorts for her and told her it's okay these things happen and gave her a bag to put her pants in and shorts to change into so now my sister reluctantly goes into the bathroom and changes into the gym shorts and puts her soiled pants into the bag once she leaves the bathroom the office lady tells my sister that when my mom called and told her the situation she also mentioned that unfortunately my mom was busy and my sister would have to walk the three blocks home so my sister does the walk of shame home with her backpack and her pants in a bag where she finds my mom totally not busy and laughing hard upon seeing my sister in borrowed gym shorts my sister was not happy but whatever she did end up meeting her friends at the mall but decided not to tell them what it took to get there bad choice on her part because boy oh boy do school employees talk come the following week my sister hears whispers about her being the poop girl and while she tried her best to squash the rumors for the rest of the year she was known as the girl who pooped her pants which thank goodness helped take her down a teenage angst pig let me ask you guys when you were going up through school would you be willing to take the sacrifice to be known as the kid who pooped their pants just to be able to have gotten out of school one of the days you were going there or is it just totally not worth it let me know what you think in the comments down below our next story is by bear in the woods i'm not an idiot i just play one on tv eons ago when the world was young and dinosaurs roamed the earth i worked at a popular electronic gadget store called the sharper image now keep in mind that the current company called the sharper image is not the same company the original one declared bankruptcy and sold all its assets including the rights to the name back around 2008 and i have no affiliation to the post-bankruptcy organization as i was employed there only until its closure those were goodish times sales were constant customers were rich some were snobby and i worked with an overall decent team of five to eight people as time passed and i proved that i wasn't completely incompetent i eventually was promoted to lead sales associate which made me a key holder i helped open and close the store did nightly deposits and so on in a nutshell i was a discount supervisor with no real authority to speak of now the old boss was a great guy pretty relaxed environment flexible in scheduling and overall well-liked heck he let me duck out of work early with him once so we could both hit the casino and he taught me how to play craps those were fun times and then one day old boss left he left the company left the city and moved to the other side of the state usa the store's assistant manager got a big fat promotion and became new boss now as newboss assumed control of the store a complete store assessment was performed to give him as complete a picture as could be painted of the store status and things did not look good old boss was a bit too relaxed with his duties and several thousands of dollars worth of large merchandise was nowhere to be found large toys such as underwater scooters underwater propulsion vehicle 300 a pop roomba robotic vacuum cleaners 500 expensive air purifier systems 300 to 550 all missing without a trace it became widely believed but not proven that old boss was swiping merch selling it and using it to fuel his gambling trips after work and our store became a high theft location as a direct result of this now nubus dealt with this by implementing standard security procedures locking up small easily stolen items in a secure area daily inventories of high-priced items logging and reporting any discrepancies restricted access to electronic items to only management and lead associates all understandable and reasonable actions theft was still existent but a large bulky items no longer walked out of the store and small expensive ones were mostly under lock and key things should have been good there however new boss wanted to throw around his newfound authority and enjoyed kicking up his feet and doing literally nothing during his shifts with periodic bouts of walking the sales floor to micromanage anything that caught his eye he'd sit in his office reading a newspaper for four hours and come out to tell us to re-clean the sales tables or display shelves that were cleaned 20 minutes prior he'd duck out of work early on a friday afternoon and forget to put in the payroll so that employees would get paid for that week's worth of work and proceed to call the night closer always me because he had a nightlife to walk the hourly employee through the process he'd skip out on opening the store the following day because he was hungover and made the night guy me come in the morning after to open the store while annoying these aren't that bad and i tolerated them with quiet patience after all i still kinda enjoyed the job and nothing better popped up yet but despite all my quiet acquiescence the new boss somehow got it in his head that he didn't like me there was never any non-compliance with any of his orders work was done quietly and efficiently and i had never made any waves during my time there however new boss began to actively despise me the worst work shifts unobtainable sales goals refusal to replace leaving staff and pushing that workload onto me he made it abundantly clear to the entire staff that he did not like me and was doing his darndest to see me fail so we'd have reason for disciplinary action at one point i became the only person with the responsibility of managing the high theft stock this required daily inventory of a small locked stockroom with thousands of dollars of pricey electronics cell phones bluetooth pieces anything we had that someone thought could easily disappear was kept in that room new boss was too lazy to ever catalog the room and new assistant manager was trying to keep the place from falling apart during the day shifts so it became my responsibility alone if anything went wrong only one person would be held accountable well my inner paranoid jerk decided i would keep a hawks eye on this room and made it a point to log every item in that room complete with serial number every day after the store closed while the other employees were cleaning up the storefront eventually i noticed things started to not add up bluetooth earbuds still primitive and expensive in 2008 missing fancy sunglasses being sold in a gadget store were coming up short fancy stuff that had no log of being sold that day was not in the store whenever these discrepancies were found i immediately report them to new boss just like he wanted but never seems to do anything about it this continued intermittently over the course of a few months then new boss began trying to hold me responsible for every missing item from that room now it's true that the regular salespeople needed a key holder to access the room but even i couldn't be there all day every day to open it for them i was able to defend myself by arguing that between myself the assistant manager and new boss i can't be the only one opening that door to pull out merch especially if items went missing on my days off but the writing was on the wall and i knew i couldn't keep that semi-flimsy explanation as my only defense things came to a head when i noticed