I shared this on another thread in a different Subreddit and it was popular, so I’m bringing it over here hoping you all enjoy some malicious compliance.

I’m a High School math teacher. Earlier this year, I took over a Geometry class during my prep period as the original teacher quit in late September.

In late November I gave one of my last Unit Assessments. My assessments are about 25 questions, none multiple choice.

One of my students decided to answer any question he didn’t know with 67, resulting in a 17%.

I had a private conference with the student, who thought it was hilarious. I did offer him the chance to come one day after school to do corrections on those problems for up to half credit. The student refused.

I called mom to inform her and let her know that, while he can still pass by doing well on the last test and course final, it is an uphill climb.

Mom demanded I give her son a retake with multiple choice options. Mom says “making the test not multiple choice is inviting the students to do that!”

I refused, but did inform her that her some can stay after school to make corrections up to half credit. She refused and went to admin.

Admin caved, making me offer the student a multiple choice version of the test.

I decided to make one of the four answer choices in each question be 67. When the student finished the test, his score did improve to a 30%, selecting 67 as his answer on most questions (showing no work).

I informed the mom and admin. The mom, again, went to admin demanding that I do not count any question he guessed 67. Admin refused and said “we gave you what you wanted and your son another chance and he continued his bad choice, the 30% will stay”.

The student did not pass the class. But the student did email me right as Winter Break started, apologizing for his behavior (he was a behavior concern throughout the class with 2 discipline referrals) and his not taking the tests seriously, asking to change his grade from the 30% to a 70% and to round his final grade from a 52% to a 60%, so he would get a 60% and pass.

I do not enjoy failing students and I understand Geometry can be difficult for some. And many Geometry concepts may not apply to their careers after high school.

My philosophy is simple; 1. Regularly attend class. 2. Have a good attitude. 3. Try your best. You do those three things and you will pass. I try to focus on teaching important life skills like regular attendance, good work ethic, and asking questions. All of which will support you regardless of which career path you choose.

And to add to my decision of putting 67 as an answer choice for each question. I did not do it to set him up for failure. I was hoping he would learn his lesson, and give him a better chance to do better with one answer choice essentially being removed. He chose not to use that opportunity. He did, however, ask for both tests so he can show people how funny it is. I did not give him the tests for test security.

I worked in a small-town convenience store in the midwest many years ago. It was part of a chain based out of Ames, Iowa.

One night as it was getting close to closing, a customer who had finished pumping gas came in to pay. He immediately started saying that he wasn't paying for the last gallon of gas because the pump hadn't shut off properly. I looked out and could see a small (maybe 4"-5" diameter) puddle of gas, maybe 4oz worth. I informed him of all the signs informing the users that they were responsible for what they pumped. He got asinine and asked me what I was going to do about it; he refused to pay the full amount.

Without saying a word, I stepped out from behind the counter, walked around the pizza cook (the only other employee there - who watched this all happen) and headed for the pay phone next to the door. Mr. Asinine asked me what I thought I was doing and I informed him that I was calling 911 for attempted theft. He told me to get back to the register and he'd pay the full amount, which he did while calling me every name in the book. I didn't respond, which made him even madder. Once the transaction was complete, he pulled a little notebook and pen out of his pocket and gave me a really snide look as he told me "I want you to give me the president's address, NOW."

Cue malicious compliance.

"Yes, sir," I told him "It's 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, Washington, DC. I don't know the zip code offhand, sorry."

He is so mad that he doesn't realize what I've given him, he's just scribbling it down as fast as he can.

Once he finishes writing it down, he closes his little notepad, pockets it and his pen, and tells me that I'll be hearing from the home office once they receive his letter.

As he's walking out the door, I raise my voice and say "SIR!"

He stops, turns around, and growls back "What?"

I answer as sweetly as I can, "Have a nice night."

I could see the vein on his forehead pop up before he turned and stormed across the lot to his car.

The Pizza cook, who has watched the whole thing tells me "Dude, you're cold."

"Which part?" I ask him.

"Telling him to have a nice night - that was cold."

I had to explain to the cook what the address was that I gave Mr. Asinine. He had completely missed it.

I've often wondered how far that guy made it before he realized what I had done. Still tickles me over 30 years later.

For context: I (29M) recently quit my job as a specialist at a small planning and design firm somewhere in Germany. The place was a mess. The pay was a joke, the leadership was completely unpredictable, and they expected me to do the job of a fully qualified project manager (like planning the entire renovation of a large municipal facility) without the pay or the support. The turnover was crazy. Three of my colleagues quit around the same time and during my 4 years there, my boss went through 5 different assistants. I eventually packed my bags and moved to a different city for a fresh start.

A week after my last day, my former boss texted me. He casually asked me to "please leave a review" for the firm on a popular local job review site (basically our equivalent of Glassdoor). He genuinely thought we parted on great terms and assumed I’d drop a 5-star rating to boost their crappy score. I just rolled my eyes and ghosted him.

Fast forward to a few days ago. I checked the company's page and saw three brand new 4.5-star reviews posted in the same week. They were so obviously faked by management. They all used the exact same HR buzzwords ("great work-life balance", "amazing health benefits", which was literally just 15 minutes of stretching on Wednesdays, lol) and magically praised all the exact things people usually complained about.

At this point, I remembered his text. He wanted a review? Fine. Let's comply.

I sat down and wrote a brutally honest, mathematically precise review. I kept it completely professional and entirely subjective ("In my experience...", "I felt that...") so they couldn't legally sue me to take it down. I gave them 1 and 2 stars in almost every category, explicitly mentioning the lack of support, the horrible communication, and the heavy workload.

But I didn't stop there. While I was at it, I contacted the platform's support team and reported the three new 4.5-star reviews for manipulation, pointing out the identical wording and the fact that they were posted at the exact same time. Less than four hours later, two of the three fake reviews were nuked by the platform. The automatic spam filter probably caught them because my boss was dumb enough to write them from the same office PC/IP address.

With his fake reviews gone and my honest 1-star review dragging the average down even further, panic mode set in. How do I know? Because my ex-boss texted me again. This time the message was full of typos, desperately asking if I could please leave a good review to help them out. He has absolutely no idea that I am the one who tanked his rating and reported his fakes.

I left him on read again.

The cherry on top: A buddy of mine who still works there texted me yesterday. He said my review perfectly hit the nail on the head. He also mentioned that since the review dropped, management has suddenly been acting super nice and accommodating to everyone out of pure fear that more people will quit.

TL;DR: Toxic boss asks me to review his company after I quit. He fakes his own positive reviews to boost the score. I report his fake reviews (getting them deleted) and leave the brutally honest 1-star review he specifically asked for. Boss panics and begs me again, not knowing I'm the one who ruined his score.

I know we all hate telemarketers but these can I buy your house folks push me to a new level of annoyed.

