let’s discuss malicious compliance

by Alison Green on January 16, 2025

Let’s talk about malicious compliance — times when someone purposely exposed the absurdity of a rule by doing exactly what they were told to do. For example:

“I had a boss who needed to know via email every. single. time. we stepped away from our computers (we were all fully remote). So I decided to comply 100% with her request. I told her when I’m using the restroom, that I had to put cream in my coffee, that I’m going to put on a sweater because I’m cold, I’m about to open my living room blinds, you get the point. Others did that too and after like two weeks, she said we no longer have to notify her unless it’s going to be over 15 minutes.”

•   •   •

“I worked for a company that insisted we wear our teal-colored polo shirts at all times. They only did up to a Large. I am NOT a Large, I am a short, hairy, fat, apple-shaped stud muffin (male). OK, be like that. So I wore the one they got me. The squeamish can stop reading now. Basically the stretchy fabric stretched and showed the spare tires, it didn’t cover the bottom of my belly, my moobs were prominent, and it even had chest hair poking through the fabric.

Finishing work that very day, I was asked not to wear it and to wear my usual shirt.”

•   •   •

“I work in engineering and had a program manager, Todd, who had risen through the ranks on his ‘business savvy,’ which turned out to mean ‘bullying every young engineer on his team and relentlessly cutting corners on quality.’

He came by my desk on Tuesday and asked me to run a test by Friday. Not only would this have been a crazy workload, but it was logistically impossible – the required parts to run the test wouldn’t show up for a week. (Think like, running a test of how quickly a car can stop … without installing the brake pads.) Todd sends me an email that says, ‘I think of you as someone who is committed to the success of our project, and I would hate to change that impression. Unfortunately, that is not a delay we can absorb. I have you penciled into this meeting with [Big Boss] on Monday to report the results of the completed test.’

So I’m like, okay, you know what? Fuck you, Todd. I confirm via email that he wants me to run the test without brake pads and he says yes. I bust ass to run the test without brake pads on Friday and of course it fails miserably. I send a picture of the literal debris to him on the same email chain and go immediately to happy hour.

Monday morning I come in to an angry ‘we need to get to the bottom of this failure’ email from Todd. I ignore it. Straight to the meeting with the big boss. I’m like, ‘Hey guys, I’m so sorry but I haven’t had time to pull together a slide deck since the test was just run on Friday afternoon. I do have some pictures and schedule updates to share, so Todd do you mind actually pulling up that email chain?’ I explain what happened in the most neutral way possible. Big boss is immediately like … ‘Wait, WTF, why didn’t we wait for the brake pads and do this right?’ I respond that decision was direction from the program rather than a technical decision, so Todd would be better positioned to speak to it.

Sweet revenge. He never asked me to cut corners again, and ended up leaving ‘for another opportunity’ like six weeks later.”

•   •   •

Share your stories of malicious compliance — your own or other people’s — in the comment section!

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{ 362 comments }

{ 362 comments… read them below or add one }

        1. Heirloom Tomato Heiress*

          I can think of a person I know who very well could describe himself that way who does live on the south side. I’m not sure he has ever worked someplace that would have mandated a teal polo, though.

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      2. Commenter 505*

        Seriously. This is the kind of energy we need.

        I can imagine this apple of a muffin keeping a straight face allll day long.

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    5. daffodil*

      that poster is a delight, but I am very hung up on “only goes up to a large” i feel like a substantial percentage of adult humans are bigger than that.

      Reply ↓
      1. Typity*

        Indeed. I had a job where we were required to wear company shirts at an event, and they also stopped at L. Maybe it’s something to do with the vendors or mass production or something?

        I let my department head know I was never, ever going to be able to wedge myself into a size L. He said, “Are you sure? They’re pretty big…” and held up a shirt. There was a pause: “Oh. Well. Maybe not.” I wasn’t embarrassed, but I think he was, poor guy. I wore my regular clothes to the event, and so did other larger people, and it was fine.

        (It took another year or two, but by the time I left the shirts were being offered up to 3x/XXXL, so a lot more people were covered, so to speak.)

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          1. Annika Hansen*

            We had shirts that supposedly were sized for men and women. We measured the women’s shirts…they were one inch shorter and one size difference (like a Men’s Large was a Women’s XL). There was no extra room in the chest. So I had to size up 2 sizes to get it to fit across my chest. The shoulders was so big that I looked like I was a kid wearing my dad’s shirt. The shoulder seam was half way down my upper arm. There was no stretch either.

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          3. Grenelda Thurber*

            Back in the dark ages when I was waif-sized, men’s small was the smallest size available for our company shirts, so that’s what I got. I could have put a belt over it and worn it as a dress. It would have looked ridiculous, but less ridiculous than wearing it with pants. I don’t have that problem much anymore, but you’d think it would have occurred to someone that working adults come in a much wider variety of sizes. Sheesh.

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      3. Babbalou*

        Yes, especially if there are women who have to wear the men’s sized t-shirts. I wear a large in a man’s shirt and I weigh 135 pounds. Clearly there are a lot of folks bigger than I am.

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      4. JoAnna*

        My guess is the “fat tax” applied – the company would have to pay extra for plus sizes so they didn’t order them.

        Reply ↓
    3. MissMuffett*

      Loved that story. So glad he was actually IN the meeting and you could just look at him like, ya wanna answer that? (That’s never my luck)

      Reply ↓
    5. NoIWontFixYourComputer*

      I had a “Todd”… sort of.

      He was a marketroid who somehow wound up in charge of project X. Now for our team, project X involved learning a new language, a new operating system, and a new development environment.

      Somehow I wound up as the development lead, and he asked me for an estimate. I told him N man-months plus 3 months calendar for learning curve for everyone. I was literally told to “work smarter not harder” (I wish I’d preserved that email).

      Guess how late project X was?

      Reply ↓
      1. Grenelda Thurber*

        Oh! Oh! Let me answer!!

        Three months??

        I can’t even count the number of projects I’ve worked on that were completed exactly when we engineers said it could be done. They could have just skipped all the angst, stress, long-hours, threats, bribes, and lengthy meetings telling us how *important* it was that we meet this fantasy schedule and saved themselves a whole lot of energy.

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    6. iglwif*

      I have worked in software before. I have known more than one iteration of Todd.

      That story was INCREDIBLY satisfying to read!!!

      Reply ↓
    1. Alie*

      Yes! I admire him, I want to be that brave. Luckily my current job only “offers” but doesn’t require I actually wear their branded stuff, which only runs up to a women’s 12

      Reply ↓
      2. Throwaway Account*

        I think that is gross. They only want women of a certain size wearing their branded materials. My malicious compliance would be to wear their shirt every day. I am not a size 12 and my chest is especially not a size 12.

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        1. Texan in exile on her phone*

          At an old job, I had to wear branded polo at tradeshow, but the vendor in the 20th Century of Our Lord did not even make women’s sizes, so I had to wear a men’s small and cut off the bottom 12″ before tucking it into my hideous khaki pants.

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      3. Elizabeth West*

        I hated wearing branded stuff – women’s shirts don’t fit me across the shoulders because I’m tall. At OldExJob, they wouldn’t let me order the men’s button-down shirt, so I had to get a larger women’s size. The sleeves were too short and it was too wide and looked terrible.

        I also consider it bad luck. Every time I get job-branded shirts or mugs or whatever, I end up leaving. Once I bought a very nice leather padfolio and — you guessed it. At least the branding is discreet, so I still use it, but arrgh.