new boss pulling out a cell phone removing the sim card and placing it in a new phone we just started selling claiming he was using it as a floor demo to show customers the new features we've done this with other products before but never cell phones you don't open a sealed box with a 600 plus dollar phone just to demo it the company ate the full cost of an item marked as store demo and removed it from their inventory so those can't be resold after they become a demo item the company's corporate minions said it was bad for profit margins if every store would mark out a cell phone so no cell phone demos yet here the boss was playing with a new phone and when it was time for him to head home he left new phone and all now i'm pretty sure new boss had such a low opinion of me that he didn't even view me as a threat at that point i was just some early 20s guy who was his personal punching bag so when he left the store still holding the demo phone in his hands on his way to the nightclub i had an idea i hopped under the business computer in his office and shot off an email to the district manager who handled our store and about a dozen others across several neighboring states district manager knew me he knew his minions and he knew all the stores that were under him i messaged him as a lowly senior sales shift leader and asked him what the process was to store demo a cell phone i didn't ask if you should i only asked how after all i'm a lowly shift lead and i'm just following my manager's directions when he said he was demoing out a cell phone i mentioned the recent discrepancies in our high theft room and ask for advice on how to deal with that since new boss doesn't give any feedback when i report it to him and generally i make the email sound like it came from some young naive teenager when i'm fully aware of what i'm doing as a fed up 20 something year old i send the email and go home wondering if anything will happen the next day i roll into work at 2pm for my regularly scheduled night shift to find all the regular sales clerks hanging out in the front of the store and avoiding the back office like the plague they whisper that the back office is off limits because the district manager took a 7 am flight from ohio out to our store and rolled in just after the store opened just to catch new boss reading the newspaper and playing on his new and unpaid for phone four hours of closed back office later new boss walks out carrying a box of his personal belongings and district manager is on the phone convincing a nearby sister store's manager to do double duty until we get our store situated over the next week the ex-new boss called several of my co-workers accusing them of ratting him out and getting him fired screaming at them and calling them horrible employees he systematically called every employee at our store except me i only wish i could have seen his face when they all rightfully denied any involvement and he was forced to realize his designated floor mat was not to be messed with later on assistant manager privately tells me he suspected new boss of stealing the high theft items because he had a quiet cocaine habit but nothing was ever proven oh so that's what it is all that theft and stuff i thought it was just for extra cash nope it was to fuel an addiction sadly that makes a lot more sense and our final story of the days by satanic butt mechanic got a free car rental upgrade this just happened today i was at a car rental place in space returning a rental went inside to finish things up and saw a solved rubik's cube we got to talking about it and one employee said if i could solve it within five seconds i would get a free upgrade i said okay hand it over the guy helping me got it and mentioned he was going to mix it up i said no to hand it over i made one turn to mix it up and one turn to solve it i said with a joking tone of voice you just said i had to solve it you didn't say you were going to mix it up first you should have been more specific that's what we call malicious compliance they laughed said i was right and gave me a business card for a free upgrade on the next visit i'm slightly confused though op said in the beginning that they were in space either way though doing any kind of trick at a car place and getting a free upgrade i'm gonna say you take that and run as an absolute epic win it's nice to see that they had a pretty good humor about it actually work around for crazy high targets cost employer money when i was a teenager i worked in a factory which made car switches on the line i was on there was a particular variant which was a pain in the butt it was complicated to assemble and half the time failed on the testing machine we hated this switch and often had to rework half of them which wasn't an easy task it was always because there was some issue with a component that we had to replace therefore absolutely not our fault another issue was that the basic pay was peanuts it was only by achieving the target that we would get anywhere decent pay in fact basic pay made us worse off than being unemployed our complaints to management fell on deaf ears then one day a colleague and i figured out that if we held the switch in a certain position they would all pass this was not dangerous by the way we'd both been to the factory which made the cars and their untargeted quality controllers tested everyone so we got our targets out on that variant and we got our pay management became increasingly annoyed that they were getting back pretty much every switch we made out of that variant and were frustrated as they could not for the life of them figure out how it was passing here and not there they had multiple electricians and engineers come and watch us but if you didn't know what you're looking for it would be impossible to know how we did it it must have cost them tens of thousands they ended up losing the contract and we never had to look at that awful switch again in general i think that kind of system is bound to fail regardless because i feel like that pay setup will only work until people are entirely fed up with it and just refuse to work for that do you guys agree that there would probably be a point where people would quit over this pay style or do you think that they would be able to keep getting suckers to work for that even though the pay was too infrequent and they weren't getting the bonuses or whatever that they deserve let me know what you guys think in the comments down below our next story is by bloopy head procurement wants to play dumb sure thing i wish i had a juicier outcome than just we won but i got a pretty good business and life lesson out of it 15 years ago my company developed a unique software for a big company it's basically a software that manages the workforce for that initial work years ago they didn't want to pay the whole upfront cost to write the software so they agreed to a reduced price but with a never-ending annual license which included support and maintenance the product had been stable so we mostly collected the annual license fee and did some basic support here and there and added incremental features for a fee so we recouped our fees and got a better long-term outcome but a couple of years ago they changed their procurement and payment systems and we had several invoices go unpaid some were 36 months late not