r/maliciouscompliance | $15,000 is too Expensive? How about $48,000 a YEAR!

hey everybody hope you're all doing well my name is steven and this is the story time channel today we have some malicious compliance stories and our first story of the day is by aqualink97 boss presents a crappy contract and says i can quit if i don't want to sign so i do i used to work for a local youth center kind of i won't name them the story goes like this the man who ran the center knew a friend of my family who told him i was going to college for graphic design and video he calls me and lets me know that under the umbrella of the youth center he wanted to revive an old local magazine and wanted it to be run by youth i was 18. he said that as well as a physical magazine there was going to be a video component that would go on youtube and the website and that i would be a great fit for the team to help with this he also said that they would assist in getting all participating youth started towards their own business i was thinking wow i'll have a job right out of college this is great i was promised on-the-job training an eventual pay increase to 18 dollars an hour and a lot of other stuff i started at 14 an hour i won't go into every detail but basically i was told that i was to write articles for the magazine as well as all employees would do this no problem slowly but surely we built a small team i recommended a friend from college who would eventually become the editor let's call her editor another person who would become my friend was hired and directed edited a lot of the videos i worked on we'll call him director and there was also a sound technician named rapper there were other employees as well but the four of us were the main magazine crew the rest helped but mostly worked at the youth center for youth reasons now that i've explained that we can get into it over the course of my employment a lot of shady things happened the center claimed that they would help us start our own businesses and we should get business licenses and they would contract us in reality this was a way for them to avoid paying taxes and making us do it instead as well there were a lot of make a video about blank orders but no instructions until the finished video was handed in we did stories on a lot of cultural topics so this could really be difficult at times on top of that the boss was almost never there so when we had questions we basically had to figure things out ourselves despite all this i was loyal i worked there for two years and i'm confident that i was a major reason we were going for a while because whenever somebody messed something up in video i was the one they came to to fix it sometimes with hours left to deadline i filmed almost all events we covered i knew where all of the files were for everything the passwords and a lot more people asked me about all of these things when they forgot i also managed the youtube page all by myself but for whatever reason the boss started to trust us less and less locks were changed on the door so none of our keys worked director and i were placed in an office where somebody was constantly watching us our time cards were argued about and we were accused of only playing video games while at work we played our switches at lunch i think he had trust issues because he's a sketchy person he had the kind of fake being friends with everybody in case you need a favor view on life director and i started to be blamed for bad camera framing when we weren't even at the chute this got to the point where we were told to take extra training but editor who was mostly responsible for these mistakes was treated like a queen even if i complained about something editor had done nothing would ever come of it then comes december 2018 boss calls a meeting he tells us all that the magazine will be transitioning into its own business separate from the youth center here on top of video and writing duties we will be searching for contracts and driving to other cities in our province to film he then proceeds to hand us a contract that we're required to sign if we continue to work for him this contract sucks there were a lot of things in there that would screw us over but the main things were that while working for them we wouldn't be allowed to conduct our own contracts and if we quit we can't work in our field in any of the whole province for six months on top of that our job titles would be changed to interns and our pay would stay the same even though we were promised 18 an hour literally all of us were mad about this contract but whenever we brought up problems he would say this is non-negotiable it's a perfectly normal contract he also accused me of trying to find loopholes whenever i try to discuss it i have no idea about contracts but if you're claiming to start youth up on their own businesses this is not how you do it he let us know that to aid with the transfer to a new business he was in talks for a new contract worth a lot of money but didn't disclose how much probably so he wouldn't feel entitled to be paid for more doing all the work he gave us a week to look at the contract after that there would be one week until christmas i spent all of the week dreading the next monday when i had to make a decision i begged boss to change it but he stood firm he even indicated that if we weren't happy with it we might as well quit this is important then on the friday evening i noticed that my job is listed on a job board i'm shocked i check facebook the magazine website and everything my passwords are removed i have no login he is