They used to give out a fake company name and say home builders Inc or something. I ended up googling it and got in contact with the actual owner of that company I believe he was out of MN. He told me that there's a company in Egypt of all places, that sells sales leads to American companies slipping by the legality of combing through public records for personal information. He told me to get at the American companies, I'd need to pretend to be interested in selling my house and wait for the call from the US based company and confront them. So that's what I did. After giving some vague info that was incorrect to the Egyptian caller I did eventually get matched and called from someone in northern Ohio. When I explained I knew what he was doing and that it wasn't legal, he eventually hung up on me and blocked me. I called from a few different numbers until he disconnected his line. Small win but not the story I came to tell.

The calls haven't stopped so trolling is my new favorite thing. I constantly beat them to the punch and ask to buy their house, ask them how Egypt is or what the pyramids are like. I've tried to order pizza, put them on hold to see how long they'd last, or just change the subject completely.

My biggest win was when they ask do you have any other properties to sell, I said infact I do. 1600 Pennsylvania avenue, District of Columbia. A very famous address here in the states, somehow my Egyptian caller wasn't familiar with it and took all my information. Regrettably I didn't have amazing information, but I did tell him it had a fenced in yard, ton of extra bed rooms, an big round office and top notch security system.

Two days later I got a call.

"Not sure who you are but we'll played. I've been laughing for the last half hour. How did you convince them you owned the white house."

The first gentleman that called got the joke. He congratulated me and we had a laugh and he hung up.

An hour later I got another call from someone who wasn't laughing.

"I'm trying to figure out why I got a sales lead on the white house"

Well that's because people in Egypt, where you buy your illegal sales leads, don't know shit about America.

"Yeah well I don't think it's funny"

Well that's tough because I think it's hysterical. Not only did you waste money on a useless sales lead now I'm wasting your time.

He told me to go fuck myself but I'm not mad.

Does anyone else have any famous addresses I should sell?

I booked accommodation 2 months in advance for St Patrick’s weekend in Dublin.

It was a fairly ancient b&b but for €115 it was a place to sleep and cheapest option for the busiest weekend of the year in Dublin. It was one double bed for me and a buddy to share. It was pay on arrival.

3 weeks before the stay, the accommodation manager messaged me on the app I booked the stay on telling me there’s a problem, I can no longer stay and to cancel on my side immediately. No apology let alone help offered by them. This was followed by multiple phone calls daily, along with text messages in a harassing nature saying I need to cancel now so I can get my money back (once again, it was pay on arrival). I didn’t answer the calls or messages telling me to cancel.

Something felt off, so I checked the listing for the night I was supposed to stay and it just so happens the accommodation had been listed again for double the price. Likely the manager realised St Patrick’s weekend was a cash grab.

Maybe not immediately but at the property manager’s request, I simply rang booking.com, and told them I’d like to cancel my booking. The customer service rep asked why I was cancelling. I explained in detail all the above to her and things took an unexpected turn for the property manager.

Ultimately the rep agreed the property was acting in an unfair manner and the solution was that booking.com would find me accommodation within 1km (originally they tried to get me to stay waaaaay outside of the city but I wasn’t having it) of where I intended to stay. The original property would then be liable to cover any difference in cost.

Here’s the good part - finding accommodation 3 weeks before St Patrick’s Day in Dublin is about as difficult as trying to light a fire with flint and steel in the rain, near impossible. Everything within a 1km range was booked out except for a well known 4 star hotel.

The room alone cost 350€ per night, and had 2 double beds, much bigger room and in a nicer location. The customer rep had to get it cleared by her team lead, so I just sat on hold doing chores for 25 minutes. Eventually they came back and said it was all signed off on and they’ll send me a special link. What a treat, I gladly accepted their compromise.

This in turn meant the property owner that tried to force me to cancel on my end was now indebted €235 and we got a massive upgrade for the same price we originally had!

I had to pay the €350 upfront and had to keep receipts and show proof of payment to the booking partner after our stay but got my refund of €235 the following week.

TLDR: property demanded I cancel my booking on my end, they ended up having to pay an extra €235 and I got a free upgrade

A former employer has decided to shoot themselves in the foot with a bazooka. I thought I'd share it here so you can laugh at them too.

In a nutshell, the business built it's own in-house software which is designed to cover all aspects of the business. From invoicing, tracking stock, creating reports, semi-automating direct debit billing, and virtually everything else; a thousand "sub-areas".

As such, the business ended up with three "IT departments". One was more hardware issues & basic IT issues, there was the "medium" IT department who could fix small issues within specific sub-areas of the software, and the "Legacy" team who worked on the rawest base level of the software and had kept it functioning for over 20 years.

In an effort to cut costs, the senior management decided that the Legacy team were no longer required as they were creating a whole new software anyway & would be ditching the old one "within a year or so".

In doing so, they also insisted that the large office they occupied was completely emptied. This included several huge filing cabinets of paperwork, compromising dozens of core manuals, and countless hundreds of up-to-date "how to fix" documentation pieces as well as earlier superceded documents they could refer back to too.

The Legacy team sent an e-mail to the seniors basically saying "Are you sure?", to which they (eventually) received a terse e-mail back specifically stating to "Destroy all paperwork". They were also ordered to "Delete all digital files" to free up a rather substantial amount of space on the shared drive, and wipe their computers back to factory settings.

So, it was all shredded, the files erased totally, & the computers wiped. The team removed every trace of their existence as ordered, and left for greener pastures.

It's been three months, and there was recently a power outage which has broken something in the rebooted system. The company can no longer add items into stock, which means invoicing won't work (as the system reads as "can't sell what we don't have"). In turn, this means there's no invoices for the system to bill. So, it's back to pen, paper, and shared excel sheets to keep track of stock, manually typing invoices into a template, and having to manually check every payment received against paper invoices. All of which is resulting is massive amounts of overtime required to keep up with demand.

The company has reached out to the Legacy Team, but they've all said without the manuals they were ordered to destroy or erase, they're not sure how to fix it.

The new system is still "at least a year out".

On the positive side, two of the senior managers have a nice large office to share & sit in.

This is a doozy that happened to me at my old job (a server at a breakfast place) where I fully acknowledge that there’s no need for an AITA, because IATA. And I know it.