because of technical reasons but because the monthly email reminders were ignored and because the threads that went from one month to the other and from manager to manager were just insane with hundreds of replies and up to 50 people cc'd at one point going over the same topics over and over again constantly them asking for proof of the work for proof of the work request proof of managerial approval for the work for copies of the invoices that we sent they were already there four times in the email thread and so on right when we thought we would wrap up the thread someone would say wait what are we talking about again and the whole thread would just continue with another iteration of the craziness it was a nightmare enough to make anyone lose their marbles we eventually got paid but god darn about five years ago they called us and said we're bringing in a new backend system at our production facility so you have to do a major update to your software so that it can talk to our new systems the new systems will be online january 1st so it's critical that no matter what your system must be ready by then so we agree on a price for the updates we're told the contract will follow the following week they assign a project manager coordinator and we start working because we need every minute if we're to make that deadline except the contract doesn't come instead we're put in touch with the procurement guy to finalize the details let's call this guy ashish ashish was also on the previous email threads and not exactly on the ball then a warning sign time tick-tock first ashish proceeds to ask me for the old master contract then he tells me he doesn't understand it and that we'll need a new master contract in the future hmm then he says he doesn't understand what the software does and as far as he's concerned it's just a nice to have for the company hmm then he says it should be free of charge since it's included in the maintenance and support but no the changes they want are 10 plus years out and out of scope from the original requirements of course we're polite as we answer but there's something about the way he writes and asks for stuff that makes us believe he's either just dumb or severely overloaded and or out of touch and or our small contract is just a pebble in his shoe he nitpicks about details of the agreement about things that make no sense and that clearly show he's unaware of the context since he's my single point of contact to get the paperwork done i'm starting to lose patience time tick-tock we exchanged several drafts all of which contain more of his impossibly stupid requests and details that are completely unrelated to the task at hand i mean who the heck is this guy i waste a ton of hours explaining what the project's about why xyz is necessary and why abc clause doesn't apply once we eventually reach a good enough draft ready for me to sign it doesn't come time tick-tock he calls me one day and says he wants to redo the whole thing because he thinks it's not properly framed and wants me to make him a new proposal and we have to get a new master agreement anyway me make a new proposal for what we already agreed to the price and wording for what the new update does he then proceeds to tell me that as far as he's concerned it should even be free so the new contract should take that into account i explained to him that it's definitely not a nice to have that if we don't get this done production will grind to a halt due to the particular problem that our software solves so i refuse telling him we're already well underway with the work he says fine and says that he'll have a last draft asap time tick tock a few more weeks go by and almost every day i email to get status nothing i eventually get a note asking if my new proposal is ready for him to review oh for freak's sake i get on the phone with him we start afresh with a new round of him not understanding anything about the work and the contract him discussing the issues that are irrelevant wanting guarantees that make no sense and a nonsensical wording of the work involved oh and by the way he now wants to know our cost basis for doing the work because it's too expensive and we'll have to review the price down yet again during all this time he seems genuinely confused or unaware of context or the pressures the company's under with this and more and more i'm flabbergasted as to why this is the guy in charge of negotiating our contract as much as i explain again and again nothing seems to register or if it does we're back to square one the following day i am going completely insane dealing with this one day over beer i explain the situation to one of my buddies and he laughs dang this guy's really having fun acting dumb like this is one of the many tactics that procurement people will use to erode all of your patients in the hope you'll eventually just throw your hands up in the air and say fine either just out of sheer frustration or because the alternative is just no contract no payment for the work you've already put in trust me this guy knows what he's doing the proper counter response to this just play dumb too but he knows you by now so withdraw from the negotiations and put him in front of a totally new guy and have that guy be as clueless as possible and have as little authority as possible unable to approve any decision and make him get back to him with unrelated questions and just enough nonsense next tell the procurement guy you're going on vacation and that your team has stopped work until a contract is signed maybe he's really dumb but i doubt it i think he'll wise up real fast brilliant i get back home from the pub and i check ashish's linkedin profile senior vp procurement education harvard business school right this guy's not an idiot he was messing with me the whole time next morning i talked to my management team and explained the situation they all get a laugh and are willing to participate in the theatrics i read a sheesh an email saying that i'm putting him in touch with arnold cc'd that i was taking a vacation plus three-month sabbatical and that we will resume the work once the agreement is signed it worked perfectly the ignorance my coworker played was brilliant completely believable ashish became increasingly restless in his emails and suddenly transformed from being the clueless guy to the sharp exec he actually was as he realized he might cause the project to not be delivered in time in the end we signed the document a few weeks after arnold took over we didn't give an inch we delivered on time the lower managers at big company were relieved they too were completely flabbergasted with the stupid email chains but they were powerless to intervene it's stories like this that make you really appreciative that you can have your eyes open to it but it also makes you have so much less respect for the people who do this in those situations any of these people that work in a field where they're very high up or they're supposed to be very accredited and you feel like they're doing really weird moves or things that make no sense but then you realize they're playing some really underhanded game to try and get their way in a really roundabout format especially in ways designed to just wear the other person down or frustrate them and just say screw it just take it makes me pretty quickly