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        1. Artemesia*

          I wear a lot of men’s small in turtlenecks and such because I am tall and women’s sizes don’t get longer as they go up, they get fatter. So a woman’s large will be too wide but the sleeves won’t be long enough. Not letting a tall woman get the men’s size is nuts.

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          1. darsynia*

            I am SO tired of this trend in clothing. I noticed it really heavily when it came to pregnancy clothes. They’d upsize things and add the belly space but no space for larger breasts. Tell me you’re just doing a cash grab with minimal design work without telling me.

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          2. Wendy Darling*

            As a fat woman I am here to tell you that they don’t even fit us either — for some reason a lot of brands have not noticed that for many (most?) people, your arms ALSO get fatter as the rest of you gets fatter.

            Oh the joy of exchanging a jacket because your arms don’t fit in the sleeves, only to discover that your arms don’t fit in the sleeves of the next size up either because they are THE SAME SIZE (or close enough that it doesn’t matter).

            Reply ↓
            1. Jackalope*

              Yup! I have one formerly favorite company that I mostly can’t wear anymore because if I get to the size where my arms fit, the rest of the shirt/coat is floppy and looks awful.

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        2. Wilbur*

          I think it’s designed to be bad for everyone. I’ve got a 1/4 zip pullover that fits me well, except the neck hole is so small and inflexible every time I try to take it off I think “This might be the time where it’s stuck on me forever. Even if they give me the right size, there’s always some combo of it being designed for someone 50 pounds heavier, sleeves that fit more like a cap sleeve, sleeves designed for the Rocks biceps, or the torso is too short. It doesn’t help that if my division asks you for your size, you can guarantee that you won’t actually get it for a year. My company/division had their 100 year anniversary last year, they decided to ask us for sizes in November and I’m hoping we get them this year so I can be disappointed by the design or fit. There are plenty of companies that will open a corporate store and let you pick your item and size and then complete and ship it to you in 3 months, how is this an issue? Rant over.

          Reply ↓
        3. AMH*

          I have the opposite problem…I’m five feet tall with T Rex arms so I always end up with sleeves covering my hands and then some.

          Reply ↓
    2. knitted feet*

      Yesss this LW is my hero. I was once asked to wear a team t-shirt from a range that stopped at 3 sizes too small for me. “Well, can’t you just make it work?” Sure, Ms. Medium-in-shirts, I’ll wear that if you’re equally comfortable wearing one made for an 8 year old.

      Reply ↓
      1. Zelda*

        Oh, to have been a fly on the wall (or a Zoom recording bot…) during that one! At what point did Todd see the bus coming? What was his face when he realized he was going under it? Marvelous!

        Reply ↓
        1. Inkognyto*

          the engine of the Bus started and revved, when he came in Monday morning to the emailed debris picture.

          He wanted to deflect/avoid it , since the Engineer was penciled in to talk about the email.
          But it was already too late as the bus was now fully under way to the destination by remote control.

          Reply ↓
        2. Pastor Petty Labelle*

          About when she refused to take the fall and said well that was a higher up decision. he realized that she wouldn’t cover for him and take the blame for his screw up that she warned him about.

          Reply ↓
    2. Not Tom, Just Petty*

      “oh crap, I forgot this project. I know, I can blame the engineer!”
      -said no person who ever met an engineer.

      Reply ↓
      1. Wendy Darling*

        I feel like engineers as a mass are uniquely disinclined to take the blame for things that are some manager’s fault.

        Reply ↓
      2. SpaceySteph*

        Yeah, 100% Todd either caused the delay or knew about the delay and didn’t take the right steps to recover schedule/flow down the delay and then tried to pawn it off.

        Reply ↓
  7. That Paralegal*

    I worked for a small museum in the oughts. Our board of trustees decided they wanted to know what we did all day, and wanted weekly reports. With our directors’ approval, all 12 of us wrote down every single thing we did all day long, in excruciating detail. Every phone call, email, every time I straightened a painting, every patron interaction, you name it: everything. It was pages long, for each of us. We then sent our weekly logs to the chairman of the board.

    They decided immediately that they really didn’t need that information after all.

    Reply ↓
    1. Cheeruson*

      Similar occurrence when four of us techs, at a somewhat junior level, were given a new senior to manage us. He was a star in another capacity at another site but although he was degreed in our area, had never actually worked in it. We all rolled our eyes but whatever. One of his first interactions with us was to schedule a meeting to “review” what each of us did, to see where there were openings for us to pick up more work currently being done by other groups. A clear corporate climber plan.

      The others barely reported what their areas were, in the shortest way possible, since he wouldn’t understand anyway. My plan was different. I gave an almost step-by-step of all of my regular tasks, including references to the out-of-the-ordinary things that occasionally came up, and interactions with other groups who relied on our group for support. Fully 4 pages single-spaced. As expected, he concluded that I was way too busy for other work, but continued to try to load up my team members, who had to push back every time, instead of setting that expectation early. Our shorthand for the tactic was Advance Pushback.

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      1. sb51*

        And if he’d been good at it/actually willing to learn, the detailed report would have been exactly what he needed to actually start learning what you did!

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    2. mango chiffon*

      I had a manager who made us send her reports every Friday of everything we did that week. She never told us what she wanted so the three of us reports were apparently doing entirely different things. I wrote a quick list, turned out another coworker was writing paragraphs upon paragraphs. Team morale was so low at this point and we were remote and we didn’t realize how much we were doing until much later where at this point we had banded together to go to HR about our manager. It was at this point we realized our manager had never even been reading these lists, and after our conversations with HR she “left” the organization after “going on leave”

      Reply ↓
    3. Bexy Bexerson*

      Similar story.

      We were told we needed to account for pretty much every minute of every workday on a paper form (this was approximately a million years ago) that we turned in at the end of the week.

      For each day, I included an entry for 15 minutes that I titled “filled out this form”.

      I was not the only person who did this, perhaps because I told my coworkers what I was doing and encouraged them to do the same.

      The forms didn’t last long.

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      1. PTBNL*

        I had a manager once that made me report what I would be doing that week. Not only am I a litigation paralegal so I kind of have to react to whatever hits my desk, I was on a massive case at the time that took all of my time. So I reported 39.75 hours big case, .25 hours report on anticipated weekly activities.

        I only had to do that report two weeks.

        Reply ↓
        1. darsynia*

          Yes! The last time my husband had to do that kind of an ‘account for everything’ it was after a project that went way overbudget. He was asked to write out a plan for the next project and he included X hours a week for ‘coworker interactions (questions, concerns, etc.).’ He’s not much of a complainer so I think it really signaled to his manager that he valued collaboration but also needed to have those moments included in the time budget because they DO occur whether we have ‘time’ for them or not.

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        2. AW*

          I’m in the midst of this myself. I’m a temp-agency type contractor and am required to track time both for the agency and the client. The agency wants a minute-to-minute accounting of my hours… split across the four different assignments I have with four different departments of the same large client. I am now devoting approximately ten percent of my time to timekeeping. We shall see how long this lasts.

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        3. JJJJ*

          I had a (now) ex boss that required me to (ideally at the end of the week, but worst-case first thing on Monday, email her a document with my planned activities for that week (every minute had to be accounted for and scheduled on my outlook calendar), with calculations of the percentage of each week that each task/project was allotted, the tasks within each project (also with time amounts/percentages). I was expected to send a midweek update and an end-of-week report on what did/didn’t get done and why, actual time/% taken, amount/% of time overage, etc. When she got a new boss (grandboss for me), it only took a few weeks for my boss to be gone and for me to start reporting to the new person, who told me to stop wasting time on such nitpicky and pointless reporting. (I could have written multiple letters to AAM about that old boss but never did)

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      2. That Paralegal*

        A long time ago, I was a seasonal data entry monkey for the IRS. There was literally a six-digit code for everything we had to put on our time sheet. This included a six-digit code for the time we spent filling out the time sheet.

