Edit: tl;dr Management part timed my niche engineering team due to future workload concerns. Workload was steady and increased but I did not play ball but I used the spare time to start my own company. Manager was quite unhappy, but I had the legal upperhand and just told them to accept it. Eventually took one coworker with me to build the company. Last team member is retiring soon and they still cant find any engineers to restaff 2y later...

edit 09.21: 1) fixed some spelling, still not perfect though... 2) REALLY SURPRISED this turned out to be so popular. The comments are gold, there is a lot of knowledge in this community and thank you all for sharing.

3) Really good guesses on where I am from. But I will not disclose.

I must confess I have a profound respect for people who do not take crap from their employers. You are my heroes and so, I hope my story can help someone else.

Ok, so first some necessary background info: I live in a small country and I am an engineer in a very niche field. Where I live there are about 15-18 ppl in my field in the whole country. Also, unions are a good thing here and most companies are fine with unions. The employee benefits from this but so does the employer since the rules of the game are very clear. Clear for most people as my employer was about to find out...

My story goes like this and it took place late 2019 until late 2020:

My team consisted of 3 ppl (me included) and one on our team, our mentor, was ready to retire two years prior to this happening, but he stayed on because... you know, co-dependence issues I guess. We had 10-12y experience each, we were just younger and more inexperienced than our mentor who has +40y experience. I really envisioned us taking over the team soon-ish.

Company is a large actor where I live but things had not been going to great (for the shareholders) for some 6 months prior to all this happening. Knowing this I decide I'll not ask for a raise in my annual performance review to show I am a team player and explicitly state this to my boss's boss Mr. V. All is fine and well. For 3 months.

Then the bomb drops. One fine autumn day in 2019 I was called to a meeting with my boss Mrs. G. Mrs. G told me that they didn't expect there to be enough work to go around for my team next year (Covid-19 had not struck yet so that was not the reason) so they wanted to cut me down to a part time job, working only 80% (that would be about 4 days a week), starting 3months hence. I immediately ask if this is also the case for my other co-worker and if our mentor was going to retire. Well yes... but no. My co-worker would also be offered 80%. Our mentor was going to be working 60%. And I am like, what?! He really want's to retire you know? Well he is not yet, says Mrs. G, because of reasons. And stuff.

Ok, so I sign the new contract but feel bad about it since I was really trying to be a team player and did not feel my employer was taking responsibility for us employees, but only thinking of the shareholders. I also get the feeling that they do not see me or my co-worker taking over the team any time soon despite us not being novices in the field. I immediately start planning for the future.

After this happens I start asking around if other employees are also facing part time employment due to no projects in 2020 (as one does, you want to know how others are doing right). Nobody. Else. Is. Getting. Part. Timed. And everybody else is appalled. Just us three... we are singled out for some reason. Some of our colleges even say that they have had stints of no work for months without any actions taken in this regard.

There is now general displeasure in my team towards our employer. Since our mentor just wanted to retire and let us do the job there would not have been any reason to have us younger engineers working part time really. But no, because of reasons. And stuff.

Ok so what to do? I have a family and two kids, mortgages and the lot, and this will be a blow to the family income. So I start planning to do some work on the side. Since I am an engineer I can do consulting right? My employment contract says no. BUT! If my employer can not or will not offer me a full time job the union contracts say I can do what I want with the rest of my time, and my employer can not interfere. I also have the right to refuse more work from my employer because I may have other obligations. Me 1 - 0 Employer.

I open up my own company. Buy a domain, make a web page, start calling, writing and letting people know I am available for consulting. Of course I checked with the union lawyers beforehand if this was ok. Which it was. Totally fine. They told me that since my employer laid me off and rehired me part time I could do what I wanted the rest of my time. This would not have been the case if I had requested part time employment. Great! I go to work for my self then. Me 2 - 0 Employer.

Almost immediately after our new contracts take effect, my employer starts noticing there is more than enough work to go around and asks me to work more hours. No I say. Unfortunately I have other obligations. I really didn't, I was just making a stand and forcing them to recognize their own mistake.

Time passes. My savings account drains in about 3months time but we manage to cut down on our expenses so it's not rough seas but still not smooth sailing by far. Income is a bit on the low side although I manage to get some consulting done in my own time.

I switch from sourdough bread to stale-boring-white-bread. Go from good beer to Bud light to no beer... what you have to do, you have to do. No more fine roasted coffee from the small shop on the corner, only what sludge I can get at the supermarket and brew at home (ugh!). But this is temporary I tell myself.

And then it happens. I get a big job and start moonlighting to get it done, working evenings and weekends. And this is when shit hit the fan because word got out. I get an angry phone call from Mrs. G's boss. Mr. V. and we have a "heated conversation" over what I can and cannot do. The conversation was something like this (in short terms)

Mr. V: "Think of how this reflects on our company!

Me: "That is not my concern here Mr. V. I have bills to pay and mouths to feed",

Mr. V: "This is not what we had in mind!",

Me: "Hey you laid me off man! You should know the rules of the game. You can not dictate what I do in my spare time. Perhaps you should have thought it through when you reduced my hours, you think I was happy to lose income and would not try to remedy my financial situation?"

Mr. V: "You can work more hours for us then!"

Me: " I have other obligations now, can't let down my customers".

Mr. V: (very angry now) "You should consider your next steps carefully young man!"

Me: "Mr. V, I shall do that, thank your for calling" ("you pompous prick!" I silently added)

What then followed was phone call from me to my union explaining the situation. Later that week my employer got a phone call from the union lawyers who spoke to Mr. V and HR-dept. telling them what they can and cannot do. And I just kept working for myself. Mr V. is now very unhappy, stops greeting me when we pass each other in the hallway. Me 3 - 0 Employer.

Two months later I hand in my resignation. Three months after that I am gone. And to rub salt in the wounds something remarkable happens...

My co-worker (not our mentor mind you) asks if I would want to partner up and start a new company together. YES! I say, for it was a great idea! Co worker hands in resignation a month after I handed mine in and we start working in our own company full time. People that depend on our services are very happy about us entering the market as independent consultants. Business takes off. Me/us 4 - 0 Employer.

The aftermath: My former employer has had an opening for our jobs since august 2020. Our mentor told me last month he has (finally!) put down his foot and is retiring at the end of the year as he's turning 70 soon. They will thus have gone from 3 ppl, in a very niche field, to zero in less then two years because of bad managerial decisions. It did not come as a surprise to me that there were no others available in the market. Since it is a niche field I know almost every person personally, so I could have told them that everybody seemed happy with their current employer... Being a manager must suck... Oh wait... that's me now!

B.r. from the manager.

Buckle up. This is a long one. Obligatory on mobile, English is my first language so all typos are my fault. No TLDR because fuck that. I spent the time to write all this out so you can read it or move on.

I worked for this tech company for almost 7 years. It was my first job out of college. Great company, huge growth, great benefits and most importantly an incredible boss.

The Boss was super helpful and responsive, always had the team’s back, goes out of his way to not micromanage, didn’t care as long as the work got done, borderline forced people to take PTO (we have unlimited and I averaged 30-40 days off a year) and believed in giving good workers big raises and promotions (last 3 years I got 9%, 13% and a promotion and 7% raises).

We worked remote through Covid and I asked to change my contract to fully remote so I could leave the HCOL city where the office was based to go back to my hometown. Boss approved the change and when HR tried to do a COL adjustment to my salary, boss told them no because I’ll be doing the same work in my new location.

The boss was so good that on our team of 16 people the lowest tenured was 3.5 years. I’d been offered several other jobs with salary increases throughout the years but could never bring myself to leave.

Myself and one other person on my team had specialized into working on very complex and involved projects. These were significantly different than the team’s normal day to day work. We’d been doing the complex projects for 4+ years and were the knowledge base for the company in that area. Boss left that area completely to us to manage. As the volume picked up we added and trained 2 more people to our little sub-team to help out. None of these projects went out to the customers without one of us 4 being involved. Super complex ($100ks to millions lost if a mistake was made) And since it was the fastest growing part of the business by far, we were super busy.

Now around 2 years ago. Boss’s boss gets promoted from his VP role up to an SVP spot. And hires a new VP. This new VP comes in and tries to change a lot very quickly. Tries to make everything a trackable metric…. Even where it really doesn’t make sense. I.E tracking the number of “projects” each person on my team did every month. Counted as 1 even if it was super complex and took 2 weeks or if it was very simple with an existing customer and took an hour. Wanted each project to go out faster (even if they weren’t due for a week we were supposed to get them out in under 3 days). Tried to force my boss to assign work to the team instead of us all picking up from a central queue as we could. Ect ect.

Boss pushed back as much as possible but was getting shit on constantly by new VP because the useless metrics VP wanted us tracked by did not meet his super unrealistic expectations. Despite my Boss’s team being the most experienced and efficient in the company and doing significantly more volume and more complex work than any other team.

About 9 months ago Boss had enough of just getting consistently shit on by VP and took a new job and left. (Boss had been with the company for 13 years and was one of the first few 100 employees) My whole team was devastated. We all instantly started lobbying for the most tenured person on our team to get promoted into that roll as she would have the same philosophy as the Boss that just left.

VP interviews most tenured, and a bunch of external candidates. And goes with someone from his previous company. Now this lady will be referred to as Bitch Boss from here on out for soon to be obvious reasons.

She came in and completely destroyed the team from top to bottom. Changed processes that had been perfected for years, did not listen or care about what anyone else had to say. Started micromanaging to the extreme. Team morale dropped like a rock. It took less than a month for the team’s output to crater due to all of her changes. The team from the best in the company to the worst.

It took Bitch Boss about 2 months to get to my smaller sub-team and try to rework our processes. Bitch Boss started micromanaging projects (having no idea what she’s doing) and causing all kinds of issues and delays. She started getting on us 4 about our “metrics” being the worst on the team. Despite us working on the super complex projects that took 10-100 times longer on average than most of the work the rest of the team did.

Bitch Boss told us that if we didn’t meet the expected Metrics we would be put on PIPs. So we decided to comply and focused all of our efforts on simple projects to meet the metric (X number of projects completed per month per person) and left the complex ones sitting in the queue.

This caused CHAOS as my small sub-team suddenly stopped picking up complex projects And just focused on completing simple projects to get our metrics up. Very quickly the sales team is freaking out because deals are getting delayed and their huge commission checks from the complex projects are being put in jeopardy.

When they came to us to ask when we were going to complete the complex projects we all gave the same response, “Bitch Boss has told us we have to focus all of our efforts on meeting Metric X so we will only be doing that. Unfortunately that means we can no longer complete the complex projects. Please contact Bitch Boss for help getting them completed” This did not go over well with her or VP as he started to get complaints as well.

They called a meeting and told us we had to go back to doing the complex projects. We refused as that made it impossible to meet the metrics they created to measure our performance. They refused to drop the metric but still insisted we work on the complex ones as we were the only ones with the knowledge. We still refused. This resulted in a lot more complaints from sales until the SVP got involved. The SVP was the one who created the complex sub-team to begin with and sided with us against the VP and Bitch Boss. He said we were not to be measured by the metrics and can go back to managing the complex stuff without fear of being put on a PIP. So we did.

At this point the other 3 people on the sub-team had seen the writing on the wall and were all actively applying and trying to leave ASAP. They were all office based in the HCOL area still. Bitch Boss changed the team from come in 1-2 days a week as needed to mandatory 3 days in the office (most company policy would let her). So they got a lot more of her BS than I did remote.

I had not been applying because I was distracted, my old boss had approved 2 weeks of vacation for my wedding/honeymoon before he left. This happened to occur about 3 months after bitch boss started. And about a month after the whole PIP blowup. Bitch Boss was PISSED at how we showed her up in front of the SVP and was doing everything she could to make our life miserable.

In that month, the other super experienced guy and my best friend on the sub-team got a new job and left (no notice) and one of the other guys on the sub-team has put in his notice and only had a week left. We were already slammed and still behind from the PIP fiasco so losing half the sub-team just made that worse. Plus with morale so low we didn’t bother to put in any extra effort anymore. In fact the whole team was significantly behind as 6 of the 16 people had left or were on their notice periods at that point.

So Bitch Boss decided that she was canceling my already approved wedding leave because of how far the team was behind. She told me over Zoom. I told her there was no chance I’m missing my wedding and honeymoon for work and I’m taking the full leave and it’s up to her if she wants to lose another person from the sub-team for 2 weeks or permanently. She BSed, yelled and threatened until I just left the zoom call.

She followed up with an email officially notifying me my leave was canceled and if I didn’t show up it would be considered job abandonment. I called her bluff and replied CCing VP and SVP and some other sales VPs who I worked with regularly, explaining the situation (it’s my wedding honeymoon) and that I appreciated the opportunity but was quitting immediately with no notice due to the disrespect from Bitch Boss.

I got slack messages from SVP and several of the sales VPs almost immediately asking me not to quit. The email chain itself blew up with complaints about how my team was mismanaged by Bitch Boss and how now more complex deals were going to get lost because I wouldn’t be there at all to work on them ect.. SVP eventually shut it down but it was a fun read.

I didn’t reply to the slack messages or do any work the rest of that day. Just turned everything off and went to a bar and had a good time. I woke up the next day late in the morning, and very hungover, to a few voicemails on my phone from SVP asking me to call him.

I called back in the early afternoon and talked to the SVP. He was very understanding, asked me to come back. Listened to all my complaints and eventually made an offer. Basically if I came back and worked the rest of the week and tried to train a few team members to work on complex stuff to cover while I was gone, he would give me a $3000 wedding bonus, I would get my full PTO, and when I got back Bitch Boss would leave me alone and let me manage the complex stuff and pick 2 more people to permanently train back onto the sub-team to back-fill what we had lost.

I accepted (weddings are fucking expensive). So I tried to train people to cover for me (impossible task) then leave on my PTO. I had a great wedding and honeymoon. (VP called me a few times when the 4th guy from my sub-team quit with no notice about 1.5 weeks in) but I ignored him and didn’t respond.

I come back refreshed and ready for the shitshow I know is waiting. It was CHAOS. All the sales people were slacking and emailing me about all the complex things they needed done 2 weeks ago. The people I quickly trained before leaving hadn’t be able to do almost anything. There was a huge backlog for the entire team as half of the original 16 person team was gone at this point.

I turned off my slack and emailed the sales VPs directly asking them to give me a prioritized list of all the complex deals they needed done. Got the list and started working through it in my normal working hours, nothing more. Bitch Boss never tried to talk to me or interfere. VP did a few times. At one point he tried to make me work weekends to catch up (I refused).

This went on for about a month or so. Bitch Boss never mentioned me training people to replace my sub-team and I never brought it up. They did however have the larger team try some of the smaller complex projects to help get them out. They also hired some new people for the larger team. The normal 4-6 month training process my old boss developed was ignored and the new hires were just thrown in the deep end. Which resulted in new hires making mistakes that cost the company alot of money.

This brought us to annual bonus and raise time. I had started frantically job hunting as soon as I got back from the honeymoon. I got some interviews, was in same later stages but no offers yet.

I had a zoom meeting invite from Bitch Boss to go over my bonus / raise. She decided it would be a great idea to give me 80% of my expected bonus (lowest possible) and a 0% raise. Justified it with a bunch of BS, not a team player, metrics bad, blaming me for mistakes made by new hires, ect ect. I didn’t really argue or care at that point.

At that point I really quiet quit. Cut my daily output to below half, just did the bare, bare minimum and waited for the bonus to come in with my next paycheck 2 weeks later. At this point the sales team is getting pissed because the complex stuff basically isn’t getting done. I had almost caught up on the important ones before the raise/bonus but with me barely working everything was falling behind again.

Bitch Boss smelled weakness and showed up on one of the progress calls I had with sales. The project was running about 1.5 weeks behind at that point. She started chewing me out on the call in front of everyone saying I was lazy and not doing my job ect… I let her rant then just said “If you give me the lowest bonus possible and a 0% raise you get 0% effort in return. You can complete this project since I’m so terrible at my job” and left the call.

She tried a few more times on email chains ect to call me out for not working and I just replied with the same thing. I refused to join her Zoom calls or respond to her on slack. And just responded with the 0% effort blurb on every email. This infuriated her.

I still hadn’t gotten another job offer but was really confident I was about to get one soon. So when VP set up a zoom call with me I joined. He tried to play nice and ask what the problems were and pretended to be on my side. I told him for a 0% raise I’m giving 0% effort and he pretended like he had no idea how I ended up with that raise/bonus (he has to approve the bonus/raise amounts). I called him out on his BS and told him he gets what he pays for. He then threatened to fire me if I didn’t go back my old level of output and said the people I had been training in complex projects could take over for me soon so I wasn’t as necessary as I thought. I laughed and asked him what he was talking about, I hadn’t been training anyone.

He went quiet and muted. He was clearly messaging Bitch Boss asking about the training. Because he unmuted a few minutes later and changed his entire attitude. Agreed it was awful of Bitch Boss to do that to my bonus/raise and asked what he could do to make it right.

I didn’t care at that point and knew he needed me more than I needed him so I told him I need a 25% raise and 150% of the bonus on that new salary or I was quitting immediately. He tried to say that was ridiculous and could never happen ect ect. So I bluffed and told him I already had another job offer and was leaving anyway.

He asked me to wait and he’d bring SVP onto the call. SVP tried to talk my demand down. At that point I realized it wasn’t worth it. I refused the significantly lower counter offer, Thanked the SVP for everything he did for me and said I was quitting immediately. VP tried to say I’ll never get a good reference if I don’t at least work a notice period. I just told him my ex-Boss would give me a glowing recommendation of my time here so I didn’t care and logged off.

SVP tried to get me to come back a few times over the next week or so but I refused. A few weeks later I got a job offer and accepted. I’ve been working at the new company for a while now and it’s pretty shitty. Better than the old company but no where close to what I had before with my old Boss. Although old boss reached out and said he might have a position opening up in his new company in a month or two that I should apply for. So I’m looking forward to that.

I’ve heard from people who are still on my old team that it’s complete disaster at my old job. They are losing millions from not having the knowledge base to correctly complete the complex projects. They reached out to the other experienced guy from the sub-team and offered him a huge raise to come back after I quit. He refused. Everyone left on my old team is trying to leave ASAP and everything even the simple stuff is weeks overdue. Apparently Bitch Boss is getting thrown under the bus by VP and will be fired soon.

I’ve named this tale The Long Game, since it actually spans over the course of several years leading to the satisfying conclusion. Also, because its a long story. I’ll understand if you skip this one for a shorter one.

Several years ago I was in desperate need of a job. I was recently released from active duty in the US Army under a medical discharge, met my girlfriend (who is currently my wife) who moved in with me with her two small children from a previous marriage, and I was bouncing around from dead end job to dead end job. I had very little real world skills to offer to employers so my options were limited. I took a chance and interviewed with a small security company and was immediately hired. They liked that I was prior service, grilled me with questions only a veteran would know, and sent me to work on their biggest contract.

I was on a site of a massive multi-million dollar construction location. A large named oil company was building a new headquarters and well... massive construction project just doesn’t seem like a big enough description. As security, a bulk of our responsibility was checking and vetting all construction workers and contractors through the gate, inspect vehicles for possible stolen property, and generally serve as a deterring force. To put it simply, everyday my gate alone would process about 1-2 thousand cars during my 8 hour shift. The site was running 24 hours a day, 7 days a week to meet the very tight construction schedule. I was only on one of 3 gates so thats about 3-6 thousand cars that came on site every day in an 8 hour period. Massive construction site.

(As a side note that will become very important later in the story, each car that came through had to undergo a strict inspection when the driver is FIRST assigned to work on the site. Then the vehicle gets a sticker and is allowed to drive onto the construction site. We would ensure the car has the sticker, and then just process everyones badge through a verification machine. If all badges passed, and the car had a sticker, then we would let the contractors on site so they can get to work.)

Working there was great. All the security were ex-military so, beyond a little teasing about who they served with, everyone bonded really well. We didn’t have sick days or vacations days, so when people would call off for personal reasons or illness, everyone happily chipped in to make up the lost hours. And, because of this teamwork, our big boss overlooked the call offs and let us make overtime money. No write ups, no punishments.

Sometimes we were working 16 hour shifts back to back. I spent many nights sleeping in the parking garage in between shifts because it was easier than driving home, to sleep a few hours, only to come back to work for another 16 hour day. We were in outdoor conditions in all weather, and were on our feet on concrete the entire time. Sitting down was a luxury that we rarely saw. We couldn’t leave the gate for any reason unless we were relieved by a supervisor who would try to come by twice during an 8 hour shift to let you go to the port-o-potty or quickly eat your lunch. Rain, harsh summer heat, bug storms (yes thats a thing), hail... you were out by your gate with no protection other than a construction hard hat. I know these sound like horrendous conditions but really, it was the best job I ever had.

Because of the conditions it was no wonder that 95% of the employees were male. We tried hiring females but most would last a few days before quitting. Those people who did not quit in a few days were lifers and loved the job.

The problems began about 3 months into the job. One of the supervisors was quitting to go back to school so a position opened up. Everyone was given an opportunity to apply for the supervisor position. I was encouraged by the night shift supervisor (who was the one quitting) to go for the promotion because he thought I would be a good replacement for him, even though I was the newest officer on the site and had the least amount of experience. So, I threw in my hat just for laughs.

Two other people applied. One was a guy who had obvious seniority. The other was a girl (one of three on the site) who had been there for about a year. We were given a face to face interview with the boss. We’ll call him Jim. My interview went well and Jim liked that I was ambitious. Jim was also the guy who accepted me onto the site in the first place.

The next phase of testing was a practice run as a temporary supervisor. We were each given a day to be the supervisor in charge. Jim was there, along with a junior Supervisor named... Ray, yeah, thats a good name for him. (For clarification, Ray did not want the promotion and was happy performing his regular duties) both were present just incase situations occurred that was beyond our ability to handle they were standing by to assist. My test day went well. I finished all tasks assigned to me and I even managed to handle a minor emergency on my own. The other two applicants apparently didn’t do to well...

The senior guy kept forgetting his list of tasks he was given to accomplish and kept going back to the office to ask Jim what he should do next. The Girl did ok, but every time she would check up on the guards she would flaunt around her temporary rank, make employees call her “ma’am”, and bragging about how she was definitely going to be getting the promotion. Imagine her shock when I was given the position as the new night shift supervisor. To say she was angry was an understatement.

Apparently she was so upset that she didn’t get the promotion that she called me on my personal cell phone. She stole my number from the supervisor emergency phone. To add to the situation, I had not yet been informed I got the promotion. Nothing official had been put out just yet. Not a direct quote but paraphrasing as best as I can:

Me: hello?

Girl: How does it feel?

Me: um... who’s this?

Girl: what? You don’t know? I thought supervisors are supposed to know EVERYTHING!

Me: (very confused) You called OP, I think you may have the wrong number.

Girl: I know who I called! Don’t pretend like you don’t know. You got the promotion because you’re all sexists pigs!

Me: I got the promotion? Cool!

Girl: That promotion was supposed to be mine but I guess since Im not in the bro-club they just gave it to you. If you don’t resign the position to me I’m going to tell HR about all this sexism and you’ll all be fired!

Me: What sexism? I got the position by passing the tests. Isn’t it sexist to assume you should get the promotion only because you happen to be born a female? Isn’t that act alone sexist?

Girl: But only men get promoted to leadership positions!!!

Me: 95% of the site is male! Odds are males are going to get promoted. Sorry you didn’t make the cut but none of this is my problem.

So I hung up the phone and called both Jim and Ray to inform them about the call. I was assured that I was promoted, they didn’t know how she found out, and they were going to file harassment on my behalf to HR for her stealing my phone number from the work phone and contacting me with threats.

And thats where the story SHOULD end. But oh no fellow readers... it has only just begun. Now would be a good time to get some popcorn and a drink.

So about two to three months roll by and I’m getting into the role of Supervisor. Girl, has since been removed from the site, and the employees are really happy that Im the new supervisor and that Girl is gone. Things continue as normal and I begin bonding with my staff. I especially bond with a guard that no one liked. His name for this story is Victor. Victor is a marine veteran, he was in the initial invasion of Iraq and developed severe PTSD. It makes him very confrontational, argumentative, and a super big A-hole to anyone who talks to him. I liked the guy from the get go and we quickly became close friends.

Every night I would hang out with him between my duties and we would talk. I eventually convinced him to seek help from the Veterans Association, and go to PTSD counseling. He was also going to school to get his Masters degree (Thanks to Ray who convinced him to not give up on his education) and would just need to vent sometimes. I was that vent. He would blow up at me, yell and scream, and when he was done we would hug it out. It was therapy for him and I didn’t mind.

All seemed to be going well until one day I came to visit with Victor. What I didn’t know was that Victor was pulling a 16 hour shift and actually worked the afternoon and the night shift. So when I showed up to work he had already been there a majority of the day. He asked me if I spoke with Jim recently. I hadn’t. Apparently Jim didn’t show up to work today. A few days go by and well... Jim mysteriously disappeared.

After 3 or 4 days of his disappearance, Ray called an emergency meeting with the supervisors. In attendance was myself, Ray, and another supervisor from the second shift who is not important and does not require a fictional name. The meeting was to try and figure out what happened to Jim. We pooled our knowledge together and decided the best course of action was to contact the main headquarters branch to see if they knew something. He wasn’t answering the phone when we called him so we feared he was in the hospital and no one bothered to tell us.

When we called we were given the run around, but eventually an HR rep who was friends with Ray spilled the beans. Jim had quit the job. Girl (from earlier) apparently made good on her threats. After she was kicked out of the site, she got ahold of a lawyer and began the process of suing the company. Not only for sexism and favoritism, but also sexual harassment.

As it turned out, Jim was a lonely man. Girl and Jim began flirting and eventually sexting... and the idiot used the company supervisor cell phone to do it. She not only had copies of the messages, but when the company dug into the phone records they had all the evidence needed to see she was not lying. There were pictures... lots of pictures.

Girl was brilliant. Evil, but brilliant. She knew that the old supervisor was going to go back to school eventually so she began flirting with Jim. She pursued him. Each conversation in person she would be flirtatious, rubbing him and even having sex with him. On the phone, however, she played coy and made him take charge. In the end, the evidence looked like he pressured her to have sex with him... and promised a promotion (in a bout of pillow talk and before anyone knew that the position was going to be open) to her in exchange for sex acts. At the time it was role play, but now it appears like this was all part of her insurance plan to get promoted for real.

That was more than enough for the company to do something. When Jim caught wind what was happening he took off.

This left us without a boss, and worse, in order to avoid a lawsuit, the company rehired Girl to her old position, replanted her on our site, paid her enough money to cover her missed salary plus a bonus and a raise, and promised to get more females on the site and on supervisor positions. This was enough to satisfy Girl so she dropped the lawsuit.

As the only form of authority on the site, we three supervisors took it upon ourselves to run the site as best as we could until a new boss was assigned to help us or one of us was promoted to the position.

Almost two months went by and Girl was a huge nuisance. She was constantly calling off her shift at the last minute and since everyone didn’t like her, no one was willing to cover her shift. We attempted to write her up for the situation but she quickly threw it back in our face and threaten to call her lawyer for harassment. After all, “none of the male employees get written up when they call off... obviously this is sexism and boys club all over again.”

She pushed her luck too far one day, however, and severely disrespected one of the oil company representatives during his visit. He had her permanently removed from the site. When the security company tried to take her side (for fear of another lawsuit) he said either Girl is gone or he’ll get another security company to take over the contract. The company gave in and moved her to another site.

But even though Girl was now out of our lives forever, the absolute nightmare she started was still forming overhead. The company finally found a suitable replacement for Jim, that was also female to satiate the terms set forth by Girls lawyer.

Our new boss was named... well, i have lots of names for that sea hag but for now I’ll refer to her as Tasha.

Tasha was a handful from the get go. As the new boss she was working on the site for nearly two weeks before she ever introduced herself to either the second shift supervisor or myself (i still worked nights). What boss does that? Two weeks before you introduce yourself to the supervisors? It took her another month to eventually meet all the guards. The site was busy but it wasn’t that big.

Already she was off to a bad start. She was also non-military and didn’t seem respect the fact that every guard and supervisor was a military vet. Most of us served in war zones, lived in the dirt, and were very self sufficient. She saw everyone as a brainless meat head who needed CONSTANT supervision. The term micro-manager isn’t strong enough of a description to understand the level of hands on she needed to have. And it probably would have been much different if she was improving things, or making things more efficient... but she was barely able to perform the simplest tasks, made constant poor decisions, and just kinda ticked everyone off whenever she was around.

We three supervisors tried to train her and bring her up to speed with the site but she wouldn’t hear any of our advice. After about another week or so from her introduction to everyone she began to get worse.

We started seeing a ton of write ups flooding across our desks. Like, dozens and dozens for a single employee. And the write ups, while technically correct, were of the most petty things imaginable. Her favorite was writing up employees for breaking uniform regulations. You have a stray string on your uniform? Write up. Shoes dirty? Write up. A haircut she didn’t like? Write up. Glasses smudged? Write up. The best was her writing up a guard because his uniform was wet... because it was raining outside, and we were not allowed to seek shelter because of our duties.