wanna say screw that guy our next stories by sky is good i kept getting written up for my hairstyle so i cut all my hair off when i was in the fire academy the women's dress code said that hair had to be worn in a neat bun i had layered shoulder-length hair so it was difficult to keep it up neatly all day long the shorter pieces would stick out of the back of the bun or fall around my face and my bangs weren't long enough to pin back without using an entire bottle of hairspray most of my instructors were understanding and said that as long as my hair was up and my mask could seal to my face they would consider me to be in dress code but there was one instructor who said there was no excuse we're a paramilitary type school so dress code is extremely important she acknowledged that it wasn't a safety issue but told me i had to follow it anyway and that doing my best wasn't good enough she wrote me up three times and then called me in for a meeting to inform me that another write-up for the same issue would get me expelled from the program i looked into the dress code and saw that the men's hair coat was much more lenient it just said that hair must not touch the collar of the shirt or the tops of the ears so the night after that meeting i went to the hair place and told the stylist to do whatever she wanted to my hair as long as it fit those requirements she was stoked and gave me a really cute pixie cut the next day the same instructor tried to write me up but since i technically was in dress code she couldn't the next semester there was a man with long hair who wore it in a bun instead of cutting it and the following semester the dress code was rewritten to be gender neutral i definitely appreciate that at the very end of this they finally rewrote it to just be a hair policy i failed to see why in fire academy men and women would have different hair dress codes dictating what a man can have for hair and what a woman can have for hair seems so 1970s to me especially having survived the man bun era genderized hair restrictions is very outdated this next story is by the mrtrow won't give the class paper towels without dispensers okay then i'm a high school science teacher specifically chemistry and physics so many of the classrooms i've taught in have a smaller actual classroom that's attached to a large laboratory room shared between two classrooms in the past the custodians would make sure each lab station had a roll of those crappy brown paper towels so students could clean up whatever mess they made during labs but then we were told by our custodians that it wasn't allowed i don't remember if it was a new rule new admin etc and that paper towels could only be placed in paper towel dispensers so what did we do we put in work orders to have a dispenser installed at every single lab table well over 20 in the building to have access to paper towels so instead of just dropping them off the district had to pay however much money it cost to install all those paper towel dispensers and aren't saving a dime on the paper towels being used i don't know who was trying to get a budget cut or save some money here but and probably in the long term as well because you can't just take some of the role and then pass it off to another lab gotta fill up each of those every single time and stay on that maintenancing it definitely just isn't financially savvy and our final story of the day is by wrangler man proof of deposits for home loan you asked for it i own a flea and farmer's market i get all cash from booth rentals been in business 40 years as corp business buying a home and they can understand me making large cash deposits and want some proof for some deposits very well we use a standard four receipts per page book a lot of 10 and 20 dollar receipts i separate every page into single receipts and take pictures and upload to the loan company over 700 pictures loan is approved from various accounts i've heard from friends over the years these people whether it's an actual bank or a business selling a home or maybe it's just a homeowner leasing a place or an apartment it can be difficult if you have a somewhat unorthodox job to get a deposit or secure a lease like even for somebody like me that would be making money from youtube or let's say a twitch streamer because they're not actually employed they don't have a set salary or a reliable figure that they're going to get every single month a lot of these places just will turn you away and just hope that the next person that applies works at some office getting this set salary every first and fifteenth day of the month so an op situation with the flea and farmers market getting nothing but cash from booth rentals it sucks but it scares away a lot of these people that are trying to sell the houses or leasehouses out oh you want to prove you're allergic to the vaccine okay now you're fully vaccinated so i'm a doctor in new zealand currently working in immunology our country recently like today introduced a policy where you need to show a vaccine pass to be able to access hospitality or retail stores to get this vaccine pass you either need to be fully vaccinated or have a legitimate medical exemption as i just started working in immunology i have a weekly allergy clinic i had a woman referred into me who we shall call karen who had reportedly had a reaction to the first vaccine dose we take that very seriously and there was a strong possibility that she could receive an exemption from the second dose or subsequent booster shots depending on the nature of the reaction however it became clear within the first few minutes of the consult that this woman had not had a serious reaction to the vaccine she was not telling me any of the symptoms she experienced and just kept referring to the reaction even direct questioning was getting nowhere however after a frustrating 10 minutes i was able to rule out a severe allergic reaction or a possible cardiac event the two major concerns for the pfizer vaccine during the course of the consult it became obvious that karen was more interested in grandstanding about the vaccine than in actually receiving medical care she accidentally let slip that getting a vaccine exemption would benefit her politically whatever that meant she also let slip that she was against vaccines in general and was trying to prove a point i offered her an alternative vaccine the astrazeneca which she vehemently refused due to risk of blood clots so i explained what the standard procedure is to confirm a serious allergy it's called a challenge basically we give the patient the thing they might be allergic to if they react we have all of the necessary care with experts on severe allergy right there this is in a major hospital and if they don't have a reaction we know you aren't allergic i explained it by seeing we give you the shot and see what happens if you have a reaction i'll happily write you an exemption for the booster she agreed to this sign the consent form after i went through it in detail i gave her the vaccine and she promptly had a seizure i put that in quotation marks because it was the least convincing seizure i have ever seen i've seen drug addicts trying to score benzos in the emergency department having more convincing seizures i'm not even willing to call it a pseudo seizure it was that terrible she literally