trying to strong-arm me into signing then on monday my girlfriend and i get breakfast before i go in when i get a text from director letting me know he got fired upon walking into the building my gear start to turn in my head if he fired director then he's definitely counting on having me to do all of the work still i know that i won't get fired because i'm the only person capable of making videos properly so instead of going to work my girlfriend and i type a letter of resignation walk over to staples and print it out and bring it over to work before i give it to him he greets me and lets me know that he fired director the casual way he talks to me about it confirms he expects me to stay but he did this to himself by listing my job and arrogantly stating that we should quit if we didn't like the contract so i hand him an envelope which has my letter in it what's this opie my letter of resignation he is shocked but accepts i think in that moment he finally realized that his actions have consequences then he walks inside i say goodbye to everybody hugs all around pack up my stuff then find him crying in the sound room i talk to director later and he tells me that his mom was connected to boss's huge paying contract and that he actually hadn't had the contract yet director's mom was really upset and since they hadn't signed anything yet she pulled some strings and got director the contract instead turns out it was worth something like 60 thousand dollars so basically the boss tried to strong arm us into signing a crappy contract then lost the only competent employee and a sixty thousand dollar contract editor and rapper eventually quit too rapper decided to focus on his music career and is doing pretty well for himself i worked video contracts for a while until i got a full-time job again so as a result of all this crappiness and overall arrogance boss no longer has enough money to print an actual magazine is short staffed constantly going through new employees who always end up quitting and rarely upload videos their videos have crappy titles too like the title of the camera footage and rarely have edited thumbnails i think it's safe to say we destroyed his ambition of starting a business exploiting youth talent right before christmas and just to be clear even though i had the effects that my quitting would have on him in mind i also knew that the youth center was funded separately from us so we didn't ruin any poor kids lives if somebody tried to hold a crappy contract like this over your head and then you later on found them kind of crying over the destruction of their entire corporation or organization in this case being this magazine company considering they effectively lost absolutely everything would you feel any ounce of remorse for them or would you feel like they deserved every bit of it let me know in the comments down below our next story is by coletis the 15 000 equipment is too expensive for your department to purchase why don't you just rent it for 48 000 a year back in the day when 33.6 kilobits per second modems were hot crap i worked for the engineering department of a growing company this company had started small it was privately owned and the vps had all put in a portion of their own money to start the company by this time in the story they were finally making a respectable 30 to 40 million a year in profits but they still acted like a small company penny pinching our engineering department was designing circuit boards with embedded computer systems and to program these instead of soldering the microcomputer to the board we would solder on a microcontroller socket then plug in an in-circuit emulator that would pretend it was a microcontroller and allow the programmer to create the required program this in-circuit emulator or ice was made by hitachi it plugged into a free pci slot on your pc and had a ribbon cable that would attach to the specialized microcontroller die that plugged into the socket it was a mess it gave our tiny i.t department headaches and it cost fifteen thousand dollars and it was an absolute necessity for most of our most popular product lines and there was only one of them and we were renting it it cost four thousand dollars a month the first month we had it our cto and marketing vp planned our whole new product line around this family of microcontrollers so at the end of the month us engineers ask management to buy this for us since we would be using it for a while the engineering vp saw the price tag and told us to just rent it surely we would be done with it soon engineers being practical forgot about the objection and just put our noses to the wheel the cto when marketing made plans to keep us busy using this microcontroller line for a while they pre-ordered a few million chips after a year the vp of finance asked about this recurring contract line item they called the engineer who had originally started the contract the engineer helpfully forwarded the approval from the engineering vp and his later email asking to buy it and the vp's reply where he demurred by the end of the week this toy was ours along with a second one since finance determined that product rollout was being affected by not enough access to the equipment hidachi just gave us the first one stopped charging us and never asked for it back we paid fifteen thousand dollars for a second one no one got fired or demoted but at the next apartment meeting the engineering vp tried to sell us that we didn't have enough money to upgrade our pcs that one engineer spoke up would forty thousand cover it the company found the money