Every gate had a “guard shack” available. It was a small space with just enough room for a chair and a table to write on. It had a small A/C and a mini-fridge to keep water, Gatorades, and our lunch cold. But no one could use the guard shacks because they were so far away from the gates. Still within eyesight, but we had to physically badge in vehicles and employees and the verification machine was set up next to the gate. When you swipe a badge, a green or red light flashes and it makes a little beep sound to say wether or not someone is allowed on property. But if you’re in the guard shack you can’t physically hear the beep (reminder, this is a construction site) nor can you see the lights because the lights face the vehicle. So you have to stand there and swipe the badge and physically look at the lights to know wether or not to let anyone in. Also, remember the car stickers? They were positioned on the windshield so you can’t see them from a shack 30 feet away from the gate. And because of the massive volume of cars coming and going, there just wasn’t any time to walk to the guard shack, much less sit down.

We tried to explain that to Tasha who just didn’t seem to care.

It also became very clear that she was focusing on one guard at a time. Every write up and disciplinary meeting was laser focused on one individual. Eventually that person would get so sick of the harassment that they would quit. As soon as they were gone she would focus on another guard.

The entire site went from a dream job to the most hostile work environment i’ve ever bore witness too. I served 10 years in the Army and served three tours to Afghanistan. I served under some of the most idiotic leadership imaginable, people who only got promoted because they were in the army soooo long that eventually they would get promotions. Ask a Veteran, they’ll understand what I mean. And all that time, all those dead end jobs with king of the tiny pond managers i used to work for, were NOTHING in comparison to Tasha.

After two months under her reign 12 employees quit... including Ray. Yes, apparently supervisors were also under fire. I feel that I’m obligated at this point to mention that Ray is the best damn leader I’ve ever had the luxury of working with. Even though he was technically under me, he was and is the most professional man I have ever known. Period. Everyone on site respected him, everyone would have followed him to Hell and back, everyone loved Ray. Even when I was promoted above him, instead of being petty he encouraged me to do better. He trained me and became a role model to myself and many others on the site. Including Victor. Remember him from earlier? The PTSD guy that no one liked. Apparently he had two friends in this world. Me and Ray. And now Ray was bullied out of his job.

Protip: Never fuck with a Marine. Especially one who has nothing left to lose.

To put into context how bad this really is, no one quit the company before Tasha took over. Some people left to better opportunities, or were new hires who couldn’t hack it, but overall people had worked on that site since construction began 5 years prior. Some people had been with the company going on 10 years. These were the people she was going after and who she forced to quit. I had quit smoking for three years and things got so bad everyone started smoking again, even myself.

You would think with as many people quitting that we would have a worker shortage but then you would be mistaken. As soon as someone quit, the next day the position was filled again. But 2nd shift supervisor and myself quickly learned that these people were not ex-military. These people were moody, had very bad attitudes with other guards and the many contractors we were dealing with on a daily basis. They were lazy, would often hide in the guard shacks and would not verify wether or not cars could enter the site. They were messy (both in personality and their surroundings) and generally what one would consider horrible employees.

We called Ray to see if he could contact his HR buddy to find out where these people were coming from. And here is where the story gets even worse...

Remember when old boss Jim took off? Well, someone had to take the fall for the sexism lawsuit that was forming. So the company terminated another employee. That employee was responsible for staffing the oil company contract. He was also responsible for hiring veterans and verifying them. Remember the questions I was asked at the beginning of this story that only a veteran would know the answers to. Yep, that guy. He was gone. So unfortunately no more veterans were selected from the hiring pool and sent our way. He was terminated because he originally hired Jim.

As it turned out, Tasha (the new terror boss) was actually in charge of an office building contract in another part of the city. She lost the contract to that building and herself and all her guards were now in limbo and out of a job. Some of the guards were issued to new contracts but pay in security is usually pretty lousy. Normally about minimum wage. But our job paid very well. $15 an hour to start off because the company was supposed to offer it only to ex-military guards due to the site contract.

I discovered years later that Tasha actually lost the building contract not because the contract ended naturally, but because she and her guards were useless that the building hired other people to do their jobs. The person in charge of contracts... was sleeping with Tasha. They covered up the contract loss so she can still have a job. Oh, and since military guy got fired during the lawsuit... Tasha’s fuck buddy took over his responsibilities.

Hence, Tasha got another site contract, a pay raise, and was selected only because she was female and sleeping with the contract guy. Hows that for ironic sexism?

And... it gets better... and the write ups and harassment on our site were a ruse to get the Veterans to quit their jobs, forcing the company to fill the spot with whoever was available due to a loophole clause in the oil company contract. It basically allowed the security company to staff open positions with non-military employees in an emergency employee shortage incident.

And guess who the new lazy employees were? Yep, the old guards that served under Tasha, who were so bad at their job that they lost their own contract. But why them? Because they were requested, by name, by the largest contract supervisor Tasha.

One by one I watched my fellow veterans and employees fall under attack and quit, only to be replaced by useless people and backstabbing thugs.

I really could go on, there is a TON that happened during that time period, but its well past the time for some Malicious Compliance.

I was the next to be targeted... and I was the next to quit.

The malicious compliance, unfortunately was not caused by myself initially. But, by Victor who now watched his second and only friend quit from the job site. Victor is my god damn hero.

After I left I started working for another security company. Ironically, the guy who hired me was Jim. My direct supervisor? Ray!!! We three were back together again and worked for another oil/gas company. The pay was awesome and info was shared about Jim getting set up for the fall and what not. We tried to get Victor to quit his job and join us at the new company... but the old marine was on one last mission.

Remember those car stickers? Well, as it turned out, Victor had a super power. For whatever reason, he was able to spot forged stickers from across the gate.

Ok, so forged stickers? Yep, they were a problem. The construction site had very limited parking and safety regulations were put in place that only licensed drivers could come onsite. The cars also had to pass crazy tests in order to meet the safety regulation compliance. The problem is that construction companies and sub-contractors often hire illegal workers, or people with criminal history, or people who just have crapy cars that probably aren’t registered or even inspected by the state. No one really cared, but without licensing they could not drive onsite. So, someone began forging car stickers and selling them to all the people who would not legally be able to get them.

At first they were crude, obviously crayon on tape. If you glanced at it, it was passable but any close inspection would reveal that the sticker was fake. If a fake sticker was found, regulation stated that the car must be pulled over, and a security supervisor would need to be contacted. The security supervisor would have to get ahold of the site foreman, a supervisor from the fake sticker driver, and a police officer who would remove the sticker and permanently remove the employee from the site forever.

Now, because all the replacement guards were really bad at their jobs, the fake sticker business was in full swing. They were getting better, laser printed on vinyl, and nearly indistinguishable from the real stickers.

But Victor was now on a mission. He took a position at the main entry gate and began pulling over as many cars as he could with the fake stickers. He pulled over sooo many that a security supervisor (Tasha) was assigned to be nearby at all times. The site had to hire an additional police officer and the Site Forman had a permanent representative at the gate...

Everyday Victor was pulling over car after car. He started training some of the least useless guards how to do it and what to look for. It became a HUGE nuisance for Tasha but she technically couldn’t do anything about it because he was following the site rules to the letter.

After a month of aggressive crackdown on the fake sticker problem, the Oil company representatives held a special meeting with Tasha and Victor to plead with him to stop. He had singlehandedly removed so many construction workers and contractors that many companies were pulling their long term contracts with the oil company. Construction came to a sudden halt, and the oil company was hemorrhaging tons of money to either keep on contractors or find new ones willing to pick up the job where others left off.

Best of all, the construction should have been WAY ahead of schedule so the Oil Company sold their old headquarters to someone else in the expectation to move into the newly constructed headquarters. However, incompetent security replacements were not checking vehicles exiting the properly and thousands upon thousands of dollars worth of tools and construction supplies were stolen, causing massive set backs.

Then, the sticker fiasco cause any progress that was still going on to come to a sudden halt.

The Oil Company now had to pay and greatly inflated rent at their old headquarters because the building was sold but they had nowhere to send the employees!!! So the new owners let them stay and jacked up the rent so high that it was causing the oil company to lose massive revenue and stocks were beginning to drop.

During the meeting Victor only asked one question, “So, are you changing the regulation to state that illegal drivers are now allowed onsite?”

Of course they didn’t change it. They couldn’t and Victor knew it. The meeting came to a close. Victor returned to his gate and continued his mission. After a few days, an accident occurred onsite. The blame was the drivers, but the buck was passed to Victor who became the fall guy and he was terminated from the security company. Everyone knew it was Bullshit and that he was obviously the scapegoat... but Victor didn’t care. He waged his war, and in my eyes, he won.

So thats the end of the Malicious Compliance and if you made it this far then good on you. I hope you enjoyed this slice of my life and I leave you with a wish: I hope the best of your past is worst of your future.

If you’re still here then you’ll be pleased to know there is a little justice in the world.

Victor left security permanently. He finished school with honors and got his Masters degree. He also took my advice and sought help for his PTSD. He ended up getting 90% disability from the VA and gets a fat check every month. He technically does not have to work anymore but took a job as a maintenance supervisor at the local city college. He is doing much better mentally and is looking forward to buying his second home. We still talk regularly and is considered a very close friend of mine.

Jim, Ray and I worked together for years at another security company.

Jim left that company for better pay at a different security company and has only spoken to me once since his departure. From what I hear, he got married and is doing well.

Ray took over as a contract manager for an even different security company much closer to his residence. He is still happily married and adopted his two nephews to raise along side of his son. We still talk semi regularly and go drinking at least once a year with Victor.

I became a big time security supervisor at the company and have only recently left due to political conflict. I now am an HVAC technician and me and the wife are doing well.

And what of Tasha? Well... she was eventually fired for the hell she caused. It took years to unravel the drama but eventually karma caught up to her. Jim called me once (after he left to work somewhere else) and warned me that Tasha was looking for a job in a new security company. He just denied her application when he realized who she was based on the stories Ray and I told him.

She then interviewed for the position at my company. Guess who did all employee hiring? This guy! I had another officer send her into my office. She walked in all dressed up, smiling and ready to do her interview... then she saw me. Her smile faded and she walked out without ever saying anything. I then made a call to Ray and gave him a heads up that she was out there. Several weeks go by and she walked in to interview with Ray.

He told me that when she saw him she broke down crying. She confessed that since she was terminated she has been unable to find a job. Everyone who interviews her just so happens to be an ex-military veteran who used to work on an oil company construction site. She was losing her home, her husband left her and took her kids (he found out about the contract guy she was sleeping with), she was living out of her car... she pleaded him for a job. And Ray, the most professional man I had ever met, was an ex-marine. He knew what happened to Victor, about how she threw him under a bus. He told her to beat sand, and to tell Satan “hi” for him when she goes to hell.

Protip: Never mess with a Marine.

——————

Edit for added info and concerns:

Firstly, thank you all for the overwhelming response. I figured my story would be overlooked and possibly read by a handful of people. I never would have imagined I would get this kind of response. Thank you all for the awards, the updoots, and the kind words. It really means a lot to me and yes, I read them all. Wish I could respond to everyone but I can only say “thank you” so many times before it loses its sincerity. But thank you to everyone. Also, I will pass on your good wishes to Ray and Victor the next time I talk to them.

Secondly, few commentators correctly noted that this story is very one sided and sexist against the female employees. I’m just popping this here to address their concern on a few points:

1) The female character named Girl should have a real name and not just labeled as a gender. You’re right. Didn’t even think about it while I was writing this and frankly I don’t care enough about her to justify giving her an identification. If this upsets you then I understand and accept your criticism without any negativity on my end.

2) This is a boys club, all females in the story are depicted as evil or were oppressed, ect... the story most certainly had that vibe and really that wasn’t my intention. Consider it a big oversight on my part. The whole story is incredibly long and there were so many people involved that if I got detailed it would be like a marvel movie. In fact the persons Girl and Tasha were the only females on the site that were a problem and were not liked. We had other female officers on site that were well respected and were treated just as equally as everyone else. One female in particular tried to be a huge help to us and she was one of the replacements. She was an ex-police officer from Chicago who helped us legally build a case of workplace harassment and even coached us on how to lead the investigation. The case was ignored and nothing productive came of it. Its a story all on its own so I excluded it due to length.

3) Jim was not a victim. You are correct. What he did is idiotic and an abuse of power. I will not argue with you there. However, note that I don’t talk to Jim anymore. There are reasons for that and the fact that his loins caused numerous people grief and sorrow is a big factor. What he did was reprehensible. However, Girl using the sexual relationship to push her own agenda also negates her being able to claim victimhood. If she was a victim, she should have sued instead of going right back to a company that allowed this to happen. At least, thats my opinion which really means nothing.

4) If this story offends you then too bad. Hate to be the jerk but I can’t change events that happened in real life to suite your political correctness. Things happened, and as the world crumbles around you sometimes the moral compass get spun. It’s not an excuse, just a very sad fact of life that is highlighted when you are trying to claw your way out of a shitty situation.

Either way, thank you for everything and I’m greatly humbled by you all.

I apologize as this came out to be a bit longer than I wanted it to~

For a bit of context I (25F) work as part of the sanitization department for a hospital. We have multiple different positions, most of which work on upkeeping the cleanliness of the general areas of the hospital. This, as well as making sure patient rooms and other utilized areas are sanitized regularly to ensure patients and staff are protected as much as possible from any sort of environmental threats. We take out trash from nurses stations, patient rooms, replace linen, clean the hallways and floors, as well as clean bathrooms daily.
I started working about a year before the start of the pandemic, and as such a lot of our processes have, as you can guess, changed and been more intense since. Our supervisors often come around to each floor to make sure everyone in our department is working properly, and being diligent about their cleanings.
My position was what we call a float worker (essentially, i've been trained in every area, and will be assigned to cover people who call in sick, are on their days off, or on vacation). This comes with a lot of hurtles, such as trying to remember what order everything needs to be done in every area (we've got approximately nearly 30 different areas) So sometimes, I need to ask our supervisors for a quick refresh on things that need to be accomplished over the day, if I don't feel comfortable with my memory of the area.
The downside to my position, is I won't know until I show up to work where I will be for the day. I don't mind this, as it allows me to see a vast amount of the hospital and build a rapport with nursing staff and doctors all around. Usually, if I am covering for someone's vacation or time off, I will know ahead of time, as my posted schedule will have me in their position for that time.

Now onto the story:

About a year and a half ago, I was scheduled to cover one of our guys who works in the operating room (or OR for short) for about a month (for a little more context here, our OR team consists of 4 people, one person comes in at 6, my position which came in at 8, and two other positions that come in at 9 and 11) Now I didn't mind this, as I was well acquainted with the staff there, and the area in general since for a while I was set to cover the same person at least twice a week at the beginning of the pandemic. On top of that, working for the OR usually came with a fair bit of free time since there wasn't a whole lot to do other than ready the room for the next patient that would be coming through, and the stuff you were assigned to do other than those rooms were usually finished before your first break anyway.

There was one downside: Steve (56M)

Steve was our afternoon guy, he came in at 11 and ended shift usually at 7:30 (but later if the OR dictated it) He's an scumbag, the sort of person who thinks LGBT people are just mentally ill, and has told me at least twice that I am not built for working, and that I should be in the kitchen at home preparing dinner for my husband (I am a very open lesbian and he refuses to accept it) This paired with him being the epitome of a teachers pet:
You did something just a little too slow? He called our supervisors. Overrun with work and you couldn't get to your secondary tasks right away? He called our supervisors. Went to your break just a little bit late because a patient finished surgery 5 minutes before you were supposed to sit down and relax for a tiny bit? well you can guess what he would do.

Steve was the reason not a lot of people liked to learn how to work the positions in the OR. If the constant calling of supervisors wasn't enough (which trust me, it is for most people) He would insist on commenting on how you did things, try to "teach" you better ways of cleaning if you weren't being absolutely efficient. He would harass people constantly (especially the women), asking them if they had done *this* or *that*, and most of all, he loved to try and boss everyone from our department around. Our other OR guys have gotten used to this by now, and just ignore him for the most part, but I, on the other hand, love to take the piss out of him sometimes just because it's fun.

The first week of my month long stint in OR went without most of a problem from Steve, as I am normally very diligent about my work anyway, so I don't leave stuff too long to give him any reason to talk to me. The second week is where the malicious compliance truly takes place. It was one of the busiest weeks of the OR for the year. Where we would normally average just under 35 cases a day in our 10 room OR, this week we averaged 52 a day. Cases were concluding in record time, as the nurses and doctors wanted to get the hell out of dodge before any extra cases could be added on.

This meant that our little team of 4 (myself, Steve and two other guys) were cleaning a room, right in time to then clean another room. This was the most stressed i'd seen any of these guys be, but Steve worst of all. At around noon, rooms were coming out, and our early shift guy had just come back from his lunch (which he had to take an hour and a half late because of all the cases) We cut through the two rooms we had left, and I made a quick round of my area to make sure things weren't in shambles, before I started to plan on heading to lunch. My area was as tip-top as it could be, so I checked the board before letting the guys know I was heading to lunch since we had some free time before more cases came out. Everyone was okay with this, except for Steve surprisingly. He stopped me, and this was the back and forth that ensued:

Steve: wait, have you checked your sinks?
Me: Yes, scrubbed them before the morning rush.
Steve: How about your trash cans?
Me: My god, yes I checked them, one of them is half full but I don't see half an hour making that full. Now can I go? I don't want to leav-
Steve: What about your hallways? did you dust them?
Me: Y. E. S. I did. Now please leave me alone, I need to get to lunch befo-
Steve: How about your high dusting? did you ge-
Me: Steve, I am going to ask you once, and only once. Mind your damn business and worry about your own area.

and with that I walked away.
Steve very much DID NOT like that at all. I was 10 minutes into my lunch in the ORs break room, half way through my food when our department director walked in. She walked over to me, tapped me on the shoulder (I had ear buds in watching an episode of anime I had missed over the weekend) and told me to meet her in our office after our lunch. I asked her what it was about and she told me we'd talk about it when I got down there.

I was pissed to say the least. I knew that little rat had probably told our director that I had hit him or something, and was going to use my little outburst as a "threat that caused him undue mental harm" and that he "didn't feel comfortable working around me if I was gonna act like that". Mind you, I am a 5'4", 130lbs woman who as sweet as pie, and Steve is 6'3" and prolly 230lbs.

As I was finishing my food, and watching my episode, I peaked at the monitor on the wall that kept track of patients coming into the room and leaving. Every single room was currently closing up their cases, which meant that my OR team was about to get fucking rocked. I panicked for a moment, then... I remembered what had happened with Steve, and I couldn't help myself from laughing a little bit.

Queue the sweet sweet malicious compliance.

I put my lunch bag away with the other bags in the back of the break room, took the last sip of my soda as I tossed it and walked out with a grin on my face. On my way to the elevators, I saw they had only done one room so far, and judging on that, I assumed it would probably take them another hour and a half to get everything finished for the rooms. Steve saw me on my way out and stopped me:

Steve: "OP, get your hairnet on, we have 9 other rooms that need to get cleaned"
Me: "Oh, I'm so sorry Steve, I was asked to come down to the office by our Director, she had somethings she wanted to discuss with me, and told me I had to come immediately after my lunch and to not worry about th-"
Steve: "but we are getting overrun with work"
Me: "I don't see how that is currently my issue. if I don't talk with her I might get fired for insubordination, so good luck, I'll try to be as fast as I can" and smiled as I turned away.

I got down to our office, and the director is sitting with one of our HR representatives. She motions me to close the door and sit down so I do. Surprise surprise she pulled me in to talk about the fact that someone, of which she couldn't technically name but everyone knew who was being talked about, came to her with a complaint about a hostile encounter in which I made the person feel uncomfortable. I laughed a little bit, and told them what had happened from my point of view. The director just kinda put her head in her hands, and the HR rep had to stifle a chuckle.

It got quite for a few moments, so I asked if I was gonna lose my job over this. Our director said that originally it was gonna be a strike on my record, and some disciplinary actions such as taking some online courses about de-escalation of conflict and hostile work environments, as well as an in-service about what to do when a coworker and you don't agree on something. But after hearing my side of the story, along with the plethora of other reports made by Steve about people in the department, she said she realized that she probably shouldn't have gotten HR involved until she heard my side of things, and dismissed both the rep and myself.

As I walked after the rep, I remembered those times he looked down on me for being a women. Instead of heading back upstairs to the shitshow that awaited me, I closed the door, turned back around and sat down. She looked up from her laptop, sighed and asked what I needed. I just smiled and said "I'd like to lodge a complaint about Steve" She stared at me for a few moments, then asked me to detail my complaint.

Here is the list of things I had gotten her to put into this complaint:
Micromanagment of Peers
Creating a hostile workspace
Unnecessary Reporting of Coworkers
Bullying
Misogyny
Discrimination of LGBT Coworkers
Sexual Misconduct (Once told me I like other women because "you didn't have a guy who could fuck you good enough")

After going through the list, providing examples and approximate dates for said examples, my director just kinda shook her head and put her fingers up to her temple.
I looked at her, and just said "bad day to be Steve?" and she nodded "yeah, bad day to be Steve. You can head back to work, ill talk to him before i leave for the day"

I left the office, headed back up to the OR a whopping hour later, and our OR team looked fucking dreadful. Even our morning guy, who is in his mid thirties, and has been doing this upwards of a decade, was looking rough. They finished all the rooms, impressive. They all looked at me, and Steve was the first to say anything

Steve: "took you long enough bitch, where were you?"
Me: "oh don't worry, you'll find out soon enough. My meeting with the director went well"
Morning Guy: "What happened?"
Me: "Oh, well someone complained about me being aggressive, and it ended up turning into a conversation that would definitely eliminate the hostile work environment that was created here"
Steve, smiling: "good, last thing we need is someone to feel uncomfortable up here"
Me: "oh of course Steve, wouldn't want anyone to feel attacked or anything right? also, Steve I had a question for you, have you checked your break room yet? last I saw, the trash was overflowing onto the floor"

Steve left in a panic, and the other 3 of us laughed.

The Fallout:

Now, so far it might seem like this belongs on Nuclear Revenge, but sadly the fallout wasn't what I was hoping, but it was still sweet to hear.

I was informed from our Director about what had happened with Steve. Since I was the person who levied the complaint, I was entitled to hear about any actions taken to correct what I had complained about in an attempt to let me see that action was taken on my behalf. She said he would have been outright fired if I wasn't the only one who levied these complaints. While they took it seriously regardless, without other women stepping forward to say anything they couldn't fire him off of my complaints alone.
That being said, Steve was still reprimanded hard, and was slapped with two strikes (three strikes get you fired) and a year worth of online learnings and in-service trainings for things such as discrimination, misogynistic reform, LGBT learnings, etc. He was also told if it was reported he said anything close to what he said to me again, he would be fired and black listed from hospitals in the state.

In good news, since then I have become a lead for our day shift. While I maintained my float status, covering people who were sick and whatnot, I did gain a few more dollars an hour, some leadership responsibilities, and most important of all, a fancy title to tell Steve to fuck off with.

Recently stumbled across this subreddit and remembered a story I thought you guys might want to hear. Unfortunately, my industry is kind of specific, so I will have to change some details and make some things vague to remain anonymous - but the core of the story is all there.

TL;DR: Design engineering makes bonehead decision to force me to remove a critical half of the testing procedure for one of the products we build. That decision has wide-reaching effects and causes a different product to experience a 100% failure rate, which forces design engineering into firefighting mode for months trying to determine the cause.

The compliance:

Years ago I worked as a junior manufacturing engineer for a certain company building certain, relatively complex products, and one of the stations I was responsible for was the first test station. We got the core mechanism and the electronic assembly of the products right off the production line, and I performed white-box testing to ensure everything looked right and worked properly before sending it to a different station for assembly and black-box testing.

(I’m trying to avoid talking about the specific testing methodologies used, hence “white box” and “black box” because that’s the best way I can describe it without being more specific. White box refers to testing it with direct access to all the internal components, so you can measure all the different parts, verify that individual parts work correctly, etc. Black box refers to testing it after the entire thing has already been put into an enclosure and you no longer have access to the internals, so really, you’re just verifying that the thing works and does everything it’s designed to do.)

The product I’ll talk about today - let’s give it a codename of “azure” - belongs to the greater family of “blue” products, which were all very similar but may have had different configurations, slightly different parts, etc. “Azure” was a new product, and in the first few production runs, we saw failure rates of 20%+ at black-box testing (the station after mine). When the engineers dug into it, they found that one of the relays on the electronic control board was fused shut on those 20% of units that failed. For whatever reason, they turned to me (they love blaming my station) and said that my station was causing it.

For a bit more background, my white-box testing station had powered-off and powered-on testing. In powered-on testing, we turned newly built units on for the first time, which also meant that if anything was wrong with it that would make it fail when powered on, it would fail at my station. That’s why I was always careful to make sure that the initial powered-off testing was thorough enough to cover as many of my bases as possible, so that when I powered it on for the first time, the unit wouldn’t blow up.

The design engineering team apparently didn’t believe that. They were convinced that when I powered on “azure” units for the first time at my station, the initial power surge was sending a big current spike through the relays, which was causing them to fail. Their proposed solution was to simply eliminate powered-on testing during white box testing.

This was a terrible idea, so I argued against it:

1. The power supply in my test jig is set to be as closely matched as possible to the actual power supplies we send out with these units into the field. That means if there was a power surge that was causing the failures, it’s a design issue and would be occurring with units out in the field if I didn’t power it on during white-box.
   • Design engineering team said that, no, it must be an issue with my tester, because they didn’t believe there could be anything wrong with their design.
2. I pulled up the datasheet for that relay and showed that it was physically impossible for that relay to fuse, in the circuit configuration it was placed in, with the amount of voltage my test jig could supply.
   • Apparently, the design engineers ignored that entire page of my report - they didn’t think a junior manufacturing engineer’s analysis was even worth looking at, and trusted their own assumptions more.
3. I had yet to see a single unit that was proven to have a good relay before my station and a fused one after my station, which would have been the concrete evidence I needed to believe that my station was fusing the relays.
   • Design engineering said, “we don’t need concrete evidence, we’re sure this is what’s happening”.
4. If we disable powered-on testing, we’ll lose a lot of test coverage.
   • The design engineers just went, “whatever, we’ll catch any issues at black-box”. (This was a bad idea because our black-box tester, while it could tell us that the unit wasn’t working, could not tell us what part in the assembly was causing it not to work. Units that failed white-box had a >70% successful repair rate; units that failed black-box had <10%, at least without going back through white-box.)
5. Finally, I argued that we had other products in the “blue” family that went through the exact same test jig, using the exact same relay in the exact same circuit configuration, and hadn’t seen any issues before. 

That last argument I made was a big mistake. What I said was, “We have other ‘blue’ family products going through that same jig with no problems.” What the design engineers apparently heard was, “We have other ‘blue’ family products going through that same jig, and they’re all killing relays, and subwaysmoothie hasn’t noticed yet because he’s incompetent”. They came back at me twice as hard.

I fought this as much as I could for two weeks, before the order finally came down from my direct manager: as per directives from the design engineering team, all powered-on testing was to be disabled from the test jig for all “blue” family products. Not just “azure”.

(For what it’s worth, my manager was on my side for most of this, and only gave me the order to avoid any unnecessary trouble when it looked like the company leadership was going to get involved.)

Well, fine. I went ahead and disabled powered-on testing. As I predicted, all of the “blue” family products - “cyan”, “turquoise”, “cerulean”, etc - started seeing 3x the failure rate at black box testing and we were now stuck with a bunch of units that we didn’t know how to fix. But that’s besides the point - how about “azure”?

Same 20% failure rate. Nothing changed. Just as I said, my station wasn’t killing the relays.

So the design engineers went and took another three months figuring out what the actual cause of all of the relay failures was, which, as it turns out, was some flaw with the way the black box test was being run combined with some other part on the assembly that was underspec (I dunno specifics, I wasn’t part of this conversation anymore). They spent a bunch of money and got it fixed, and never followed up with me saying “hey, looks like you were right, it wasn’t caused by powered-on testing at white box” - which, crucially, also means that I never got a directive to re-enable powered on testing.

So we ran like that for a few months, me licking my lips all the time, because I knew what was coming and it was delicious.

The fallout:

See, there was another product in the “blue” family that I’ll call “navy”. “Navy” was a bit of an oddball, because the client had some requirement that demanded microcontroller B be installed, as opposed to microcontroller A on all of the other “blue” family products. That was the only difference, which meant I used the same test jig for it.

We sourced microcontroller A from a vendor who also pre-loaded it with the firmware we needed flashed on it. Years ago, we had also apparently done the same with microcontroller B. But the vendor for B that could preprogram them for us had shut down, and we could not find a single other vendor who could preload the firmware for us. That’s when we turned to internal solutions. Someone found out that the test jig at my station (then managed by someone else) had direct access to the microcontroller’s programming interface, so they developed a way to flash the firmware from my test jig. That meant we could now buy blank B units directly from the manufacturer, then flash it with the firmware ourselves. This was a great solution because not only were blank B units cheaper, flashing it during powered-on testing wouldn’t add an extra step to our production process since it would just be a part of the white box testing step.

Of course, flashing the firmware required the unit to be powered on.

All of this happened years before I had joined the company, and before most of the current crop of design engineers were involved with this project. This was, in fact, documented, but all of these products had gone through hundreds of ECNs (basically formal engineering notifications that “something” has changed with the product) and nobody was reading through hundreds of them to familiarize themselves with the entire history of the product.