laid down didn't fall she actually laid slowly on the ground and started flopping like a fish while periodically looking at us to make sure we were watching i've never seen anything like it her vitals were all completely normal blood was completely normal everything was fine after she had recovered read got tired and gave up my boss who had taken over by this point because of how bizarre it was explained to her that she did not have a reaction to the vaccine was kind enough to call it a pseudo-seizure which is essentially a seizure-like event caused by a psychological trigger rather than physical that to the patient feels like a real seizure but is not typically dangerous he informed her that she would not be receiving an exemption that resulted in much yelling and shouting until i calmly informed her that she didn't need an exemption as she was now fully vaccinated she received the first dose prior to being sent to our clinic and we gave her the full second dose during the challenge so she was covered the look on her face was absolute gold she then proceeded to declare that she had not consented to being vaccinated she had in writing and that she refused to accept that she was vaccinated she was and that we were trying to prevent her from claiming to be unvaccinated we weren't she then stormed out of the clinic when i gave her a i'm fully vaccinated sticker which we normally give out after a second dose i kinda got in a tiny bit of trouble for that bit but it was so worth it it was an entertaining afternoon if you were a doctor in a situation where the patient claims to have something that they don't have you watch them literally lay down on the ground and flop around like a fish would you get a kick out of just standing there watching them waiting for them to finally stop and get back up let me know what you think in the comments down below our next story is by chainsmoker magic don't speak spanish in front of you okay how about french no maybe german so this is an interaction i observed in a convenience store the other day it was a busy day so there was a bit of a line and behind me was a couple speaking spanish to each other my spanish is not the best but i understand enough to overhear them being cute and flirty with each other kind of made me smile because ain't love grand enter karen standing behind them in line obnoxiously large sunglasses the classic haircut and red lipstick on her teeth probably mid 40s she gets into the line and immediately starts looking visibly annoyed she grunts in sighs audibly prompting the boyfriend from the spanish-speaking couple to turn around hey is everything all right he said in perfect english karen gives him a look that could peel paint from the walls and says oh i'm fine i just wish people had better standards for themselves you know speaking spanish in public makes you seem uneducated right now my knee-jerk reaction upon overhearing this was to turn around and tell this lady where she can stick it but the boyfriend beat me to it as soon as she said uneducated the dude's face inexplicably lights up like a christmas tree he smiles at her and immediately turns to his girlfriend and starts saying something in french the girlfriend responds to him also in french he turns back to karen and says is that better at this point i'm giggling to myself because darn this was great but it's not over karen stares at the guy mouth a gape completely speechless no how about this he asks and turns to his girlfriend and asks for something in what's clearly german the girlfriend laughs and responds also in german now i don't speak french or german but really i didn't need to this was comedy gold at this point i'm just busting out laughing karen and the other people in line saw me so i just turned to the boyfriend and simply smiled at him and then turned to karen and let off a darn he told you i had paid for my stuff by then and i leave as i hear the girlfriend ask so how many of those languages are you educated in wish i stayed around to see the end of the interaction from the moment the dude spoke french karen's face was just priceless but i'd already interjected with some smart buttonness and confrontations really aren't something i'm looking for in my life besides these two didn't need anyone's help this really gives you a look into karen's mindset for some reason this karen seems to think anybody that can speak spanish means they're less educated i love that this couple turned around and just showed up this karen and left that karen just mouth gaping there maybe after that point the karen wasn't educated enough to construct an actual sentence this next story is by the doomed hero new army captain tries to end her career i used to be an armorer in the us army i was the person in charge of securing and maintaining all the weapons i was stationed overseas at a base that only had one arms room and i was the guy who ran it so instead of just being responsible for the weapons in my unit i was responsible for all the weapons in the entire post on paper that's a job that's supposed to be done by an e6 with a two-person support staff in reality the position was chronically short-staffed it was just me as an e4 doing the job of three people because the position was critical to the operations of a bunch of different units including things like psyops and special forces where everything about them is classified by default and joint operations with the navy and air force and a few foreign militaries who were working with the us i had to get a security clearance that was higher than everyone else in my own unit as far as i knew there were only four other people on the post with clearance high enough to do what i did and they were all officers this led to some amusing situations where i was accidentally called for security briefings that were way above my pay grade that sucked because i was on call all the time and had to go to work anytime anyone needed a weapon being on call was supposed to be a duty rotation but i was the only one who could do it so i slept in the arms room a lot i wanted to make sure i had as little to do as possible so i got very good at my job how good during an army-wide review of the entire supply chain my post was found to be the best run arms room in the entire army i want a medal in everything then we had a change in command and the new captain hated that i didn't have to go on training exercises because i wasn't allowed to be more than 30 minutes away from the arms room ever the compliance the new captain was absolutely determined to take me on a training mission she'd somehow gotten it into her head that i was a slacker which i absolutely was but only because i was efficient and pissed off that i never got to leave the base so she drew up a bunch of paperwork to sign the arms room over to the supply sergeant i refused to sign because the person with all the ammo and the person with all the guns are supposed to be different people next she tried to sign the arms room over to the psyops company commander i refused to sign because that commander had become a friend of mine so i knew he was required to leave the base weekly for security briefings finally she tried to sign the arms room over to our company's supply lieutenant i tried to explain that the lieutenant didn't have a high enough security clearance but she