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    4. Inkognyto*

      For 1 month everyone was asked to track all tasks they did.

      I’ve had to compile all of the tasks I did each day. I worked in IT Tech out of a ticket queue.

      It wasn’t enough. So in my reports, where I tracked how long it took to do each single ticket, I added the tracking time with it.

      My productivity was down but all of it was logged including that I took 1.5 hrs each day to track everything I did. I got asked about it and I said “if I cannot also track how long it takes to track 60-70 tickets a day then this report won’t be accurate”

      Middle mgmt was trimmed after the 3rd party got the tracking data.

      6 months after that (I had left) the company was bought out.

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    5. Moths*

      That Paralegal — I hope that you also documented in the report every time that you were documenting something in the report!

      8:32 am: Straightened painting
      8:33 am: Documented that I straightened painting
      8:34-40 am: Answered phone call from patron
      8:41 am: Documented that I answered phone call from patron

      Reply ↓
    6. Soon-to-be-ex-wife*

      I did that when my husband yelled that I did nothing around the house when I was unemployed. He looked at it and asked why I bothered writing every step of everything down, both sides of a paper, every line, two columns. I told him it was because people had told me I didn’t do anything all day. He shouted at me, “who said that!?

      Reply ↓
      7. Mentally Spicy*

        I’m a freelancer and my wife will sometimes convince herself that I do nothing all day. The last time she told me I to “do more around the house” because I “spend all day doing nothing”, I sent her this list of what I’d actually done that day:

        *Did paid work from 8am to 2pm
        *Did laundry
        *Dealt with builders
        *Emptied [son]’s room and put it all back for him
        *Fixed boiler
        *Cleaned up after Molly [one of our cats]
        *Picked up Faye from school
        *Did shopping
        *Picked up 2x takeaways
        *Ferried kids around for showers and picked them up [we were having building work done which put our bathroom out of action]

        And that was a pretty typical day! She hasn’t mentioned it since.

        Reply ↓
        1. Wendy Darling*

          I do this to MYSELF. I’ll be like “ugh I did nothing today” and then I actually write down everything I did and it’s like a massive list of stuff I didn’t really think about because it was mostly “I saw that X needed to be done, so I did it”

          Like I don’t THINK of calling the pharmacy and sitting on hold with them for 40 minutes while I did the dishes as a thing I did today, but it is.

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      8. Anon for this*

        I had a similar experience and am now the XW. I hope you are soon free to do whatever you want however you want, STBXW.

        Reply ↓
    7. Spacewoman Spiff*

      Hahaha. Had a similar thing after I spoke with my manager about struggling to fit in all my assignments in the allotted time (org had just decided to limit overtime), and asking him what I should cut. He didn’t believe I truly couldn’t fit in the assignments and told me to track my time, so I did, in excruciating detail. If I took 2 minutes to go to the bathroom or 30 seconds to get a coffee, I wrote that down. He finally admitted that I was correct I had too much work, though I don’t think he ever did anything to correct it.

      Funnily, I later learned that he put one of my coworkers on a PIP, and had her do the same activity, and she maliciously complied in the same way. I guess this was his one managerial trick.

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      1. Jillian with a J dammit*

        I was working about 60 hours a week when corporate cut all overtime. My boss continued to add “urgent” projects to my workload. Every time he added something or moved up a deadline I responded with “Instead of what?” and insisted he tell me what he wanted me NOT to do.

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        1. Spacewoman Spiff*

          YES! I think I started trying this, with occasional success. The only other thing I clearly remember from this “overtime reduction” period was that our office manager instructed everyone who earned overtime to, if we went over weekly hours, report our extra hours in the following week and take comp time. So, if I worked a Saturday event, I should report those hours as if I’d worked them the following Monday, when I would be on my “comp time.” I pointed out that (a) this was illegal and (b) I already couldn’t fit in all the work they were piling on me without taking the illegal comp time…with results about as positive as you’d expect. (I still just quietly refused to do it and reported my time correctly and 6 months later was laid off. For the best!)

          Reply ↓
    8. Elitist Semicolon*

      I work for a state entity that has a fraught relationship with the legislature, who thinks we’re all overpaid and lazy. In spring 2020, when we were all sent home to work remotely, we were “encouraged” to keep a list of the daily tasks we accomplished in case the legislature decided to act up. So I did – and I chose my action verbs carefully so I could arrange them to spell inappropriate words/messages when read vertically. The day I managed to spell “Twatwaffle” was a personal accomplishment.

      Reply ↓
    9. One Duck In A Row*

      I would like to take this opportunity to note that I used to have a truly excellent manager who turned this idea on its head to lift up his direct reports and make clear the depth and breadth of our contributions to the projects he managed. We had twice annual formal goal setting/review meetings (that was a company-wide thing), and at each one he would have compiled a long list of every project I worked on, every task I held, etc. It was a really wonderful lesson in owning your contribution to a project and/or team, even if you might sometimes feel like you aren’t as important as someone who holds higher level tasks, etc. (And to be clear, he never made folks feel like they weren’t important – that’s just the ol’ former-gifted-kid-not-living-up-to-potential b.s. that some of us deal with.)

      I actually didn’t realize for years that creating a list like that wasn’t a company-wide practice that managers were trained to do, but just something that he felt was important to do with his team, as a manager. Him doing that helped me reframe my work in that context and beyond (despite raging imposter syndrome), and is absolutely something I will do if/when I ever become a manager. Let’s normalize actually recognizing the breadth of work that folks contribute to, even if (possibly especially if) they are in an admin-assistant or other similar position where they may feel more cursory to the meat of the work being done by the team/organization.

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      1. Silver Robin*

        I make these for myself as standard practice because I always make a “how to do my job manual”. and then at review time, (or grant application time) I have a handy dandy list of everything I do. helps with the confidence immensely *and* it makes transitions easy when I leave that position.

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    10. Artemesia*

      Now if I had been on that board and got this obvious attempt to jerk me around I’d have insisted on the detail continuing — I wouldn’t read it, but I’d make you do it. Reverse malicious compliance.

      Reply ↓
      1. That Paralegal*

        Rude! Seriously, people think museum curators waft around the galleries, gazing contemplatively at the Art. Our millionaire board members were like, why do these poors want a pay raise? They hardly do anything all day!

        So, you know, if you’d like to get on a non-profit board and squander the time of overworked/underpaid employees, well, you have the day you deserve, ma’am.

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    11. Pomodoro Sauce*

      Ah! I did something similar during lockdown — at first we had to send an email to our division head at the beginning of any “work time” and at the end, no matter how many times it happened per day.

      I had just returned to work after having a baby and we had no child care, so my work hours were irregular. And I absolutely sent him a beginning and ending email whenever I was up bouncing a colicky baby and decided to respond to a few emails during the wee hours.

      At first I didn’t realize that due to some compliance needs he was not allowed to put his phone in DND or have it in another room. I, and a couple of other parents, wore him down within two weeks.