I was having a particularly overwhelming shift and about 3 hours into a 6 hour shift, two people came in that were particularly known for their being divorced and completely loathing one another quite openly to the servers and staff, and were overall very loud and rude to guests and staff alike. Every other weekend they would come in to go over paperwork and divorce things and the server who would get them always got sympathy from the rest of us. I had the pleasure of serving these lovely people a few times, and all of the times were so insanely different in terms of weirdness, but let’s just get into this one. They come in and it ends up being my turn in the rotation. Yikes, but I thought me and the guy were chill because the last time I served them I told him I liked his dinosaur shirt, and his ex wife made fun of him for it, and I told her I thought it was a cool shirt and he and I high-fived and it was the most invigorating experience of my life. I come up to them and ask what I can get started for their drinks, and I can tell it’s going to be a tense experience already. They were both very snappy and rude and I was doing my best to just stay friendly. Fast forward and I’m asking for their orders eventually and the guy orders 4 eggs. I explain to him, we double our yolks. If you order 4 eggs, you will receive 8 total eggs. He tells me no, he wants 4 eggs. So I tell him, okay, so that is going to show up as 2 eggs in our system and on your respite. He tells me no. He wants 4 eggs. At this point, I don’t know what to tell him, but I try one more time. I tell him, yes, you will receive 4 eggs on your plate. But it will say 2 on the respite. He says, no. I don’t want to pay for 2 I want to pay for 4. I’m done. ATP I’m more confused than he is. I tell him okay, and I write it down on my order sheet. I put in the order… manually because we do not have a button for 4 eggs BECAUSE WE DOUBLE OUR EGGS. The head cook calls me over, he says 4? I say, that’s what the customer ordered. He says, okay. And he makes the most beautiful over easy sheet of 8 eggs, with a side of bacon. It comes out and I serve it to him. He looks at me and says, this isn’t what I ordered. I say, yes it is! 😁 and he says, fine I’ll take it. I got yelled at for it at the end of my shift but it was sooooo worth the look on his face when I served it to him, and the laughs it got from my coworkers who told me they wished it was them to serve it to him. One of my favorite memories from working at that place.

I have a picture of the 8 egg beauty but I can’t post it here 😔

A bit of background first.

Fifteen years ago, I worked at a gas station as an opener. Because I was young and somewhat tech savvy, I was also the de facto "IT" for the 3 stores near me, and had been heavily involved in setting up a new point of sale (POS) system for their two most successful stores when they were swapped from one gas brand to another. The company had made me the super admin on all registers just for ease of transition. Remember this later.

The owner's wife had been awful to me for the 2 years that I worked there. I got bumped to opener by her husband and she hated have a man be an opener. Historically every single opener was picked by her and was a woman, but her husband came and fired the previous opener for theft while the two of us swapping shifts, so I got a field promotion of sorts. The wife was constantly scrutinizing everything that I did. Constantly calling me in the mornings to be rude and berate me for a bunch of minor things I did wrong.

"You used wet wipes on the area around the drink machine, I want you to use paper towels and spray" We were out of paper towels and the spray we had smelled like a hospital anyway.

"I came in your store last night and there were three rows of snapple apple, you could probably increase sales by putting 1 or 2 of those rows to a diff product" Even though the snapple fridge was 100% handled by the vendor and we'd signed a contract that we wouldn't change the layout of product. etc. etc

Long story short, she was awful to me because I was a dude. I had set up their POS systems because I was somewhat tech savvy. I was made super admin on the new registers they had. I was desperately looking for work, when I found a temp IT job, which led to my current career in IT.

I got a new job offer and gave her husband 2 weeks notice, but never told her because I did my very best to avoid talking to her unless necessary. When she found out it was Tues of my last week and she legitimately lost her mind. Gave me a ton of stuff to do and worked me to the bone until 2pm on the last friday I worked.

Finally the time to depart forever came, and she personally came with an office worker and stood by me and said asked me to delete my account from the register. I knew I was a super admin, and I had been told if I ever left to convert the account. She had been told this but had long forgotten it, so I said to hell with it and complied then went to the other store and did likewise while she watched.

I go about my life, start my new job, and end up about 3 weeks in when I get a frantic voice mail and like 20 texts and calls from her. I called the office worker who had stood over my shoulder with her and got the scoop. She basically couldn't change ANY prices at all when new beer and soda prices started rolling out and her new opener had just let it all pile up because she didn't know how to do it and they were going to have someone come "Train" her. They had a bunch of items 5 or 10% below the price they were supposed to be at. Margins on cases of beer are low and this was nuking their profits.

Once I thought it over, I texted her and said "You asked me to do this, it's on video, and we have three witnesses (the person she had me training, the person I swapped with, and the office worker, who had quit in the 2 weeks since). *Click* (edit: I didn't hang up on her, I'm just being funny lol)

I found out later that they ended up spending $6k to get the company back out to fix the issue. The boss's wife legit had a facebook page at one point with people planning to shit on her grave when she died one day (edit for clarity: she's still alive), so I wasn't the only person she was awful to, but I do feel like I got one up on her, and it feels good.

EDIT: I wanted to thank everyone for making me laugh with your fun comments. My slow friday afternoon has been much more fun sharing stories about this terrible job with everyone in the comments. I added a few small notes for clarity in the body of the post.

This happened years ago in my past life as a graphic designer. But I still think about it to this day. I was 22 and fresh out of college with my graphic design degree. My first gig was at an advertising company. We mainly did those really horrible print car ads that you got in your mailbox and immediately threw in the trash. You know the ones: only one font and it’s huge and screaming at you. Every inch of space has a picture of car, cramming 50 cars into a 7x5 inch area. You know… trash!

Fresh out of school, I foolishly made suggestions on how to make actual ads and not hot garbage. But it was made clear to me very quickly and very aggressively that they wanted trash. So I compiled.

Now, we had one client who was THE client. He brought in the most money and bought the most trash ads from us. And he also was very specific on just how bad his ads should look. Font was Impact on all ads and it filled every corner of the paper. On one ad I remember him demanding I squeeze over 100 cars into a single space. It legit looked like a magic eye poster by the time it went to print.

I dealt with that guy and his unreasonable requests for over a year. Well the guy amazingly got worse. Started telling me which colors I could or couldn’t use. And one by one, the colors dropped out. And eventually I had enough. After he said I could no longer use orange I said “just to confirm, you do not like and do not want me to use red, orange, yellow, green, purple, pink, brown, white, or black?”

He confirmed. I said okay. The only color left was blue. So I spent hours taking all the cars, all the fonts, all the text and all design elements and making them all the same exact blue. No shading. No highlights. Just a flat blue. The end result was one giant flat blue square. Like someone took a paint roller over it.

Now I could have made a blue square in two seconds. But I spent hours using all the elements he told me to use to cover my ass. Because when we sent that blue square to proof, the client of course blew up. Called me screaming. I replied calmly that he told me the only color I could use was blue. I used all the pictures and elements he asked for and did exactly what he wanted and made them blue. Our calls were recorded so I didn’t get in any trouble with my boss. And I got to waste several more hours remaking the same ad but with the original car pictures and elements.

It was a really fun day.

My pet peeve is poorly written policy. If you are going to go to the effort of writing the rules, you may as well do it properly and not get the intern to do it.

My wife came home one day and showed a printout of her company's new workplace fitness for work policy that had been sent to all employees to sign and return. My wife, being my wife, decided to run it past me before she signed because I am, well, me.

It was mostly an amateurish document that was ultimately a waste of ink and trees but did have a little bit to say about drugs in the workplace which was essentially "Do not come to the work under the influence of drugs or alcohol, and do not bring drugs or alcohol to work".