cut me off she said she was tired of my excuses then she ordered me to sign and threatened me with an article 15. i wrote under duress on the paperwork she didn't even look at the signature so i sent an email to the warrant officer who was in charge of logistics for the area he was the guy who'd given me the award i mentioned earlier so he was pissed when he found out what was going on and went on the crappy little weekend training exercise and basically enjoyed my vacation that sequence of events happened on a friday afternoon the chief didn't get my email until monday morning on monday afternoon my captain was relieved of command i eventually had to testify at our disciplinary hearing my second favorite part of the whole experience was the supply lieutenant who got a slap on the wrist for inadvertently obeying illegal orders because he hadn't learned the regulations before signing seeing is it like that for you all the time this has to change my favorite part was the full bird colonel in charge of the hearing asking my former commander your soldier was awarded for being the best at his job in the entire army after he refused your orders the first few times why didn't you start asking questions i think the greater question that they should have asked is is something broken sure they can be annoyed that you're not going out anywhere or traveling or doing other things but if everything you're doing is keeping things running smoothly why would they care so much our next story is by tal yyr0 save up to 15 on your water bill by shafting the unhoused today i work for a canadian harm reduction clinic run by a big non-profit we have two gigantic laundry machines down here for towels from our shower program and clothing donations because the clinic budget comes from the government and the building budget comes from the non-profit directly he forbade us from doing the client laundry because it runs up the building's water bill and we ain't paying for that like even just once or twice for someone who's sleeping in the literal dirt and mud in snow still a no so now i tell clients that since we can wash their clothing for them they may as well donate it to us i launder to put it out and lo and behold there's a client right here who just gave away all their clothing and has nothing to wear so i distribute the now warm and clean donations i just received from them back to them suck a doink boss honestly the management here is so asleep at the wheel i'd be floored if he ever actually notices the water use it's been two months since his declaration and i'm just still quietly doing my daily end run around my boss to help folks i think if you just boil it down to basic human decency that's the right thing to do good on op and our final story of the day is by some weirdo and sa insist i announce every time i have to pee no problem so this was a few years ago after just receiving a promotion at my previous company and working under a new supervisor who we shall from here on call karen this is one of many altercations between us but the only one that contains malicious compliance from my side this was a desk job position which also had customers calling to schedule services or repairs on their warehouse machinery out of proactiveness i would discreetly tell the person that sat next to me if i were going to the loo in case my phone rang so that they could take a message this had worked fine for a few months with no issues until one day kieran usually had varying moods and this day was a bad mood day nonetheless i continued doing my stuff keeping my head down and whatnot i let my neighbor know i'm headed to the bathroom and make my way out of curiosity i used to time my lube breaks and i was never away from my desk for longer than three minutes i walked back into the office and had not even sat down yet when this exchange happened karen shouting where the heck have you been me already pissed at her tone of voice say i was peeing why karen says you should tell people when you're not going to be at your desk i'm tired of picking up your calls call this person back and see what they want they hand me a note me noticing my neighbor was not at her desk i say i had told neighbor where i was going karen says well you have to tell me too i need to know where you are if i'm going to be answering your calls me already hatching my malicious compliance plan with a huge smile on my face say okay no problem i'll do so in the future it was this day that i decided i should really start looking after my health and make sure i get in my 8 glasses of water a day so the next day i arrived with my 500 milliliter water bottle knowing i would need to finish the bottle four times before the work day ends i was going to the bathroom about hourly and each time i would stand up walk to her table wait if she was on a call then politely tell her i'm going to go pee now with the biggest smile on my face and then go after about a few weeks of this she eventually cracked karen very loudly said why do you keep telling me when you need to pee i don't want to know your internal schedule as if she had forgotten her outburst a few weeks prior i say you said i had to tell you if i were going to the bathroom a few weeks ago karen remembering the incident said well i didn't mean to tell me each time as long as someone knows where you are if your phone rings me smiling still say sure i'd rather do that then cue the new malicious compliance plan just to make sure this issue never gets brought up again from now on each time i had to use the bathroom i would announce it in the office as i stand up i'm going to the loo in case my phone rings my colleagues all smirked the first time i did this and they all started following my lead and announcing loudly whenever they went to the bathroom this continued for the following three years that i still worked there new hires thought it was just protocol and did it without question this announcement did work in everyone's favor though because on route to the bathroom was a different apartment's office that we would often have to hand paperwork to so whoever was going to the bathroom would usually ask if there was anything needed to drop off at that apartment on the way and before i get people accusing me of possibly being a slacker and that being the reason the supervisor was on me the whole time i was one of the hardest working employees at that company and got four promotions in the five years i worked there karen was a witch to everyone see what i think karen was really after was cutting down on the amount of bathroom breaks it might have also been influenced by them just being annoyed having to help out a little bit more but i personally do have a suspicion that this karen just would prefer if everybody stayed at their desks the entire day but op ain't gonna let that stop them this sub inspired a small malicious compliance prank on girlfriend's birthday so i spend way too much time in the sub reading stories here and last night an opportunity presented itself to enact my own malicious compliance so today's my girlfriend's birthday and we have a bunch of things planned out one of those things is an escape room with some friends that are mom bought as a present because we're living in a different country however girlfriend's mom asked me to keep the event itself a surprise so girlfriend