      Reply ↓
    12. not nice, don't care*

      My workplace did something like this, only made everyone post every duty in a shared spreadsheet so the entire place could vote on what duties they felt were important. Super fun to see everything I do voted off the island for a year until badmin finally acknowledged they couldn’t lay anyone off and couldn’t squeeze more blood from us.
      I helpfully offered to explain to my 300+ service-users that the services I provide were deemed unnecessary. Got no takers. Still doing the same work, still treated like I am a carbuncle on the ass of my organization, still providing outstanding service to my ‘client’ base.

      Reply ↓
    13. Sack of Benevolent Trash Marsupials*

      “Crush them under the weight of the information” is my strategy for almost everything.

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    14. International Employee*

      Related Story: I used to work for an international organization living overseas. I found it frustrating that our American bosses didn’t speak the local language; to be entirely fair, they had tried to learn, but on the other hand they regularly made racist comments about the country, its culture, and its people, so I was still irked. Also, we had to send them various reports every month, which I would have been fine with except that they demonstrably never read them, and the reports took a lot of time.

      The internet as tool was still a new concept, and they decided to try out a program that would let them have more control over our lives. We had been complaining that our workload had increased too much, so they said we would all have to let them know what we were doing by making a daily recording in this new Internet program they’d found. Because of course the solution to a too-high workload was… giving us more work.

      I was so annoyed by this, and knew that they weren’t even going to read it because they never read our other stuff. So I started recording my activities, 100% in the novel language. Technically we were a bilingual organization, so I don’t know if that’s why they didn’t complain or if as I suspected they never bothered looking at what we wrote.

      Reply ↓
  8. FMNDL*

    I get in trouble for doing what people specifically say all the time. I don’t have any good stories though, I just get in vague trouble for believing what people say and not understanding when they actually meant something completely different than what they said. I guess people must think it’s malicious on my part?

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    2. Mockingjay*

      Not quite malicious, but still compliance: the recap email. Just send an email summing up what you heard: “Hey Coworker/Boss, per our convo today, I’m going to do X and complete it by noon Friday. You didn’t specify who needs to review it; should I send it to you or to Bob?” (If they don’t respond, send to both.)

      My job involves receiving tasks from the entire program (which can be 60 – 100 different persons). We have a tracking system for work assignments, but most don’t use it. The recap email has saved me from many butt chewings.

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      1. iglwif*

        The recap email is a great tool for all sorts of situations!
        – Your coworker/boss is scatterbrained or forgetful? Recap email!
        – Your coworker/boss is a blamestorming jerk? Recap email!
        – Your coworker/boss is not very smart? Recap email!
        – Your coworker/boss does not express themself clearly? Recap email!
        – Your coworker/boss is nice but flakey? Recap email!
        – People in the meeting were clearly not paying attention? Recap email!
        – Unreasonable deadlines were set over your protests? Recap email!

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    4. Varthema*

      I don’t think that counts – sounds like just poor instructions. Malicious compliance is when you get instructions and are able to fulfill them in a way that technically doesn’t break any of the specs but DOES produce a result that you know will land poorly, not work, or otherwise cause damage.

      Often the recipient of the malicious compliance richly deserves it! But sometimes the complier is just being a jerk (see example a couple posts below).

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    5. Armchair Analyst*

      Wasn’t there a letter where an intern or new hire went to the city town hall for the company “town hall” meeting?

      If not, it was a meta social network group that I’m in, as a “how do I manage this person?!” Discussion starter.

      I’m not quite that literal, but I do get confused sometimes

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    6. Definitely not me*

      My sister is this way. My mom, who worked outside the home, had put a pot roast and vegetables in a roasting pan and left it in the fridge, and also had started a load of laundry before she left for work that morning. After school she called my sister, who was in high school, and told her to put the roast in the oven and the laundry in the dryer. And she did. But she didn’t turn either appliance on. So there was still wet laundry and no pot roast for dinner. Still kills me! ;D

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    7. Nightengale*

      I have this too. It isn’t malicious compliance and I’m not sure it has a specific name, but I have historically gotten into much more trouble over the years following directions than not following them. And I’m an autistic rule follower. . .

      My specialty seems to be informing people of directions and policies they didn’t know about. Like quoting the online handbook. Asking at an interview about something on the program’s website. Once I asked the lab TA how to do something and she yelled at me “is that RELEVANT to what we’re doing today?” and I was like, “yes it’s in the first step of the directions.” (It turned out we were skipping that step. No one had told us we were skipping that step. How was I supposed to know we were skipping that step?)

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    8. Ess Ess*

      OH, I hate when someone decides to be sarcastic or facetious when I ask a serious question because I assume they are giving me actual facts. Several years ago I was assigned to be part of a huge software production release for a company. The release involves the coordination of dozens of departments and it takes approximately 24 hours around the clock to complete the whole thing. Different departments have different responsibilities so they are scheduled to work at different times around that 24 hour schedule. For example, database people are near the beginning in order to take backups of the db before the release in case they need to revert back if there are issues, then server admins might need to come in to make changes to firewalls, then developers in different departments might have code to move that is needed before other code, then main code, then testing team, etc… It’s a HUGE all-company event. This was before remote work, so you had to come into the office to do this activity. I live in a big city and do not own a car so had to take public transit or taxis to get to the office (this is before Ubers).

      So, it was the first time I had been assigned to be part of this. I knew that some people sitting near me were assigned to begin their parts at around 7am on the deployment day. I went to my boss and asked what time I was scheduled to begin. He said, “For you, 2am, ” and he walked away. So I took a taxi to the office the morning of deployment and arrived at 2am. NOONE else from my team was there. So I called my boss, woke him up, and he was pissed and asked why I was there at 2am because my steps didn’t start until that afternoon. I was furious. I yelled into the phone, “BECAUSE YOU TOLD ME TO!” and I went home. I never got reimbursed for the taxis I took to be there (too dangerous to take the public transit at that time of the night). I never trusted my manager again.

      Reply ↓
  9. not nice, don't care*

    My email archives are full of delicious documentation of assorted fkery, should I ever need to deploy it.

    Reply ↓
  10. Potato Potato*

    Before HR stepped in, I was considering growing out my beard and attending one of the Women’s Development Sessions that the organizer refused to stop inviting me to.

    Reply ↓
    1. AnonAnon*

      LOL same. I have all the codes to go nuclear if someone decides to f-around. Especially when they put their nonsense in writing.

      Reply ↓
  11. Respectfully, Pumat Sol*

    This one is double sided, I guess?
    In my first role ever managing people, I was a student “account executive” at the on-campus design shop that made posters for the on-campus clubs and activities. One of the designers I managed worked a completely different schedule than I did, due to class hours. He was consistently late on his projects and deliverables. So I asked him to start giving me a rundown of the projects he worked on during his shifts. I explained it just as a “I worked on projects x, y and z. I’m almost done with x and y, z will be a little longer because of Reason. I will connect with client for project K on Tuesday.” Really brief and standard status updates.
    He responded with malicious compliance and gave me essentially a minute by minute reporting of what he did during his shift. Obviously trying to overwhelm me with detail so I’d stop asking.
    I responded – yes perfect. More of that. And just made him give me that level of detail for a week. I did finally catch him and tell him to knock it off and give me the correct level of detail. But I let him make himself miserable with his own “malicious compliance” for a week first.

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    2. Silver Robin*

      honestly, this is the first time I have heard of such an attempt from the manager’s perspective and, ya know what? Kudos. He did that to himself. Did he ever get better?

      Reply ↓
      1. Respectfully, Pumat Sol*

        Unfortunately no! I also had very little guidance from my manager on how to handle the situation, and since it was a 1-year student position, there wasn’t a lot I could actually do to “manage” things. Obviously, in an ideal world one or both of us would have moved our shifts around so we overlapped more, but class schedules dictated when we could be in our offices. It was definitely a learning experience!