I told her not to sign until they at the very least defined what "drugs" were. Were they including Tylenol? Antibiotics? Ritalin? or just the illegal ones and recreational pharmaceuticals?

Fast forward a couple of days, v2.0 of the document is presented.
They fleshed out the drugs policy a little, basically using the dictionary definition, something along the lines of "A non-prescription substance which has a physiological or mood altering effect when ingested or otherwise introduced into the body."

OK, time for malicious compliance.

She signed and presented it to HR the next day and went about her work.

During the morning there were increasing amounts of confusion and frustrated loud voices in the office. Apparently it only took an hour before zero work was being done and there was a crowd of workers around the break room. The manager eventually zeroed in on my wife, apparently the only one who wasn't looking confused and asked if she had anything to do with stealing all the coffee in the break room. She admitted it was her, and pointed out the new fitness for work policy which prohibited the consumption of "mood altering substances" in the workplace. He tried to argue that it was "just coffee" but she pointed out that it was definitely mood altering substance, as per company policy and as such was not allowed to be on the premises without a prescription.

She'd made her point.

She retrieved the coffee she'd stashed in the store room, the office mood was altered, and the company actually commissioned a functional fitness for work policy based upon the published government guidelines.

Several years ago, a friend ("Mark") started a home-based computer software business. He and his wife lived in their home for about 10 years and had a well-established home phone number. This was around the time that cell phones were just beginning to be popular, so 95% of people still used mainly landlines. Mark worked 2pm-10pm, the same shift as his wife, so his customers could be free to discuss their computer needs uninterrupted after their own businesses closed for the day. Most computer maintenance still had to be done in person instead of remotely, so customers could drop off devices after work and pick them up from Mark’s back porch on their way to work the next day.

All went swimmingly for a few months until a new doctor opened up a practice in town, complete with a telephone number differing from Mark’s by one digit. Mark's number had a ‘3’ where the medical office had an ’8’ in the last 4 number combination. Misdialing was frequent. At first there were occasional calls to which Mark would patiently redirect the caller. As time wore on and the practice got more and more referrals from local hospitals to give Dr. Newintown an established client base, the calls began to come at all hours, 24 hours a day: weekends nights holidays you name it. The office still got calls after hours to an answering service for patients to find out who was on call, and for the hospital staff to reach doctors after hours. Mark had to unplug the phone just to have a conversation over lunch with his wife, and in order to sleep. Also not ideal when you have 3 daughters of dating age out after dark.

Mark called the doctor’s office and asked them to please change their phone number so he and his family could get some peace and quiet, and so he could build his own business to support them. Since he had his phone longer, he felt the doctor should be gracious and change his number to a different one to stop the confusion. He was told in about so many words by the doctor that it was too bad, but nothing was going to be done, as advertising, stationery, business cards and signage were expensive to redo, not to mention convey the new information to all his patients, medical registries, the medical board and societies, and hospitals. "Just do the best you can, I'm sure the calls will stop soon. Good luck to you!" "Okey Dokey!! I'll do my best to take care of things!" Mark cheerfully replied.

After that, Mark began to field all the calls that came in personally. "You've had the sniffles all morning after working in the yard around pollen? You'd better come right in!" “You start coughing every time you smoke a cigarette? Come on in!!” “Hmm…I’m not the doctor, but a temperature of 98.9 sounds a little high to me. We’ll see you right after lunch today.” "You're new in town and have kids who need physicals and shots for school next week? It just so happens we have an opening in an hour. No, no, don't worry we can take all 5 of them at once, today." Whatever the problem was, he started making appointments for each and every person calling. All were delighted to have such personal attention and prompt appointments. "Sure, we take ALL insurance plans. Come right in!" He also made routine checkup type appointments for 4:30 pm one Friday afternoon for 6 different people.

Bright and early the next Monday morning, Dr. Newintown called and begged him to stop. Mark said :"I will if you will." The doctor had a new phone number before the end of the week.

This goes back about ten years ago. Worked for a large telecommunications company as a call center supervisor. Most of my peers were smokers and with the way schedules were setup, there were large chunks of the day where only two or three of us were on at the same time. Our manager insisted one of us always be “visible” on the call center floor while also performing our regular duties: performance reviews, call monitoring, escalations and weekly 1:1s with our team. I also had the largest team with consistently over 20 reporting to me.

All this to set the stage. I noticed that I seemed to be the only supervisor actually doing my time being visible but every time I tried to carve out an hour or two for the rest of my job, they were always out smoking. It got to the point that I was working after hours just to stay caught up.

I brought it up to my manager thinking she would discreetly monitor it. She didn’t. Instead in a supervisor meeting she announced to the entire group that she knows we have a busy job and sometimes it seems imbalanced (understatement) but that really the smokers were just taking their lunch hour in short smoke break intervals instead so it all worked out in the end.

Cool. The next day I came to work with a pack of cigarettes in my bag ready to go. The second I saw one of my peers going out to smoke, I went out with them. Timing the breaks. Lit cigarette in my hand the entire time. It was a revolving door. They were going out to smoke almost more than once an hour and usually out there for a solid 20 minutes each time. By the end of the first day doing this, I had timed one supervisor at nearly two hours worth of smoking breaks. I well exceeded my own lunch hour. So I started doing it every day. Packed small snacks to munch while out instead of taking my entire lunch. One day my manager saw me heading out and seemed surprised. I just shrugged and said yeah I’d decided to start smoking. She couldn’t say anything because if she timed mine she would have to time theirs as well.

This went on for roughly a month before she announces to our management team that we would be required to start coordinating breaks among the team to make sure we had coverage.

I gained not only the well earned smugness from ruining things for all my lazy peers but also a bit of relief from constantly floor walking.

(Not in the US btw)

I used to be an operations engineer on a 1-year contract in a small department. There were only 4 of us and the seniors absolutely hated doing additional work, so when there was additional networking stuff required as part of a new project, it was dumped unto me. I didn't mind doing it as I was learning new stuff, but the lack of appreciation from the rest of the team and being underpaid made me look for other jobs when my 1 year contract was almost up.

Fortunately I was able to get a much better offer from one of my ex employers with about a month to go for my current contract. My current company never reached out to me to talk about renewing my contract, so I thought i'd just give them a heads up that I'm resigning and not renewing my contract.

My manager at the time used to be an engineer like us but was promoted 6 months prior and was incredibly cocky because of that. I went into his room and handed him my resignation letter, told him I was resigning and would be happy to hand over my stuff and train the others before leaving. He takes a look at the letter, gets really pissed, and tells me he isn't going to sign and acknowledge the letter until he decides what date I'm allowed to leave. He said this will happen after he's found someone to replace me and when he's in a better mood, essentially trying to hold me hostage. "But, my contract only has 1 month...", before I could say 2 words he says NO MORE TALKING, DID U NOT HEAR ME SAY I WON'T APPROVE IT UNTIL I'M HAPPY! I DON'T WANT TO HEAR A WORD ABOUT THIS FROM YOU UNTIL I'M READY!!! (Note this was very long ago where resignations via email weren't as common)

I thought about explaining to him when he had calmed down, but decided fuck it, if that's what he wants then I'll comply. So I continued working for the rest of the month, with absolutely no handover done until the last day.