has no idea what's happening for the last week she's been wondering what it could be and last night after the clock turned midnight she said to me i want three guesses and if i get it right you have to say yes i thought about it for a second and then asked her that's it yep so i agreed i knew she wouldn't get it as this isn't something we would normally go do she's done it in the past and liked it but just not a regular thing and so i let her guess away at the third attempt i say yes because even though it was wrong nothing had been specified about how i had to answer if she did not get the answer right i stringed her along for a few minutes about her correct guess before reminding her about her rules and then emphasizing the lack of what to do if the answer was no she was not amused for all of two minutes while i got a good chuckle and a small story for a sub that i love well they did say you have to say yes let me ask you guys are you the kind of person that loves dropping surprise gifts or surprise trips events anything like that or are you the kind of person that when it comes to giving gifts you prefer to give it to them as upfront as you can or maybe as soon as possible let me know about you guys in the comments down below our next story is by ben hawking the biggest stalking as an adult i traveled to my grandma's mom's mom house for christmas adults were expected to bring her own christmas stockings but grandma and a couple helpers i think would fill up everyone's stockings chocolate socks etc on christmas eve well since we were responsible for bringing our own i found a very large stocking while maybe i'm partially hoping this will result in lots of chocolate i also just like making jokes and i found it to be a funny thing to do christmas morning i woke up and checked my stocking and it was full with a 25 pound bag of charcoal can't say i didn't deserve it i just want to believe that this grandma was secretly holding onto a bag of coal for any time somebody was gonna try to act up or get wise and they deserve that bag of coal you're gonna go and be a smart butt don't be surprised when grandma gives you some call for christmas this next story is by steve was happening now colleague required an agenda so i created an agenda a few years ago i was talking on the phone to a colleague we were both executives but didn't report to the other we ran out of time but agreed to discuss project x further in another meeting which i was to set up between just the two of us i did the meeting invite her admin called and said that susan doesn't accept meetings without an agenda i explained susan knew what the meeting was about the admin was insistent so i created this agenda 9 am meeting starts 9 to 10 am discuss project x 10 am meeting adjourns i held the meeting and no one ever mentioned my detailed agenda i mean while you're at it if you're going to go on a bathroom break you might want to draw up a detailed agenda of what's going to happen there too 9 30 a.m find the bathroom 9 30 a.m in 30 seconds locate the nearest toilet you might as well make a detailed agenda of how you arrive to work i get there's like formalized processes and stuff but sometimes it's just kind of redundant our next story is by elena cakes another manager perspective malicious compliance i just saw a post from a manager's perspective and it unlocked this memory i was just starting out in my industry but quickly was promoted to team lead and then manager of my group turns out i made the least of the old team and management wanted them all to quit go figure i live in an area that sometimes gets heavy snow making getting to the office time consuming and dangerous my former boss lived in another state and worked from home but no one else was permitted to work from home so we all had to deal with it most of the senior managers worked out of state from home one year it was pretty bad and when i suggested leniency on working from home my boss said i could work from home but no one else could and if they didn't like it they'd have to use their pathetically little vacation days i lived closest to the office so there was no way in heck i could tell my team they had a report but i was going to stay home and i thought the whole thing was bs so one very snowy day i got a call from an employee requesting to work from home i informed her of the policy and she was pissed and said fine i'll take a day off few minutes later another call same results we had a huge workload that day and ended up with me and one other person working i called my boss to ask her what to prioritize and to inform the sales team we wouldn't hit their deadlines i could hear the steam coming out of her ears when i explained the team took pto before the next storm the rules change to if there's a state of emergency they can work from home and then again to if the school's closed in their area they can work from home i left that place and haven't looked back last they heard they're still being crazy aggressive about work from home and management is at each other's throats with high turnover and not so quality employees now i don't know if i sound a little biased here but i think work from home is a pretty good idea i think if there was ever a positive that came out of this pandemic it's that a lot of employers had to switch to work from home to just make it work and that happened for a lot of places that staunchly refused work from home but once they had to do it and once they tried it out it's been revealed to be a relatively successful thing obviously not every business can be work from home but a lot of places can and they just prefer to have that in-person connection but a lot of times it's more like supervision ability to micromanage stuff like that this next story is by pm me your dink memes stay at the table until you finish your vegetables i am a stubborn person as a child vegetables made me gag i also hated textures but i compromised i would eat anything without veggies i also didn't care about sweets intended to steer into space as a pastime my parents were concerned for my nutrition they tried escalating tactics one you don't get dessert unless you eat the veggies huh no big loss two no dinner until you finish veggies no problem i can ignore hunger three alternate bites of veggies and other food first bite was very big of normal food then done four can't leave the table until eat veggies this one was the funniest to me they had to let me eat something as they were losing the power struggle but they assumed i would need to go to bed anyway i had no trouble complying i slept to the table they walked into my room saying they hoped i hadn't broken the rule then calling my name and they found me at the table they tried saying i also couldn't have breakfast until i ate the now cold veggies the veggies had been canned least appetizing prospect i just sat there in yesterday's clothes knowing my mom had to go to work i tried to get out of school siding the table and that i was already going to be late if i had a change i don't remember after that but i assume i went to school i was about five unfortunately they gave up and it was 10 years until i ate veggies ah yeah that was probably bad for me but what could the parents do my mom tried to force feed me a carrot when i was four and that didn't help although op was very staunch in