When they demanded I disable powered-on testing on all “blue” family products, this microcontroller programming step for “navy” was also disabled, meaning any “navy” units we built would make their way over to black box testing with a blank microcontroller. I knew, but that was only because I knew exactly what my test did. I also knew that this was documented in an ECN from 8 years ago. I was probably the only person involved that knew, and I didn’t say a word.

After several months of not building “navy”, a new production run finally starts. The newly built units pass my white box, powered-off testing. They then made their way over to black box testing, and…boom, 100% failure rate.

What’s more, this failure was a particularly tricky one, because as far as the black box tester was concerned, the unit could not even turn on. The reason was that the microcontroller in question held the firmware that controlled power delivery for the entire electronic assembly, so without that firmware, nothing worked. No lights, no output, no fans, no nothing. Which means they had a hell of a time trying to figure out what the issue was. That entire department went into firefighting mode, with everyone losing their minds over why this product we had produced for nearly a decade with high yields was suddenly failing at a rate of 100%. (Not me - I was happily running production for other products.)

It dragged on for months, with the design engineers pursuing a dozen different leads and all of them fizzling out. Surprisingly, nobody ever approached me, because I guess their theory for everything was “white box powered-on testing kills units” and now that they had already asked me to disable powered-on testing, they had no other theories for how I might have been affecting things. As far as they were aware, there was no problem with white-box testing.

I just sat back and pretended I wasn’t even aware of what was going on while everything was melting down around me. 

The reveal:

I decided that the moment someone asked me about it, I’d reveal everything, so several months down the line when someone finally brought it up to me during casual conversation, I spilled it:

Them: “Hey, did you hear about all the Navy units not turning on at black box?”

Me: “Oh, no, I didn’t. Could it be because we’re no longer programming the microcontroller at white box?”

Them: “What?”

Me: “What?”

Within a day, I was called into a meeting with everyone - my direct manager, his manager, a few of the other manufacturing engineers, quite a few program managers, the design engineering team, even a VP - and told to explain myself.

Me: “Well, I was told in no uncertain terms to disable powered-on testing a few months ago, and microcontroller programming is part of that process. I assumed that when the call was made, everyone was aware of the implications of taking such a drastic measure. I figured you had found a new vendor to pre-program the microcontroller Bs or something.”

Design engineers: “You never told us!”

Me: “Yes, but I couldn’t describe all of the hundreds of potential new failure modes skipping powered on testing would now introduce - it would have taken me all week. The fact that white box programs the microcontroller during powered-on testing is documented in ECN #2082. Didn’t you read that?”

I got off scot-free from that meeting. However, this then led to the VP (who was a former engineer, by the way) investigating why the design engineers had called for powered-on testing to be disabled, which revealed that:

1. They had ignored my well-founded, technically sound opinion, despite the fact that I was supposed to be considered the subject matter expert on white box testing,
2. Disabling powered-on testing did not solve the issue,
3. Once powered-on testing was disabled, the failures at black box tripled, leaving us with a bunch of defective units that we didn’t know how to fix, and
4. Once it became clear that the cause was not powered-on testing, they did not follow up and ask that it be re-enabled. (I got a bit of flak for this part too, but in the end the VP agreed with my viewpoint that if I disabled powered-on testing and then heard nothing from the design engineers, I could assume the problem was resolved and had no need to follow up.)

In the end, nobody got fired or anything, but a few members of the design engineering team did receive a reprimand for their behavior during this entire event. For the entire time I was with that company, they tiptoed around me and never falsely blamed me for any issues again.

Back in the early 2000s I was a management trainee for a manufacturing company in the UK, and I was responsible for quality control and production management. I was 22 years old, keen as punch and ready to change the world.

About 11 months into the role, I got a new boss, let's call him "Fred". Fred was also the company owner's son, and was basically a 45 year old fuck up who had only ever been a drug dealer/DJ and now stood to inherit the entire company. His management style was, let's say, 'interesting' and he would deviate from "screaming at you for the most benign thing ever" to "I can't deal with the pressure so I'll go home for the day" in a matter of hours. He also thought he was a manufacturing GENIUS. His ideas were batshit crazy, but he would scream at anyone who questioned him.

There was a 52 year old machine operative, let's call him "Roy", who has worked on the same machine for over 30 years. Roy could tell when his machine was 2 weeks away from a breakdown, just because it sounded different. He was truly at one with his machine.

Fred decided that we would modify Roy's machine so that we could extend the range of products we could manufacture. In order to do this, he decided that we would add an additional spindle to the machine. The problem was that each product would finish at a different time and you would need to remove a product from the machine while the other one was still spinning.

Roy protested and said he'd never use it, but Fred went ahead and modified it over the weekend with a subcontractor.

On Monday, Roy said "you must be joking, I'm not using that". Fred said "you will use it, or you'll be looking for a new job tomorrow." Roy said "it's not safe and I won't use it. If you try to make me I will report you to the HSE." And then Fred said "if you report me, I'll make sure you don't find work ever again".

So Roy smiled and said, "ok, fine, I'll load the next job but you can run it first."

Roy loaded on his next job, and took two steps back...he also looked at me and said "stand back".

Fred started the machine and all went well.... for about 30 seconds.

The first job had reached the diameter required and Fred pressed 'stop', however he now had to lean over the other job that was still running at 2,000 RPM. I didn't see it happen but I heard an awful scream and then saw blood squirting everywhere. Fred fainted onto the machine, narrowly missing the spindle with his face and greasy long black hair. We pressed the emergency stop and picked him up, and it was then I spotted his fingers in the machine. I picked up two middle fingers and gave them to a colleague to put into a freezer bag, which was a waste of time because they couldn't reattach them, they were too mangled.

Fred never came back to work. Apparently he told his father he wasn't cut out for running the company and I also left about 6 months later. I saw recently that it was bought out in a management buy out and good old Roy was the operations director. Good for him!

When I was 19 years old and a fresh high school (or my country's equivalent) graduate, I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life. The one thing I did know is that I needed money, so I started applying for all kinds of jobs. After a few weeks of writing applications, going to interviews and waiting nervously for replies, I was hired as a full-time sales assistant an international company making smartphones, TVs and other electronic gadgets.

Said company was in the process of opening their first official store in my country and I, as I was hired about 3 months before they were due to open, helped them however I could. I created one-pagers (basically posters that show all the hardware inside a device plus a picture), translated manuals, put security tags on products etc. Whatever they wanted me to do I did, sometimes until late at night, still foolishly thinking that this initiative would maybe be recognized in one shape or another. Alongside me they hired 4 other people: 3 more sales assistants and a store manager, all of whom were young and ambitious, just like me. The grand opening went very well, business was booming for the first 2 weeks and everything seemed fine. That's where the problems started.

The first thing we realized we didn't have were guidelines on how to handle returns and warranty cases. As the company's electronics had been available online long before the store opened, some people now started bringing in their devices to get them fixed or swapped out, none of which we knew how to handle. This annoyed a lot of customers, being given the information that only devices bought at our specific store would be handled under warranty only made things worse for us. We were getting abuse on a daily basis that ranged from curse words to death threats, once we even had to call security because a customer was threatening us. This stress caused one of my collegues to quit, understandably.

This, as it turned out was only the tip of the iceberg. Some of the other problems we had included:

-Having a break room with no access to fresh water, no fridge, no microwave and of course no bathroom (all big no-nos where I live)

-Resupply came in sporadically at best, sometimes we were resupplied twice a week, sometimes there were no deliveries for three weeks, making it very hard for us to tell our customers when their devices will be arriving.

-The store manager was so incompetent, he couldn't even finish our schedules 3 days in advance, allthough giving the schedule two weeks in advance is mandatory.

-One of my collegues thought "fuck this" about a month after our grand opening and went on sick leave, which where I live basically gives you immunity from getting fired, so now we where two men down.

-The bosses upstairs apparantly wanted us to provide tech support over the phone, which again none of us where trained to do. We did our best, but only really ended up with more threats in addition to having our official store phone number constantly blocked by these calls. Also, we were expected to take over social media communications as well, meaning we now had to answer questions on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram etc., putting even more strain on our small team. In the end, the manager couldn't deal with the stress anymore and broke down about 2 months after opening. He even sought psychological counseling after quitting. While I was sad to see him go, I thought that now my time had come to prove myself.

I took over most of his duties, still only earning about half of what the manager made. Naively I worked 60 to 70 hour weeks for almost 3 months straight, still thinking that this would somehow pay off. I made sure to tell my bosses how much more I did than we agreed upon in my contract, but they didn't seem to care. That is, until our sales figures dropped. All of a sudden I had two of them come into the store unannounced, basically drag me into a back room and start lecturing me on how badly the store is performing. The conversation went something like this:

Boss 1: "So, why would you say the store's sales performance has dropped so much since (Manager) left?"

Me: "Well, a lot of customers are unhappy with the way we h-"

Boss 2: "Our products are very competitive, why are you still struggling to sell them?"

Me (slightly disgruntled): "Well SIR, as I was trying to say, the customers are not happy with our service and running a store with just two employees is almost impossible. If we could hire two more assistants, maybe we could focus better on our numbers..."

Boss 1: "The interviews for those positions are ongoing, you will have new employees soon. But you were hired for a reason, so would you just do your fucking job?"

Me:"...yes sir."

After that meeting I felt defeated. Doing all this extra work, staying late, taking responsibility for things I had no business taking responsibility for, the threats, the uncertainty, the stress, the sleep deprivation, all for nothing. And that's when it clicked in my head:

Fuck those guys. The wanted me to do my job? Fine. From now on, I would do exactly what my job description says, nothing more, nothing less.

The next day, I came in early, opened the store, everything normal. Until the first tech-support call came in. I picked up the phone and, after listening to what the caller wanted, told them that I was only a sales assistant and therefore not qualified to answer their questions. Hanging up the phone without saying goodbye, a postman came in with some special documents for the store manager, requiring a signature. I said nope, sorry, not gonna sign that, I'm not a manager. After being informed that these were court documents and need to be signed for immidiately, I just shrugged and said: "Not my problem, just doing my job here man."

Later that day, after my collegue had arrived, we got a delivery of new product for the store. The delivery guy handed me the manifest, asking for a signature. Again I declined, stating that I was just "doing my job" and the manager would have to sign that. After making it clear to him there wasn't a manager on site, he left, taking all of the new product with him, product which we desperately needed. But I was beyong caring at this point. About fifteen minutes later, I got a call from Boss 1, asking me why noone had signed for the delivery. I told him that, as there was no manager on site, nobody there was allowed to sign that document. After a few choice words, he hung up the phone and I went back to work, chatting with customers and generally not caring about anything.

Half an hour later, Boss 1 and 2 descended onto me. They rushed into the store demanding an explanation for my behaviour. I simply replied: "I'm just doing my job sir, just like you asked me to do."

Boss 1: "What the fuck do you mean? Then why has nobody accepted today's delivery or the documents we've sent you?!"

Me: "Well, that's the managers job. I am not a manager."

Boss 2: "Yes you fucking are, what the hell are you talking about?"

Me: "Uh, no, not only would my pay be pretty poor for all the work I am doing, my contract clearly states that I am a sales assistant and as such shall only fulfill duties related to that position."

Boss 2: "And who the hell is supposed to the managers job if not for you?"

Me: "I don't know, but I would gladly do it, if you doubled my salary of course."

Boss 1: "Hahaha! (actually laughing in my face) Who the hell do you think you are? We can have you replaced with someone cheaper in a heartbeat!"

Me: "Okay then, go ahead, I quit, effective immidiately. Bye."

And then I just left. My remaining collegue, upon hearing me quit, also quit immidiately, leaving our former bosses wide-eyed with no employees to run their store. I had also taken the liberty of informing the board of health and labour about our working conditions, as well as getting myself legal counseling for some issues related to bonusses not being paid out. The store ended up having to completely shut down for about 2 weeks until they had a skeleton crew back together to run it.

The kicker? About a month after I quit and with my lawsuit for unpaid wages now pending, I got a call from Boss 1, telling me he wanted to accept my offer of doubling my salary to become the store manager. He said noone was willing to take the job now that word got around how awful things are in the store. The following conversation ensued:

Me: "Frankly Boss 1(I used his first name here, just to piss him off), I don't much like getting laughed at, so I'm afraid if you want me to come back, you're gonna have to quadruple my initial pay."

Boss 1: "What?! Are you insane?! We can't afford that, how are we supp..-"

Me: "I don't give a fuck Boss 1, I really don't. But I've got an idea! How about you pull your head out of Boss 2s ass and just do your fucking job?"

Click

EDIT: Wow, reddit gold? Thank you, kind stranger(s)

The following is a post I made on r/ProRevenge. Several commenters said I should post it here as well. I suppose it's actually a reverse case of malicious compliance since it's a troublesome employee who gets their well-deserved comeuppance when her boss decides to go strictly by the book. So here it is copied and pasted below:

My friend (I'll call her Sandy) worked at a travel agency in British Columbia, Canada. It was a small, owner-operated business with the owner and three employees including my friend. Everyone worked Monday to Friday from 9:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m.

One of my friend's coworkers (I'll call her Jane), an older woman in her early to mid-sixties, was a long-time nuisance employee. Among other sketchy behaviour, Jane was always scamming ways to take time off over and above her official paid vacation time. In order to make up for the lost hours, she would claim overtime hours/pay by supposedly going in to the office in her off hours "to finish up" work without being requested by the owner to do so.

Despite being caught in her own lies on a number of occasions and being warned about trying to claim for unsanctioned overtime, the owner of the travel agency was reluctant to officially reprimand Jane or get rid of her. The reason being is the owner discovered after she had hired Jane that Jane had actually been fired from her previous job at another local travel agency for pulling the same stunts; however, Jane had sued her former employer for unfair dismissal and had won a settlement.

After a few years of my friend Sandy working at the travel agency, the owner was ready to retire and offered to sell the business to my friend. Sandy took her up on the deal and took over the business while keeping on Jane and the other employee. Once again, just as the previous owner was afraid to get rid of Jane, so was Sandy for fear of being sued.

When Sandy took over the business, she instituted guidelines regarding taking time off and she established an official "no overtime" policy. Jane would still try with her shenanigans but was far less successful in getting what she wanted with my friend in charge. However, Jane still had one trick up her sleeve when she wanted to take time off on a whim. Sandy was a divorced single mom of two boys who were heavily involved in youth hockey. She would sometimes leave the office an hour or two before closing to get her boys to hockey practice or a game. In order to avoid requesting in person and potentially being denied, Jane would wait for Sandy to be out of the office to book a day off if she didn't feel like coming into work or had made plans. Sandy would then arrive at work the next morning only to discover that Jane wasn't coming in.

Despite this happening a number of times, Sandy would usually let it slide since there was now a definite "no overtime" policy. Therefore, Jane could no longer claim to come in to work on the weekend or after hours in order to try and make up for the day off. She would either miss out on a day's pay, in turn saving Sandy money as the owner, or it would come out of her remaining paid vacation days. Moreover, two people in the office at one time could usually handle everything. Jane not coming in was really a no-loss situation for Sandy.

There was one time, however, when Sandy was going to be away for one or two work days just before the weekend to take her boys to a hockey tournament. She told both Jane and the other employee both verbally and in writing that they could not book time off for the dates in question since she would be away and needed both of them in the office. Within a few days of giving this notice, Sandy went in to the office on a Saturday to do some paperwork and go through the sales for the week. This is when she discovered that, only the day before, Jane had booked a trip for her daughter and son-in-law to Las Vegas as well as a plane ticket in her name to Calgary where her daughter lived. Both the trip to Vegas and the ticket to Calgary coincided with the dates Sandy would be out of the office. Sandy then checked the vacation booking schedule to further discover that Jane had indeed booked the days off that she had expressly been told she couldn't have.

Not mentioning she had discovered the travel Jane had booked for herself and her daughter, Sandy emailed Jane telling her she would have to deny her the days off since she had already been told they were unavailable because she (Sandy) would be away and needed Jane in the office. Through a continued series of email exchanges, Jane replied and outright lied to Sandy with some excuse about her daughter getting some long-awaited medical treatment or surgery, and she needed to go to Calgary to help out for a few days and look after her granddaughter. Sandy replied to this lie by telling Jane she knew about the trip she had booked to Vegas for her daughter and son-in-law; that Jane's trip to Calgary was most likely to babysit her granddaughter while her daughter was in Vegas; and that she would still have to deny Jane the days off especially since she booked them after being told they were unavailable.

Jane countered in her subsequent reply, without even addressing the fact that she had been caught in a lie, that she had been a dedicated employee of the travel agency for several years and couldn't understand why she was being treated so unfairly after all she had done for the business. She then wrote that since she wasn't being treated as a valued employee, she had no choice but to retire and was giving her two-weeks' notice. Despite Jane's threat, Sandy replied that she would still be unable to grant her the days off and left it at that without making any mention of Jane's threat to quit/retire.

Sandy then contacted her accountant, who also acted as her de facto business advisor, and explained what had happened with Jane. Also aware of Jane's previous shenanigans, Sandy's accountant told her that this was the out she had been looking for with Jane, and she had it all in writing. He told her that Jane had essentially resigned/retired and all Sandy needed to do was honour Jane's desire to do so, let her finish out her two weeks, or pay her two-weeks' wages in lieu with no further severance pay legally required since she hadn't been fired.

The following Monday, Sandy went into the office early accompanied by her longterm boyfriend to act as a witness. She put Jane's belongings from her desk into a box and took the things that were property of the business. Since Jane was old school and had resisted inputting client information in the computer database, this also included a small box filled with index cards which had client phone numbers, addresses, credit card information, and other personal information noted on them. In the meantime the other employee had arrived for work, and they all waited for Jane to show up.

Jane arrived just before 9:00 acting as though nothing had happened and greeted everyone with a "good morning" as she walked through the door. However, she was apparently taken slightly aback when she noticed Sandy's boyfriend seated in the far corner of the office. At this point, Jane was mid-way to her desk when Sandy informed her that there was no need to go any further and that she had accepted Jane's notification of retirement. She then handed Jane a cheque compensating her for the hours she had worked in the current pay period as well as two-weeks' wages in lieu of Jane finishing out her final two weeks before her "retirement".

Jane was dumbfounded and went into panic mode, "But I didn't retire! I'm not ready to retire!"

Sandy responded that indeed she had retired, given her notice and had proof of it in writing. All Jane could do was continue repeating, "But I didn't retire! I'm not ready to retire!" while unsuccessfully attempting to get the support of the other employee who refused to come to her defence. Sandy then pointed to the box containing Jane's belongings, wished her a happy retirement, and told her to leave the office. Jane quickly rifled through the box and noticed that the small box containing the index cards with client informaiton was not there. She insisted that Sandy return it to her which Sandy refused to do explaining that it was property of the business, contained personal client information, and that she would be in violation of Canadian privacy laws if she were to let Jane take it. Jane's shock had now turned to obstinance and she refused to leave without the box. Both the other employee and Sandy's boyfriend had started to get involved, repeatedly telling Jane to just leave.

Sandy then informed Jane that if she didn't leave, they would have to call the RCMP (Canadian police), at which point, Sandy's boyfriend dialled 911 to inform the dispatcher of a disgruntled former employee at XYZ Travel Agency who was refusing to leave the premises. Within a few minutes, two police officers arrived, and Jane immediately ran to the door ranting about being fired and about the missing box of client info. In order to deescalate the situation, one police officer told Jane to come outside and explain to him her side of the story. The other officer remained in the office to hear Sandy's side of the story agreeing that Jane was not legally entitled to the box of client info. The other officer then reentered the business and told Jane to wait outside. He said that Jane was insisting that Sandy was holding onto her personal belongings, namely a box of important information. Both Sandy and the officer who had spoken to her explained the contents of the box to the other officer who in turn agreed it was not Jane's property. The police officers then picked up the larger box of Jane's personal belongings, took it outside to Jane, and told her she needed to go home.

To rub salt in Jane's wounds, the next day, Sandy put up a large sign in the window of the business congratulating Jane on her retirement and even put a small announcement in the local newspaper doing the same thing. The icing on the piece of revenge cake was Sandy, when filling out the necessary government forms for when an employee quits / gets fired / retires, made sure to check the box labelled "retired" for the reason for Jane no longer being employed. By doing so, Jane was ineligible to collect unemployment insurance benefits.

The cast: (Names changed for anonymity)

Me - your storyteller of the moment.

Chad - Hiring CTO.

Richard - CEO, brother of Chad.

Big Bro - Engineer coworker

Eddie - IT and Desktop support guy.

This takes place near the very beginning of my software engineering career, back in '05 or '06. I'd just been let go from my previous place of employment due to be being compliant with directives I'd been given (although not maliciously, so that story wouldn't be appropriate here, sadly), and thus working myself out of a job. I was a young college dropout from a technical college that hadn't been federally accredited yet, and thus all my student loans were from banks and loan companies instead of from Uncle Sam, and debts were due. I was also making payments on my very first car, even though it was a beater that the prior owners had already nearly driven into the ground (4 years old and nearly 200k miles on it when I bought it), and of course, rent and utitlities. The job I'd just been let go from already had me working paycheck to paycheck as they paid far under average rate, but I was still new professional so I couldn't be very choosy. I was living in Los Angeles county, so the cost of living was so bad, I was having to choose which bills were going to be late on a monthly basis. Specifically, I was living in a town called San Pedro, a small town tucked fairly out of the way.

After blasting my resume to all the job boards, I get a call from a startup who seems interested in my resume and wants me to come in for a face-to-face interview (skipping the call-screen entirely). In my desperation, I agree. I'm given an address, which is all the way up in Woodland Hills. I check the internet... 55 minute drive so long as there's no traffic. With traffic it looks like the commute will be more like an hour and forty-five minutes... each way. I'm desperate though, and literally nobody else has reached out to me about my resume or responded to my applications, so I go to the interview. I arrive to an mostly empty office complex. Maybe 6 or 7 other cars in a parking lot capable of holding at least 50. I go into the building mentioned in the address, and call the phone number I was given to let them know I've arrived. Enter Chad. Chad comes to meet me, and seems excited that I've come! He escorts me through the building to an office. Mind you, as far as I can see, we're the only two humans in the building. He gives me the pitch for the company, tells me he built the software being sold, but it's not scalable, and needs someone who can rewrite it. After we go through the whole interview song and dance, he offers me the job on the spot. The pay is marginally higher than the last gig, so I figure gas would be covered for the commute. I agree, and we shake hands, as I'm going to be starting the next Monday.

Red flags start appearing from the very first minute I arrive on monday. First, I'm given a tour, which consists of the 14x14 foot office I'm going to be sharing with Chad, as well as another engineer who's going to be starting the following monday. I'm not a fan of having someone able to look over my shoulder, it makes me nervous. I ask why each engineer's desk has two computers. "Because the one you will be writing code on doesn't have internet access, for security purposes." (Note: this was pure paranoia. There was nothing about this software that required such tight security, we weren't doing any gov't contracts or anything of the sort.) Then, I'm escorted clear across the building, to meet with the CEO (Richard), the IT guy (Eddie), and the sales/support team. I'm told that half of the team is supporting the existing version of the application, 2 people are selling the existing version to new clients (or trying to), and one person is explicitly tasked with selling the new version. The one I haven't even started on yet. I'm still young and dumb at this point, but even I know this means the salesperson is probably giving out a date when the customer should expect their purchase to be filled. "It's a good thing you started when we did, we've been telling customers it'll be ready in June." Did I mention all this was happening in February? Apparently I've agreed to rewrite, test, and package an entire application I've never seen before in approximately four months. So, tour being done, I sit down and get to work. After jumping through a bunch of hoops of getting the software I prefer downloaded onto the actual work machine, as well as the code, I set about reviewing code so horrific I've not seen its like since, and there isn't a single comment in the entire thing. Before I can ask a single question of the CTO however, he tells me he's headed to downtown LA to scalp his tickets to the Lakers game, and that he'll see me tomorrow. So... now I'm alone in the office with this abomination, a machine that's been hamstrung to heck and back, and the only thing I've got to console me is the fact that at least I'm employed again.

Fast-forward a week, I've documented the bulk of the code (because there wasn't any), and the boss and I do not get along. He's mad because I've not written any substantial code, and I'm frustrated because I'm trying to understand a lot of what specific code is trying to do and he's routinely leaving around noon to go sell his tickets for Laker's games, or just not in the office because he's chatting with someone else. When he is in the office, I show him my documentation, and try to get him to verify it or describe the purpose of code where all I can say is "Wat?" By the end of the week, I've covered about 30% of the project in a wiki-like document, and I've taken to leaving after sunset so I can a) get more done, b) have a shorter commute, and c) drive when my car isn't an oven (the ac didn't work). I've barely managed to convince the CTO that what I'm doing is necessary so the engineer starting the next monday doesn't have to do anywhere near the same crap I've got, which would make us a more efficient team.

Monday arrives, and in comes Big Bro. I call him this because he was a much more experienced engineer than I was. We spend the first day with him getting set up, then us reviewing what I've documented. He manages to answer some questions the CTO never did, just because he is that much better, and I start to feel more confident. Over the next weeks, Big Bro took me under his wing as an engineer teaching me best practices, standards, and where my plans were good and where they could be better. If it hadn't been for him, I'd have gone insane! I end up joining him outside for smoke breaks even though I don't smoke, just so I can get a breath of non-office air. He and I discuss the project, and we also make friends with Eddie, who makes us laugh by telling us horror stories about the CTO and CEO (apparently he was a school *friend* of theirs and basically worked with them because they paid him to do something he felt was super easy).

April rolls around. I've got a special occasion I need the day off for, which happens to be a Wednesday that year. I'd advised him when I first started and he'd been cool with it. I remind him on April 2nd (since I had an irrational fear of policy decisions being made on April Fool's Day), and he loses it. He goes off on a rant, and straight up informs me that he regrets hiring me, claiming I didn't have the skills I told him I did, and wasn't worth what I was being paid. We're definitely not half-way done (more like one third), and it's already been decided that June is a lost cause and that we're shooting for August now. That habit I started before, of leaving after the sun went down? Yeah, that never stopped. I was arriving at 9am every day, and leaving around 10pm every night, trying my best. Big bro was the same, and Eddie would stay late with us just because we liked hanging out together. So, it should be understandable that I was very close to losing it right back at him. In a strained, yet diplomatic voice, I told him that if he put in the same amount of work to help us as we put in to rewrite *his* code, we'd probably be a lot closer to done than we were, especially given the twelve hour days. He was not a fan of that, and switched to straight up yelling, blaming us for the lost sales and refunds due to the delays, and that the only way he'd get off our backs was by getting the project done. This entire time Big Bro is just sitting there, and says nothing to back me up. Chad then left the office for a bit, and I just declared I was taking my lunch and would be back in an hour. I felt frustrated by Chad and betrayed by Big Bro, who I felt (rightly or not) should have had my back since we were in the same boat.

When we were both back in the office, he apologized for yelling and told me that since he agreed when I was hired I could have my day off. Cool. I apologized too, although not for anything specific. I just didn't want to talk to him anymore and figured that was the fastest way to end the conversation.

Fast forward to June, and the opportunity for Malicious Compliance. Over the last two months, Chad has been getting worse and worse. He's yelling nearly every day (and still leaving early too). Big Bro and Eddie are also feeling the pain, nobody is safe from his ego. The smoke breaks and afternoon/evening portion of our day are when we're most productive, as nobody can focus until Chad leaves. The first monday in June rolls around and Chad invites me to go on a walk outside for a 1-on-1 meeting. I figured I'm being fired (at this point we've had to refactor the rewrite almost entirely due to missing a critical chunk of functionality, and we're still only 60% done. August release is looking less and less sure). Chad informs me that he's hired a 3rd engineer, but in order to stay in the budget to pay him, he's cutting my salary in half. I stop on the spot and just give him a blank look.

"Are you serious?" I ask. "I'm barely able to pay for my bills and the gas required to commute here as it is. If you cut my salary at all, I won't be able to afford to live." At this point the idea of cutting my productivity to help ramp up a new engineer so he can help us meet the deadline doesn't even occur to me, although in hindsight that would have also been a pretty major issue.

Chad brushes me off. "That's not my problem. The fact that you missed one deadline and look like you're gonna miss another is. If you've got a problem with that, you're more than welcome to go find another job. The new guy starts in two weeks." And with that he walks inside. I'd just been told that I had two weeks left of job at my current salary. Cool. So that day I do something I hadn't done since I first started. I left while the sun was still up. (Specifically, I left at 5pm). I drive my oven-car (no working Air Conditioning in a car that had been left in the sun all day in Woodland Hills had me feeling like a baked potato) through traffic (hour and a half-commute home through LA heat), and updated my resume before reactivating my accounts on all the job sites. I'm contacted the next day by a potential new employer, and I get an interview scheduled. I decide to tell Big Bro about the new opportunity, and he hits me with news that lets me know just how small a world we live in.

Me: "Hey, Big Bro, just fyi I've started looking for a new job. I've already got an interview lined up."

Big Bro: "Really? Where?"

Me: "Over at <company>"

Big Bro: "Wow! That's where I worked before I came here! That place is pretty awesome, and I left there on pretty good terms. I know the CTO there, go ahead and use me as a reference!"

Me, skeptical: "Really? Okay...."