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  12. beautiful, talented, brilliant, powerful musk-ox*

    So, I learned to decorate cakes at a grocery store bakery my first year out of high school, and I did that for around ten months. My handwriting is not great — in pen or in frosting — but it was fine by the time I left that job. However, that’s not a skill that just stuck with me forever, and though I could still passably decorate cakes, writing on them is a whole other thing.

    I got a job about four years later at Costco, which has a bakery, but I did not work in the bakery. Also of note: the Costco I worked at didn’t train everyone in the bakery to write on cakes (the grocery store I learned decorating at did), so if the decorator had left for the day and someone wanted a name written on a cake, there was a bunch of scrambling to find someone who could. Early on, my frosting writing abilities were okay, but the longer I went not working in the bakery, the worse my handwriting got. Every time I’d get pulled from my position to go write on a cake for someone, I would warn the supervisor or manager telling me to do this that I was out of practice and it likely wouldn’t look good.

    Finally, I got told to write on a cake when it had probably been a year since I’d last been told to do that. I told the manager telling me to do this that it was going to end badly. They told me to try anyway.

    So, I did. I gave it my best shot. I didn’t mess it up on purpose, but it didn’t look great. Later, I saw the women who I’d helped returning the cake, and since it hadn’t been touched or left the building, but couldn’t be resold due to the writing, it got stuck in the break room. And I was never tapped to write on cakes ever again.

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  13. Make it more expensive? No problem!*

    This was many years ago. When traveling for work, I discovered that I couldn’t get reimbursed for customary tips on transportation (taxis, group airport shuttles). When I complained, it was just “too bad.” Only a few dollars here and there, but I was peeved. Why should I be out money while on work travel?

    I read the travel policies closely after this and realized I *could* get reimbursed for car rental and parking. Flying in for a client meeting less than two miles from the airport? Car rental. Spending a week downtown in an expensive city for which I didn’t particularly need a car? Car rental plus over $50/day in parking fees so the car could just sit there until I needed to drive back to the airport.

    Did this for all work travel forcthe remainder of my time there.

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    4. a bright young reporter with a point of view*

      Every day I, an American, learn about a new person you’re supposed to tip. Group shuttle driver? I would never have guessed that one.

      Reply ↓
      1. Selina Luna*

        The last group shuttle I was on had a sign that specifically said not to tip the driver (I asked the driver about it, and apparently, a driver had been robbed at some point and had all his tips stolen), but that was when I learned about this expectation.

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      2. Grandma*

        For the shuttle driver from the remote parking lot (2-5 miles away) to the airport, $1 per bag riding on the luggage rack up front.

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        2. a bright young reporter with a point of view*

          The intra-airport shuttle driver? This is even more surprising to me than a hotel shuttle driver.

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      3. Lellow*

        Genuinely a reason why I’m reluctant to ever visit the US – I’m autistic and the thought of this mandatory but fraught with unspoken rules add-on to what seems like every single interaction with another person makes me incredibly anxious and filled with dread.

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        1. Mad Harry Crewe*

          If you tip 20% at restaurants, that’s good enough for tourism. You don’t need to know all the particulars, and Americans frequently don’t agree on the fine details either – see the airport shuttle discussion above. You can also ask up front, “is a tip appropriate?” and most people will tell you what’s normal. I did that when starting a new-to-me service a few weeks ago and got a straight answer.

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        2. Hannah*

          I’m in the US and get nervous around tips in other countries because I’m so used to the unspoken rules!

          That said, if you Google “tipping in US”, you’ll get all the major ones. Sometimes there are weirder ones like the shuttle driver but trust me, half the people who ride that shuttle either don’t know or are not planning on tipping so you will be in good company.

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      4. darsynia*

        My dad used to work at those, and IIRC the salary he was paid took into account the tips as though EVERYONE tipped. Because not everyone tipped, the workers’ take-home from that job could vary wildly week by week. However, my dad was an inveterate storyteller, so his tips were always superb, usually tops of the group of employees.

        His boss had to change the way they ranked employee of the month because of this; it used to be based on tip amount (to get people to hustle), but Dad’s charisma made it more apparent that the tips shouldn’t be the indicator of whether someone’s doing good at their job, since ‘telling great stories and making customers like you’ isn’t part of the job description. Granted, this was 1990-94 so there weren’t cell phones to keep people occupied while riding the shuttle.

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        1. Don P.*

          Making customers enjoy their ride (and more likely to use the shuttle again) should be part of the evaluation, for sure!

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    6. Tree*

      I had something similar happen at my old firm! I spent $60 on one nice dinner while I was travelling for a week. Every other dinner was $20 or less.

      My Sr Director was pissed, even though the policy said we’d be reimbursed for ‘reasonable’ dinner expenses. She defined reasonable as $40, and wouldn’t authorise the extra twenty for that night – even when I pointed out that the grand total would have been higher for a week of $40 dinners.

      So, every subsequent dinner while travelling was $40.

      I’m convinced that she didn’t realize how the math worked out when she first raised a stink and was too stubborn to back down. Fine by me – I kept the email chain.

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    7. AthenaC*

      I had something similar a few years ago and I was irritated enough to blog about it (will send the link in a separate post but if you Google “to my esteemed employer” it’s like maybe the 5th one down).

      Basically, I would eat modestly for each of 3 meals, but I got my expense report kicked back because I guess I can’t run through lunch when I’m traveling. Okay, no matter – I’ll just stock up at breakfast and then get more dinner than I need so that I have leftovers and I can eat at my normal cadence. In the process I am nearly doubling the cost of my travel meals, but – problem solved? I guess?

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      2. ICodeForFood*

        Yeah, I once worked for an employer that actually sent out a memo telling us that lunch during business travel would no longer be covered. I told my boss that I’d be brown-bagging a salami and a raw onion for my lunch on business trips (which is not something I would actually eat, but you, and more importantly she, got the point). No one ever tried to enforce that rule when I travelled…

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  15. anotherfan*

    this’ll get buried because it’s kind of ‘workers vs my busybody aunt’ instead of something really egregious, but when my aunt’s fancy house was being built, she had her nose into everything, never left the premises, had lots of suggestions for the builders, designers, contractors and even the guys who did the real work — who squared off the frame, nailed on the sheetrock — you get the picture. She insisted the blueprints be followed to the letter. Fast forward to the house is finished and she walks in to make a final inspection and … ah, yes, blueprints didn’t actually square with reality because they never do. so her very fancy house includes a slab of something in front of the fireplace slightly askew (flint? marble? slate?), fancy inlaid wood to the opening for the staircase to the lower floor that isn’t quite … square with the opening … and carpet that doesn’t quiet line up with the doorways.

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    2. Riley*

      Is this really a “match the blue prints” problem? Bc unless the drafter was drunk, blue prints tend to have things square off. Sounds more like a “builders were jerks to the client” problem.

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      1. Dinwar*

        You’d be surprised.

        On one of the first projects I helped with redlines on, the designers put the dots on the map where they looked like they should have gone using the georeferenced aerial photos. This produced a lat/long coordinate for the points. This put the points 3 feet into a 45 ft thick hunk of concrete that had 1″ rebar on 2″ centers; NOT the sort of stuff you can get through with an excavator. Ended up being due to the difference between the standard foot and the survey foot–at our distance from the equator that difference was three feet.