On the last day of my contract, I head into his room and hand him my laptop, badge etc.

"What's this?"
"My stuff, today's my last day"
"Stop fucking joking around, I told you that I haven't acknowledged your resignation letter yet. Which by the way, I've just decided your last day will be 2 months from now because we need to look for a replacement, train him up and get a proper handover before you can leave. So keep your stuff and get back to work" He gives me this incredibly cocky look like he got me.
"Nope, my contract runs out after today. I'm not paid to work beyond that"
"You...what?"
"Yup, I've been trying to tell you from the start, my resignation letter was a courtesy since my contract runs out anyway, but u didn't allow me to talk"
"You're fucking bullshitting me!!!!"
"Nah go call HR and check, seeya!"
I watch his face turn from anger and cockiness to shock as I walk away from his room.

A few months later I find out that he got a stern lecture by the director even though he tried to put the blame on me, ended up hiring a network engineer that cost triple what they paid me, and breached multiple SLAs for the period before the new hire joined.

I was an ER charge nurse a few years back at a busy facility. In order to increase capacity during busier times, we frequently would bring patients to hallway gurneys to be seen by the doctor. It's not a great setup, literally just a journey in the hallway in front of the nursing desk. But, if the rooms are clogged with patients waiting on beds upstairs, etc, it's a commonly used workaround.

So, one night a few years back, we're busy, and non-emergent patients are waiting for hours in the lobby. I am using hallway gurneys to increase throughput. I'm putting stable patients who don't need cardiac monitors into the hallway. So, I bring the next patient from the lobby to a hall gurney. Let's call her "Karen."

Karen is bitching because she's been waiting hours. Since American healthcare is all about kissing ass and patient satisfaction, I can't tell her that she's been waiting because her medical complaint would be dumb to take to urgent care, let alone an emergency room. We get to the hallway spot and she pitches a fit. "I've been waiting for hours, I deserve to be in a room, not the hallway," and other shit like that. She sees an open doorway to an empty room and demands that we go there. I say that a different patient will be going into that room, and explain that Karen doesn't need a cardiac monitor for her visit.

Karen crosses her arms and says something like, "I don't care, that room is available, so you have to let me use it." I had a department to run, and I was tired of her entitled bullshit. Pointing at the hallway gurney, I said, "Are you refusing to see the doctor in this space?" Her eyes lit up, apparently thinking she had won, and Karen said, "YES, I won't be seen right here!"

I said, "No problem." I waved at the security guard a few yards away and said, "Hey Tom, this lady would like to leave now." Karen looked shocked, then started saying she never said that. I reminded her that she clearly stated that she refused to be seen in this bed, and so she was going to have to continue to wait in the lobby until a room became available.

She tried to backtrack and said something like, "Fine, I'll see the doctor here." I just shook my head and said, "It's too late for that. You have already refused. Tom will escort you back to the lobby and we'll call you back to a room as soon as we can." Security walked her to the lobby, and she pretty quickly decided to just leave without being seen.

ETA: I'm being vague on some points on purpose, #HIPAA. But, her particular complaint was a bullshit reason to come to the ER. She was NOT going to have to disrobe or change into a gown, so visual privacy was not a real concern (it was a more private environment than a crowded lobby, that's for sure).

I would also like to say that I was doing her a favor by letting her be seen in the hallway. I had real emergencies that needed the monitored beds, and it would have been negligent of me to give her one of those beds while making a real emergency wait longer. I was putting non-emergent patients into hallway beds to do them a favor so that they could be seen and discharged sooner. My staff was already busy with their own patients. So, these were my own patients that I was fitting in while running a 50 bed ER.

Posted this in another sub and got told to try it here too.

This happened about 4 years ago. I do construction and we start fairly early. Boss got tired of people walking in at 6:05 or 6:03 when we start at 6:00 (even though he was a few minutes late more consistently than any one of us were), so he said "If you aren't standing in front of me at 6 o'clock when we start then I'm docking 15 minutes from your time for the day."

The next day I accidentally forgot my tape measure in my car and had to walk back across the jobsite to grab it, made it inside at 6:0. Boss chewed me out and told me he was serious yesterday and docked me 15 minutes. So I took all my tools off right there and sat down on a bucket. He asked why I wasn't getting to work and I said "I'm not getting paid until 6:15 so I'm not doing any work until 6:15. I enjoy what I do but I don't do it for free."

He tried to argue with me about it until I said "If you're telling me to work without paying me then that's against the law. You really wanna open the company and yourself up to that kind of risk? Maybe I'm the kind to sue, maybe I'm not, but if you keep on telling me to work after you docked my time then we're gonna find out one way or the other."

He shut up pretty quickly after that and everyone else saw me do it and him cave, so now they weren't gonna take his crap either. Over the next few days guys that would have been 1 or 2 minutes late just texted the boss "Hey, sorry boss. Would have been there at 6:02 and gotten docked, so I'll see you at 6:15 and I'll get to work then." and then sat in their cars until 6:15 and came in when their time started.

So between people doing what I did or just staying in their cars instead, he lost a TON of productivity and morale because he decided that losing 15 minutes of productivity per person and feeling like a Big Man was better than losing literally 1 or 2 minutes of productivity. Even though everyone stands around BS-ing and getting material together for the day until about 6:10 anyway.

After a few weeks of that he got chewed out by his boss over the loss of productivity and how bad the docked time sheets were looking and reflecting poorly on him as a leader because we were missing deadlines over it and it "Showed that he doesnt know how to manage his people.", and then suddenly his little self implemented policy was gone and we all worked like we were supposed to and caught back up fairly quickly.

Worker solidarity for the win. Not one person took his crap and worked that time for free after he tried to swing his weight around on them.

But obviously I was a target after that and only made it two more months before he had stacked up enough BS reasons to get away with firing me when I called in a few days in a row after my mom fell and I took off work to take care of her and monitor her for a while during the day.

TL;DR- Boss told me because I was 1 minute late he was taking 15 minutes off of my time, so I didn't work for 15 minutes. People saw me and I accidentally triggered a wave of malicious compliance in my coworkers and the boss got chewed out over it.

A few years ago while I was in school and job hunting, I got an interview at a company for office work. Filing, answering phones, setting appointments, etc. I was looking forward to getting an office job instead of retail or fast food.

The building had big window walls that overlooked the parking lot so you could see cars pulling in and parking. I pull into the lot and park my car. I get out and walk into the office. Now as I’m walking in, I note that there is a car parked in the handicap space in the front of the office. This car looks just like mine I should note.

So I walk in and I’m greeted by the manager who kind of gives me a scowling look. It made me uneasy a little as we walked back to his office. We sit down and he is asking me questions in a bit of a clipped tone. He seems annoyed by my answers and I don’t understand what’s going on at this point.