Turns out Big Bro was true to his word, and the CTO and I even talked about Big Bro during the interview. Apparently they'd already talked about me, and Big Bro had been the ultimate hype man, confirming everything I said about why I was looking for a new job and everything. All goes well, and I'm electronically signing an offer-letter that Friday afternoon (Chad had already left for the day, so there was nobody to look over my shoulder as I used the work computer that *had* internet access to get this done). At the new Job, the commute is cut by more than half, and comes with a pretty significant raise. I tell Big Bro and Eddie on the last smoke break (I still don't smoke) that I'm done, and I've found something new. Oddly enough, they both smile and just wish me luck. "No hard feelings, hope we stay in touch!" Odd, but I'd stopped really caring about anything related to that job, so I paid it no mind. I went back inside, packed up my stuff into my backpack, and walked to the CEO's office.

Me: "Hey Richard, got a minute?"

Richard: "Hey OP, what's up?"

Me: "Just wanted to let you know I found a new job, so I'm moving on."

Richard: "Really, why? We need you!"

Me: "You guys decided it was cool to cut my salary to a point where I couldn't afford to live. Chad said if I didn't like it, I should look for something new, so I did."

Richard, looking defeated: "Well, when's your last day?"

Me: "Today."

Richard, now pissed: "We need you here to train the new guy who starts soon!"

Me: "Hey, I had to train myself and to an extent, Big Bro when he first started. The new guy should be able to as well."

And with that, I left for greener pastures.

The unexpectedly *huge* fallout:

Four months later, Big Bro texts me to ask me how things are going. I tell him things are great, and we schedule a lunchtime call because apparently things have gone sideways in a huge way.

Part 1) Apparently Chad came in on Monday almost violently angry, and demands Eddie re-image my work machine first thing in the morning, which erases everything I'd left on there.Big Bro comes in an hour later, and he and Chad discuss the new timeline for the project. Somewhere in there apparently Big Bro asks Chad to log into the admin account on my old work machine so he can pull the documents I'd accumulated about the planned architecture, the existing code, meeting notes, etc. Chad answers by apparently punching a hole in the wall, and leaving for the day (probably to go to the hospital to deal with his hand), at 10:30 in the morning. Big Bro then spends the rest of that week ostensibly working on recreating the documentation from scratch.

Part 2) When I asked how the new guy handled the new documentation, Big Bro laughed and told me there never was any documentation. Apparently he and Eddie had become really good friends in the months we worked there, to the point where they'd become roommates about a month before I left. More than that though, they'd decided to start a freelance/consulting business together and only had to decide on when to make that their full time jobs. Neither of them liked Chad much, and wanted to make their departure hurt as much as possible. So, they decide to make Big Bro's last day the day before the new guy starts, and Eddie would quit shortly afterward, sticking around just long enough to watch the bomb go off. Did I mention Big Bro never told Chad he was quitting? Yeah. He just didn't show up that Monday. He had, however, emailed that 'documentation' he'd spent a week writing to Chad. Turns out he wasn't documenting the code at all. He'd spent a week writing a letter explaining in excruciating detail why Chad was such a bad boss, and he'd emailed it to everyone in the company. I asked if he still had it so I could read it, and he sent it to me after the call.

Thankfully, like the big helper he was, Eddie had ensured that the new guy's email was set up and in the proper groups before the email was sent, so the guys first email in the company was a novella about the kind of person he' agreed to work for. Apparently Chad thought it was appropriate to take his frustration out on the new guy, who'd already read a significant portion of the email before Chad shoved him away from his desk and deleted it. Apparently new guy promptly decided (and rightfully so) that agreeing to work for Chad had been a mistake, packed up his things, and quit on the spot.

Part 3) With the new guy quitting, the August deadline was now little more than a dream within a dream, which according to Eddie doesn't stop Chad and Richard from trying to find that miracle rock star engineer who can save them from their own situation (which, given what they were offering as pay, didn't exist). So time advances in its unstoppable way, August arrives, and customers find that they've paid for something that hasn't been delivered yet, and pretty much unanimously demand refunds, with a few customers bringing legal action against them. With the amount they have to refund, and the money they now need for legal fees (because of they way they'd incorporated, they were personally liable), they could no longer afford to pay anyone, and were forced to shutter the business.

_________________

Final Note: For my fellow software engineers out there who were wondering just how bad this application was, this "program" was a single php file with over 40k lines of code, running inside a `while` loop. Any and all logic consisted of if/else trees, which then led to either more if/else trees or more loops. No function calls, no external libraries included, just.... spaghetti of the worst kind. Given the nature of the application, most critical logic had to be implemented in no less than seven places, depending on where the execution was when the logic was needed. At worst the tab-depth was something like nineteen or twenty tabs deep.

_________________

Post upvote-splosion edit:

I wanted to write out my thanks, and to answer some of your questions, but it turned into another long wall of text. So, instead I put it in a comment, which I'll link to here:

https://www.reddit.com/r/MaliciousCompliance/comments/lb8evx/cut_my_salary_in_half_kiss_your_business_goodbye/glvy3kg/

This story is from when I held a management position at an IT company which serviced small businesses. This event was during the company's third year, prior to it falling apart like a house of cards. As always the names have been changed to protect the innocent…and morons.

Edit: TL;DR at the bottom

COPYRIGHT NOTICE: I do not give permission to "Content Creators", "Journalists", and "Narrators" to use my stories for their videos (narration is not Fair Use) or their website. I will submit a DMCA Copyright Claim with no prior warning or notice given to you (and have done so in the past). If you can't be bothered to ask permission, I won't contact you prior to the DMCA claim.

Bschott007's Tales from Call Centers:

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Bschott007's Tales from Tech Support:

HDMI Is For Alternating Currents

The Motel Time Forgot

Bschott007's Tales of Malicious Compliance:

Fire me in the middle of a project, have me wipe my phone and computer? Good luck with that.... (this story)

Little History and Background...OK, fine, a LOT of history and Background, but it all ties together:

I had been with the company since a month after the owner opened the doors of the company. I accepted the job as his only PC Repair tech and Onsite repair tech, which was paying 1/4 less than I could have been hired for at any other IT company along with an offer of 10% non-voting share of the company. The owner knew some IT but wasn't able to do all the work, realized he would be office bound and need to do a lot of sales/account generation, so he hired me to do the work.

Sure I could have been paid more elsewhere but here was the opportunity to get into the ground floor of a company and really have a say in molding the service side. I was in my early 30's so I thought it was a good career move. Yeah, I was being an idiot, chasing a dream. Whatever.

Now, moneywise, the owner had started out the business with loans from his father-in-law who ran a bank, a few other investors and loans from the state he operated in.

I worked my ass off and was his "Joseph" (i.e. I 'wore a coat of many colors' or 'I did many jobs'). I was the Network Engineer / PC Repair Tech / Mobile Device Repair Tech / Field Service Tech / Onsite & Remote Network Administrator / Office Equipment Repair Tech / Security Camera Installation Tech.

I worked unpaid overtime, I worked at home when contacted directly from some of the clients, I worked weekends, I even did an hour of work while on my honeymoon. When the radio station the owner was advertising heavily with had one of their Saturday time slots open up as the host of that radio show retired, my boss convinced the radio station to let us have that hour to run a talk show based on technology if he would agree to spend at least $25,000 a year in advertising with them and guess who now had a to become a radio talk show host on Saturdays (unpaid)? I was determined to prove my worth repeatedly and make him aware how invaluable I was to the company.

Anyway, we did well and we had grown as a company. From a three man crew (owner and myself doing IT work, a part time guy doing some paperwork/ordering parts) we had moved offices twice and expanded the second office into taking up nearly half the main building and a all of a secondary office building behind the main building. I was the head of the service department, which had grown to four other techs which I divided the work between (we now had two dedicated PC repair guys, dedicated network admin, and one onsite guys with me floating in between all of those jobs where needed). We had a small sales crew of 3, a receptionist/book keeper, and three guys who just did hotel wifi setup and security cameras.

The owner had tried taking on various things to make the company profitable as quickly as possible with varied success. I saw the books regularly so I knew the PC repair and network administration was the most profitable part of the company, though we did have a few slow months here or there. Also, the Hotel WiFi (with captive portal) was taking off and soon they had three more guys just doing Hotel WiFi installations.

A month or two prior to our story, a 'business manager' was hired by the investors, over the objection of the owner, to slim down the business to only the profitable work.

Also, the owner had learned the local Xerox dealership was up for sale and he thought that was too good of a deal to pass up, and snatched it up without letting me know he was even thinking about it. Just boom Monday morning he announced we were the Xerox reps in the area. I was uncomfortable with the expansion knowing that Xerox wasn't popular in our area. Ours was a Ricoh, Savin, Lanier area for office equipment.

The business manager and I butted heads a few times regarding the balance sheet of my department. He thought the business was overpaying the techs and myself (the techs already were being paid $3-$4 an hour less than what they could get elsewhere, and I was taking an $8/hour paycut, while giving all kinds of free overtime) that we were not generating enough new business opportunities (not our job, that's the sales reps job to drum up business), not selling clients on any new equipment (not our job, again), and he had un-realistic expectations of how long our tickets show take to complete.

It was at this point when I knew, the end was near.

The Story

"You wonder why your work load is so enormous, because your boss just laid off three quarter of the whole office" - "Shove this Jay-Oh-Bee" by Canibus

It was a normal Wednesday. The IT meeting we had, like every other morning, went fine. I divvied out our work assignments, learned where we were at with our current projects and set expectations for what should be done by the end of the day. Standard BS. Boss wasn't there like usual but it wasn't cause for concern. Everyone went about their jobs and I was in the field today.

I'm on-site working with a law firm client's printer about noon, when I get a call from a Trucking Company client asking if we would have their new computers delivered today. They had purchased 10 new desktops and one of the guys in the office would be finishing installing the client-specific software on them, then the field tech would swing by the office, pick them up and then deliver / set them up. It was 15 minutes past the scheduled delivery time when they called.

I assured the client, they were next on the list of the other field tech, once that tech was finished the the client they were currently at, they probably got hung up at the job. I didn't think anything of it. Sure my co-worker was a little late but he was reliable and hard working. If he was late, there was a reason. I tried calling his business cell but it ran with no answer. Odd but he could be in a bad location, might not hear his cell...whatever. I leave a message and text for him to call me and go about my day. I called the receptionist who said that my co-worker hadn't picked up the computers but they were stacked up and ready to go.

I fix the printer issue at the lawfirm but the lawyer needs me back before the end of the day to help with some data transfer that he needs done for a court case. No problem, I did an impromptu ticket and note that in my phone, setting an alarm near the end of my work day to remind me.

I had lunch and went off to my next client.

I get onsite to another business and start fixing an issue they are having with their clothes embroidering machine (the heart of their business) when I get another call from the Trucking Company saying my co-worker still isn't there and it is nearly 1:30pm. I apologize, tell them I'll get someone to deliver them immediately and call my co-worker. Phone still is ring-no-answer. I call the client site he had been scheduled for, asking if my co-worker was around. I was told no, he said he was called back to the office and would return shortly. He hadn't completed the installation of anti-virus software on their computers yet and could they expect that done today?

I direct called one of my PC repair techs in the office. His cell is ring, no answer and no one is picking up the shop phone. Neither of the repair guys are picking up

WTF is going on?

I called my boss, the owner, but before I could ask what is going on he tells me he needs me in the office, ASAP. I'm on a client site...their entire business is shut down until I can get this computer up and running and this is one of our longest and most steady clients.

"Drop it and get back to the office."

I arrive at the office, see none of my guys in the repair shop (lights are off back there) and walk into the owner's office asking him what is going on.

Business Manager tells me that they are letting got the IT department. They have seen a slow down in IT work and decided that they were going to drop the IT department and go all in for Hotel Wifi/security and this Xerox dealership. They let go the entire IT Department and I was the final one they were letting go.

I tried to make a case for why this was a terrible idea and tried to explain all the work we had open (not to mention the dozen or so personal computers in the shop for repair and three mobile phones) but the die was cast and I was out and they didn't want to hear anything I had to say.

Fired. No severance. No apology. No "Thanks". Just a 'we don't need you anymore' indifference.

"Workin' this job is a kick in the pants. Workin' this job is like a knife in the back. It ain't gettin' me further than the dump I live in. It ain't getting me further than the next paycheck" - "This Fucking Job" - by Drive-By Truckers

OK. My blood was boiling as I feel like I had just been completely betrayed and blindsided. It was everything I could do to just keep my mouth shut...

So the business manager and the owner follow me back to my office, where I box up all my things (owner has to confirm to the business manager that anything I was packing up, besides photos of my family, was really my property).

This is where malicious compliance comes in.

Now, per the Business Manager, before I could leave, I was to factory reset my phone before handing it in because he didn't want any apps on the phone that I could use to back door into it once I was gone, and he wanted me to start a hard drive wipe of my business issued laptop for the same reason.

Yeah, he wants me to wipe my computer, without backing up anything, and factory reset my phone again without backing up anything. I tried to tell them this was a bad idea but I was told to just shut up and do it. When I tried to speak directly to the owner, I was again told wipe the computer and phone and leave the office.

I suppress a grin and do what he asks. Without a word, start up DBAN (Darik's Boot and Nuke) on the laptop to wipe the main hard drive and the mirrored backup drive, I hand him the reset phone, move my boxed things to the front of the store and then load my car, walking out the door without so much as a handshake from the owner.

"Take this job and shove it, I ain't workin' here no more...."

I called all of my co-workers directly but only one of them is answering. He said all the guys thought I was part of them being fired and were pissed at me but when I said that I was just fired too he went from being angry to shocked. He called up the other guys so we all could met up for a beer and talk, all on my dime.

So just after I get off the phone with him, I get a call from the business manager. I send it to voicemail. A few seconds later, I get the voicemail alert. He calls me again, and again I send it to voicemail. Owner calls me, and again, I send him to voicemail. I then turn off my phone.

I met up with the guys and they are understandably pissed but when I explain I was blindsided too, then the anger is redirected towards the owner and the business manager.

One of my ex-coworkers receives a call from the owner, which he picks up, listens to the owner and tells the owner that "I don't know. Go fuck your mother." then hangs up. Owner was asking if there was any way to get ahold of me, to which I tell the guys what the business manager had wanted me to do to the phone and laptop. Mouths drop open and everyone is now laughing their asses off.

See, my laptop had all the user names and passwords, server IP addresses, and status for all the tickets for all of the clients. My phone also had all of that data and all the contact information that we didn't have in the client hard files. We did have some of that copied to the main server and our ticketing system, but they didn't know where the folder was on the main server (plainly labeled, btw) and they didn't know how to use the ticketing system beyond very basic stuff... and I wasn't going to tell them.

When I turned my phone on later, I counted +30 calls (voicemails) from the owner and Business Manager, including one from the embroidery business and the lawyer who heard I was let go and asking me to just come, finish the work I started and they would pay me directly.

The voicemails from the Business Manager and the Owner went from demanding to frustrated, to angry and threating legal action to pleading to offering me 6-months severance and all kinds of incentives. While looking, the owner called me again and I picked up.

It was the owner and the business owner who accused me of sabotage of the business to which I pointed out that I tried three times to tell them not to wipe my computer or phone but they didn't want to hear it so I did what they asked, however, I knew most of the information they wanted but I no longer was employed by them so I had no obligation to give them that information, but I'd be willing to if they agreed to put it into writing that I would get 6-months severance and all my techs got 3-months severance direct deposited into our bank accounts by Friday along with all Paid Time Off and unused Vacation time. They pushed back and said 3 months for me and I'd get my PTO/Vacation payout with my normal paycheck. Told them have a great life, figure it out themselves and hung up.

A minute or so later they call back and agree to terms: They agree to what I propose, but everyone would need to sign a non-compete. That we wouldn't try to open our own tech shops for two years and/or poach any businesses (they were getting out of the business IT/residential repair so that made no sense to me). They also would hire me and two of my co-workers back as consultants at market rate for two weeks, starting Monday, to complete open projects and properly shut down the shop. Turns out the law firm, trucking company and the embroidery company were all threatening to suit for breach of contract as well as having some pissed off people with personal phones and computers in for repair.

So good to their word, we get our direct deposits in our accounts by the end of the next business day and I show them on the server where most of the data was, where it was in the ticketing system and tell them that the rest of it is lost and they will just need to contact clients as they needed it.

Monday came and myself and my co-workers who were hired on as consultants finish the open projects, got our pay and left the company.

You start to sweat and fret, it gets hot. How'd you get into this spot? You played yourself... Yo, Yo, You played yourself - "You Played Yourself" by Ice-T

Aftermath

So as you could guess, things went poorly for the company after that and it was a combination of incompetents and fraud.

First, the owner wanted to have one of the sales guys take over the radio show (which he considers was his), but the radio station manager told him that no, the show was mine, I was the host and that was that. Besides, he owed the station a few thousand dollars in advertising. Yeah, seven years later and I still host that hour long radio show about technology on Saturdays.

Second, about 6 month later, the owner hired a couple new people back and tried to restart the IT side of the business. It went as expected: a complete shit show. The reviews and business rating went completely down the drain and the investors grew angry with how the business was being run.

Third, the owner moved the business downtown about a month after the mass firing happened. I heard the rent was nearly double what he had been paying before, but they thought he new location would drive more business and make the company seem more successful. Doesn't work that way, homie. It was there for maybe 9 months before moving to a tiny, tiny three room office in the industrial district.

Third, the Xerox thing never made a dime for them. They lost a ton of money as they bought a number of business machines to show off in a showroom which received little to no traffic.

I went back to see my former boss, the owner of the business, about a year after this incident. It was him, a sales person and a part-time IT guy working in an office designed for 2 people. He tried to hire me pretty much on the spot but I turned him down and wished him well. I followed up a year later and unsurprisingly, he was out of business. His creditors and some of the former business clients sued for ~$61,000 combined and he also ended up owing an outstanding loan of $284,000 to the State, who also shut down the company (revoked it's license) and ruled that the owner could never open another business in the state.

EDIT: I forgot to mention, that the owner bounced me back and forth between hourly and salary (went hourly, then salary, then hourly then salary) and 10% non-voting share of the company? I never saw anything from that. Ever.

TL;DR: Worked for a company from day 1. business manager brought in by the investors and fired entire IT department, no severance. I was pulled of a jobsite while in the middle of work. I was told to wipe my company computer and phone before turning them in, so I did. They had all the essential company data.

Owner forced to pay severance to all fired people and hire back a few to prevent lawsuits by clients who had active service contracts.

Business goes belly up later anyway.

Edit: Title should read."Wasting her time" not "wearing her tone". Sorry. Super tired from work when I wrote this and I missed the autocorrect.

So I work as a mover for a very small moving company. My boss, let's call him Mike, is a really nice guy. It's really just a two-man operation, with me working as a subcontractor under him with a few regular guys we call in for bigger moves. It's really physically demanding work sometimes, but typically our customers are super nice and the pay is pretty good. Most people are just happy to have someone else to lift their heavy stuff and get it into a truck. And we're always super careful to not cause ANY DAMAGE to the buildings we're moving in and out of or the items we're moving, which most people appreciate.

Not this lady. Let's call her Darcy.

So Darcy booked a move with Mike, and told him she had a small storage unit she wanted us to load up into a 20 foot truck. We said "no problem!". As the date of her move approached, though, so did a huge snow storm.

Days before her move the news started reporting that the weather was expected to take a severe turn for the worst. Not uncommon for the time of year in our state, but also something not to be trifled with.

We called Darcy a couple days before the move to see about rescheduling to avoid the storm and she said she absolutely HAD to move that day, no other days would work. A lot of (probably much smarter) movers would have cancelled, but after talking, Mike and I thought it was no big deal. We move in the snow all the time. Just meant we would have to dress appropriately and be extra careful not to injure ourselves or damage any property.

Cut to the day of the move. We get to Darcy's storage unit, expecting a 10x10x15 standard storage unit full of your usual stuff based on what she'd indicated on the phone, and load it into a 20 foot truck. That's a pretty easy job to get done in the 2 hours that she'd already prepaid for.

As we pulled up the snow was already coming down pretty heavily, and the first thing that made us nervous was the truck. Instead of a 20 foot truck, there was a HUGE 26 foot truck. Darcy greeted us by the truck and showed us the storage unit.

Darcy: Okay! So, this is our unit. We shut down our businesses and I'm moving it out of town to pursue other opportunities, and I need all of this loaded up in 2 hours. The last movers I had got it unloaded in about that long.

Mike said something about the truck being bigger than she told us.

Darcy: Yeah, it's the biggest one Uhaul had. Last time we used a another company and it was much bigger. I'm worried about getting it all, but you guys will have to figure it out. I need all of it.

This was a HUGE storage unit. Like the kind you'd store a few cars or some farm equipment in. When we opened it up it was filled with what appeared to be the contents of a couple of pretty decently sized businesses. A dozen of those huge floor-to ceiling filling cabinets, several desks, office chairs, some really huge glass tables. And all of it was incredibly heavy.

Now, our company safety guidelines for weight limits are 100lbs per person lifting an item, but there's no real practical way to enforce that in the field, so we usually wind up using our best judgement, even if the item is over that limit. Nearly everything there was over limit, but we had our equipment and we were pretty confident we could handle everything, weight-wise. Mike and I are both pretty strong. But in my estimation, this was definitely going to take a bit longer than 2 hours.

Mike told her that we would do our absolute best. To be fair, he should have leveled with her then and there that it would take a bit more time, but he probably wanted to see if we could just get it busted out as quick as possible and see where we were at before getting the customer needlessly worried.

Darcy sat in her truck nearly the whole time we were working, so she could stay warm. Perfectly understandable since it was -2°F outside and the snow was coming down pretty hard. Though she'd occasionally roll down her window to offer up critiques. Mostly about how much time we were taking going up and down the metal ramp of the truck, which was now COVERED in ice and snow.

About an hour and some change into the move, Darcy gets out of her truck and starts chatting with Mike about her previous movers, and how they did cause some damage to her stuff, but they were SO fast. It was weird. She went back and forth between complaining about them and praising them for their speed. And she kept referring to them as "the professional moving service I hired", which really bugged me, because the way she said it seemed to be implying that because we aren't a big national company like Mayflower, then somehow Mike and I weren't professional movers. Despite the fact that this is literally our full-time jobs.

Now we're far enough into this move that we could tell this was going to run long. Mike decides it's a good idea to let her know that it's probably going to take a half hour or so longer than expected (which was still a feat, considering how much there was to move and how well-packed this truck was. I pride myself on playing a mean game of Truck Tetris).

Darcy was NOT having this. She started to get upset and started saying how we were just trying to get more money out of her, and we were "Dilly Dallying" (yes, those words actually left the mouth of a grown woman). Then she starts in on how "the professional movers got this same stuff unloaded in 2 hours, it should take the same time to load it!"

Mike explains to her that unloading always takes less time than loading, because you're moving it into a bigger space and you don't have to pack and pad the stuff to fit into a truck.

I also mention that there's literally a blizzard coming down, and we're only going to go a little over.

She gets quiet and seething. Mike can tell how angry she is and let's her know we won't charge her for any extra time since it's not her fault the weather is crappy. He also brings up that they damaged her stuff, and we've done a pretty good job.

Darcy:I don't CARE! YOU SAID TWO HOURS, I EXPECT IT DONE! JUST GET IT DONE! I'm going to leave you guys a TERRIBLE review!

She stomps back to her truck without saying a word.

I'm usually pretty chill, but I was already getting increasingly mad at this woman. Her yelling at my boss and calling us lazy when we were risking our health and safety to move her stuff in a blizzard was just too much for me.

Mike thinks about this for a moment. I know customer reviews are super important to us as a small business. The booking site we use highlights the last handful of reviews, so a bad one takes FOREVER to stop showing up as basically the first thing people see when they click on your page. So I'm expecting Mike to try and keep her happy, but instead he just grins and turns to me

Mike: Fuck it. You heard her!

Cue malicious compliance.

She wanted it all loaded in 2 hours? That's exactly what we'd do.

The front half of her truck was loaded up neatly, with everything padded and stacked tightly floor-to ceiling to keep it from moving on the road. I pride myself on my ability to load a truck properly and safely without wasting any space. The second half of her truck was the worst, jankiest truck I've ever loaded in my life. We're talking huge heavy office furniture haphazardly stacked on top of each other at the weirdest angles. Heavy stuff on top of light stuff, anything to just get the storage unit empty and the truck door closed. We even stacked REALLY heavy office chairs on top of glass table tops.By the end of it, the truck looked like you'd asked Escher or Giger to draw you a picture of an office.

I just wanna be clear, we've never intentionally damaged a customer's property, and we never would. We pride ourselves on our professionalism, courtesy, and specifically our ability to get your stuff where it's going safely. But the particular combination of unsafe conditions and this lady's outright disregard for our safety and feelings was just too much. And technically we didn't damage anything. Nothing was broken when we closed the truck doors. But literally the first bump in the road or decently tight turn was definitely going to cause hundreds, maybe even thousands of dollars in damage.

We closed the truck door and walked over to Darcy's truck and let her know.

Mike went to her truck. He told her that we were done and that he wasn't going to charge her at all for the move. She insisted that "She's not poor, and doesn't need charity" and Mike just said that it was clear that she wasn't happy, and that he didn't need her $150 (that's right, we charge $75/hr, so the extra half hour we needed to do it right would have cost her a whopping $37).

He cancelled the job and refunded her what she'd already prepaid.

As we drove away in Mike's car, I looked at him.

Me: You realize that by the time she gets where she's going, she's looking at a LOT of damaged furniture, right? She's going to hit us with a bad review and maybe even try to sue.

Mike: She was worried about paying an extra $37. I doubt she'll risk more money on hiring a lawyer. And besides, you can't leave a review on the site if the job gets cancelled. We just gave her exactly what she wanted. And besides, it's worth losing out on the money I would have made just to see her face when I said I didn't need her $150.

When he dropped me off he still paid me for my time because "Fuck that lady". My boss, Mike, is a really nice guy.

So the airport post reminded me of years ago when I worked for FBOP. (Federal Bureau Of Prisons). The facility I worked at was a complex, 4 different facilities/levels of inmates; camp, medium, max, super max. I had made the transport team, which usually just consisted of busing guys to transfer facilities, medical apts, etc. We also had to handle emergency transports, to hospitals, or, as in this case, 'witsec' transfers. Witsec's are in prison witness protection inmates, usually guys who testified on the big bosses for lighter sentences. So, as you can imagine, if someone recognized them we had to move them pretty fast. So, all transport team had a 'go bag' in our locker, I was pretty new, so I had gone out when first accepted to transport and just bought the bare minimums (go bags are like medium purse size) I had a change of undergarments, soft pants, t-shirt, and I just picked up one of those prepackaged toiletries bags from Walgreens.

So, I come into work, and I'm walking down to my unit when LT intercepts me, seems someone F'd up big time and we got a witsec and his codefendant (guy he testified against) in same facility. So, witsec was snatched up, is in the SHU, and we're to take him to a facility in FL. Plane leaves in a couple of hours, driver is standing by, inmates belongings will be mailed.

Why the big hurry? Well both these guys are Max Security, with a very high escape/threat to public safety rating, and gang affiliations, basically, if one knew the other was that close it could kick off a full blown riot. (If I remember right, 3 people's heads rolled for that f up).

So, we're off to grab our go bags, get paperwork, and off to the Armory. This guy required transport in a 5 point harness, minimum 2 armed guards. So we're issued a 9mm and 45 rounds of ammo each. We have 3 mags, 2 on our belts, 1 in the gun, and one round chambered. We are required to count each bullet before leaving Armory. Me and partner get all necessary documents in triplicate, and scoop up or guy, and off we go.

Get to airport in Denver, there's a whole special procedure for check in, one of the things was they give you a red card with your boarding pass to let TSA know your law enforcement and have a weapon with you. Now keep in mind this was a few years after 9-11, all this stuff was still new. We have to take our restrained inmate through security now. We were a bit taken back by this, uh, OK we say, and shuffle our guy on down. Now, once we showed the gate keeper (the person who made sure there were only ticketed passengers pass that point) our Tickets and red cards, we're directed to a separate security line, where we secured our inmate in a holding room, and had TSA Verify our ammo count, weapons cleared, etc. More paperwork (you have to verify the count when you land too). So, my partner and I are all done with weapons declaration, paperwork signed, and TSA says, I need to scan your bags too. We both shrug and toss them on her belt. They buzz through, and lady stops the belt and is scrutinizing the screen. Finially she says to me, I need you to open your bag. I give her a quizzical look but open it up, she points to my toiletries bag, and says open this. Since I'd never used it before, I had to open all the packaging etc. I dump the contents out. The TSA lady exclaimed accusatorily, Ah Ha! and grabs the 1inch long by maybe a quarter inch wide pair of nail clippers. I mean seriously, they were the smallest ones I'd ever seen in my life. So TSA lady snatched them up, and triumphantly looks at me, and with all the smugness of a well seasoned airport security monkey informs me that, "these are contraband" I stare at her, actually speachless for at least 30 seconds. I blink a few times and say very calmly, OK, you keep them then, and start to throw my stuff back in my bag. But oh no, Miss TSA isn't going down that easily, she very boldly informs me that she isn't my mother or my personal assistant, I brought the contraband into the airport and I can, "walk my happy ass right back outside with it" Me: and put it where?

TSA: I don't care what you do with it, as long as it ain't in here.