        We had to go through a whole process to get that design changed, because officially the design said we were cutting out a 3 ft wide swath of insanely over-built concrete. What the design said is what we were legally obliged to do until we got everyone’s approval to do the sane thing.

        I’ve also seen triangular rooms where the three corners had angles that added up to 170 degrees. The engineer couldn’t understand why we were trying to change the design.

        So yeah, I can absolutely see weird things happening in design drawings.

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        1. Sola Lingua Bona Lingua Mortua Est*

          I’ve also seen triangular rooms where the three corners had angles that added up to 170 degrees.

          I’m trying to figure out if the underlying planet is that small or the room is that big that its curvature is forcing non-Euclidean construction.

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          1. Mad Harry Crewe*

            This would actually be the other way around – a triangle drawn in the bottom of a bowl, so the points are extra pointy. Normal triangles sum to 180 deg.

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            1. 2e asteroid*

              Not the bottom of a bowl! The inside of a sphere has exactly the same positively-curved geometry as the outside of a sphere, so a triangle drawn in the bottom of a bowl would also have angles that sum to more than 180 degrees.

              To get less than 180 degrees you need a surface with negative curvature: say, a saddle shape, the inner rim of a torus, or a pseudosphere.

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      2. Southern Violet*

        I mean its hard to do your job properly with a know-nothing micromanager breathing down your neck. If she doesn’t like it or thinks they didn’t do their job right on purpose, sounds like she has the money to sue if she wants to. Otherwise, she should learn to stay out of things.

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    3. Dust Bunny*

      Nah, that’s just doing a crap job. Any half-way decent builder would have smiled and nodded and then done it correctly behind her back.

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    4. Dinwar*

      I have some sympathy for your aunt here. I do the same with contractors working on my house, but it’s because of the number of times they try to get away with stuff. I work in a construction-adjacent field and write scopes of work for a living, so I actually read our contracts with the contractors. And I hold them to the contract mostly.

      To give an example: When we hired someone to install a fence they insisted that they had to charge us an extra mobilization charge because they didn’t have enough materials. I asked for their instructions and said “No, our instructions agree, you just didn’t load enough. According to our contract, that’s on you.” That’s one example, but this stuff happened over a dozens times–for a fence. It finally got to a point where they refused to talk to me, and tried to con my wife. Her response was a perfect application of weaponized incompetence–“Oh, I don’t know what I’m looking at, I’ll ask my husband when he gets home tonight.” I kept a copy of the redline drawings as well, at first for practice (I’d only just started working on that sort of thing), and eventually for negotiations.

      That said…yeah, you’ve gotta be flexible. That same company also had an idea that raised the costs by a bit, but which made life MUCH easier (a change in the gate). In that case yes, they got the extra money–because they weren’t trying to screw us over, they actually had an idea that benefitted us.

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      1. Strive to Excel*

        When my parents were replacing the floor of their house, they found a bunch of the snap-together wood floor at a second-hand construction materials place. They decided they didn’t want to try and install it themselves and hired a company to do it. The contractors came out and did a good job – then when they were done loaded all the leftover wood floor onto their truck and left. Several hundred dollars worth! That my parents paid for! And the contractors knew full well they hadn’t brought it, because they commented that this was the first time they’d worked with it when they showed up.

        The Google review that followed was spicy.

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      2. Artemesia*

        Then umber of idiocies in our home when we first moved in after it was contractor built ( a spec house we bought when it was half done) was legion. Hanging rod in a closet 10 inches deep. Shelves in a closet that was 4 feet deep so you’d have to wiggle on your belly to use them. hanging rods in front hall closets that were not centered to take a hangar. An HVAC return that was not finished so the furnace was just sucking air through the area under the stairs filled with scrap lumber and saw dust. Drain system for HVAC system in the attic that didn’t have safeguards for flooding. I made a long list and got it fixed, but you can always assume contractors will do a crappy job and some of it you won’t discover till water is dripping through your ceiling or you remove the microwave for repair and find the big hole in the sheetrock behind it.

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    5. blupuck*

      We are having our house worked on. This is my biggest fear.
      Our plans are great, but honestly I don’t want the sink off center. We could have done another round of drawings but decided to just sort it with the builder. Its been working out great!
      But I make a point to not bother the workers. I show up during their lunch and completely ignore them while they are one break. Stay for 15 minutes once they get back and ask “need anything from me?” and then LEAVE!

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    6. WorkerDrone*

      I hate to say it but I feel like this was a case of cutting off one’s nose to spite their face. I can’t imagine anyone who saw the house once completed would think, “Gosh, this must be BusyBody Aunt’s just desserts” vs. “Gosh, these were some terrible builders, better avoid this company.”

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    7. Llellayena*

      Ah yes, the type of person for whom the “construction tolerance” statement on the drawings means…nothing. Y’all, a 2×4 piece of lumber is NOT 2″x4″ and is often very slightly off from the accepted 1.5″ x 3.5″. Not noticeable when it’s ONE, but when there’s several next to each other…

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    8. Generic Name*

      Huh. My husband is a carpenter, and back in the day he was building $7 Million houses. He also did high-end renovations on historic homes. The only time he did something that wasn’t perfectly plumb or square was when he had to work around/compensate for non-plumb/non-square 100 year old houses. Maybe you just don’t like your aunt for other reasons, but I pay contractors to do it right, and right is not having everything “slightly askew” and “not lining up”.

      Reply ↓
  16. Czech Mate*

    I was an admin at a privately owned ESL school. I had a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad coworker, “Fergus.” The owner absolutely adored Fergus, a class A bullsh*tter who was demonstrably bad at everything and who was despised by staff, faculty, and students who had been there a while, so she decided to put him in admissions. He was in charge of talking to prospective students and selling them on our school (as a bullsh*tter, he was great at talking but knew nothing about what the school could and could not deliver). We were also told, as admins, that we were to direct students who wanted to transfer to Fergus so that he could convince them not to transfer.

    In due course, we started to get tons of starry eyed students who had been promised the moon during the admissions cycle by Fergus. They would quickly realize that none of what Fergus had promised was real. Any time one of these students came into the office upset, I would immediately direct them to Fergus. He was, after all, the brilliant, talented, so good, very wonderful salesman–who was *I* to try to step in? It basically became a revolving door where students would be admitted by Fergus, then within a few weeks, they would go straight back to Fergus to ask why they hadn’t received anything he had promised. Fergus often tried to recover by promising more things that he couldn’t deliver. And thus the cycle continued.

    Fergus, sensing a firing on the horizon, eventually quit.

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    1. Slow Gin Lizz*

      Yes, we do! It sounds like the kind of story my dad, also an engineer, could have told. He had some really stupid bosses over the years who had no idea what they were doing.

      Reply ↓
      1. ScruffyInternHerder*

        It did not take me past age ten to never question logic with an engineer. It was not going to end well for you. It was likely to be painful. And chances are, you were wrong anyways.

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  18. William Murdoch's Homburg*

    OMG, the teal polo shirt and, “OK, be like that”, had me ROLLING. Love it, I wish I could be that brave!

    Reply ↓
  19. LG*

    My school district once refused to apply for an act of God day due to an unusually snowy winter and made us give up a holiday to work because they expected us to work every minute of our contract. I was Working almost 1.5 hours extra every single day by coming in early and leaving late, so I just…quit doing that.

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        3. Throwaway Account*

          Haha! Coworker got promoted to boss and is very hard on himself and others. Our reviews were very bad, mine worst of all. I’ve stopped volunteering to help and if I get called on it, I’m going to say I’m acting in accordance with my review.