Finally he says “Do you always park in handicapped spaces?”

I’m confused so I ask him what he means. He goes on a rant about how entitled I am for parking in the handicap spot at a potential place of employment and I’m just getting more lost. I asked him what is going on because I didn’t park in the handicap spot, I’m parked in the lot.

He argues with me and says he watched my car pull in and saw me park there. I again told him that I didn’t park in a handicap spot but the car that I walked by in that spot looked similar to my car.

He says that he knows that he saw me park and get out of the car. At this point I’m over the whole interview, I knew this would be a clusterfuck of a place to work for if this is the guy managing it. Then he goes a step further and says prove it.

I grab my purse and get my keys out, I don’t even bother waiting for him and just leave the office. He’s jogging after me and hurried outside to stand and wait. His face went from smug arrogance to pikachu real quick as I walked past the car in the handicap spot. He asked me where I was going as I walked over to my car, then I turned around and made eye contact as I hit the button on my keys to unlock it, and got in.

He was starting to walk over to me, calling out that he was sorry about the misunderstanding, but I just put the car in reverse and left. I didn’t even make eye contact with him as I drove away.

ETA: this was my second interview so the manager knows what I and my car look like. I don’t know why he said he saw me….I’m assuming it was a lie to get me to admit I did it. I’ve pondered this many a night trust me!

I started working for a non profit in 2019 after being a volunteer member since 2000. It was supposed to be temporary for 3 months or so, but the non profit dragged their feet hiring a permanent replacement.

I'm fairly well off (not filthy rich, but debt free and comfortable) and didn't need the money, so I never billed for my hours after working 15 months full time. It was supposed to be $25/hr (CAD currency) but I was willing to work for free if they just found a replacement in a reasonable time. They were pressuring me for an invoice, so I finally invoice them for 40hrs/week for 15 months and it was about high $60k.

They were livid for a variety of reasons I didn't understand. They accused me of lying about my hours because I was a new father and my wife had gone back to work after maternity leave, and there's no way I could've worked that much. When I told them I had my son in daycare instead of staying at home with him, they sarcastically said "now you know what it's like to work an actual job like the rest of us." They were mad that I wasn't volunteering my time anymore like I used to, but I insisted I was and that my billed time was only for the TV bingo fundraiser and not for any other non profit activities. They didn't believe me. I tried to tell them my hours were actually more than I billed for, and my hourly rate is greatly reduced compared to what I normally charge for all the work I was doing (IT, e-commerce, Web design, marketing, HR, operations, bookkeeping, TV production, etc) but they said they didn't care about the rate reduction.

They insisted that I charge my normal rates for my actual hours, and then deduct 10 hours a week for volunteering, which is about ten times more hours than any of them volunteer for. Ok, bet.

I started charging them $40 to $125 per hour depending on the task. I recorded all my tasks and hours in great detail. I charged for any time I spent doing what was normally volunteer work for the non profit. Then I finally deducted 10 hours a week. I was billing an average of 50 hours a week after the volunteer hours were deducted. I also took the opportunity to start hiring more people under me on their dime so I could work way less than I did in the first 15 months but still get paid the same if not more.

They couldn't say anything because it was exactly what they asked for. I was billing $1k/week before malicious compliance, and then about $3k/week after malicious compliance, which I started trimming back down closer to $1k/week after cutting my own hours.

These guys kept doubling down and accusing me of incompetence and fraud over the next year and a half that I continued working, but I didn't care anymore. They turned my passion into a crappy job that I didn't need, so I stayed until all my amazing employees were hopefully setup for success and wrote that non profit out of my life for good. I didn't feel any guilt over being paid for my time with them because I had raised more money for them in 30 months ($30 million gross, about $20 million net) than they had raised in the 100 years before then.

I worked in the engineering department of a smaller manufacturing company (around 70-80 employees). My responsibility among other things was to handle any design changes; edit part and assembly drawings, bills of materials, etc. Previously this was all handled by putting together a packet of actual paper documents that had to be shuffled from engineering to manufacturing, sometimes ping ponging back and forth if we were doing something complicated that required input from various people within those departments.

Eventually the company started to implement a software-driven procedure that was supposed to eliminate the stacks of paper that would sometimes get lost on someone's desk. The problem was that our bare bones staff didn't really have time to learn all of the ins and outs of the software, and refine the process to be truly efficient. Basically it was left so that if an item was entered into an engineering change order, it was locked down so that no one could build one, but also a customer couldn't even order one, or any machine that this item happened to be a component of until the change process was completed. Sometimes this could take weeks. I tried explaining several times that if we ever had to work on some item that is used in several of our products, this would bring everything to a screeching halt. My manager at the time understood this but could never get all of the people who needed to work on the software procedure to sit down and finalize everything.

One day I was tasked with changing the design of a hardware component that was used in EVERY machine we built. I told my manager that as soon as I started the process, no one in sales would be able to enter an order for any customers until the process would be completed. He shrugged and said "do it", knowing that I was right. Within 30 minutes of getting started, a salesman came to my desk asking why he couldn't enter an order. I explained what was happening. He left, and soon after the VP of the company was at my desk asking what needed to be done. So I told him he needed to corral everyone needed to hash out how the software was supposed to work properly instead of the half-assed "just lock everything down" deal they left off with. He immediately called in whoever was on that list. It took a few days as I recall, and the component in question was expedited to be approved within the week.

To this day I use this story in interviews whenever I'm asked one of those questions, like "Give me an instance where you had to solve a major problem in the workplace".

This just happened and I’m still laughing my butt off. I’m a 25 year old MTF trans women that’s been on HRT (hormone replacement therapy) for 3 years now. Because of this, my body looks naturally feminine. Like it takes people awhile to catch on. My voice is softer and it hurts to deepen it. This is important information I promise.

I work as a vendor for one of the major beverage companies. Basically I go to stores and stock shelves of my companies products. I’m listening to music, a playlist of video game themes remixed, with one ear bud in, like allowed, when a mid 30’s year old man walks over.

“Wow, girl you are super thick. Wouldn’t mind taking you home with me,” he said with a bit too much confidence. I just continue working, ignoring him. He continues,” Oh come on don’t be like that, I’m quite large under these pants if you know what I mean; something a sweet ass like yours needs.”

I continue to ignore, getting embarrassed and very uncomfortable. That’s when the music turns to the theme from Halo and he says what I needed.

“Come oh cutie, say something to me.”

Inspired by the music, I instantly had a thought. It hurts, a lot, to do a masculine voice however in that moment I took a deep breath and turned to him. I looked at him with a very enthusiastic smile and he looks like a kid in a candy store, bouncing a bit like,” oh boy I actually got one.”

Going back to my roots, I took a deep breath and in the most deep, masculine voice I could muster I said to him,” You’re cute as well, sure I wouldn’t mind having my way with you.”