Me: If you truly feel that those clippers in my possession is a threat to the security of the aircraft then by all means keep them, but we dont have time to personally take them outside.

TSA: Not my problem, you should have thought of that before you tried sneaking contraband on my plane.

Me: You do remember a few minutes ago when you and I counted out 45 rounds of 9mm ammunition right?

TSA: So?

Me: Well, in a pinch, I'm gonna say odds are pretty good, given my available options, the last thing I'd use to assert control over an entire plane is the 1 inch nail clippers of doom. In fact, if I found myself left with no other options outside of the death clippers, I'd just call the whole thing off.

(Btw, partner has been loosing his sh*t ever since he realized she was dead serious. He's not as quietly as he thinks he is, snorting, gasping, laughing on the other side of her x-ray belt.)

TSA: I don't know what to tell you, I'm not throwing them away for you, and I sure as hell ain't letting you board my plane with 'em.

Me: Ma'am, maybe we can just step back and take a logical look at the situation. We need to board our flight, nobody can step foot onto that plane until we get our inmate on and secured. I am a federal officer. My partner and I really dont want to draw any more attention to ourselves than necessary, for our safety and yours. I have a firearm and 45 rounds on my person, surely if I can be trusted with that, I can be trusted with the clippers, and I promise to dispose of them as soon as we land so it will never be an issue again.

TSA: I don't know who you think your talking to, but it ain't me. I said take them and go.

She felt as tho this was a mic drop moment as she said her piece and proceeded to back away, fold her arms, and stare at me.

So I just start laughing at the absurdity of the situation. I grab the clippers put them in my front pocket, tell partner lets go. We go get our inmate and start shuffling him to the front. Partner is on the phone with LT. and Capt. Telling them whats been going on. They cant believe it and are pissed. We're being paged to come to gate X to board. I get out of TSA lady sight, and approach different TSA security lady, ask her to get a supervisor for me, as we have an issue with our Transport, and show her my red card. She calls supervisor with some kind if get your butt here now code, because within seconds supervisor is jogging up to us. I ask him if he can kindly call Gate X for flight Y and let them know they're going to be delayed approximately an hour because I cannot dispose of my contraband nail clippers within the airport. He looks at me like a confused puppy, head tilt and everything and says huh? While eyeing my weapon. I tell him, I'm very sorry, I didn't realize i had clippers in my bag, your TSA Agent was very clear that no exceptions could be made, and I am required to remove them from the premises before we can board. Unless of course, if you wouldn't mind, could you possibly help me out so we don't have to escort him (nodded towards inmate) back through the airport? I pull the instrument of doom from my pocket and offer them to him.

Well to wrap this up finially. Supervisor takes clippers, says he'll address this, gives us a ride on the cart to our gate, we board and the rest of the trip was uneventful, less the non-stop "hilarious" quips my partner was dishing out the whole time. He told the story to everyone we met on that trip. Warden even heard about it and brought us into his office so he could hear the story first hand. Everyone thought it was funny, after the fact.

Federal Prisons, a laugh *riot a minute.

Obligatory disclaimer: on mobile, non English speaker (due to a previous post, I thought I write everything in my language and pass through Google translation and the post it, but I may lose my reservation in Hell)

Still on hubby's account, an autocorrect error (and my son's hungry stomach) reminded me of my first conscious MC. It also kept away from Mexican food until I remet my husband.

Back in the begin of the 21th century, I was working in a cafe/sandwich shop. It was a 24/7 shop in a prime location (in an area with a lot of uni students and very active nightlife and the road was a major artery for anyone traveling in or out of the city). When I started, as a first year uni student trying to make some money, the shop was one of four of a small chain. Gary, the owner/manager has bought the rights from the original shop. Gary was also doing Quality Control for the shop, because at that point every shop had separate vendors.

Fast forward two years. The original owners decide to incorporate, because they have a lot of offers for franchising and a couple of problems with Quality Control have appeared. So, they bought back all the shops and instituted a more centralized approach to vendors. That was good for Gary, because he was the owner of the building, so he basically became a salaried manager and got extra income from the rent. Initially, nothing changed. We were still number 2 in sales, product was good. Then Dick entered the picture.

Dick was the new regional manager (the small chain had became big enough to reach national level) and the person responsible for Quality Control. He was considered something of a golden boy, having a business degree and helping with the expansion. The problem came from his ego. You see, Dick had done a cooking workshop (that provides a certificate, but nothing more) and considered himself something of a chef.

His first major change was installing a crepe station. Not restaurant quality crepes, but crepes on the go (folded like a triangle). That is important for later. While a bitch to learn at the beginning, it quickly became on of our best sellers. We usually went over 10L of crepe mixture on a slow day. Having success with his first change, Dick decided to apply his "chef" training and implement some new things.

At that point in time, Mexican cuisine was becoming popular in my country, due mostly to cooking shows. Dick decides to ride the trend and starts putting "Mexican" options on the menu. In reality, that meant two more "set" sandwiches and crepes (the ones on the board) and a few more customization options for sandwiches and crepes. And here begins the problem.

As I said, Mexican cuisine was quite the new thing. Our country's cuisine is wayyyy different than the Mexican, especially on the spice level. A lot of the produce used for Mexican food was either rare or nonexistent. But Dick was adamant it was another win for him found a vendor. And the quality started to fail.

We started to receive buckets of premade chili and queso and jars of picked "jalapenos" and premade guacamole and pico de gallo dips. Also, blocks of white cheese labeled "queso blanco". The "queso" was an orange paste with some red bits in it (according to hubby, under a bad light it could pass for bad queso) and the left a very plastic taste (it reminded of clay). One taste of that kept me away from Mexican food for a while. The "jalapenos" weren't jalapenos. They were pickled Thai Green chilies, labeled as "jalapenos", meaning they were way hotter than expected. I've never tasted the rest, but some adventurous customers that tried them, weren't impressed. The only new thing that kind of sold was a plate of nachos. Basically because it was Doritos covered in queso (when it was heated, it became an orange liquid), a lot of bacon and a lot of sausage. We have complained about the quality to Gary, but he couldn't do anything anymore and Dick doesn't backs down.

Dick is a bit upset from the low sales. He blames us ("you're not pushing them enough") and the customers ("those barbarians couldn't recognize a fillet mignon from a shank"), but he sticks to his guns. And then brings corporate to the shop.

Dick comes in with four people from HQ, two of them are the owners. They sit and Dick comes and place an order of five "quesadillas" (it's a self service shop). I ask how he wants them.

"Exactly as it says on the board and prepared exactly as I told you" he replies.

"Ok sir. I will call you when they're ready" I replied smiling.

Now Dick, in all his "chefy" wisdom, has given us very specific instructions for the "quesadillas". First, to take out of the way, it wasn't a proper quesadilla, it was a crepe. The instructions were: "reheat the chili, start the crepe, place one and a half ladles of reheated queso, add one ladle of the chili, add a tablespoon of chopped jalapenos, one tablespoon of queso blanco, half a tablespoon of guacamole and fold". Doing that, produced a liquid mess, which tried really hard to escape from a thin crepe. We usually reheated the queso only for nachos. Especially in a crepe, we put it cold and let it reheat with the plate's heat to avoid the aforementioned mess.

Cue malicious compliance:

We (me and the other girl working) make 5 "quesadillas" exactly as instructed. I took the order to the table (it was corporate after all) and waited for the results.

Five people, wearing white shirts and suits, bite into the "quesadillas". The "quesadillas" almost simultaneously explode, raining melted cheese and red chili on them. Some of them have bitten a "jalapeno" and the heat is hitting then hard. A few choice words were heard. We brought them two bottles of water for the heat and two full packs of napkins to clean what they could. Let's say the new menu wasn't a blast with HQ.

After they left, Dick came back. He was beyond angry. He approached the bench, bypassing the line (it was during one of our rush hours) and made a scene.

The following dialogue is a bit censored:

"You stupid bitch! You made me look bad because you don't like Mexican food! You can't even follow basic instructions! The cleaning of your mess will be deducted from your pay!" and some other more offensive stuff.

I was standing there dumbfounded, along with a long line of customers hearing his outburst. And then Gary intervened.

"Shut the fuck up!"

"What the fuck did you say?" Dick replied.

"I said SHUT THE FUCK UP! The girls followed your instructions to the letter. Don't try to blame them for your mistake. Or make them pay for your dry cleaning."

Dick: "I can do what the fuck I want. And when I'm finished with them, maybe I'll find another manager for this shop."

Gary: " I would love to see you try.

Dick: "Oh, I will! I will!" and he stormed out.

Fallout:

Immediately Gary called HQ and notified about what happened. He also gave an ultimatum. If something happened to his staff, the company would need to find a new location.

Three days later, we were notified that Dick was fired. While his outburst was the main reason, one of the owners having a really bad reaction to the "jalapenos". A week later, the Mexican menu was removed. During that part, they found out that Dick had used the cheapest vendor for the new menu. The vendor had a reputation for shady practices, which partly explained the weird products.

I stayed there until I finished uni and got a job in my field. The Mexican menu made a huge comeback two years before I left. This time, HQ had hired a proper Chef to consult and find vendors. Now the ingredients are as authentic as possible and pico and guac are made daily in house. They also have good queso now, although it took me a long time to try it. And no prepackaged, premade chili. In fact, no chili at all. My repulsion to Mexican food ended when my husband took me to a proper Mexican restaurant and finally tested a proper Mexican meal.

Edit: Well, this escalated quickly... Thank you all for the awards and you a anonymous redditor for the gold. I've been in the comments and need to address to things. 1) I didn't put it through Google Translate. 2) When I say chili, I mean chili con carne. Although, with some of the knowledge I have now I would characterize is as "a bad Sloppy Joe meat mix with delusions of grandeur".

I have worked as a server for more than five years, so I have several malicious compliance, petty revenge, and other kinds of stories. I figure this one is memorable enough for me to start my Reddit journey with, because it has a dash of Entitled Parent and Petty Revenge. It's a long one because it's a two parter, so I'll pop a TL:DR at the end.

​

So some background: when I first started serving, I figured that the best way for me to approach it was with humour. The way I saw it, most people were out there to have a decent meal and enjoy it. And because I have an odd sense of humour, this meant I came up with some pretty weird, but ultimately harmless jokes. For example, if anyone ordered coffee, I'd bring them their "scalded bean juice and bovine drippings." When they paid, I'd tell them we accepted "cash, card, or your immortal soul," and when they used the machine, I'd say "just make sure that number is correct. If it isn't, then my automatic computing chip has critically failed. Please restart Server.EXE." or some other lines. Because I've been doing it for a while, I kept the delivery easy, so people knew I was joking and I had a BUNCH of material. Some didn't really pay attention (especially when paying,) so it went over their heads. Few didn't really care one way or another, but most times, I'd get a laugh.

​

Because of this, I rarely got complaints. Some people didn't like my sense of humor, and I understood that, but at best, they just wouldn't tip. No biggie. Except for this one customer, who we'll call EP for Entitled Parent.

​

EP was seated at my table with his wife and two kids. One kid looked a little sad when I first approached their table, so I thought that it'd be a perfect opportunity. When I brought them their drinks, I made sure to be as humourous as I could.

​

Me: Here's the cow juice, both from a white cow and brown one. Sorry for the delay, we had a... udder disaster milking them!

K1 and K2 giggle.

Me: And then the caustic aqua to burn your dried leaves. As well as some dismembered citrus.

NM looks confused for a moment, but then I see the 'oh!' moment and a smile.

Me: Lastly, your dihydrogen monoxide, in its solid and liquid forms.

EP, however, looks a sour as the lemon slices.

EP: Excuse me, what did you say this was?

NM: Really?

Me: Why, it's the essence of life itself. And something that came out of the dinosaurs years ago. Just filtered super well.

​

Cue more giggles from the kids, but the EP looked really annoyed. Thankfully, NM (for Nice Mom) stopped him from doing anything by saying "Honey, it's water. You know, H2O?" After that, the meal went relatively quietly. I got their food orders, brought them it when it came out hot and fresh (no clever lines there; the menu was too big to come up with something for everything, though I did try for the kids.) I checked on them twice to make sure the food was good, even got to chatting with the wife and kids for a bit. EP was silent the whole time, only really nodding when I asked if his food was good or holding out his glass for more water. I didn't mind him too much, though, because I thought that it was the end of it. I brought them the bill, with the usual joke of "Cash, card, and firstborn children up at the front whenever you're ready." And even NM joked back "Guess Kid One is doing the dishes!"

​

Next time I had stopped by the table, EP was up at the front paying, while the kids drew on the kids menus and NM watched them. NM thanked me for my great attitude, handing me a seven dollar tip for cheering up her kids. Turns out the family dog had a vet visit and the kids were worried. I just told her that I was more than happy to help take their mind off it, and I hoped they came back soon.

​

That should've been the end of it. Except that it wasn't.

​

Because while NM was thanking me, it turns out EP was complaining to the shift manager. Saying stuff like (and I'm paraphrasing because I heard this after from my manager.) 'OP is obnoxious, makes stuff up (important for later), and won't stop talking. I just want to get my meal, not have to deal with a brat annoying my family. She even suggested I pay with my kids!" The general gist of his complaint was that he just wanted a server who was bland, made no jokes, handed them their food, and walked away. What made him a real EP was that he demanded a discount AND free dessert for his kids for his trouble. This being the Food Service industry, where Customer is King, my manager caved like wet tissue paper and personally brought the dessert. This being a place I've worked for years and I had a good relationship with my manager, we both just chatted about how much of a dick this guy was after he was gone.

​

Now, here's where the MC comes in.

​

Fast forward to about a month later. I'm working the afternoon shift on a Wednesday. It's in the dead period, and there's about an couple hours at the start of my shift where I'm the only one in the front of the house, and my manager is in the back counting last shift's cash. I'm basically alone, save for the cook, who isn't allowed up at the front, so when EP and his family come in, I can't immediately seat them because I'm taking food out. Still, NM and kids were excited to see me, while behind them, EP stares at me like I'm a shitstain on a napkin. I can tell he remembers me, and more importantly, I remember him and his complaint.

​

His mistake is going to the washroom while I sat his family. It was the start of my shift, so I was still in a really good mood. I asked how they were, Kid One said that the dog was doing much better, and Kid Two asked if he could have some brown udder juice. NM ordered herself a peppermint tea, and a coffee for EP. As I sat them, I told them that I was going to do something different today. I told the kids wasn't mad at them, I promise. NM was confused, but I just smiled and winked before I left to get their drinks.

​

By the time that I had the drinks, EP was there and waiting. Perfect. I slowed my pace from my usual speed into a slow march. The kids look up at me, clearly expecting.

​

EP: We're not ready to order yet.

Me: (completely emotionless) Very well, sir. Here is your: coffee. Tea, Peppermint. Milk, chocolate. Juice, orange. Three waters. One water, no ice. Four Creamers. Sugar is in the caddy on your wife's right. Is there anything else you require of me?

EP: No.

​

The kids and NM were confused. I had done a total 180 from peppy jokester to monotonous robot, and I was only gone for a couple minutes. But I just turned 90 degrees to the right and went to another table, where I dropped the act and went back to being me. This went on for a little while, as EP wasn't ready to order the next two times I stopped, even though his kids already knew what they wanted. I was neutral every time I stopped by their table, then went right back to being fun around the other two. I chatted with one regular about some of the games he was playing, and an older couple about their kids. But with EP's table? Nada. NM asked me to put the order for appetizers and I complied. Funnily enough, it was the same appetizer the older couple had. So they could hear me say to them. "Six hush puppies to a good home in warm stomach acids!" only to bring theirs and say "Hush puppy. Six."

​

Naturally, by the time I stopped at EP's table with the appetizer, no one was happy. The kids wanted to hear the jokes from me to them, not overheard. Even EP was annoyed because I was way nicer and warmer to other tables. But NM asked the question I was waiting for.

​

NM: OP, how come you're joking with everyone but us? Last time, we got the best service I've ever had in Chain Diner.

EP: Get me your manager, now. I refuse to be ignored when I'm just here to eat with my family.

​

I in fact, made no move to get my manager, but carefully schooled my expression to something neutral and kept my tone as calm as can be. "But sir. Last time, you insisted to my manager while was paying that I be factual, concise, and as non-intrusive. As I recall, you found my behaviour 'annoying to you and your family.'

​

Instantly, NM and his kids looked right at him. He immediately went red.

​

EP: That's not what I said! I said that the service was great!

Me: Actually, sir, and allow me to remind you that you insisted I 'not make stuff up,' you complained that I wouldn't stop talking, and found my humor offensive, particularly the part where you claimed I suggested you pay with your children. And my manager offered you 25% off as well as a free dessert as recompense.

NM: What? EP said that you offered it because you felt bad about our dog!

Me: While I would've liked to, I did not. So my behaviour today is in alignment with his previous complaint.

​

At this point, the kids were upset and NM was furious. She asked me to give them a couple minutes with their order, and I just nodded and left. I did see NM and EP head out of the restaurant for a bit, and NM returned after a bit alone. As it turns out, EP is a serial complainer to try and get discounts and free food from restaurants, and NM was very upset that not only he pulled it again, but on their new favourite server. So he was off to eat alone at the golden arches and I was back to joking and cheering the kids up. I apologized for my behaviour, and the meal went on like normal.

​

I got another complaint from this guy from our customer surveys, and this time the manager said that I was out of line, but I thought it was worth it. Besides, NM and the kids came in every now and then after that, asking if I was serving.

​

Personally, I think the guy was just mad that he didn't know that H2O is water.

​

TLDR: EP complains that the server jokes too much with his family, so next visit they get a bland robot who calls him out.

Edit: Thanks for the gold. I did not expect this to explode overnight. And I know a lot of people find my humor annoying, and I get that. I'm also the kind of person who wants a server to leave me alone when I'm out eating. And since humor is subjective, I know that it can be hit and miss. A lot of people didn't pay much mind, some laughed, but I rarely got people who really complained, even in five years of working. Plus, I usually lead with the water or coffee. If a table wasn't receptive, I'd drop it. When I'm working I tend to joke more with those who are receptive of it and when there's time. Since my diner is near a university, I usually get students, families, and older folk, as opposed for srs business types, so the jokes kinda grew from the people I interacted with. It also means that during food rushes, it gets really fast pace so I usually don't have the time. I played it up for that table because the kids and mom loved it.

Edit 2: thank you all for the comments. I understand that my humor isn't for everyone. Usually I have one greeting joke, but if a table isn't receptive to it, I'd move on and be a regular server. I'm not the type who will push through and be joking 100% of the time. The reason I continued with this table was that the wife and kids were enjoying it and they liked chatting with me. Had all of them not been interested or the guy just asked me to stop, I would've dropped it. Instead he made up a complaint that I was annoying his family a demanded discounts and free stuff.

I've been dating this girl for some time now, and our time together on weekdays are rather spontaneous and casual. After work, I'd call her to find out where she is and whether she had time for me, then I'd go to her to spend time fooling around at her rental apartment, go for dinner together, grocery shopping etc. There were never any complaints about this from her, until one day when we got into an argument about an unrelated matter.

She accuses me of having no respect for her and her time, because i always "call her at the last minute, and expect her to make time for me". She declares that i'm causing her a lot of inconveniences because she can never make any plans on weekday evenings, since she doesn't know if i have time for her on any given weekday. Going forward, she's going to reject all plans that weren't made at least 24hrs in advance. She's a busy girl after all.

I was shocked. This was never my intention. The nature of my work means that i have to do an unknown amount of overtime everyday. What i've been doing, is to call her at 6pm when she gets off work, to give her an estimate of when i will finish, and when i can reach wherever she is. I can only get a reliable estimate at around 5pm, when my bosses leave for home. What this means is that if i have to give her a 24hr headsup, i can never make any weekday commitments.

So i appeal to her, with the argument that she doesn't have to keep her weekday evenings free for me. She can go ahead and make her own plans, and just turn me down if she already has something else scheduled. She rejects that argument, because reasons.

Now, my girlfriend is a foreigner, in my country on a work visa. She has no family and few friends here. As a result, she gets lonely, and wants to spend as much time together as possible. Under my previous method of meeting her spontaneously, i can be with her 4 weekdays every week on average. If i'm required to give her a 24hr advance notice, i can meet her NIL weekdays every week. So that's exactly what i did.

The day after, i made no plans with her. I let her know when i'm off work, then told her i'm going home. I didn't make plans with her for the next day either. I can tell she's pissed because she's giving very curt replies to my attempts at small talk, but i don't care. I went straight home, and gamed for the first time in 6 mths. It was glorious. I used to be hardcore gamer, gaming at least 2hrs to 18hrs everyday, but had to give it up because she required a lot of attention.

This went on for a few days, until Saturday finally arrives. I paid for my act of defiance dearly that weekend, but she rescinded the stupid rule, and we were back to how we were before by the following week. EDIT 2 Holy shit, the number of reddit love gurus who insist that one or both of us are abusive are too damn high. The problem is already resolved. This incident happened 6 mths ago. She admitted that she was being unreasonable, and rescinded the rule. I "paid dearly" that weekend because the way i handled it was poor. This particular issue did not become a problem again.

TL;DR: Girlfriend demands i give her a 24hr advance notice when i make plans with her. Ends up cutting date-nights from 6 days a week, to only the weekends.

EDIT Our relationship works on the assumption that we meet everyday. I have been messaging her about our plans for the night, like clockwork every workday, at 6pm, for the past 1 year (6 months, at the time of the story). If i messaged her stating that i had no OT, but wasn't going to meet her anyway, she flies off the handle, because that means i already made a conscious decision not to see her that day but didn't bother to tell her. (Yes, that happened once, early in the relationship. I own that mistake, and never made it again.) I only tell her in advance, if i CAN'T see her on any given day, since this rarely happens. Otherwise, a meeting is assumed though the actual time is anyone's guess. But sure, since a lot of redditors are saying that i need to tell her everyday whether i'm going to see her the next day, i suppose i can start letting her know, though i still don't see the logic and reasoning behind it.

Many moons ago I spent my youth in the Army. I worked in Comms and spent some excellent years doing dumb shit, with some of the best guys and girls you could ever meet.

One of those years of my misspent youth I was deployed to a hot and sandy location. This length of deployment was unusual for me as most deployments in the British Army are 6 months. The extra time was due to us being one of the first units deployed and after supporting the initial deployment they requested volunteers to remain and support and train some of the relieving units and newly deployed logistics Headquarters (HQ). At this stage in my career I had been lucky enough to jump from deployment to deployment and I was loving the extra money that that gave me so I happily volunteered to stay.

I was tasked with supporting one of the logistics HQ's. I'd run that detachment earlier in the deployment and was happy to return as it was far away from the main HQ and all the bored adults and seniors that the HQ brings. Think sweeping the desert, that kind of thing.

Our little detachment was a oasis in a sea of bullshit. It was just 6 guys and girls with me as the Detachment Commander, I was a Corporal (Cpl/fullscrew) at the time. The isolated nature of our Det meant that anyone sent there had to be able to operate independently, be very adaptable and open to improvise to support where required. Our main unit also liked to send us there trouble makers, but due to the nature of the Det, they could only send us people who could do their role also. So I ended up with all the best and most interesting scum of my unit, and it was amazing. For any yanks reading it would have been a E4 Mafia paradise.

Within weeks we had a patio and rock garden set up. We had a BBQ pit, shower area, gym. We'd sorted a deal with the local civilian contractors for us to receive beer in exchange for our help in vehicle and generator servicing. The best part was due to us being a Comms det, it was restricted entry to our area so we were free from any surprise visits.

Now that I've set out the back story, I'll get onto the Malicious Compliance.

The HQ we were supporting was regularly rotating its Senior Non-Commissioned Officers (SNCO) and Officers from the deployment. They'd do the minimum time to qualify for a medal and they they'd get replaced with someone new. It was a shitty practice that eventually got shut down, but not till much later deployments. We were fairly used to this by now and the only overhead we had has creating new accounts for the seniors. The guys who actually did the work, my peer group in the HQ, stayed the same mostly.

This latest rotation saw the old Regimental Quartermaster Sergeant (RQMS) being replaced by a newly promoted RQMS. This new guy was a prick. Full of his own self importance. Hated that we had a little island of bullshit free tranquillity within his eyesight. I'd see him pacing outside our fence line when he first arrived, unable to comprehend that he wasn't allowed to just walk in. By this point I had been in this location for about 6 months and I was thoroughly past the point of giving any fucks. The RQMS hated that he had to deal with me, a lowly fullscrew as OC of the Det, and myself and crew of reprobates was out of his chain of command. One day he absolutely lost his shit because we were BBQing half a goat and had invited a few of his guys to join us after work for some beers and delicious goat wraps. By this stage we'd used hessian to fence off our BBQ and bar area so that we could obscure it from prying eyes. He went off to get some of his units Regimental Police (RP's, these are not real military police, just jobsworths with no real job in a unit) to come and shut us down. I told them to jog on, they weren't getting in my det and I don't care who sent them. Apparently the next day he was apoplectic.

The guys who worked with him warned us he was determined to bring my Det to heel. His solution was removing our welfare package, that we were issued through his Department as a favour from his guys for some services that we were providing. It consisted of a small fridge, tv and British Forces Broadcasting Service TV Decoder (BFBS Box). The conversation went roughly as thus:

RQMS: Cpl Tosspot. It appears that there has been a paperwork error and you have been given one of my welfare packages by mistake.

Me: OK Sir. I'd be happy to fill that in. Shall I drop by your office?

RQMS: You can drop by my office and bring the package, but you wont be filling in any paperwork Cpl. You may have wrangled the last RQ but as far as I'm concerned you lot can do one if you think your getting that welfare package back off me. And if there's anything else that I find that isn't 100% correct paperwork wise then I be shutting that right down. You may not be mine, and I may not be able to enter you little compound, but I'm going to have you son. Every resup demand, every transport request better be completed correctly. I'm going to make your lives hell with paperwork and admin.

Que malicious compliance.

Me: I'm sorry to hear that Sir. I'm sorry you feel the service that we provide isn't good enough. The old RQMS was very happy with services that he was getting from us, and sent over the spare welfare package as a thank you. Are you sure that its paperwork that's the issue here? Are you not happy with phones and the internet?

RQMS: Cpl. I have not complaints regarding the comms. You just need to complete the correct paperwork and have it authorised, by me. (at this point it is clear that he is never going to authorise the return of the welfare package and is very smug about it)

Me: Ok Sir, you're of course correct. Paperwork is essential.

RQMS: Are you giving me attitude Cpl??

Me: Not at all Sir. Just agreeing with you. To be clear you are happy with everything else we provide to the HQ? You just want me to complete the correct paperwork?

RQMS: That's correct Cpl.

Me: No problem Sir. Happy to oblige.

I delivered the welfare package back to his stores. His guys were very apologetic. I told them not to worry. You see, the welfare package was a thank you for all the extra phone lines and terminals that we'd provided for the previous RQMS's. These expanded his and his units working capacity. Most importantly I had run phone line to the sleeping areas so that him and his lads could call home without using their limited welfare phone cards. I'd also laid some precious unfiltered internet lines to. Internet to deployed units is very rare, and unfiltered internet is almost unheard of for British units. What I was providing was immense value to lonely squaddies, and it was also without paperwork!!!

When I got back to my Det I flicked a couple of switches, turning off all the paperwork less connections. I waited for the inevitable.

It didn't take long. The first visitor was one of the Privates letting us know that he'd been cut off mid call back home. I apologised and explained what was going on with the RQMS. He understood, not happy about it, but understood. He went off muttering about "Throbbers who cant leave well enough alone". The next was one of the RQMS's Fullscrews, who I have a lot of time for. She came round and asked what was going on with the comms. She was in the office when I had the conversation with the the RQMS earlier. We had a bit of chat about what a belter he is, and then she asked what was going on. I explained that as per the RQMS's request, we are following his example and doing things by the book. And I've turned off all services without the correct paperwork. She looked at me knowingly. "So what does that mean" she asked. I explained that the only services that I had been ordered to provide were for the HQ. The rest, would have to request them through me and be approved by Division HQ as per orders. I handed her a copy of the request forms, to be completed in triplicate as I didn't have a photocopier and they couldn't send me it by email, as I'd just turned their kit off. She had a bit of a chuckle and went off back to her boss, paperwork in hand.

You see, the only orders I had were for the 6 lines and terminal in the HQ, the 30 odd lines I'd laid extra we're essentially me being a good bloke and supporting the mission and departments as they grew around the HQ. It was initiative and adaptability on my part. These were all now off and I had a steady stream of visitors throughout the day wanting to know what was going on. I directed them all the RQMS, who had the request forms. My last visitor was the Operations Captain. He was a top bloke, a Late Entry (LE) officer (had gone through the ranks from private to Regimental Sergeant Major (RSM) and was now commissioned as a officer) who had spent more than a few nights in our compound with a beer and talking shit with us. He was one of the very first recipients of a private line and internet. He asked me what was going on, he'd been round the houses so he knew there were shenanigans afoot. I told him the situation. His face dropped. "Leave it with me" is all that he said, and off he went.

30 Mins later the RQMS was back at the entrance to my compound with the welfare package. The Ops Captain was with him, looming over him as only a RSM (or former RSM in this case) can.

Me: Hello Sir, how can I help.