that's definitely the dangerous thing about subscriptions if you don't stay on top of that and you don't cancel it when you mean to or if you're going to use it long term look for an option where you can buy it long term otherwise with subscriptions you're surely paying more spending every month that's just how that model works and our final story of the day is by take no sides you want to talk goals i can do that i worked in sales back during the great recession during that time there were a ton of people looking for jobs and very few jobs to be had therefore employers like mine often saw employees as expendable our shop was visited bi-weekly by the corporate officers they would hold sales data meetings that showed comparisons between how each salesperson did not only was this super embarrassing for those who were struggling to get sales during the recession but you could almost always predict who was getting canned that day by corporate the store itself was run by some pretty cool people but they too were under a lot of pressure to perform we didn't get commission until we justified our minimum wage paycheck if you didn't justify your paycheck you had to be prepared for that private meeting with the corporate rep to get fired your justification was based on the commission rate of the item so for example if you sold a 700 item and it paid 14 commission you just justified 14 of your pay this understandably put the employees on edge and created a desperate and cutthroat environment oftentimes you would be seconds from closing a sale and another salesperson would claim you poached their client i sold them this one dollar accessory two weeks ago therefore this 400 item is my sale sometimes clients would walk out due to the arguments this created anyway i was a relative newbie that year which worked in my favor i didn't have existing bad blood with other salespeople even if they already saw me as competition so i found a niche in the store maintained the stock and waited for the clients to come to me i knew that clients could smell desperation on my colleagues and would decline help so by the time they reached me i just struck up a casual conversation this worked really well most people were willing to work with me because i didn't pressure them to buy and i asked them about their day i could tell the difference between browsers and buyers but i treated both with courtesy a browser could be a buyer tomorrow so i started racking up sales this way i also noticed that the company required each employee to sell two service plans a week these were gravy and pure commission or in our case justification the problem was most salespeople would wait until closing the sale or ringing up to push these by then the client was unlikely to be open to add-ons i tried a different approach i introduced browsers and buyers to our in-house repair person who was a stand-up guy i mentioned that no product was worth buying without the plan so it was best to factor it in when shopping this worked extremely well i started selling 15 to 20 plans a week this of course set off alarm bells with my co-workers they would see client after client walk out with yellow service slips with my name on it to them this would only make the bi-weekly meetings even harder i completely understood this now here's the thing could i have kept all of this for myself sure but the workplace was so toxic the commission was so minimal and i felt so bad for these people who were just trying to survive that i started trying to build goodwill it was the great recession after all when my co-worker was in a sales slump or had a bunch of sick days i would ring some of my sales under them they were often extremely grateful for this i also started doing coffee runs for my department even though i was pretty broke over time the toxicity waned and we began tag teaming sales soon other department members would do the coffee runs and we had a much more relaxed atmosphere which helped keep clients comfortable and more willing to work with us the store manager was thrilled with this he started doing coffee runs as well and padded art apartment on the back as the yellow service plan slips began pouring in however all the while corporate kept showing up asking for more and more even though we actually almost met the previous year's sales pre-recession there was the inevitable terror january anyone who has worked in retail sales knows that january is when returns happen this counted against your justification to make matters worse the economy tightened even more leading to post-christmas layoffs in other fields so a huge wave of christmas returns created a deluge of negative sales that just about destroyed everyone corporate held their first bi-weekly meeting of january and chastised us for not preserving the sales however we all knew that people who were coming to us with returns were straight up apologizing because they lost their jobs and every penny counted within days two of our department members were canned and replaced with fresh-faced teenagers corporate also noted that coffee drinking on shift was unprofessional and that no more drink runs would be permitted even though we only did it when one of us was on break to get the coffee and the store was at or near empty within days nearly all of the goodwill was completely undone my co-workers were back to desperate sales tactics fearful that they would get the axe next meeting by this time i had managed to get a job with another company to get a few more hours on the side i had worked for the first place for about a year at this point and