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    2. Successful Birthday Rememberer*

      I did something similar. I had an employee get sick and need to go to the ER. I took her, stayed with her, waited until she got checked in, swung by drive through for lunch, and came back to the office. My manager blasted me for taking so much time off of work (about 2 hours).
      So I kept to my 9-5 schedule and cut the extra 20-30 hours a week I had been working. But I sure was in the office 40 hours a week just like he asked.

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      1. Successful Birthday Rememberer*

        And then I left and he got fired for not being able to do his job. His career has sunk over the years, with him taking lower and lower positions at each company.

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    3. I don't mean to be rude, I'm just good at it*

      I am a former urban high school teacher who always scoffed at those who came in a week early to decorate their rooms, spend an hour a day after school to tidy up their rooms etc…

      It’s bad enough I spent a couple hours a day at home grading papers and preparing lessons, but I was in the building 5 minutes before the bell and out the door 5 minutes after.

      Reply ↓
      1. Not a Vorpatril*

        I mean, we all do what we enjoy and with the schedule that works for us. I get in ~40 minutes before school starts, but that’s because I want to make sure I have time to print things out, move desks, etc and more importantly get in before the mob of student drivers and busses make the parking lot a nightmare. I leave ~90 minutes after school gets out, but that’s because going home before heading back out to get my kidlets is not worthwhile, IMO, so I’ll just hang about and chat with other teachers or what not assuming I am all ready and prepped for the next few days.

        And then some days I’m using all of that spare time to get stuff done because plans got changed, or the lesson I used previously wasn’t good enough, or the batch of students this time around are more/less suited for the level of material I was throwing at them. That’s getting less as I’m getting more comfortable with everything, but personal preference.

        On the other hand, I look at other teachers who have made out their rooms in cool, interesting, or just nice ways and get a little jealous. Only for the ability to put it all together like that, mind, as I will not make the time, but I know my classroom is a bit on the drab side.

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    4. Texas Teacher*

      If only every teacher would stop working 12 hour days on the regular!
      we would either 1) get more contract days (and more pay), 2) have to teach fewer hours per day or days per year (when does all the paperwork and planning get done?), or 3) get a lot of the extraneous tasks eliminated or streamlined.
      I’d vote for number 3.

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      1. Not a Vorpatril*

        Ha! #3 is a lovely pipe dream as we keep seeing the additional crap duties (bus duty! bathroom duty! Hall monitoring! Oh, and why aren’t you doing more for clubs/sports/dances/whathaveyou to make the school better?) pile on when what we are needing, more and more, is to have additional bodies available to just be around for that sort of thing. But that requires money, and in public schools, good luck there!

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  20. EEB18*

    This story comes from high school rather than the work world, but I’ll share it anyway:

    I was a good student but have always been a shockingly terrible artist. In high school I had a slacker bio teacher who would give us dumb time-killing assignments. A lot of these assignments designed art projects (like, “imagine someone with blue eyes had a baby with someone with brown eyes. Based on the principles of genetics, draw a picture of the baby with the most likely eye color.” And I’d be like “can I just tell you the color rather than draw the baby?”) This teacher knew I hated his art assignments.

    When we were studying evolution, his assignment was that we had to each drawn an animal with an evolutionary adaptation, and then present that drawing and adaptation to the class. I decided to steer into my lack of artistic talent and draw the ugliest animal I could – garish colors etc. – and say that the evolutionary adaptation was that the animal was so ugly that no other animal wanted to eat it. My teacher told me I couldn’t do that and that I needed to take the assignment seriously. So when it was my turn to present, I held up a blank sheet of paper and said that my animal had evolved to be invisible.

    I’m pretty sure my teacher laughed and gave me a decent grade…

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    2. Cats Ate My Croissant*

      I’m similarly academically bright but have the artistic ability of a three-year old who’s had a full bag of Haribo and is way overdue for a nap. I’ve encountered waaaay too many assignments with the dreaded words “design a poster to illustrate your results”. Frickin degree level physics and some bugger still wants a poster, ffs.

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      2. KateM*

        I have a kid like that. Once when we were walking from school to music school he asked me conversationally “do you know which lesson at school I like least?”. Well, first month of first year of school as it was, that question was enough to fill a parent with dread, even before I heard the answer “music – because we have to colour in so much”.
        Thankfully, both his music school music teacher and regular school music teacher were shocked when they heard it and made sure his joy of music would not be suffocated by colouring pages.

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    3. Ginger Beer*

      To be fair to your teacher, those assignments might not have been the result of laziness, but rather to meet some supervisory requirement to use “varied modalities” to address different learning styles. There’s a lot of that kind of thing in education, and teachers need to document what activities they have done to address those kinds of requirements. That said, I love both of your animal adaptations and would have given you a good grade for either one.

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    5. Sola Lingua Bona Lingua Mortua Est*

      Also high school. From grades 6-10/11, I was on an Architecture track. I was in every drafting, woodshop, and “industrial tech” course my school district offered, and every extracurricular my family could swing. Even volunteered in the concession stand one season since the drafting teacher I was closest to was also the high school’s baseball coach. I was really, really into it. I finished the Architecture track and just didn’t continue it into college.

      Anyway, spring semester, 11th grade year, “Industrial Tech” final was a twofold project. Two students were paired off; each one drafted a set of vellum blueprints for a whatever, exchanged them, and then built the other’s whatever to their specifications. I got paired with a bully from a clique I wasn’t part of.

      So the plans I received were decent, but had some discrepancies. The big one I remember is that the isometric didn’t maintain a consistent scale nor did it reconcile to the three-view. I built the thing to best of my ability, even involving the teacher’s help a few times (the only person in the class who did and who needed to). Bully went first alphabetically, absolutely reamed me on grading it, assigned me something like a 40%. I remember a condescending “you tried” as my feedback. I appealed to my teacher for help, something, and was told “well, be thorough, too. I’ve seen your work; I know you have great attention to details and high standards (for yourself).”

      That’s what I would maliciously comply with; high standards, attention to detail, and being thorough.

      So the next day, I signed out one of the Starrett aluminum Aircraft Scales (they go down to 1/100″ or ¼ mm), bought a 6H red pencil, and signed out the fancy, super-accurate stainless steel calipers. I really didn’t have to put much effort into judging the stepstool I had designed, as it had clearly been as half-assed as the plans I’d received to work from, but I poured my revenge into every single measurement. I may as well have just doused both with red graphite powder–and because it was all 6H, I had to press hard on everything. I think my feedback for him was “You did not try.”

      The final grade I assigned Bully was so low that he would have failed the class if the project weren’t capped at 0 on the low end, and if each class’s grade weren’t likewise capped at 0, send him back to remedial 2nd grade. Teacher tried to mediate in the moment, but the die was already cast.

      The aftermath got bad. Bully’s parents demonstrated where he learned his bullying hobby. Both projects got confiscated; everyone else who acted in good faith got to keep their project. Administrators got involved, we both met with the Superintendent of the district, physical altercations (and those would have involved law-enforcement, except I was the Chief of Police’s eldest grandchild, so I couldn’t file charges and expect impartiality, and Bully didn’t want to try bullying in that venue). 4 years after I graduated, when my youngest sibling graduated, that course was still not being offered again.

      Reply ↓
      1. Holly Gibney*

        1) This is 100% my brand of malicious compliance, congratulations.
        2) Wow I would’ve loved your school. It sounds amazing. I went to a STEM magnet and we had, like, one CAD class.
        3) I relate *hard* to getting huge blowback for reacting to terrible people, aka “we’re both the a*hole but they were 100% the a*hole first.” Like, sorry I’m crafty with my revenge and you’re too busy being awful to see it coming….