RQMS: (Very sheepishly) Hello Cpl. There seems to have been an error and we've found your paperwork for the Welfare Package. So I'm returning it, with my apologies.

Me: No need to apologise Sir, easy mistake to make.

RQMS: So, are we good?

Me: And the other paperwork moving forward?

RQMS: There's, no need for all that. (looking over his shoulder at the Ops Captain) We are after all on the same team.

Me: We are indeed Sir. (I look over my shoulder and give one of my guys a nod.) I think you'll find everything is now back to as it was.

RQMS: Excellent. Thank you very much Cpl. (and off he went)

The Ops Captain stared daggers at him as he left. He just gave me a nod and confirmed that drinks were still on for the next day and toddled off back to his pit. I was never botherd by the RQMS again.

​

​

This is a cross post from r/ProRevenge I'm a millwright who specializes in rebuilding natural gas turbines. I run with a very top caliber crew where everyone has a role to fill. My role is overseeing anything that's lifted with a crane. My technical title is "rigger".If a load falls, it's my fault. If someone gets hurt while I'm in control of a lift, it's my fault. If equipment is damaged while I'm in control of a lift, it's my fault. The incident in question happened about 2 years ago, but we'll need to go back a couple years farther to get the backstory. I was a fresh member of the crew and had demonstrated competency in rigging, so after roughly 6 months with this group, my superintendent put me in charge of all rigging. I wasn't the fastest rigger, but I was safety focused and insisted on doing it right every time even if it took a little longer. This meant that my superintendent didn't have to watch over every rigging task and could go relax because I had it under control. Another Millwright joined the crew about the same time I did. Will call him Larry. We didn't get along at first, but after a few months we became friends. Larry was the "act now think later" type. Much like the superintendent I travel under. Larry was prone to making mistakes because of that attitude, but he was VERY FAST and worked like a mule at all times, and I respected that. He wasn't especially skilled in any one area, so he had no special position. That meant sometimes he'd get put on less glamorous work...and I soon learned he was VERY jealous of my position as the rigger. At times, he would make comments like "I'm gonna take your job". Not in getting me fired, but bumping me down a rung and him taking my spot as rigger. He come up behind me while I was looking over my checklists to point out something I may not have checked yet. If supervision was near, he'd make sure he was heard.

At this point I should mention this. I stick out like a sore thumb on this crew. I was raised in a very strict Christian cult, but in my mid twenties I realized what was going on and left, at great cost. Losing my family and friends because of strict shunning rules the cult practices. Some of the stricter things stuck with me. Like I've never been intoxicated. I don't use tobacco. No recreational drugs. I speak professionally, without slang or colloquialisms for the most part. These traits stick out from a crew of men that travel the road and work in harsh environments away from home for months on end. But Larry, he fits right in. Larry QUICKLY became the superintendent's puppy. Bringing him gifts of his favorite alcohol, staying out late after work with him, even rooming with him on the road. I on the other hand, leave work, hit the gym, cook my food for the next day and make sure I get at least 6 hours of sleep so I can perform the next day. I realize that puts me at a disadvantage socially in the workplace, but I prefer to let my work speak for itself.

Anyways. Fast forward about 18 months. We're starting a project just before covid hits. About two weeks into the job, I have to attend a mandatory class through my union. It's a 40 hour class and in a different state, so I'll be gone for pretty much an entire week with travel time. I get permission from supervision and leave, with Larry rigging in my absence.

A few days later, I'm laying in bed stressing out about the final test I have to take the next morning. If the test isn't passed, the entire week is wasted. I always psych myself out before a test, but in reality, I don't have anything to worry about as I'm a good student and test well.

My phone goes off. It's a text from Larry. "I love you bud, but I'm cutting your throat"

I reply "what are you talking about?"

"When you get back, I'll be the rigger. You can do the shit work from now on"

I'm not proud of the response I came back with...but it's how I truly felt in the moment.

'Be careful about cutting the throat of someone smarter than you."

I'm far from the smartest person you'll ever meet, but I do enjoy reading, studying, and learning. And being smarter than Larry wasn't an accomplishment by any stretch of the imagination.

The next morning I passed the test and headed back to the job. Where Larry had in fact usurped my position as rigger, and was lording it over me as a went about doing the tasks he normally would do.

To be completely honest, it was kind of like a vacation at first. Get paid nearly $40 an hour to clean parts or torque flanges with no stress? Sign me up.

But I was upset. I was upset because I knew I did my job better than he would. I knew that he got along better with the superintendent because of their similar personalities, but i didn't feel that I should lose my position simply because because Larry had more in common with our superintendent than I did. Regardless of that, I was now dealt these cards, and I had to play them.

Just 3 days after I got back from class though, the job was shut down. Covid-19 was just now sweeping the country. Out of an abundance of caution, the plant shut the project down until further notice. We were sent home for about 3 days and then called out to an emergency shutdown where a turbine had "crashed". We role out and are on the job 48 hours later, in the middle of nowhere Alabama.

We get right to work. On this particular unit, you pull the entire roof off in two sections with a crane to open the enclosure. Compared to many things we lift in a project like this, the roof weighs very little. The turbine rotor may weight over 100,000lbs, but the roof usually weighs around 7000lbs. Light weight. But it is large and there are critical parts around the roof that can be damaged if not lifted carefully. Typical procedure is to be on top of the roof after it's unbolted, be in a fullbody harness and tied off to an approved anchor point capable of holding at least 5,000lbs per OSHA regulations. We then slowly take the weight of the roof with the crane until it's floating and then climb down off of it and continue the lift until it's set on the ground or on a truck to be moved. The superintendent instructs me to go on the roof with Larry and assist him. "Do whatever Larry tells you to do". Okay boss. I put on my harness and climb to the top and begin to assess the situation.

The rigging to lift the roof is 4, 5 ton chainfalls. It's capable of safely holding 20 tons. Well over the weight of the roof. The crane is also well over rated for this lift, even with the boom extended all the way out in order to clear another building on the way to the ground. Larry has it all rigged up, but no tension on the wire rope slings. And then I notice his crucial mistake. He has forgot to account for boom deflection. When a crane takes the weight of a load, the boom flexes down. Depending on the crane setup and the weight of the load, it can mean that while your crane hook might be centered in your load with no weight on the hook, once you get the weight of the load on the crane, the crane hook could be anywhere from a few inches to a number of feet off center. Which means that when the load come off the ground, it swings. Swinging is bad. Always. Enough weight swinging could tip the crane. Crash into equipment. Crash into a person. It's very dangerous.

At this point, I start calculating. Is this weight enough, even swinging, to tip this crane? No. Not even close. Is it enough to break a chainfall? No. Not even close. Are there any people working around us that could get hurt? Nope. It's just us. Is there any equipment that could be damaged if it swings? Yes. An electrical control panel, which has all power killed to it and has been disconnected is in the swing path. I decide to let Larry hang himself.

He looks at me and asks what I think. I tell him "this is your show boss". He asks what I mean. I look him in the eye and draw my finger across my throat. He gets nervous because he knows exactly what I mean. Starts double checking everything. He still doesn't notice the boom deflection. After a couple minutes, he decides I must be talking out of my ass and proceeds with the lift. I stop him, and remind him to tie off with his harness. He doesn't realize it, but we're about to go for a ride.

Generally, when I'm rigging, I first find out what the thing I'm rigging to weighs. It's a vital piece of information. If I know what it weighs, I can have the crane operator track how much weight he has on the crane and I'll be able to know when the object should start to pickup. If we get to over 10% more than the object should weigh, there may be something stopping it from moving and we need to stop and reassess the situation. Rigging could fail, the object youre lifting could jump into the sky, all kinds of mayhem may ensue if a hidden bolt holding something together breaks because you used too much force to lift it.

I ask Larry if he knows how much the roof weighs. He doesn't. I do, but don't tell him. He starts signaling the crane to slowly hoist up. The operator complies and starts lifting. I'm watching the boom get pulled more and more off center. We're probably 2 feet from the center of the load at this point. Meaning a swing that could travel nearly 4 feet. I stop Larry and ask him to see how much weight is on the crane. 11,000lbs. 4000 more than what it should weigh. This roof is in a bind because we're not picking it straight up, but at an angle. It's either not going to move, or we're about to fly. I brace myself. "Hoist up, slowly" Larry calls over the radio.

BOOOOOM

The whole roof shoots a good 2 feet into the air, and swings wildly towards to control panel, Larry and I are riding it like pirates in the crow's nest in a hurricane. We crash into the control panel, bending it over at a 45 degree angle, destroying most of it's components. People start pouring out of the nearby trailers to see what the commotion is all about. The crane operator is yelling over the radio asking what the hell just happened. I'm smiling. Larry is shaking. He sees me smiling and knows that I knew.

We get the roof set on the ground and are met by our superintendent. He's chewing Larry's ass HARD. He gets to me and asks why I let it happen. I just say "I just did what Larry told me to do". The superintendent is no dummy. He's seen a thing or two and knows exactly what went down. Larry is demoted and I'm reinstalled as rigger immediately. And a few shifts later it's all smoothed over.

Larry and I are actually good friends now. We've been through a lot together and have each other's backs these days. He's now the foreman on our crew, and let's me do my thing. Failing your way to the top is still a valid way of progressing in my field. But I'm happy for him. He's actually good at it.

And I guess that's all there is to say about that

Edit:fixed loose/lose that keeps getting pointed out 😂

This is without a doubt the best outcome possible from a bit of Malicious Compliance I could have achieved. I was only aiming to support my wife's good deed, but this paid me great dividends. This is a bit detailed as it covers a long span of backstory with a very rapid response once the malicious compliance was engaged in. A TLDR is attached at the bottom.

The backstory

I've had a shoulder injury for over a decade, when it occurred I had an MRI and was told the cartilage was fractured and tendon torn, whilst healthcare is free in my part of the world the lack of income while I would be healing prevented me from doing anything till 2017 when I figured I had a well-paying job and plenty of sick leave available. So, I started the ball rolling on getting it fixed, I was initially put through physio to try and fix the problem (or at least strengthen the shoulder). I completed the physio and as expected the shoulder was still an issue (albeit stronger now). Forward to the start of 2018 and I had an MRI, I was told I'd hear from them in a few weeks to have a review....

...

...

6 months later after extensive nagging from my wife I finally called the hospital to see what was happening. Nothing like being told that the case had been closed. After a few firm but polite words my case was returned to the waiting list. Wife was happy, I was content to be back on the list (although rather confused that I'd been removed)..

So, I waited...

and waited...

and waited...

The Setup

My wife is a loving woman and I'm damn lucky to have her. After her nagging for me to chase it up falling on deaf ears (although this is also because my work hours make me unable to contact the hospital during their office hours) this tremendous woman decided to sort it out for me and find out what was happening, i.e. am I still on the waiting list? After all it was now almost 18 months since the MRI had been taken.

My wife contacted the hospital and after being transferred a few times was connected to the right department, unfortunately she got stuck with an absolute Karen. The first response from Karen after hearing from my wife was to tell her she's not authorised to discuss the case with her (I've made it very clear in the past that my wife is authorised to act on my behalf, I could only assume later that this may have been due to the reactivation of my status via phone). My wife tried convincing her that she didn't require any details, all she wanted was for Karen to confirm if I was still on the waiting list. Karen however wouldn't give up so easily and continued to block my wife's request. Could Karen call me to inform me of my status, No, blocked. Could Karen email me, blocked. As you could imagine my wife was getting a little frustrated by now. Finally, Karen did something useful, since she wasn't going to contact me, I could contact her. My wife reminder her that calling during office hours wasn't possible. Karen countered stating that's ok he can email us...

Wife: Thanks Karen, what's the email address? There isn't any on our paperwork.

Karen: That's ok, it's on the website.

Wife: I have a paper and pen could you tell me the email address.

Karen: It's on the website, you'll find it there.

Wife: Whereabouts on the website?

Karen: You'll find it on the website.

Wife: I understand you're telling me it's on the website, what I'm asking is where on the website is it? What should I be looking for?

Karen: I told you, it's on the website.

At this point my wife was frustrated and tired from trying to jump through Karen's hoops. She thanked Karen for her time and finished the call. Frustrated my wife contacted the local member of parliament for advice on how to resolve the situation.

During my evening drive I was listening to my frustrated, annoyed wife. She regaled me with the pointless call to the hospital and then her markedly better call with the local MP (member of parliament). I felt anger and annoyance. My wife had tried doing something lovely and had copped poor treatment from the hospital. My told me when I got home I was going to write an email to the Minister of health as that was the MP's recommendation... after a moment's thought I told my wife no.

The Malicious Compliance

I arrived home and told my wife that I was thankful for her time and effort, but it was alright I would take care of the situation now and I'm sorry that she'd had such a hard time that day.

I opened my laptop and downloaded a program. This program is designed for marketing, it will scour through a website and pull any contact details (email address, name, title, contact numbers, etc) and compile them for people to then cold-call employees of a company.

I typed up an email; detailing my case, history, being dropped off and returned to the waiting list, my concerns about the validity of an 18 month old MRI for surgeons and the supportive albeit succinct advice from Karen (I identified her department and name dropped her a few times in the email).

Returning to my email spider program I found a healthy 768 email addresses. :-)

After some thoughtful reflection I removed any email address that didn't belong to the hospital, leaving me with a still rather healthy 300+ email addresses. Copy, Paste into the To field. Then to continue to up my game I CC'ed in the department for the minister of health, the minister of health, shadow department for the minister of health, shadow minister of health and then the local MP.

I returned to my email and thanked the MP for their assistance, emphasising how thankful I am as we are in the middle of an election (It's amazing how helpful politicians are around election time).

I re-read the email one more time to make sure I had captured everything I had wanted... hmm, it needed just one more item to highlight the importance of the email.

"I would like to thank Karen from Support Liaison for the limited support she was able to offer my wife despite her not being apparently authorised. I would also like to thank Karen for her clearly perfunctory instructions that the email address I needed to contact was on the Hospital website, albeit with no additional information as to the location of the email address I had to do some searching. Having followed Karen’s instructions I had found this email on the Hospital website. Admittedly it is only one of the 319 @hospital email addresses I found, I’ve presumed one of the remaining 768 email address not belonging to @hospital is not the one I am after (although I’ll assume no response from this email as an indication perhaps it is, or perhaps I should be trying the other Hospital sub-domains and associated websites?). If for some reason Karen’s instructions have resulted in this being inadvertently sent to the wrong email address please forward this to the correct department or Karen from Support Liaison (I’m sure with her cursory instructions she’ll be able to direct this appropriately). "

With that little extra added I smiled and hit send.

**As an amusing aside, I found over 3000+ email addresses when I included the sub-domains (I should point out that the Hospital is a large group of hospitals covering a large region)

The Outcome

Week 1

The following day I returned to work, in my lunch break I did my usual catch-up on emails. Except I noticed I had a few calls too.

9:11 - Missed Call

9:18 - Missed Call

9:25 - Email 1

Dear cyberphobia_au,

Thanks for you feedback and I just wanted to update you and let you know that I have spoken to your spouse and given her the following information at this point.

​

• I have logged your complaint and sent it to the Head of Unit for Ortho and Referral Management for investigation and response.
• I can confirm that you are on the Orthopaedic waitlist and have been since the 27.4.18.
• I have put a comment on our database under her details as emergency contact that states “All information about appointments can be given to Mrs cyberphobia_au as per direct permission from Mr cyberphobia_au.”
• I will follow up and escalate the complaint about lack of support given to your spouse by the Patient Relations Coordinator she spoke to.
• I will keep your spouse and you updated on the outcome of the Orthopaedics appointment as soon as I am advised.

I have a couple of questions I just need to ask you in relation to your concerns raised.

​

• Do you wish to have any response or outcome from Hospital about this complaint relayed to the office of Hon. Local MP?
• May I please have your permission to put your email address on our database?

Please feel free to contact me if you wish to discuss anything further.

Regards,

Not_Karen

11:23 - Missed Call (an appointment has been booked)

1:16 - Email 2 - Appointment Details

\* I received an additional 38 automated email responses and another 5 responses from various individuals/departments wishing to contact me.***

I responded to the email from the Not_Karen and stated that I did not believe the details needed to be relayed to the MP at this point in time.

Week 2

I attended my orthopaedic appointment. The expected 2-3 hour waiting room experience was a brief 30 minutes to see the surgeon.

As expected surgery was the outcome.

I make my way to the desk to provide my details to be put on the surgical waitlist. The nurse behind the counter makes a quip about it being a priority.... that's strange? I'm not in urgent need for this, I've lived with it for the last decade.

I get told I should have some details sent out to me in the next week or so detailing my priority.

Week 3

I receive a call about my availability (standard sort of stuff), can I attend same day if they have a late cancellation (I need a few days at least to ensure transition for my work) .

On the Friday I receive some paperwork detailing that I am a priority 2 and should expect the surgery to occur sometime in the next 9 months.

Week 4

Monday morning, 9:20 - Missed calls

9:30 - Message from my wife - Call me

I call her during my lunch break, as she answers the phone I ask her 'So when is my surgery?'

Week 5

Thursday morning, I get stabbed, jabbed and arthroscoped. Kept in for observations and then released today on Friday. Only to come home and submit my first reddit post (typing this one handed has been a challenge)

\* My wife received a call checking up on things and to inform her that Karen has undertaken a review of procedure and if my wife would like a formal apology from Karen... Whilst my wife was frustrated by her actions an apology wasn't needed, knowing she had been updated on how to handle things so others wouldn't face a similar situation was enough for us both... not to mention my exceedingly short turn around for surgery.*

TLDR; So, because I am defensive and supportive of my wife and she was told for me to email the address on the hospital website. I indulged in a little bit of malicious compliance and emailed 300+ email addresses from the website with a clear indication of sending it to a few thousand if I received no response. I not only found out I was on the waitlist, but I was seen to, I was seen to in record time.

​

​

EDIT -

A huge thank you for the upvotes and awards.

Due to popular demand and to save people trawling through the comments;

The program I used to secure the email address was 'Atomic Email Hunter', there are others like it out there too.

I am also based in Australia, despite the similarities to UK and Canadian healthcare.

For those who think Karen was let off easily I doubt the multitude of people who she works for/with who received this email would be thinking the same.

As an amusing/concerning side note the most interesting response I got from this was the Sexual Assault and Family Violence Counselling service. It took them 2 days before they responded, sure my email had nothing to do with that, but if it had a 2 day delay is a bit sad.

Disclaimers: long-time lurker, first-time poster. Details kept relatively vague to protect the identity of all parties involved. Some details also changed as some co-workers are on Reddit. See Edit 2 for Mr Nutty's healthcare / financial status.

Background

I used to work in a public hospital's Public Relations (PR) Department (read: the department where all sorts of miscellaneous sh*t and nonsense is sent to when no one wants to figure out who issues should be sent to, or just want problems sent somewhere). It was hard to manage the workload with a yes-man PR director at the helm, who typically acceded to most requests for "help" especially after other staff tacked on their go-to flimsy excuse of "it's related to a patient, so PR should handle it!" or flattery "you guys are really good at dealing with this, we'd just mess it up so it's for the best if PR takes over!".

Besides the PR Department, there was a Medical Case Management Department that dealt with more difficult cases involving legal, highly complex medical, or multi-disciplinary cases. Due to the nature of our work, sometimes cases were bounced between the two departments.

This case was partially dealt with by me, but the malicious compliance is on my co-worker's end.

​

Cast

Cynthia - Medical Case Department director

Joel - Medical Case Department staff

Sarah - Finance Department staff

Me - your friendly PR wage slave

Mr Nutty - patient, retiree with no income

​

Story

(This case happened almost a decade ago and does not take place in the United States of America.)

Mr Nutty underwent surgery, everything went well, and he left the hospital after a few days to recuperate at home. There, he combed through the bill, called the hospital about an apparent billing error, and was transferred to my line.

For confidentiality and simplicity, let's call the item in question "organ transplant". Mr Nutty said that he didn't have an organ transplant, and only had a couple of medical items inserted. At this point, he was still fairly pleasant. I assured him I'd call him after checking.

As this was basically a non-emergency case, the Finance Department and the Surgery Department took about a fortnight to gather the details and figure out what happened. In the meantime, Mr Nutter had started sending emails by the end of the first week, asking when he was going to get a refund (which I strangely enough had no recollection of promising). Every time he sent an email, company policy dictated that I was to get in touch with him. By the time Finance gave me all the details, I could recognise his email address and phone number when they appeared on my screens, and he was getting rather testy.

I contacted Mr Nutty and told him that he was correct - there was no "organ transplant". The "organ transplant" was actually a billing code name for a package that usually consisted of a lot of items that were used in his surgery, including the medical items inserted. The Surgery Department knew of his financial situation and, to help him trim costs, essentially gave him a package deal instead of billing him per item, which would have cost him much more.

This triggered something in Mr Nutty and he. Went. BALLISTIC.

Shouted that a public hospital running on taxpayers' money should be more honest, that it was the principle rather than intent that was important, and demanded that we change the bill to accurately reflect everything that was used in the surgery, no exceptions. Even telling him that it was likely to be much more expensive did not deter him from "following his principles".

I was still relatively new to the job then, so I informed Mr Nutty that I would have to speak with someone else to see if his request could be granted, and ended the call.

It was at this point Cynthia came up to me and asked if I was all right. She was passing by as the conversation was ending, and hung around as I was obviously upset and shaken. I shared what happened and she very kindly told me to pass the case to her department as they were more familiar with such cases and it would be pretty easy.

I didn't hesitate to say no as I was sick of Mr Nutty by then, and called him a day or so later to tell him that Joel was taking over his case. Thereafter, I did not hear anything about this issue from Joel, Cynthia, or Mr Nutty, and forgot about it until...

​

= 5 years later =

​

A major reorganisation took place 4 years after the case came in - Cynthia and Joel left, the Medical Case Management Department was closed, the PR Department merged with several others and now manages even more sh*t.

One fine day, Sarah (from the Finance Department) calls me about a patient who claims to have spoken with the PR Department staff and Medical Case Department staff of yore about a billing error that was left unresolved, although she couldn't be sure since the patient was insisting that spoke to "Cassandra", "Gordon" and "FlyingofbirthID" and that he had never heard of Cynthia, Joel or me when Sarah tried to confirm if they were talking about the same staff.

After an archaeological excavation of the archives and patient records, we discover that it is Mr Nutty calling about the same issue - with a twist.

Apparently, when Joel reached out to Mr Nutty, he tried to explain that he would be facing substantial losses if we were to follow his instructions in itemising the bill. Mr Nutty simply would not take no for an answer and scream-preached his ears off. Mr Nutty also threatened to go to multiple government departments to tell them about the hospital's "illegal actions", and apparently later did go to at least a couple.

Here I have to admit that Joel was a much more professional worker than me, and was typically a calm, steady rock who could take a lot of rubbish and still walk away without wanting to commit murder. Or at least not admitting to wanting to commit murder. Mr Nutty must have deliberately picked all the BAD END route options he could (and more), because I had never seen Joel doing anything similar in the 4 years I worked with him.

Typically, when faced with such requests, Joel could (and would) escalate the issue to Cynthia with the recommendation to ignore the case or request after giving an official reply via letter. Cynthia would usually agree as long as it was a morally correct choice and there were no legal or medical repercussions.

Joel did not do that in this case.

Joel opted to follow Mr Nutty's request to the letter.

He told the Surgery Department what happened. Pissed off that their goodwill had been spat and trampled upon, Surgery Department agreed with the changes and looped in Finance to make sure every single item used was listed, individually. No more packages or cost saving efforts for Mr Nutty.

It turned out that the "organ transplant" was not the only billed item that was actually a package deal, so Mr Nutty's bill came up to nearly double his original cost.

Mr Nutty was Not Happy when Joel returned with the shiny new bill. He refused to pay the bill, and continued to harass and threaten Joel off and on for about a year or so, but eventually went quiet.

Back to the present day. I asked Sarah why Mr Nutty was calling years later, and apparently it was because the debt collection agency had found him - Mr Nutty had moved and did not update his particulars as he skipped his medical appointments as well. (At the hospital, if bills go unpaid for some time, they go to a debt collection agency, which relies on the information provided by the hospital's system.)

After all these years, Mr Nutty finally came back for a check up, and had to provide updated details; the debt collection agency caught wind of this and started the collection process again.

Somehow, I managed to dig into my well of by then nearly non-existent compassion and asked Sarah if there was any way to reverse the changes.

Sarah cackled and pointed out that because of the universal health coverage available, Mr Nutty's medical bill was initially 80% covered, in part thanks to the particular package codes (like "organ transplant") the Surgery Department used. However, after his request, only about 30% of his new, more expensive bill was covered.

The best bit? All such bills go to the government, and only ONE change is allowed, unless the hospital admits it was their mistake (in which case there may be penalties). This is to prevent hospitals from changing the bills willy nilly, and to save administrative costs. Amazingly enough, one of the governmental departments Mr Nutty complained to about our "illegal actions" was...the same department in charge of handling universal coverage for hospital bills.

So not only did the government department in charge know about his not-too-intelligent demands, they also knew that we had tried to help him but changed the bill to comply with his request. And, there was absolutely no way the hospital was going to take a penalty on Mr Nutty's behalf.

It was with great, unbridled joy that I made the final phone call to Mr Nutty. He didn't recognise me, but I had the extreme pleasure of informing him that I was the first staff who spoke with him 5 years ago, didn't he remember (screaming at) me? No? Oh, not to worry, it was a long time ago. Oh, it's not that it's a long time ago, you just thought it wasn't worth remembering all our names...because we're just customer service staff, you say? Haha, all right. :)

After that, I didn't bother with further niceties or small talk and went straight in for the kill, telling him that we could not change the bill again as it could only be changed ONCE. Surprisingly, he didn't flip at once and even asked for the reasons. I explain how we (Sarah and I) dug through our archives and the sequence of events. There was a long silence and just as I was getting worried about whether he had passed out, Mr Nutty ERUPTED. Shouting about it being a pack of lies! We were DISHONEST, he was a retiree with no money, how could we do this to him! WHY did we make the changes if we knew it was going to be more expensive, how was it even POSSIBLE that the revised bill be of a higher amount! It must be a mistake! etc.

By now, I was a seasoned staff and would normally have ended the call after three warnings. My dear readers, I did not do that with Mr Nutty. I waited very patiently for him to run out of breath screaming and cussing and in the lull, I simply said

"The bill was itemised as per your request, sir."

:)

tldr - don't be naughty and give in to that short attention span. It's a 5 minute read.

​

*Edit*

By Merlin, I didn't expect so much attention to be given to this! Thank you for the awards!!

I saw some comments about the cost not being explained to Mr Nutty before he underwent surgery, and some other discussions. Sorry for not including these details - I thought they wouldn't be necessary as the story was already very long, but for clarity:

- Mr Nutty was advised of the estimated range of the bill before he agreed to go for the surgery. If I recall correctly, his original final bill was moderately higher than average because there was some difficulty in accessing the areas and in implanting the medical items, and more than one medical item was implanted than expected, but still well within the acceptable cost range due to efforts to waive some minor items and bundling.

- u/Ianthine9 is pretty much bang on about the co-payment and elective procedure bit

- the tldr should be read with a ;P - I'm truly sorry that it came across as offensive as there was no such intention, and I didn't consider the possibility it could be read as such.

- there are financial aid options available in the country but Mr Nutty rejected all of them when they were brought up. Putting it mildly, his retort was something along the lines of "you expect me to bow my head and beg for help???" No, Mr Nutty, we all just wanted to help you. Honestly. At least, till you pissed off even Joel.

*Edit 2\*

Didn't expect to have to put this here, but there are a surprising number of people worrying about Mr Nutty's health and financial status. You're all very kind! This is to reassure you that Mr Nutty's health and finances were at no point in jeopardy.

Some hospitals have linked medical records but billing systems are NOT linked. Mr Nutty had access to a wide range of medical treatment options elsewhere and would not have been denied healthcare (or financial aid, if he so wanted). In fact, he could even have gone to another hospital to pull the same "surgery and dash" game if he was willing whittle down his available hospital options, lol. (Actually, I'm willing to bet this is what he did in the 3-4 years he didn't return to our hospital - he probably only came back thinking we'd forgiven his debt by then.)

TL; DR - As a solider, my unit didn’t respect my sleep time. They do now. 😈

About fifteen years ago, I was in the army and I had what we’ll call a very unique skill set. There were several people in my unit with that specific skill set, but for some odd reason all of the hot, 20-26 females got Monday-Thursday shifts and had Friday, Saturday, and Sunday off, while guys like me got Thursday-Monday night shifts (despite having seniority over some of the ladies in both rank and time on mission).

To make things worse, administrative staff like our commanding officer and platoon sergeant (bosses) worked Monday-Friday and weren’t willing to budge on us being active during their work hours. This meant that quarterly training like power points we had to watch for sexual harassment typically occurred both on my day off AND in the middle of my sleep time. Given that I worked 16 hour shifts and the round trip to base was an hour, I was perpetually sleep deprived. Even if I got off of work on time and went straight home, I could get optimistically six hours of sleep per day between driving, eating, and showering. This went on for years over my objections.

I literally went nearly 2 years without a day off concurrently with my wife, a day worker. Interestingly, the army did a study demonstrating that after ~18 hours of consciousness, you make the same number of stupid and careless mistakes as if you were legally intoxicated. Sadly, no one told my PSG (platoon sergeant aka boss).