i saw that there was no changing the system they used to bully workers so i asked my second job at night after the corporate meeting if they would be willing to put me on full time to my surprise they agreed full-time work was extremely hard to find with that i had my out i went to my store manager the next day and gave my two weeks notice he too was upset with how corporate basically steamrolled us and he understood why i was leaving over the next two weeks i gave every single sale to my co-workers knowing they needed it more than i did i also divvied up my client list and any unfinished sales to my department members finally this is where malicious compliance came in two weeks went by and i was on my last day it was also the corporate data day however i had strategically asked for early enough hours to be able to clock out before the meeting i hated those things so i clocked out handed my badge to the store manager and began walking to the exit in comes the corporate bigwig he was early he stops me and says can i have a word with you in my office i shrugged and said sure now i was about dead sure he was going to try and lay me off for performance issues according to my data i had sold literally nothing in the last two weeks because i had given it all away however i was already clocked out on this my last day so it didn't concern me he walks me into the reserved office for corporate visitors yes they had that and it is just as oppressive as it sounds and pulls out my file for the previous year he says you and i need to talk about goals with a giant grin he walks me through my sales sheets he notes that the service plan sales shot up tenfold since i had arrived that i was often in the top sales numbers in the store he enthusiastically started his pitch picture this you become the top regional salesperson if you could sell 15 more service plans each week you would beat even the new york branch which has four times the volume if you sold another five thousand dollars worth of product which would be easy for you you would be our top performer ooh a gold star thanks coach he then said no that's our goals for you told me your goals for yourself now when he said goals he didn't actually mean my goals he meant how am i going to up the ante for them how many service plans or sales numbers did i think i could hit i of course had no interest in that would these new goals come with additional pay i asked well we can't increase your base rate that's against company policy however if you sold 15 more service plans and 5 000 more product think of the commission you would make so what are your goals enter malicious compliance my goal is to leave the company today the look on his face went from enthusiasm to surprise to red rage the kind of face he used at most bi-weekly meetings you do understand that the job market is terrible right now if you were to leave today all of the great work you did for our company over the last year would be for nothing we would never give you a recommendation he said barely containing his voice this confirmed a few things not only was he out of touch that i was already quitting he had no idea that i wasn't even an employee anymore as of 20 minutes before i don't wish any ill will here but you asked me what my goals are is it okay if i leave he says i will escort you out so he walks storms with me toward the exit of the store he turns to the store manager and demands give me his badge and split any remaining unfinished sales he doesn't work for us anymore to which my manager confused replied i know he already quit two weeks ago he fished in his desk and handed the corporate officer my badge the officer got extremely flustered by this as i started to walk out he shouted you need to clock out now again my store manager said he already did is everything okay that's the last thing i heard from that corporate officer as i walked out the door and trotted to my car it didn't wreck the company they're still in business last i checked not a single member of my team is still left there and the store manager gave me plenty of good recommendations though i doubt he is still there either either way it did feel good to hit my goal well gosh darn o.p you hit your goal right on the head that's more than a lot of people could say that must have been extremely satisfying being able to just walk away from that corporate big wig yelling at you all upset not knowing that you had already quit that you had done everything they were demanding you to do two steps ahead of them and really just an overall impressive job all throughout all their work getting a whole new job and also being charitable to everybody around them op sounds like a good person but with that being said that's all the time we have for today so if you have a favorite story of the day let me know which story and why in the comments down below but besides that if you enjoyed the video please consider giving it a like and if you haven't subscribe and turn notifications on so you'll never miss an upcoming video no matter what you do whether it's just viewing the video liking subscribing turning notifications on i appreciate the heck out of it every little thing that you do helps the channel grow that much more and i can't thank you enough for it so until next time i hope you all have a wonderful day and i'll be right here next time on the story time channel

Channel: Storytime

Views: 26,144

Keywords: storytime, 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: XQemx1m5RUw

Length: 23min 52sec (1432 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 20 2021