what they were doing and they tried a good few things i still think this falls on the parents whether it's like super finely chopping them up or trying to figure out like a smoothie or something or even just like buckling down and trying to get like opie to take vitamins or something reading this it does leave you a little bit concerned as far as op's health growing up our next story is by jerryboy1 old lady and a rat hi from new zealand i was managing a large farm supply shop stock feed fence post to animal health and i lived in the countryside i was well known locally and would often chuck some bits and pieces into my ute pickup truck and drop them off to clients on the way home one older lady mrs grumpy 70 wood ring won a 40 kilogram bag of dog biscuits delivered logged into a distant shed and emptied into a 200 liter drum with a removable lid never a thank you or moving obstacles to make it easier i did it as her husband had been a good client and a nice guy the last time i delivered to her i took the lid off the drum and there was a huge rat running around on the bottom of the drum i slowly tipped the dog biscuits in the rat kept climbing after 40 kilograms it was near the top then i slammed the lid on dear old mrs grumpy never got me to drop anymore off now we all know that mrs grumpy clearly would have opened that drum saw that rat had a heart attack died got revived and came back blaming op for putting the rat in the drum it wasn't there before the delivery and our final story of the days by daycryst your job isn't helping customers i just started working at fry's for those who don't know it was a big box electronics retailer sort of like a micro center with terrible management at anything above the department manager level i found this odd first hand shortly after finishing training i worked in the components department think computer parts for builds and electronic stuff you'd find at radio shack and i was a sales associate that meant i was on the lowest rung and didn't earn a commission from sales my department manager had explained to me that i didn't get commission but my primary responsibility was still helping anyone who came to the department if you did well enough at this you'd be moved to commission sales where you made the big bucks so i try to be helpful plus everyone wore the same white shirt and tie and customers didn't know the difference between commission sales and associates then corporate came the corporate components manager breezed in to tell everyone how to do their job and in her eyes that meant i was supposed to be putting together product schematics to the exclusion of everyone else so she condescendingly took me aside to review how to put products on a peg in the middle of this demonstration someone came up to ask where a product was and i tried to help them that didn't sit well with corporate lady so she stopped me in front of the customer and told me that wasn't my job and that she would help the customer that earned her an odd look from the customer but whatever so i continued doing the schematic it wasn't exactly the rocket surgery she made it out to be apparently she got distracted haranguing other people because it was an hour or so before she walked by while i was helping another customer again she came up and started yelling at me that my job wasn't helping customers and i needed to get back to work or she would write me up i shrugged whatever it was a job i took to pay bills during grad school so it wasn't worth arguing i would do exactly what she said though i was putting together a product schematic right near the front entrance that day that meant a lot of people would come through and i was the first worker they saw so they'd come up to me and ask where to find something normally i'd be happy to help but not that day i wasn't going to get written up no sir so every time someone asked me to point them to something i politely apologized and told them i couldn't help they'd inevitably get angry when they realized i wasn't helping them so i'd apologize again and tell them it was corporate policy that i wasn't allowed to help them and oh by the way that policy was put in place by corporate manager who just so happened to be at the components podium that day if they wanted to go ask her anything or talk to her about that policy she never did come over to apologize or tell me to do anything any differently this lady was too convinced that her way of doing things was the right way i did have the pleasure of looking down the aisle to the podium and seeing a steady stream of irate retail customers who are always a special mix of belligerent and stupid laying into her with complaints that got more and more irate as they realized everything i told them was true i'm told she didn't end up getting much done that day because she was too proud to admit it would be better for me to take five seconds out of hanging products on pegs to point someone to the right part of the store as soon as she left we went back to helping anyone who came through even if i was doing the extremely difficult intellectual task of hanging products on the proper peg i wasn't at all surprised a few years later when the company started circling the drain because they couldn't pave over the incompetence at the corporate level in a world where amazon and newegg were eating their lunch how are you going to have be helpful to customers as an incentive to move up but then also have corporate managers come in and say your job isn't to help customers don't you dare do that the corporate manager is basically saying do stuff that's outside the scope of your job if you want to get a better promotion but i better not dare catch you doing it but if you do it and you do it well you'll get a promotion but i better not catch you doing it it's really no surprise if you go to a store an electronic store especially you're looking for some part you're just not very sure about you see clearly an employee you go up to them and you say hey where is so-and-so part or hey could you help me real quick and they say sorry can't help you company policy i can see how that would drive customers away from your store probably permanently why go to an electronic store where you're not gonna get any help but with that being said that's all the time we have for today so of all these stories i've read today which is your favorite and why let me know in the comments down below and if you haven't yet if you could like and subscribe that would mean a lot to me whatever you do whether it's liking subscribing turning notifications on all of it helps grow this channel and i appreciate the heck out of it so until next time i'll see you all tomorrow with some more stories

Channel: Storytime

Views: 789,655

Keywords: Storytime, r/, r/maliciouscompliance, r/malicious compliance, maliciouscompliance, malicious compliance, reddit malicious compliance, Storytime malicious compliance, reddit stories, funny reddit, best of reddit, rslash maliciouscompliance, malicious compliance reddit, top posts reddit, malicious compliance stories, malicious compliance video, r/ maliciouscompliance, r/ maliciouscompliance Storytime, Storytime r/maliciouscompliance, funny reddit stories, malicious compliance posts

Id: lzNOmSRZtO4

Length: 238min 46sec (14326 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 13 2022