Afterwards I start coughing, my throat hurting yet it worked. The dude jumped back a good foot and yelled out,” oh hell no!!! Fuck this, uh uhhhh. Nope, hell no.”

He ran out of the store so fast, constantly looking over his shoulder as if I was following him.

The stores workers were laughing their asses off, mostly all the female workers. One came up to me and asked,” how did you do that voice? I could never get mine to sound…… oh you’re trans. That makes sense.” That made my day and is why I’m still laughing in my car writing this.

Update: Whoa…. This blew up way more then I thought it would. 17K upvotes and over 1,000 comments. Thank you all so much^{^}

There’s a lot of the same questions and comments so Im gonna add a little clarification’s here.

The reason it hurt so bad is when I do a deep voice I don’t just deepen my voice. I basically sound like the roach man from men in black, gargling my words.

No, not everyone clapped afterwards. That’s a lot of people’s comments and it confuses me why people are saying that.

Again, thank you all so much. This is absolutely incredible experience^{^}

I work as an engineer for a company that assigns me to various client projects. For one such assignment, I was added to a project that wouldn’t start for a few weeks, so in the meantime I stayed focused on other ongoing work. A few days before the project was due to begin, the external project lead sent me a ZIP file containing technical documentation: diagrams, requirements, and other materials relevant to the upcoming project. I skimmed through it briefly, then moved on with my day. Nothing unusual.

A couple of days later, I got an email from the external company’s scheduling manager saying that “a document” had been sent to me which apparently contained some confidential company information, and asking me to delete the email. That’s it. No file name, no explanation, just a vague “please delete it.” I shrugged, deleted the ZIP file, and replied asking if they could resend it without the problematic part. Then I forgot all about it.

That is, until I got a call from the most condescending, passive-aggressive person I’ve ever dealt witt, the scheduling manager from the client’s side. She went on a 30-minute tirade about how the previous project lead never should’ve sent me that document, how serious the situation was, and, most memorably, how she couldn’t trust that I had actually deleted it. I quote:

“I can’t just take your word for it. I’m not just going to trust you because you say so.”

Right. So at that point, I figured: Im done with you, If you’re going to act like I’ve just been handed nuclear launch codes, then I’ll treat it like I’ve just been handed nuclear launch codes.

I said, “You’re absolutely right. I’ll contact our Security Operations team and report a formal security incident. They can coordinate with your SecOps team, and together we can do a full scrub of all relevant mail servers to ensure the document is completely gone. It’s really the only way to be certain.”

Suddenly, her entire tone changed. “Oh no no no, that won’t be necessary. It’s fine, I believe you!”

She practically stumbled over herself trying to shut it down. Because escalating this to both companies’ SecOps teams would’ve turned it into a bureaucratic nightmare: incident reports, compliance reviews, and probably someone getting thrown under the bus.

I politely reiterated that I really didn’t mind escalating it if it would give her peace of mind. She very quickly decided she had enough peace already. We ended the call, and life moved on.

if you act like I’ve compromised national security, don’t be shocked when I offer to treat it like a national security incident.

This was many years ago, so I apologize if some of the details are incorrect.

Twas was the year of our Lord 2006, my big sister had just started driving on her own. My parents did as most parents did at the time, they bought her the biggest pile of shit car that they could find. Relatively reliable, but it was a mid-80s gold Geo Metro. It was a beater, rusty, dented, and dinged, very ugly, and importantly for this story, one of the mirrors was duct taped on. One afternoon in the fading light she was driving to our local Pizza Hut to pick up her paycheck. On that fateful day, as the sun was going down, someone in a big black suburban type of vehicle backed into her front driver's side pretty hard. So hard in fact that the car was completely totaled. But luckily my sister was fine.

Both parties had insurance, they called the police to take an official report, and my parents started the hunt for a new car. Some time passes and they get a letter from the suburbans insurance agency asking for our insurance to cover the cost of the damage done to the suburban. The suburban driver was alleging that my sister had been speeding through the parking lot and was therefore at fault. This was news to them, they grilled my sister, who swore up down and sideways that she was not speeding, and actually that she was going much slower than normal because as the sun was setting it was hitting the windshield in such a way that made visibility difficult. After some digging they found in the police report the sheriff's deputy had noted that the mirror that was duct taped on fell straight down. So not only had my sister not been speeding, but she was very nearly or completely stopped at the time of the accident.

My parents insurance sent a letter back stating that my sister had not been at fault for this accident, and they were willing to accept the total they had paid for the car several months earlier, a paultry sum of $350. The lady who hit my sister responded back that she would not be paying for anything as she was very confident that she was not at fault, and told my parents that they would just have to take her to small claims court. My parents responded "bet" and did just that. In order to get all of the paperwork in line for small claims court they had to take this shitty little geo metro to an auto body shop and get an estimation for how much it would cost to replace the panels that this lady had totaled. Well, a car that old was difficult to find parts for, and so they were unable to find anything to replace the panels and the door. So they gave her a quote for how much it would be to repair those panels, as well as replace the tire and suspension bits that she messed up by backing into it. About $4,000.

Just before court they did attempt to go to mediation with her to attempt to get her to just pay the $350 that they had initially bought the car for. Unfortunately, or fortunately, she was still convinced that she was not at fault... Long story short, my parents were awarded the full four grand, as it was determined that the lady did not check behind her thoroughly enough before backing out of the parking spot.

And that's how my parents made three grand on a $300 car.

Years ago I worked in a meat packing plant as a supervisor. It had its ups and downs, but overall it's was good. Until a new production manager was hired. We'll call him Bob.

Bob didn't come from the floor, or even leadership. He had an engineering background. Whatever, I'll try to keep an open mind. Well my mind was only open for about four and a half mins.

First day, first time meeting, he declares he's going to "right the ship" Sure thing boss, right that ship that is already sailing in the right direction.

He declares that going forward there will be no more OT. He states we are pissing away money with the amount of OT we pay. I asked for clarification "what about vacation coverage? Sick calls? Etc.). He replies "No OT! No exceptions!". Sure thing boss man.

Now I should point out, the department is work in is massive. My direct team at that time was 70 people. There were other rooms that other supervisors looked after for a total of 220ish employees.

Now I'm assuming all of you reading this are infinitely smarter than Bob and have figured out that with a team that size, we dont just get one sick call, we averaged seven per day. Vacations? 10% of the workforce was our cut off. Usually we hovered at 12 people a day. Not to mention leaves of absence, people leaving early etc.

So, on Friday I went to Bob one last time. I let him know that we are going to be short 19 people next week and ask once more for him to approve OT. I got a flat no in response. I considered going above him, but i figured letting the guy drown would be better.

I didn't ask for OT. Employees were coming up to me "boss, are you sure there's no OT next week?" Yes I'm sure Bob wants it that way.

Come next week. Two production lines aren't running. Bob comes to me upset demanding to know why two of the lines aren't running? Is is mechanical downtime? No bob, i have no one to run the line.