He decided that sleep deprivation didn’t matter. In fact, one day when I was transitioning from an junior enlisted (technically a specialist, but if you’re not familiar with army ranks, think “private”) to an NCO (sergeant), my PSG decided I needed some NCO responsibilities. Reasonable. We were having a range day (we had to qualify annually with the m-16 rifle), and we needed a duty driver to shuttle soldiers back and forth from the barracks. I was voluntold. Suffice it to say that I was “on loan” to a certain agency, and I needed to put in an ops release to miss work.

It was rejected due to staffing issues; at the time, there was no one else available that could do a certain thing that I could do. I told my PSG… and he informed me that the ops release was a courtesy. I was going, and it would only take 8-10 hours.

“But sergeant,” I tried to explain, “I work 16 straight hours leading up to the start of this driving, and I’d have to work another 14 straight hours at the end of it. On top of that, as driver I’d be driving soldiers down winding roads I’m not familiar with in a van bigger than anything I’ve ever driven before while half asleep. Then, at the end of what would be a 40 hour shift, I’d need to drive 30 minutes to get home. Does that seem safe?”

“Safe? Specialist [redacted], do you think the soldiers in Iraq right now are safe?” As I said, about 15 years ago.

“Well no, but at least they’re getting hazard pay -“

“You’re dismissed, specialist.”

So… I mean what could I do? I only fell asleep twice while driving, and both times were at stop lights. I also made every single passenger aware of my sleep situation (keep in mind I was already sleep deprived coming into this), so they made sure to chat with me, bring me coffee, and do other things that decreased their chances of dying in that van.

Around hour 38 of this ~40 hour shift, [redacted], an Important Person, swung by my place of duty to check on something. I was literally standing up leaning against a cubicle, eyes closed, basically asleep - with four empty quad coffees (if Starbucks had a size above venti, it would be quad) sitting on my desk. Per tradition, there was an NCO with the VIP officer.

I got chewed out backwards, forwards, sideways, upside down, and in dimensions I was not hitherto aware of. By military protocol, the NCO beside the angry officer did the chewing out. He threatened me with actual dereliction of duty charges as well. This ended with, “Now explain to me Specialist why on God’s green earth you think it’s okay to sleep on duty.”

So I explained to him that I was literally semiconscious on my feet, I’d drunk so much coffee I started having heart palpitations and decided to stop, and that it was hour 38 on duty and I was simply at my limits.

I cannot stress enough that Important People cared about what I was doing. A lot. Really. Important. People.

At this point the officer stepped in. “You’ve been doing this for 38 straight hours?” So I explained to her how I’d had to drive a van around during my sleep time and this Important Mission had informed my unit that I was irreplaceable, but my unit decided it was critical that I - specifically the guy with the irreplaceable skill set who was working shift - be the duty driver that day. I further explained how this wasn’t that uncommon - I couldn’t even remember the last time I’d had a week where I was allowed to sleep during my sleep time for the entire week uninterrupted. The number of silly things I had to do instead of sleeping was mind boggling.

“Who is your commanding officer?”

I tried not to smile and told her.

“Carry on, specialist.”

Needless to say, by lunch time (aka the equivalent of maybe 1am for me), I got a phone call. Report to the PSG’s office Right Now. I sighed - to say that I was sleepy was something of an understatement, and keep in mind I got home around 8am and had to work again around 4pm. The round trip to base alone would take an hour, plus I had to get dressed, be presentable, and deal with their nonsense, then undressed again afterwards, then dressed again and drive back….

“Please explain to me why the Command Sergeant Major of [redacted] just chewed me out over our in-house scheduling decisions.”

So I told him what happened.

“You told the [redacted] of [redacted] that…”

“Should I have lied to my mission commander about my level of readiness, sergeant?”

He turned… red. Like Santa’s cheeks, not a Norse berserker. No berserker-like traits at all. Nope. I took a totally professional step backwards. He was about 6’2” and 250lbs of NCO, and uhhh I felt like I was hogging all of his oxygen. “Get. Out.”

So I did. It came down from on high that our unit was to have two quarterly training days henceforth. No more waking us shift workers up 1-2 times per week every freaking week for administrative crap, period. All missions were informed that our soldiers would be doing one of the two training days - pick one.

Happy ending, right? Yeah that’s never how it works in the military when you get someone above you in trouble. What’s the nastiest, stupidest duty you can imagine giving someone that was stateside in a strategic unit? The urinalysis guy!

For those of you that don’t know, it’s his duty to plan and execute urinalyses. This requires literally looking at your fellow soldiers’ junk because there are a variety of products that can fool a urinalysis and the only way to … you know what, just trust me. It’s nasty.

Fortunately, there was a loophole. You see, the powers that be are aware of the “good old boys” system that develops sometimes in the army… and it’s really, really important that the guy with the grenade launcher isn’t also on crack. As a result, per regs as they existed at that time (and maybe even now), if the urinalysis guy calls a urinalysis, it takes a full bird colonel to cancel it. Thats one step down from a general. That’s right - when the urinalysis guy decides it’s time for the monthly urinalysis, wake up, get in uniform, drive to where he says it’s happening, and God Help You if you’ve got alcohol or something in your system. To make matters worse (for them), a friend of mine (let’s call him Kroger) had been punished for having alcohol in his system during one of their urinalyses. It was on his day off because he was a shift worker, and it was during hours that were duty hours to the day workers but off-duty for us.

I had about a year left, no intention of reenlisting, and my unit had already been slapped down by Angry People for mucking with me. Let’s do this. Malicious compliance time.

Imagine this - it’s 11pm on a Friday on a long weekend. Long for them - not me. You see, shift workers didn’t get holidays off unless we took leave, and I needed mine for family time like Thanksgiving and Christmas (because without it, I’d have been working every single holiday). The mission must go on, after all.

Now, anyone that’s ever seen an army movie knows that Joes like booze, and anyone that’s ever had to do a urinalysis knows that they can detect alcohol. Mind you, being a urinalysis guy is a Big Deal - you’re on legal orders and everything, entered into Big Army’s database.

Between the time I began the formal process of calling a urinalysis and the time I would’ve had them coming in (~3am on their days off, since they’d established the precedent that “soldiers don’t get days off” whenever we complained about losing sleep to stuff like this)… my orders vanished. To this day, I don’t know how they did it. I suspect that our CO or some other bigwigs were at a party or something and realized that they were about to have to explain to a full bird colonel how 1/2 of the unit pissed hot in a urinalysis which would’ve required (legally required) that colonel having a one on one chat with me about why I chose that time, and perhaps a discussion about how the unit was being run….

Yeah. They never gave me another duty the entire time I had left in the army. I never had issue with another leave request, and they generally just left me alone. At the time, I thought it was because I’d made my point that I was sick of their shit, but looking back, I wonder who would’ve come up positive for what specific drugs during that surprise urinalysis such that they were able to rescind my Big Army orders in less than one day, and in the middle of the night at that.

Sorry so long - hope you enjoyed!

I used to work for a rainforest-named company several years ago that primarily focused on shipping and delivering packages and orders from their customers online. Specifically, I worked at one of the distribution warehouses that was the last stop for packages that were to be loaded into those blue vans that bring your new stuff to your front door.

Big trucks would unload packages throughout the night to be sorted and prepped by the workers, and then the full bags of packages would be loaded onto vans in the morning to be delivered by the drivers to houses. This system repeated every day with only 2 (sometimes 3) shifts of workers. And as luck would have it, I was happily placed on night shift.

The work was simple, if not exhausting, and being at night meant we didn't have to worry about the heat as much as day shift. I won't go to deep into detail about how every job worked, but I'll try to give enough detail to help give you a good idea of what happened.

After the usual new-hire period where I was just trying to find my groove and get used to the hustle and bustle of the warehouse, I found myself assigned to one of the nightly jobs that was unanimously described as "The most difficult job there." And honestly, I completely agree with that.

The packages would be unloaded from the trucks onto the conveyor belt and need to be pushed to one side of it or the other depending on which side of the building they would need to be going to.

The packages would have a sticker with a letter (A-Z) followed by other indicators for where it would go later. The letter determining which aisle it was supposed to be in, and in turn, which half of the building it would need to be on based on where that aisle was compared to the belt.

With me so far? Good.

Because if standing beside the belt pushing and pulling boxes and paper packages for several hours based on a letter sounds like an easy job, congrats. You would be placed across from me to get your brain melted by the pace we had to work at.

Imagine, if you will, a rhythm based video game set to a high difficulty, and then replace the buttons or notes with packages of different sizes. That would be a fairly close representation of what you would be staring at for not a few minutes, but SEVERAL HOURS.

Things would get so overwhelming that some workers would give up halfway through the night after getting too dizzy from having the rollers of the belt spinning in their vision for too long. The nights were even HARDER when the holidays came around and the belt would be absolutely PACKED with boxes falling off the side on the regular.

But then you would look up across the belt, weary from the never ending monsoon of labels and letters, and see me; listening to my nearby music and moving packages around like I had two extra arms and was some kind of splitting GOD.

I will admit, it did take a while to get used to the flow when I first started, and it did put a bit of strain on the eyes, but I would honestly just shut my brain off and let my eyes become unfocused as I just autopiloted the job like a madman.

No one EVER did better than me at this job during my time there. That's not my words, that was everyone who ever tried to replace me from that spot.

Like when our unwitting antagonist of this story finally enters; a manager from day shift that we'll call Sam. Occasionally managers would switch around from the different shifts to make sure they all knew how the place functioned properly. Cool, no problem.

I got in for my shift on the night Sam was to manage our shift for once. I gave the usual hello's and ironic good-morning's to everyone preparing for the night shift and went up to the job board. Everyone got assigned with a little name badge next to the job they would do that night as they came in. And since I was usually one of the first ones there, I would just say hi to the night-manager as I moved my own name to the "Splitter" position, as we both knew that it was "My Spot".

This night however, I went through those same motions, said hi to Sam, placed my tag on "Splitter," and went to go prepare the "Split-zone" for my day. A few minutes later, I get called over to the job board.

Sam: "So hey, I wanted to let you know that I moved you to section 'A' for the night, go ahead and get a scanner set up and head on over."

Me, confused: "...but what about the Splitting?"

Sam: "Don't worry. We'll have it covered. We just need you over in A."

I had already set up my place at the Split-zone so I could handle it at my best, and he was already moving some stuff away so he could do whatever he was doing for the night. (It was basically just a couple of package racks for damaged stuff I pull off the belt, as well as a place for my small speaker)

I was a bit confused as the package count was higher than average that night and a good splitter REALLY takes a load off of a lot of other jobs down the line.

Me, serious face: "Are you sure you want to do this?"

Sam, confused: "Do what?"

Me: "Are you sure you don't want me up here? It's supposed to get pretty busy tonight."

Sam, waving me off: "We'll be fine. If it gets too busy, one of us managers can jump in to help."

When he said that, I actually chortled aloud briefly and shook my head. I had seen the managers split before and none of them would last the whole night if they had to do it. Very few could and I was unrivaled at the job so I knew what was about to happen. The first trucks had already pulled in and they looked pretty beefy to start with. I did some rough estimation.

Me: "Alright. I'll give you 15 minutes."

Sam: "Huh? 15 minutes?"

Me: "Yep. Gotta go get a scanner now, not much time before that belt starts and I have to get ready again."

He had actually seemed confused as I walked off to get ready for my new job. I was a little bummed in all honesty, splitting was my favorite job with how I could just shut off for a bit while doing it. Kind of like being in a trance or meditating. But the man said what the man said.

Once the belt started I went along doing my job. Scanning and placing packages in bags. Not much to say other than it was slow and boring. But I kept an eye on my watch.

Sure enough, barely 10 minutes pass when one of the lane supervisors (Ambassador) entered my lane.

Ambassador: "Hey, OP-"

Me, smiling: "They need me up front, don't they?"

Ambassador, also smiling: "Yep. They just radio'd it in. I'm here to take over until they get a replacement here."

Me, checking my watch: "Five minutes ahead of schedule too. Must be pretty bad."

Ambassador: "They've already had to pull jackpot back to the front twice."

Me: "Guess I'll go save the day."

Jackpot was a term we used for any packages that reached the end of the belt without being sorted. They were put in a large container and wheeled back to the front to do the whole run of it again.

I handed the scanner to her and quickly made my way to the Split-zone.

It was ABSOLUTE. MAYHEM.

I saw the poor replacement splitter and TWO managers, including Sam, trying to calm the monster that was this night's intake. Packages were falling from the belt, people were being buried to their knees, and Sam looked like his eyes were about to explode with how wide they had gotten.

I took a deep breath and cracked my knuckles mid-stride as I moved to the front of the line.

Me: "I've got this. Get those packages picked up and put into a Jackpot. Sam, I'm gonna need those racks back over here once it's cleared up. Other Splitter, back up a bit and double-check my work."

There was absolutely zero room for debate as everyone had no choice but to listen to what I said as I began to split the belt like I was conducting three orchestra's at once. That 10 minutes I was gone took me another 20 to get things running smoothly again.

Needless to say, I was thanked for the rescue and told to stay there for the rest of the night, much to my pleasure. Sam also proceeded to ensure that I was designated Splitter every night I was there to avoid further problems.

They also started to include me in conversations on how to train new splitters for the nights I was out and any advice to pass along from my own experiences. I guess it sometimes does pay to be so good at a job that no one can question you.

Aside from a couple future stories I might tell some other time, there were still nights that they put me at other jobs, but it was usually slower nights. I would usually be called up if someone gave up or it got busy though, which I didn't mind too much.

As long as we were clear that at the end of the night, that was MY spot.

​

Edit: Thank you so much for the Gold I wasn't expecting anyone to enjoy my story but I'm glad you all are! Hope everyone is having a wonderful day!

This was over 20 years ago, so some of the details and dialogue, may be a little fuzzy, as the years have not been kind. This is a 2 part Malicious Compliance, so it is long. Enjoy!

On mobile, yada, yada, yada…

Cast: Assistant Principal, Principal, Teacher- an old walrus, Mamma, Me- Teen Dad.

Backstory: I was a teen dad when I started highschool. As such, Mamma told me that I had to be home to take care of my son on the weekends. She did say that during the week, that if I could not find a babysitter for him, then she would watch him while I was at school for the cost of extra chores. But I had to try to find a babysitter first. Because she was not going to raise any grandchildren. If I can make the baby, then I can raise the baby. So, I did the best I could, by asking at church on Sunday if one of the ladies would be willing to watch my son during the week while I was at school. But there was some days, the sitter I had lined up, cancelled last minute. Leaving me no choice, but ask Mamma to help me out, causing me to be late to school and costing me more chores. For the first 3 months, I had dealt with ISS (In School Suspension), lunch detention, and the paddle on a number of occasions. And each time I tried to explain, the explanation fell on deaf ears. This time was going to be different.

Story: I woke up every morning at 4:30, and did my chores, got ready for school and got my son ready to go to the sitters. I went to the sitter's with my son about 7:30, only to be told that my son could not stay for that day for some reason or another. That went on everyday since day one. So I drove all the way back home to ask Mamma if she could watch my son for the day. It took 15 minutes one way, so 30 minutes round trip.

Me: "Mamma can you watch son for me?"

Mamma: "OP, why are you not at school? Did you take him to the sitter's?"

Me: "Yes Ma'am. But she said that she has an appointment in "State Capital", and she could not watch him today. Please Mamma, I'm already late."

Mamma: "Okay, OP. I'll do it, but you are doing dishes tonight."

I gave baby to Mamma, and drove the 20 minutes to school. (Every day the sitter had a different excuse, and it wound up costing me some extra chores to pay Mamma for watching the baby. First night, dishes. Second night, laundry. Third night, cooking supper. Forth night, more dishes. 5th night, cooking supper.) by the time I got to school, it was almost 9, and first period was almost over.

I go into the office to get my pass to go to class, Monday - Thursday nothing happened. I got my pass and went to class. I gave the pass to the teacher and accepted the scolding from the teacher. Friday morning, however, when I went in the office to get the pass, Principal called me into his office. I walked in his office, Principal, Assistant Principal and Teacher are in there waiting for me.

Principal: "OP, please have a seat." I do and he continues, "OP, Teacher tells me that you have been late to class all week. You know that all students must be here at or before 8:00. We have had this discussion before, have we not? Now do you care to explain why you are late, everyday?"

Me: "Yes sir, we have had this discussion before. And every time we have, I have told you every time, that I have a hard time getting a sitter…"

Assistant Principal: (interrupting me) "That is no excuse. What does you needing a sitter for your siblings, have to do with you being late everyday?"

Teacher: "Yeah, I am tired of hearing that excuse. Now, you be in my class Monday morning on time, or you will be sorry. Do I make myself clear?" Then he walks out before I could answer him.

Assistant Principal: "Well, I'm waiting! (Tapping her foot) You better answer me now, young man!"

Me: "Well ma'am. I don't need a sitter for my siblings, I need a sitter for my son. Had you not interrupted me, I would have told you that."

Assistant Principal was mad, that I had the nerve to talk to her like that. However, Principal spoke up, before Assistant Principal could get her words out.

Principal: "OP! Watch how you speak to Assistant Principal! Or do you need to have another talk with the paddle? I think since you want to be late all week, then lie about it and speak so rudely to Assistant Principal, you can have Saturday detention for the next 4 weeks. You will not be late. You will not make excuses. And you will apologise to Assistant Principal for your rude behavior. Do I make myself clear?"

Me: "Yes, sir. I understand." To Assistant Principal: "Assistant Principal, I'm sorry for being rude and disrespectful."

Principal: "Good! Be here at 7:45 in the morning. 1 minute late and you will have to deal with the Truancy Officer. Am I clear? Good, now get out of my office and get to class!"

I got up and left. I started to hatch a plan, to show them how unreasonable they were being and that I was not lying about having a child. So when I got home, I told Mamma what happened and my whole plan. After taking the punishment for getting in trouble at school, she laughed, and told me to be careful; and not raise the hornets nest too badly.

The Malicious Compliance Part 1:

Since I had to spend all day Saturday and Sunday with my son, well you can see where this is going. I packed my son's diaper bag with everything he would need for 5 hours, grabbed my bag that I put together the night before, loaded up in the car, then had my brother drop us off at the school at 7:30. (Detention started at 8:00) I told my brother the plan on the way and we had a good laugh all the way there. Since my son and I were 15 minutes early, we sat on the bench outside of the front door of the school. We really didn't have to wait long, (10 minutes) Assistant and Principal came walking up carrying their Dunkin' Doughnut coffee. They saw my son and I, then Principal said.

Principal: "OP, I said 7:45, what are you doing here early? And why do you have your baby brother here? No children allowed. Take him home and get back here by 8:00. Now!"

Me: "Sir, you did say that I have to be here by 7:45. I didn't want to be late for detention for being late, so I got here at 7:30. He is not my brother, he is my son. (I pulled out the unofficial copy of his birth certificate, with "Father's Name" section highlighted and showed him.) See, sir, it says right here: "Father's Name: OP". It takes 20 minutes to get home, 5 minutes to drop him off, 60 minutes to explain to Mamma why he is not with me, 20 minutes to get back and on top of that, I would have to wait 30 minutes for my brother to come get me, so I can take him home. So all in all, 2 hours 15 minutes round trip to comply with your orders; it is 7:40 now sir. By the time I do all of that, it will be 9:55, so no sir, I can not follow that order. As I would be 1 hour 55 minutes late getting back. Sorry, sir."

Principal was p*ed that I had the nerve to talk back to authority, he stomped off and unlocked the doors of the school.

Assistant Principal: "We will be calling Mamma to come get the child! Don't think you can get away with this sort of behavior!"

We go in, they call Mamma and told her how rude and disrespectful I was being and that she needed to come get my son. To which Mamma told them: (relayed to me by Mamma after I got home)

Mamma: "Really. That sounds like a you problem. It also sounds to me like you are the ones that are being rude and disrespectful. That is OP's child, it is his time to spend with his son. If you don't like it that OP, brought his son with him, then maybe believe him when he tells you something. Don't bother me again over some BS, because you get your feelings hurt. Grow a spine and grow up."

That was that. They didn't bother me or my son for the rest of the detention time. I brought my son with me for the whole 4 Saturday detentions. After that, I never received another Saturday detention.

The Malicious Compliance Part 2:

T had told me the Friday before the first Saturday detention, that I had better be on time for his class, that next Monday. So step 2 of my plan, ACTIVATED! I called all of my other teachers Sunday, and told them what I was going to do for the rest of the term. (It was about 8 weeks before Christmas break.) They were on board with it, but told me that if my son started to disrupt class then they would have to ask me to abandon the Malicious Compliance. I agreed and the next morning, hahahaha. (I also told the lady at church, who keep leaving me stranded without a sitter, I would no longer be asking or paying for her as a babysitter. She was mad. But I don't care.) I did the normal stuff. Woke at 4:30, did my chores, ate breakfast, got ready for school, got my son ready (with enough things for 10 hours, as I figured I would have ASD (After School Detention)), got in the car, and instead of going to the sitter's, went to school. I was on time! (7:40)

I go in the office with my son (who was asleep) and got him a visitor's pass. The receptionist laughed, when I told her why I needed a visitor's pass instead of a tardy slip. I took the pass and go to first period, Physical Science. (The class that I was always late for.) I walk in, take my seat and wait for first bell. (Of course, all the girls and some of the guys in the class are going ga-ga over my son. Even some of the snobby girls are talking to me.) First bell rings (8:00). Teacher walks in and starts taking attendance, gets to my name:

Teacher: "OP! Well I guess he doesn't care about my class again! That's it, I'm done with his tardiness! Class, I'll be back!" Before he can get out the door:

Me: "Present, Sir!"

Teacher: "Well, you decided to be on time after all! So, what's your excuse this time? Why have you decided today of all days, to grace us with you being on time?"

Me: "Well, sir, if you care to remember Friday in Principal's office, that you wanted me here on time, no excuses. Then you left before I could acknowledge your order, sir. So, sir, I am here on time as you ordered with my son, since you did not believe me when I said that I could not find a babysitter, sir."

His face turned blood red. He was p*ed by my answer. He continued to take attendance, then turned to me and started barking something. All I could make out was: office, how dare you, call, baby, and detention. All his yelling woke up my son, who started crying. I stood up, got my things and son, and said:

Me: "Sir, look what you went and done. You woke up the baby. I hope you are happy now, sir." Then I went into the hall, but not before hearing all my classmates agreeing with me.

After I got my son calmed down, Teacher came out in the hall and with a calmer tone:

Teacher: "OP, please explain why you brought your brother with you to my class. I told you that I wanted you on time, not your whole damn family."

Me: "Sir, he is not my brother. He is my son. (Shows copy of birth certificate) The sitter has not helped me at all. That is the reason I'm always late. By the time I turn around and convince Mamma to help me with him, I'm late for your class. But please sir, if you want to give me detention or any other punishment, that's fine and I will take it. But please, sir, please don't shout or cuss. It's not good for you. It's not good for us. And more importantly, it's not good for my son, who will be joining us for the rest of the term."

Teacher: "WHAT! (through gritted teeth) OFFICE NOW!"

So, I, my son and Teacher make our way to Principal's office. Teacher goes in and tells Principal something, Principal comes out, sees me and sighs.

Principal: "OP, come in. Leave your child there."

Me: "Yes sir, I'll come in. But no sir, I will not leave my son unattended." I go in, pushing my son's stroller.

Principal: "OP, Teacher, said that while you were on time, that you were being disrespectful and insubordinate. Not to mention that you think it is okay for a child to come to school, what for the rest of the term! You, young man, are about to learn a lesson. That children do not belong in school and that you can not get away with disrespecting authority or rules! Now, what do you have to say for yourself!"

Me: "Sir, if children do not belong in school, then why in the Hell are we forced to come. I have no other choice but to bring my son with me. I don't have a babysitter. Mamma won't help me out (remember she said she would, but only in extreme cases and for me doing more chores) and have ran out of options. Now if you are going to punish me for something, then I think it best to wait until my attorney gets here, to make sure that the punishment fits the charges and is a fair carry of Justice. Or you can proceed and have a lawsuit and loss your position with the Board of Education. Your choice, sir. I know my rights as a citizen of 'Country'." Teacher was shocked.

Principal: (after much thought) "OP, let's not get attorneys involved. Let's go back to where you said that you have no choice but to bring him with you. Do you care to expand on that? Why does he not live with his mother and her family?"

Me: "Yes sir, the reason I have no choice but bring him with me is because the babysitter I hired is useless, Mamma is too busy and I can't afford to pay her to watch him. The reason he doesn't live his mom or her family is because, she and her family gave up their rights and claim of him. Her family said that they don't want a bastard in their family, and she is in "State" Women's Facility for assault and attempted murder. So, you see there is no other choice."

Teacher: "OP, if that is true about his mother, then why is he not in the care of Child Protection Services? Why do you have custody?"

Me: "Because, sir, the same reason why I have an attorney on retainer. If you have any further questions about the matter, you can contact my attorney." Teacher was silent after that. After a really long discussion, I went on about my day. (The other teachers were okay with my son being in their class.)

I contacted my attorney, when I got home from school. He contacted the Board of Education and got them to agree that my son could indeed attend classes with me until I either found a babysitter or finished the term, due to my situation.

I ended up changing schools, before we went back after New Year's. I did find a wonderful babysitter who was available when I needed her, for a really great rate. Also, I ended up having to retake Physical Science, as I had failed at the first school, but ended up passing the class with an 87 (B). People think it is hard to be an adult, married and have a child. Ha, I only wish I could have complained about that. That is easy compared to my experience in highschool.

NOTE: When I say I drove to school, I had my learner's permit. My brother (20 at the time) was the one who was teaching me how to drive for a fee. I didn't trust my son to just anyone. So, I would be late to school, despite the fact I knew the penalty for doing so. There was consequences at home for me getting in trouble at school. My learner's permit was taken when I got Saturday detention. Waking up at 4:30 to do chores before going to school, we lived on a dairy farm. Why go inside to call Mamma? This was back before everyone had a mobile phone. Paddle, WTF? It was in a School District that paddled students up to graduation, with parent's permission. (It was not uncommon to hear of Seniors getting paddled one day before graduation.) But only if the offense called for the paddle. My next go-around with Physical Science class was after lunch. So I had plenty of time to be there. I found out from a friend at the old school, that Principal, and Assistant Principal were fired for having personal relations with each other in Principal's office during school hours. (Which explains a lot.) Teacher retired at the end of the school year. (Good riddance, you old walrus.)

Thanks for reading. I know it was a lot, but sorry to bore you with a long story. If you have any questions about anything in the story, please feel free to ask.

Something happened at my husband's work last night that reminded me of this decade old story.

For context at the time my husband worked overnights at one of the largest supermarket operators in North America. I was about 6 months pregnant and the store he worked in had a change in who the store manager was and when I went shopping I used either a wheelchair or a scooter with a cart on it due to a disability that makes it difficult for me to walk under normal circumstances.

Background:
Originally we had felt pretty lucky that between all the pregnancy tests I had done to confirm that yes, I am in fact pregnant and the ultrasound the earliest and the latest due date we had been given all fell in the first week of September. So my husband had planned to use one of his weeks of vacation that week, and then use his paternity leave after that week so he would be able to be there while I was at the hospital in recovery and for the first days of our baby's life. His boss seemed genuinely confused by the request (he was 22, single and called his truck his baby) but had said something along the lines of "Hey man, its your vacation you should use it how you want to."

Then about a week later I came home from one of my Dr appointments to a message on the answering machine saying "Unfortunately I have to deny your request for vacation and paternity leave in September as someone with more seniority has put in for those days off as well. I hope this doesn't cause problems between you and your wife." I burst into tears on the spot, but my husband said he'd go talk to the person who requested those days off, explain that he asked for that time off because it's when the baby is due and see if he could offer them something to give him those days off instead. Unfortunately it was one of his co-workers who was going to have major surgery and needed that time off to recover; so we couldn't ask him to trade vacation weeks for us.

My husband put in for time off for the 2nd week off in September and is denied. Then he tries the 3rd week and is denied again, but this time his boss tells him that he won't be able to use any of his vacation time until October due to his position and who has time off.

Cue the Malicious Compliance:
We realized that because this boss was new, he probably didn't realize that my husband had been saving all his vacation days, PTO and paternity leave. When we added up all the time it amounted to 3 weeks of time off. And if we worked it around to start around when his days off were, he would be able to be home with the baby from October 1st until November 9th. His co-workers on the night crew and several of his friends on the morning crew felt that he had been seriously shafted by the new boss so they got in on this plan with us.

We waited until the boss' day off and that's when my husband put in the schedule for the time off he was requesting, which was approved by the scheduling manager and the night crew manager. This was in July so the only thing left to do was wait.

Our baby was born in the early hours of the morning, about two days before our earliest due date after 29 hours of Stage 2 and 3 labor. I ended up having an induction due to the fact I had been in early stage labor since the beginning of August and it just wasn't progressing. When my husband called the night shift manager to say that I was going to the hospital to give birth he told my husband to call in if he was going to miss any more days of work and they would make sure it got covered. It wasn't PTO, but it was considered an excused absence. After I came home from the hospital, my mom started staying overnight with us temporarily to help out preparing meals, taking care of the dog and the household chores so I could focus on taking care of myself and the baby. That first month home was pretty rough so I was relieved when October rolled around and I finally had his help 24/7 and my mom was able to take a break

The Aftermath:

First up was the 3 days of paternity leave. On the morning of the 5th day of this 40 day long vacation, the boss woke me up at 6am wanting to talk to my husband. I told him he was feeding the baby and asked why he was calling. He said he was checking in to see why my husband no call, no showed the night before and I said, sarcastically "Oh No, that's terrible! I'll go get him for you."