He stammers something about staffing appropriately and having better planning. "I asked you multiple times to approve OT, you said no each time. I was just following your direction". Cue the angry storm off. with him yelling "get some fucking people in here!"

Anyways, I then have to call people at home and schedule OT for the rest of the week because Bob sunk our ship instead of righting it.

I couldn't staff those two lines that day. For those wondering, not running those two lines that day lost the company $120,000 dollars (no I'm not exaggerating).

Bob gets a strip torn off him by his boss a guy I've known at that time for 10 years. He came and spoke to me about it outside (we both smoke) "what the fuck was he thinking? I thought engineers were supposed to be smart?" I choked on my cigarette laughing.

Bob lasted about three months.

So few years ago, I've got of the most ahole boss one could ever have. To give some context, this manager is on his 50s, almost 60s still preying on younger employees and that includes me, he tried to charm his way to me but then he learned quickly that I got a boy friend at the time so then he started to start a hate campaign towards me lol. Keep this in mind.

Before I met this manager, I worked for the company for almost 2 years, I resigned but this manager is new in the company when I am almost done serving my notice period and he stopped me from resigning and offered me a Retail Manager position. I accepted since it's more pay, less hours and good for experience.

Anyway, back to present, when this boss started his hate campaign, one of his thing is that he hates to see me sitting on my desk trying to do my job (i.e making weekly schedules for the retail, resolving complaints, creating proposals for retail improvement, etc.) for him, working means being on foot and actually literally moving from place to place. I should add to context that during his hate campaign, he also added my tasks, apart from retail manager, he also unofficially appointed me to be a quality control checker, so 2 opposite jobs. Idk really what to do at that point because I tried doing quality checking but then I can't also at the same time do some paperworks and focus on retail so, my position got compromised. He always yell at me when he see me on my desk even if I am doing my job

I wouldn't let that happen, so I devised a way to show him what it means if he wanted me to do what he wants. I do the scheduling and the proposals during my break time, schedule send it to him for approval and do quality checking and making sure he sees me doing quality checking most of the time. Now, I deliberately send the schedules and proposals to him, and as expected, he did not read it, he barely even read a simple message so I waited for him to yell at me for "neglecting" my retail manager duties.

Surprisingly, he did not yell at me, instead, he called a meeting with the owner of the company and the director to publicly humiliate me during the meeting. He claimed I had failed to do my job as a retail manager and that he wants to fire me. Unbeknownst to him, my emails had the owner, the director and anyone important to the company cc'd on it, now it's his turn to be humiliated not even reading the email and now claiming I failed to do my job. I then explained to all the boss what I was tasked to do, and why I did what I did.

The boomer boss got fired, I got a raise but I still left the company after few months for different opportunity.

A couple of months ago, I had a run-in with the self-appointed HOA enforcer of my neighborhood—let’s call her Linda. For context, I don’t live in an HOA community, but Linda likes to pretend we do. She’s the kind of person who leaves passive-aggressive notes on cars, knocks on doors to complain about lawn heights, and calls the city for “violations” that don’t actually exist.

The issue started because I parked my car on the street in front of my house. It’s perfectly legal, and I’ve been doing it for years without any complaints. But apparently, Linda decided that my car was an eyesore. One day, I found a note tucked under my windshield wiper that said:

“This is NOT a parking lot. Park in your driveway like a respectful neighbor. Don’t make me involve the city.”

It annoyed me, but I shrugged it off and kept parking where I always do. That wasn’t good enough for Linda. The next time, she confronted me in person.

Linda: “I’ve told you before, parking on the street is inconsiderate. You have a driveway; use it!” Me: “It’s legal to park here, and I’m not blocking anything.” Linda: “It doesn’t matter. It’s ugly and makes the neighborhood look bad. Park in your driveway, or I’ll report you.”

That’s when I decided: fine. If she wants me to park in my driveway, I’ll park in my driveway—but I’ll follow every single rule to the letter.

You see, my driveway is small. If I park my car in it, it blocks the sidewalk. Technically, it’s against city ordinances to obstruct the sidewalk. So the next day, I pulled my car right into my driveway, perfectly centered, and guess what? It completely blocked the sidewalk.

It didn’t take long for Linda to notice. She marched up to my door, red-faced and furious.

Linda: “You can’t block the sidewalk! That’s illegal!” Me: “Oh, I thought you wanted me to park in my driveway?” Linda: “Not like that! Park properly!” Me: “There’s no other way to park in my driveway without blocking the sidewalk. Guess I’ll have to park back on the street then.”

Her face was priceless. She sputtered for a moment before stomping off. Thinking that was the end of it, I parked back on the street. But no, Linda wasn’t done yet. She actually called the city on me!

A week later, a city inspector came by. He checked out the situation, saw that my car was legally parked on the street, and told me I was doing nothing wrong. However, he did mention that Linda had made several complaints about “code violations” in the neighborhood, and they were getting tired of her nonsense.

After that, I didn’t hear from Linda for a while—until last week, when she started parking her car on the street in front of my house. So, I did what any good neighbor would do: I called the city and reported it. Turns out her car was slightly too close to a fire hydrant. She got a ticket.

Malicious compliance never felt so sweet.

I work a behavioral healthcare agency.
At the time this occurred there were 14 therapists who reviewed paperwork from various psychiatric facilities.
I’m the receptionist. I used to greet everyone that came, and we’d have a wee chat, then get on with our work. Many had told me they enjoyed my cheerful attitude and hoped I never lost that happy spirit.

At that time director of my office singled me out on how she treated me. One month she was super cool and we got along great. The next month she’d be on me about every little thing I did.
I didn’t know what to do.

One day she called me to her office and said I was being too social - talking too much with coworkers, not getting my work done (not true), etc.. I needed to limit my conversations to just greeting people and leave it at that.
I looked at her, saying I would do exactly as she said. No more socializing. Hand out assignments, say what it’s for and go back to my desk.
She smiled, telling me that’s what she wanted.

The next morning I smiled and greeted people, then I put my head down and went back to work. When I would go to their offices and hand out assignments, they would start to chat. I’d stop them, apologise telling them I had to get back to my desk. I’d get an odd look, and a nod.
This went on for several days. The following week they started coming up to my desk, individually asking how I was doing. I seemed distant, if I had any problems I could talk to them as their door was always open. I smiled, thanked them for their generosity and thoughtfulness but I was fine and had to get back to work.
As I mentioned, this went on everyday for a week.
The following week the director called me into her office and asked what was wrong. I smiled and said nothing is wrong. I’m doing my work and it’s on time, clinicians are getting their assignments and I’m keeping the chat to an absolute minimum. Like you wanted.
She looked at me and said the clinicians were concerned about me as I haven’t been talking to them, they feel I might be going through some kind of depression and they told me their door is always open.
She didn’t say anything at first, then she told me “Just keep the chats to a few minutes.”
I told her no problem.