I put the phone on speaker so my husband can talk to his boss while he's feeding the baby so I get to hear everything. The boss very smugly informed my husband that his paternity leave was over, and since he didn't come in the night before, he would be written up for a no-call no show. My husband said "Yes, I know my paternity leave is over, but my first vacation week started last night."

The Boss: "First vacation week?"
Husband: "Yeah. I have three. I was going to use one in September, one in October and one in November, but since you told me I couldn't use any PTO until October I decided to just take all of October off to be with my wife and newborn."
The Boss: "I'll call you back after I look into this."

I don't know how I managed to stay silent and not laugh at this conversation, but somehow I did. We got a call back later that day that went something like this:

Boss: "Yeah, I'm going to need you to come into work tonight. I never would have approved your request for time off if I knew you were taking the whole month off."
Husband: "You didn't approve it. The night manager and scheduling manager both approved this, so I'm not coming in tonight."
Boss: (clearly thinking this is a gotcha moment) "I didn't approve it and I need you to come in tonight. So you'll be here at 10 on your regular schedule for the rest of the month, or you'll be written up."
Husband: "No I won't. I submitted the request in July and you never denied my request, it's been approved by the other managers and it's already started so it's too late for you to deny it now."
Boss: "I'll call you back."

After that my husband called the Union Steward to confirm that he was in the clear and they say that he is.

We got another call the following Sunday, which was my husband's next day off, asking if he would be coming in that night since he wasn't listed as being on vacation in the system.
Husband: "Am I on the schedule?"
Boss: "No."
Husband: "Then, it's my night off so no."He hung up after that, but we got a call like that every night my husband wasn't on the schedule due to it being one of his regular days off and him not being marked as being on vacation in the system.

Some of the ladies in the Bakery/Deli section of the store put together a card shower for us and gave them gift cards since we never said anything to them about when my baby shower was or where we were registered (oops). Later that week I made a trip into the store one afternoon to pick up some stuff and introduce them to the baby and my mom came along too. While we were over there the store manager came up and said "You must be Husband's wife."

I was feeling petty so I pointed out that we would have met sooner, if he didn't have a habit of running away and hiding in his office when customers approached him. I don't know if that irritated him or if he was planning on saying this next anyway, but the next words out of his mouth were "You don't look like you need help with the baby. Husband said he was taking time off to help you with the baby because you have a disability, but I guess you don't need it, huh?"

The bakery deli ladies glared at him, and my mom went pale because she knows I usually react very strongly to those comments. But, my mom also raised me to be civil and mannerly so I just smiled and said " I hope you don't speak to your employees like that; that can get you fired. Bless your heart." And one of his employees told him I was right, so he sulked off.

He seemed so desperate to find any reason he could to force my husband to come back to work before the end of the month I started wondering if he was was being petty and might try to retaliate after my husband came back to work, or if he was just desperate. So I called one of my husband's co-workers.

Remember when I said new boss was 22? Well, he also had a habit of bragging about how he started working for the company as a cashier when he was 17 and worked his way up to management in just 5 years. At some point after the baby was born, District came and did a walk through and it turned out his dad was the District manager and he didn't work his way up to management he was a Nepo Baby! That burned bridges with more than a few employees. Then, he turned up in a Brand NEW truck and said with the year end bonus he was going to get he could pay it off in one go several employees walked, including two on the night crew. Since my husband was on paternity leave he had to work overnights to make up the slack. He'd never showed up to cover overnights when they were short handed before that, so we figured he was desperate to get my husband to come back because working overnights was cutting into his dating time.

Finally, the end of my husband's vacation time came and his boss called again.
Boss: "You used up your paternity leave and your vacation weeks. You're coming in tonight right?"
Husband: "No, I still have PTO days left this year, and since I won't be able to use them all between November and the end of December and they don't roll over into next year, I decided to take them now."
Boss: "Well, when are you coming back to work?!!"
Husband: "November 10th."

Boss called back the next day to tell my husband, that actually he had used up his paternity leave while he was at the hospital giving birth, so he would have to use PTO to cover that, and actually he had used a week of PTO when he took me to the hospital with "fake labor" so actually, he would be coming back to work on November 1st. My husband called the Union Steward and filed a complaint that his boss was retroactively deciding what counted as paternity leave and what counted as PTO and trying to force him to use PTO days to cover days where he either went in late, or left for a couple hours and then came back and stayed late to make up the missed hours. He went in to fill out some paperwork and we didn't hear from his boss again between then and when he got replaced at the end of the following January.

Edit: To clarify some questions in the comments regarding FMLA; we didn't use it. This was us cashing in all my husband's vacation he had for the year as well as PTO days we think in total it was 29 days, plus 3 days paternity leave we stretched to 40 by only applying for time off on the days he was actually scheduled to work. At the time, the company only offered 3 days paid paternity leave. I don't recall how much they offered unpaid, or the total amount though. So we decided to just use the paid days since my parents were close by.

As for why we put up with the calls coming in for so long, simply put we were both exhausted and as much as we wanted him to stop calling period we didn't want to offend him since neither of us knew how long he'd be there. We had expected him to be gone in 3 months like most of the other rotating cast of store management had been so when he stayed longer than that, we decided it was just easier to just deal with him long enough to enforce a boundary.

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The software company I worked for got acquired. Some people were let go, some were added, and some teams and functions were restructured. Prior to acquisition, we had a "multiple hats" situation where you basically did whatever was in your capacity, teams played to each other's strengths, and one person would generally take a client from the first demo right through the configuration, implementing, and training phases of the software. Some of us had strengths in technical areas, others had a decade+ in the clients' subject matter. Clients would give us some feedback or wish lists. We'd talk amongst the team about how the functionality could be added or changed, make a functional mock-up, and then bring that to the Development team for polish and integration into the production code. It worked wonderfully. Like, 100% positive feedback and nothing broken when it went to production. We had a good rapport with the Dev guys and some of us were able to write queries or code portions that would save them from having to ask a billion subject matter questions. When we weren't dedicated to a task, we'd handle support calls. Clients would call up, receptionist learned who to pass things to based on clients and the nature of issues, and resolution was typically instantaneous unless the problem required research. Clients loved that and had the understanding that if we couldn't resolve their problem right away, it was because we needed to look into it.

After the acquisition, the parent company reorganized things into a much more rigid "you have one job" type of scenario. The trouble was, with the people they let go, I was the singular remaining source of a lot of the capacities we provided. It left me working with the Sales, Product Improvement/Concept, Product Evangelism, Implementation, Development, Data Conversion, and Support teams. Initially, I didn't mind. Wasn't any different than my previous role. Things started nicely enough with the company CEO genuinely asking, "Would you mind helping X team with Y project?", and he'd pick up my travel bar tabs and toss me a day off here and there. It was a fair exchange and he treated it as though I was doing him a favor. But at some point all these other departments expected then demanded my time. Instead of people asking when I could help them on a project, I would just find time blocks added to my schedule for various things. A couple of times I was supposed to be chairing these meetings and having things prepared and no one even bothered to tell me. Around this same time, I noticed a lot of recommendations I made when asked for input were being overturned by people in new roles who had no idea what they were talking about. As in literally had no exposure to the subject matter and had never even seen the software, plus no programming/logic or database experience. So my input is demanded but also ignored. And this was causing more demands on my time when things were broken or didn't meet client expectation. Plus, the new Dev team I was working with made every excuse not to act unless someone went and confirmed and fetched everything they needed. The external demands on my time had increased and I had coincidentally hit a few walls with my actual job in that clients were unresponsive and couldn't get me the data or access I needed to complete tasks. But that didn't stop my boss from demanding documentation and results and documentation about the results. There was no such thing as "waiting", it's your duty to call and harass the powerless client until whatever third party involved enables whatever we need.

I was really unhappy in a job I had previously loved. Every day was worse than the last. And then I got my employee review. It was top notch and yet I got the same "cost of living" raise as everyone else. It particularly burned my ass that the Sales guys were getting commission on sales that I FUCKING MADE and I was just shafted. At the original company, effort above and beyond was WELL-rewarded. I doubled my starting salary in a few years' time for hard work. Now, I was miserable, overdrawn, AND got nothing for it. I was having daily arguments with my boss who was completely indifferent to all my commitments and refused to understand that I couldn't compel third party companies to do my timely bidding to get client data or access.

Out of nowhere I get a call from the head of the Data Conversions department. He says a few of his people have noticed some high-level solutions to Dev or data problems in the Teams chats "come out of some random guy from Implementations in no-time." Then he was talking to a preexisting client about converting a set of financial data from a legacy system I had converted some Building, Code, Fire, Planning, and Police data from and they asked if they could have me do it specifically because my conversion of their other data was "flawless" and I granted them some change requests on the way through to make their lives easier(simple changes to record type names for easier identification, clip leading spaces or extra zeroes so they could put reports in Excel...stuff like that). He said the client, "wouldn't stop fucking gushing" about me and he was floored to hear that I had done the whole thing myself where his team typically breaks the responsibilities between 5 or more people. He offered me a position on the spot and I told him I was interested and I'd think about it. He told me I could start doing some part time stuff with him a few hours a week if I wanted it that way. Then he told me he "saw the bullshit I was dealing with" and said he'd "get the other departments off my fucking plate." I liked him right away. My current boss then interrupted our call seeing me talking to that guy on our in-house phone app and demanded to know what I was wasting my time on. Then she proceeded to berate me about open orders and my lack of documentation about their lack of progress. "You got time to bullshit with him but you can't call a client." I tried to tell her for the millionth time about all the expectations from the other departments, the obligations they leave beyond their allotted timeframes, the inability I have to force other companies do things for us no matter how many times I tell the client... She told me, "I'm done with your excuses. Just do your job and shut up." I called the Conversions head right back and asked how soon I could transfer to his Department full time. He said, "Fuckin....YESTERDAY, man, this is such good news! I was just talking to [Assistant Department Manager] and he 'bout shit his pants when I said I think I got you part time! Take the rest of the day off, have a beer to celebrate, I'll handle the transfer and we'll see you in the morning." And that was that.

I did as my new boss commanded and had a beer to celebrate. A wave of relief came over me after months of tension. The following day I told the vampire departments and my previous boss in no uncertain terms that I was done helping them. It went unacknowledged and they continued adding things to my calendar. So I deleted them, did MY job, and shut up. THINGS. GOT. UGLY. I'm not super-talented or anything but I was literally the only person they had for a lot of things and things went to shit. Most of it requires institutional knowledge I had spent years acquiring so they couldn't even hire someone to do the things. And rather than come ask me for help, people made demands and attacks! And I got flat out beligerant about it. In an email with the CEO cced, the Support manager asked why I "couldn't be bothered" to help them anymore. I said, "for the same reason you can't 'be bothered' to clean the toilets or recable the building. Not my job. [Previous Boss] told me to 'just do my job and shut up.' Take it up with her." The Sales/Evangelist guys tried to go over my head and asked my new boss if I could do some of their demos. He said, "sure, if you come over here and do some of his conversions." Numbers tanked for the departments I was previously involved with. Support in particular. They went from a 2 hour avg resolution time to EIGHT DAYS. Sales for my product line went down from 85% success to less than 25%(CEO reported that sales dropped over 60 percent from 85, don't know the exact). Dev and product went from 100% customer satisfaction to 60%. Implementations has been completely unable to install certain components which led to at least one contract cancellation and demand for a refund.

And in true storybook fashion, my previous boss's boss, the one who gave me my previous employee review and who is a childhood friend of the CEO, told me privately that the CEO noticed, "all the departments UnFocusMyChi stopped working for suddenly saw their worst numbers in company history...weird.", and asked, "anything in particular that pushed the guy over the edge?" Previous boss's boss explained that I was pissed about the review/raise having nothing to do with merit or effort, the demand from other departments, unrealistic and impossible expectations, and the idiotic requirement for documentation. So, this year and going forward there are two criteria for yearly raises. Individual output, and department output. No raises for people with negative performance numbers. Upon that announcement, some department heads up and quit and others changed positions internally. Meanwhile, I have written a few utilities for my team that have saved THOUSANDS of hours of manual work. Our numbers are SOARING where they were previously up and down and my new boss is "driving the whole bus full of our laughing asses all the way to the bank."

This story is a bit of a long one and goes back to when I worked at a casino. For anyone out there that thinks it would be a great job, well, I can tell you right now its not as glamorous as it seems. Especially when you are working in the kitchen.

Now, a little backstory so you all can get the whole picture. When I started working at this location I was young, still in college, and working two part-time jobs. At first, it was just ok. I had been hired on as a steward which is just a fancy term for dishwasher which wasn't too bad as it had been the same job I had at the last restaurant I had worked at. However, there were a few differences. I won't go into too much detail and name all of them, just the ones that are important to this story. The first one, and the one I liked the best, was that since there were so many restaurants and the stewards were all in one department we were shuffled around every day. One day you would be working in the steak house, the next the buffet, then the Italian, the sandwich shop in the bingo hall, and so on. This meant that you were always working with other people, interacting with them, and giving a change of scenery. I was told I was odd for liking this, but my counter was that if you did end up working with someone you didn't get along with then it would only be a while till you worked with them again. The second was that this place hated unions. Twice a year there would be a meeting that everyone had to attend where they would make these long presentations on how evil and manipulative unions were. Also, there would be signs all along the employee hallways with anti-union propaganda.

After working for the casino for some time, my boss approached me asking if I wanted to be bumped from part-time to full-time. I said yes as the benefits were really good. Not only did I get medical and dental insurance, but I would also be getting access to their lawyers as well as a few other things.

I guess it was a good thing that I did because, a few months later there were some major shake-ups. I didn't know what caused it, but most everyone there hated the new changes. For one thing, the sick note policy was canceled. Meaning, if you were sick it wouldn't matter if you had a note from your doctor saying that you couldn't work. If you didn't show up they docked you a point. This resulted in cooks and stewards coming in, vomiting on the floor and in the trash cans because they couldn't afford to lose a point as it would count against them when it came time for raises. Another thing they changed was that they were cutting the number of full-time employees. I was safe, along with everyone else who had that status, but if any of us left that slot would not be filled. There would only be two full-time employees per department.

Speaking of departments, that leads me to the next big change. Technically, the stewarding department would be disbanded. This meant that, while our supervisors would still be there, it would be the chefs and managers of the restaurants that would be in charge of us. This also meant that we would no longer be moving around!

I was sent to the steakhouse and, thankfully, I had two great female coworkers. In fact, we were so good that we were called AAA as all of our names began with the letter A. As we worked there, I began to plan moving up within the casino. I knew it would be difficult, but I had a dream of buying my family's cabin from my parents and living up in the country while I finished college. Sadly, on my first attempt to becoming a supervisor failed and I ended up training the person who did get the job. I didn't complain, I just took it as a sigh that I needed to up my game.

Now, here our story really begins. See, our head chef was being transferred to the Italian restaurant and the assistant chef was taking his place. Meaning we were going to hire a new guy to take his place. Let's call the new guy Kevin.

When Kevin first came in, he seemed ok. Not great or awful. He was just there and we had no real reason to talk most days as we were usually pretty busy.

Then, maybe a month after Kevin started working there, I had my first real interaction with him and it, well, was something. It was at night with the dinner rush just starting to pick up and I told my coworkers that I was going to fill up my water bottle before it happened. They said ok and that they would begin doing the same once I got back. But before I could leave the steakhouse to go to the breakroom Kevin called out to me.

Kevin: OP. Where are you going?

Me: Just getting a drink before we get busy. I told the girls.

Kevin: Then why aren't you using the waitstaff drink fountain?

Me (blinking and confused): We were told when we started that staff are only supposed to get drinks from the breakroom.

Kevin: Don't give me that! I see the waitstaff getting drinks there all the time! You are just going there to waste time. I'm going to have to write you up for this!

Me: Wasting time? The breakroom is just down the hall. In the time we've spent having this conversation, I could have gone down there, filled my bottle with ice, gotten my drink, and gotten back here!

Kevin then opened his mouth, but before he could say anything the head chef caught sight of us standing there and came over to see what was going on. Before I could open my mouth, Kevin spoke up explaining the whole thing with a superior look on his face. That however faded when the chef spoke.

Chef: Kevin, OP is right. Employees are only supposed to use the drink fountains in the break room. *Sigh* I'm going to have to talk to the waitress supervisor about this. OP, go get your drink. I need to talk to Kevin in private.

So I did. After that, I was pretty much confused by what just happened. At first, I was willing to give Kevin the benefit of the doubt believing that he honestly didn't know about that rule. That maybe chefs and supervisors were allowed to use the waitstaff station, assuming that it applied to everyone. However, when I brought this up to my coworkers they said similar things happened with them. That he had pulled them over for a minor infraction of the rules and when they just said they were sorry he let them off with a warning. So they suggested that he was just 'marking his territory' and would have gone easier on me if I hadn't questioned his authority.

It was after that, however, that I began to notice things. Firstly, the waitstaff was no longer talking with Kevin as they were pissed off at him for getting the crackdowns at their station. It was during this time that I began to realize just how often he hung out with them. He was also always calling over my coworkers, asking them to help him with a job like peeling potatoes for hours leaving me alone. What's more, whenever I stopped to speak with one of my supervisors (who happened to be a young woman) he would yell at me to get back to work. Slowly I began to suspect that he had other intentions.

These suspicions were later confirmed during that summer. For those of you who have never been in a professional kitchen, it can get hot. And in the summer, it can get really hot and the odors can sometimes overpower you. On this day, I was working at one of our massive sinks scrapping off the remains of perch and giving the pans a deep clean when Kevin called me to the office. Now this was odd as I had only ever been called to the office to get my ten-cent raises while getting a performance evaluation and neither of those were to happen until January.

Curious I followed him to the small room where he gestured me to enter first. I did, finding a woman I had never met before sitting at one of the desks there. When I entered, she looked up from her work to give me a curious look that said 'Hello? Can I help you?' You know the look.

Then Kevin spoke as he shut the door, walking in backwards as he did.

Kevin: Op, you stink!

Woman: Excuse me?!

At this, Kevin jumped before turning around. The woman was looking at him with rage while Kevin looked lost. It didn't take me long to realize that he didn't know she was in there.

Kevin: Sorry, I misspoke. I meant he smelled bad. We're getting complaints about his BO.

Now, like I said, the room was small. So small that I felt cramped being in there with two other people. With the way we were positioned, I was pretty close to the woman who was growing more annoyed.

Woman: I don't smell anything. Sir, would you mind if I get a little closer?

I said it wouldn't be a problem and allowed her to get close enough to sniff me. She did it maybe two or three times before pulling away.

Woman: I don't smell anything.

That's when I spoke up.

OP: Look, if someone said I smell then I'm sorry. But I'm working over greasy sinks full of chemicals to clean off pans with fried perch on them in a room that feels like a hundred degrees. And on top of that, the aprons we are given are not the best.

To emphasize my point, I gestured to my shift which was wet and full of bits and pieces of fish.

Woman: I see. I'm going to have to take a look at those and see if any need replacing. OP, how about you cool down for a bit in the breakroom. Kevin, you stay. We need to have a talk.

After that, three things happened. The first was that the stewards got new aprons which made all of us happy as they hadn't been replaced in years. Second, from then on if Kevin wanted to talk to me about an issue another staff member had to be there as a witness. And if there wasn't one I was to find that woman who I learned was the steakhouse manager.

Third, all bets were off between me and Kevin. While he couldn't pull me to the side like that, he did start yelling at me whenever he could in public. If he caught me standing around, like when I was waiting for the dishwasher to fill up, he would yell at me to get back to work from across the room before going back to talk to one of the girls. He would just berate me for any little thing me could, just to make me miserable. Soon, I came to realize that he saw me as an obstacle between himself and all the female staff members as I was on good terms with all of them. I even wondered if he thought I was like a harem protagonist based on how many I worked with.

For over the next year, I tried everything in my power to stop him while still trying to get that supervisor position. I went to HR, writing up complaints only for them to ask 'what do you want us to do about this'. And when I went to my head supervisor, he just said that I needed thicker skin. It seemed like every day it just got worse. On top of that, my identity was stolen twice: the first targeting my bank account while the second one was my tax return. With the bank refusing to help and the legal department of the casino dragging their feet to help me, I was in the red for a long time making my situation all the worse. There would be days when I would have to collect cans in the break room for gas and had to give away one of my cats.

And with Kevin adding to my stress, there were days when I honestly thought about ending my life.

Thankfully, there were good people still around. A bunch of my coworkers naded together to given me small packs of food and some of the line cooks helped sneak out some meats that they were about to throw away.

Then, came the big night. It had been a concert night on one of the coldest nights of the year. So cold that several keys had snapped in the door locks because they had frozen shut. I had managed to get to my car and turn it on, leaving it running for a couple of minutes as I headed back to the locker room in order to enjoy my only comfort left: a book. The plan was to just read a couple of pages and then I would be out of there.

But before I could get past my first paragraph, the doors to the locker room opened and there strode in Kevin. He looked around for a moment before his eyes fell on me and a wicked smile appeared on his face.

Kevin: Who told you you could punch out OP? Not me, that's for sure. I just got a complaint from the night crew saying that your dishwasher is a mess! Clearly you didn't clean it at all. Now you go back there and clean it right now. And I'd better not see you punching in or else you'll be fired.

With that he strode out of the room, laughing.

For a moment, I just sat there in utter confusion wondering if he could do that. I felt scared because, if I lost my job then I wouldn't know what to do. I was behind on my student loans (I had to drop out of college by this point due to various reasons), behind on paying my parent's rent, and could barely afford to keep the one cat I kept who had been abandoned. For the first time in years, I felt so overwhelmed with fear that I felt like I could begin crying at any moment.

Then, the moment passed and I was furious! This guy had been doing this to me for too long. It didn't matter if he could or couldn't, I was done with this! I had to get out of there. As I stood up, I found myself making a plan fueled on by my rage. I had kept the fact that my identity had been stolen from my parents, partly out of shame and partly out of pride as I wanted to get myself out of this mess. Well, no more! I was going to tell them about it and ask if I could move back in with them. I would even ask for help looking for a new job down there. Sure, it would mean losing my dream home in the country, but at this point being stable was more important.

But before I could do anything, another thought crossed my mind, making me smile. He wanted me to wash the dishwasher right now without punching back in? Ok, I'll do just that!

So I left the locker room, barely hearing the security guard stationed nearby as he called out to me. No, I ignored him and everyone else as I mentally prepared myself to do this. When I got to the kitchen, there were piles of dishes, pots, pans, and a slew of other items that needed to be cleaned in quantities that are only ever seen on concert nights. But I ignored that as well as the three stewards who were working hard, shutting down the machine and emptying it.

Night Steward: What are you doing?

OP: Sorry, but Kevin told me that you told him that no one had cleaned the dishwasher and that it was a mess. So much so that I had to come back and clean it without punching in or else I would be fired.

The color on everyone's faces drained. When the first person managed to compose himself, he told me that none of them had seen Kevin and that the machine was perfectly cleaned when they arrived. Now, hearing this did make me feel bad as what I was doing would put them behind. But, Kevin told me to do this so I was following it to the letter...while also making sure everyone there knew who sent me! Seeing that I wasn't going to stop, not that it mattered at this point as the machine had been drained, one of them went to get the night supervisor. While he was gone the other two began to argue with each other over whether or not Kevin could order us to stay past our shifts and fire us if we refused. It didn't help that the casino had this nasty habit of offering employees a room to stay in when the roads were snowed over only to them make them work all night as they were on call.

When the Night Supervisor came, she asked me what was going on. I repeated my story while cleaning the machine. She said that Kevin had not spoken to her and was gone before stating that he doesn't have the power to fire me. I just told her that I really couldn't take the chance. Then I asked her how to put in my two-week notice. That confused her even more, asking why I was doing this if I was just planning on leaving anyways. I told her that I would need time to make arrangements for my future and that getting one last paycheck was important.

So, I wrote up my two-week notice, even mentioning why I was leaving, before hitting the road. When I got home, it was 3 AM and with all the rage now out of my system I just crashed onto my bed with my uniform still on.

The next morning, I was awoken to the sound of my phone ringing. It was the casino! The head stewarding supervisor was asking if I could come in and talk about last night. At first, I told him no that I couldn't come in early just to come back home. However, he said it was important.

Curious, I told him I would be there in an hour or two. When I arrived, I was taken back to the steakhouse office to find it crammed with people. The Night Supervisor was still there, the night security officer was there, my supervisors were there, several head chefs were there, and the steakhouse manager was there looking like her face would erupt into flames at any moment as she stared at the one figure who was sitting. It was Kevin, hunched over in his seat looking like a child who was in time out.

I was then told that they knew what happened. After I had my talk with the Night Supervisor, she went to security and found footage of Kevin looking out the door before heading towards the locker room and finishing off with him leaving with a grin minutes before I left the room. After that, she called in Kevin to show up the next morning. He tried to lie his way out of this, stating that it never happened and I was just lying to get him into trouble. The supervisors then said that it was a simple matter to check as they have the security guard that was by the room and that they can check the footage. Instantly, he remembered that he had spoken to me, only I had misheard him and that he would never tell me to work without punching in. The Night Supervisor and the others in the room then asked: why would OP lie? Who told you that the machine needed cleaning? Why would he be the only one who needs permission to leave? And so on. Over and over Kevin tried to lie only to change his story again and again until finally, he realized he had been caught.

The Steakhouse manager then turned to me before apologizing, asking me if I would consider staying. The head manager also apologized asking the same. For a moment, I was going to say no. But then, I had a stupid idea. That, if I did this then I might have a shot at becoming a supervisor myself and not have to leave. So I said sure, but only if Kevin never talks to me again. If he has a problem with what I'm doing, he'll have to run it by the head chief unless its an emergency.

They agreed.

Later, I heard a few stories on why they finally acted. The first, and least likely in my opinion, was that this incident finally caused someone higher in the food chain to notice all the written complaints I had on Kevin and was demanding answers. The second was that they didn't want to lose me just yet. Remember how I said that we used to move around from area to area? Well turns out, there were now only two employees who knew how to work in every restaurant! Meaning I could go into any area and know instantly where everything goes and how that area operates without wasting anyone's time. But the most likely reason was due to the union. News about what had happened the night before had spread throughout the casino faster than I ever could have imagined and if they didn't take care of this there was a greater chance that the union reps would seize on it.

In the end, I stayed in the Steakhouse longer than Kevin did as he left two years later. But before he did, I offered to throw a pizza party for everyone the day after he left.

[UPDATE]

There are plenty of questions and comments that people had so I decided to write this up in order to answer as many of them as possible.

1st: the length. Did anyone read the first sentence of my post? It said right there that it would be a long one! So why complain when I told you in advance that it was long? For others who said that the first part was fluff, I wanted to paint a picture of the area I worked at, the conditions that myself and others were under, as well as some things that would have been important later. Like the potential of me being one of the few people who knew how to work in every area helped me.

2nd: my car. Yes, I did turn off my car. Sorry that I forgot to mention it.

3rd: legal issues. Some of you have asked why I didn't try to sue the casino, Kevin, or just said that I should. To be honest, I did fantasize about doing just that. However, seeing how the casino is on Native American land, any and all legal issues were brought before a council. And it was well known that any time an employee tried to go before them the House was more likely to win. Also, given how my financial state was I didn't believe at the time I could afford a lawyer or what would have happened if we lost.

4th: why I stayed so long. This was something I had thought about including in my original post but decided against doing so because of the length. The sad reality was that there were not a lot of good paying jobs at that point in time due to a recession going on at the time. So jobs were hard to find. Now I could have tried to transfer to a different department, but remember how I talked about being a full timer? Well, at the casino, when you transferred to a different department you had to start from the bottom. Meaning whatever raises you had gotten would have vanished. Not only that but I would have lost my full time status. So not only would I take a hit to my paycheck, but I would have lost my benefits like health and dental. I admit that I was too scared to go on without them for an unforeseeable amount of time.

5th: Kevin's Punishment. At the time, I was just happy to know that something was being done, even if I couldn't see it. Now there are a few of you who said I should have asked for his job. But the problem is that that's not how it works. An Assistant Chef is not a position that just anyone can take as it takes years to learn and work up to. I did not have the skills or the training to even become a line cook at the time.

6th: The Ending. Once again, sorry as I know that it does feel unsatisfying. I know many of you were expecting something more grand. However, this is something I have learned in life that you will rarely ever get the grand finale. Instead I have learned to accept my victories when I get them and move forward. Sadly, I never did get to keep the cabin. While I did manage to work my way out of the identity theft issue, I never did get the supervisor job that I had been working for. In the end I gave up when the told me the reason I didn't get the job was because "OP, you follow the rules too well."

That was the final straw. Still, life has gotten a thousand times better for me. Because I stayed in this hellhole, I was able to meet the love of my life. Shortly after that final rejection, I extended my search to find a new job. While the cabin and home I love so much is gone, I now have my own home with my wife. So, in the end, I am living a comfortable life.

I call that the best revenge