        Reply ↓
        1. ScruffyInternHerder*

          Its so odd that people who dish out $hitty energy REALLY don’t like it when the recipient is of the opinion that “know what? I’m going to match your energy, K?”

          I’ve probably started a fecal atmospheric disruption a couple of times by doing this. And by probably, I do in fact mean absolutely.

          Reply ↓
    6. AnneCordelia*

      Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day —one of his complaints is that in art class, his teacher didn’t like his picture of an invisible castle.

      Reply ↓
    7. A Genuine Scientician*

      I had one English teacher in high school who did not grasp that she was teaching English, not Art. Essentially every assignment for the year other than the in-class exams we had to do some artistic creative thing, and no we couldn’t make that artistic thing be a poem, or satire, or even any sort of writing; we had to draw or paint or make a collage or something.

      I eventually figured out that she considered calligraphy to be sufficiently artistic, and I’d already taught myself calligraphy out of a book a few years before to deal with a different but similarly inclined English teacher, so she got fancy-writing-with-multiple-ink-colors stuff from me. When she later told me I’d done calligraphy on too many assignments, I got her approval to do one with photography. On which I printed out a written thing, took a photo of it, and submitted the developed and printed photo.

      Reply ↓
      1. iglwif*

        I had a science teacher in Grades 7 and 8 who seemed like she wanted to be teaching art. (We later learned her BEd teachables were language arts and PE — she ended up teaching science because they needed another Francophone science teacher. Ah, the 1980s!) Every project and report involved diagrams (fine), illustrations, illustrated covers … and we had to do so many written reports, OMG.

        One I particularly remember was a written report on a constellation — but no two people could do the same constellation (remember, it was the 1980s, our research was all via encyclopedias and reference books in the school library) and I ended up with a very small, very boring one that I had never heard of and could find very little information on. I’m honestly still kind of mad about the lousy mark I got on that assignment — like, is it my fault that in the sources available to my Grade 8 class, the lore of Ursa Major is twenty times as extensive as the lore of Lyra, and I got stuck with Lyra????

        Reply ↓
    8. Christine*

      I have a similar high school story, we were asked to write a story from the perspective of our 5-year old selves. I kind of forgot about the assignment and panicked the morning it was due, so I got out my crayons and a sheet of white paper and drew a terrible picture of a kid in a tree, then scrawled in my most five year old hand writing “I climed the tree.” Luckily my teacher had a good sense of humor, gave me a grade, and then told me not to try that stunt again.

      Reply ↓
  21. raincoaster*

    Long ago I worked for a large coffee company, under a micromanaging district manager. The company had historically provided newspapers for the clientele to read, but made a deal with the papers to sell them instead. Naturally, customers were confused and kept taking the papers, reading them, and putting them back or recycling them.

    District manager decided that the solution was audits! Before anyone was allowed to take a break they had to do a written count of how many newspapers were in the box to be sold. This in a chain where an average of nine people a day worked.

    For the next district meeting I asked for five minutes for a “labour cost analysis.” Basically the time cost of these audits and reporting cost every store more than an hour of labour a day. I multiplied that by the number of stores in the district, subtracted the gross profit of selling all possible newspapers, and showed the audits meant we would always lose money selling papers this way.

    The audits ended that day.

    Reply ↓
    1. Strive to Excel*

      Just have the paper company install those $.25 lockboxes in the cafe and call it good. Or keep the papers behind the counter instead of in front.

      Reply ↓
      1. raincoaster*

        They didn’t want lockboxes (which were literally outside the store) because they couldn’t get a cut of the action. And they didn’t want them behind the counter because I have no idea why. Not a very logical process or company.

        Reply ↓
  22. Bad Spellir*

    Our useless principal required all of us to do a book study on his favorite book. The book in questions was basically a list of schools that had greatly improved their standardized test scores. So if they could do it, so could we! No complains allowed. No methods were listed on how they improved. They just did, so we should achieve this miracle too. I was annoyed by this, as a special education teacher my students were often penalized on standardized testing, I did not think this was a good method to assess all student progress.
    I looked up the schools in question, and what do you know, a third of them were linked to test cheating scandals another third were under investigation. I was in the last group to present at the faculty meeting and happily listed the news stories about the schools in question. The principle tried to do a wrap up after we presented, but we never had another book study after that.

    Reply ↓
    3. CeeDoo*

      That’s excellent. I hate all those inspirational stories that show teachers putting in 200%. I may not change the world, but I’m also not spending 20 hours a day on my job.

      Side note: A school in Waco, TX had a 100% graduation rate, which is absolutely not possible. They got in huge trouble for falsifying records.

      Reply ↓
  23. A large cage of birds*

    This was in high school, but it sort of counts. In this one class, we were only allowed to write in blue/black ink. I’d been given a set of pens including a bunch of dark purple ones, very legible, and asked if I could use those. Teacher tells me no and reiterates blue or black only.

    Well this was the early 2000s and those milky gel pens were really popular. I found the lightest blue one that I could find. Barely legible on white notebook paper. I handed in an essay that way. The teacher asked me about it and I reminded him that he said blue or black only and I was just following his rule to use blue ink.

    Reply ↓
  24. Emotional support capybara (he/him)*

    When I worked for a now-defunct retail electronics chain whose surname rhymed with “shitty” (and also long before I figured my gender stuff out) our store manager decided one day that he was making a change to the dress code… for women only. Effective the following day, women had to wear “light colored” tops and dark pants or skirts. Fine. Not my preferred palette but I did have enough pastels to get through the week.

    Nope! My pastels weren’t pastel enough. I got an Official Verbal Warning about the pale mint green blouse I showed up in the next morning. I tried to explain that clothing costs money and the only place that was even open after we closed was Walmart and it’s not reasonable to expect people to buy a whole new semi-professional wardrobe on less than 24 hours’ notice. I pointed out that the men were still being allowed to wear any color dress shirt they wanted. Store Manager was unmoved.

    Fine.

    I was off the next day. I went to a good thrift store and bought three nice men’s dress shirts and five nice ties. And then the following day I came to work dressed exactly the way the men were. My fellow sales minions, regardless of gender, Saw What I Did There and largely approved.

    Store Manager was not happy and, better yet, clearly knew he couldn’t say boo about it. (incidentally, my numbers that day kicked ass, which I now realize may have been less about what I was wearing and more about me realizing I felt really damn good in a tie. Which maybe should have been a sign, but anyway)

    A few months later Corporate decided they wanted the sales minions to wear identical branded shirts, which was fine with me.

    Reply ↓
    2. Slow Gin Lizz*

      What on earth?? What other shady things did that store manager do? Who goes ahead and changes the dress code effective the very next day???

      Reply ↓
        1. Emotional support capybara (he/him)*

          I never really got Perv Vibe from him but y’know, there aren’t many other explanations for that particular pile of BS.

          Reply ↓
      2. Emotional support capybara (he/him)*

        He was, shall we say, Not Well Liked st the store and I eventually ragequat that job over being passed up for a slight promotion, which was instead given to a part timer with a 75% return rate (yes, you read that right, three of every four things she sold came back– and this was the era when you couldn’t cancel a cell phone contract and return a used phone without acts of Congress and/or God) and who once called 10 minutes before she was supposed to come in to tell us she had a flat tire… in Dallas, 200+ miles away.

        He was A Piece of Work in a lot of ways.

        Reply ↓
  25. Anon for this*

    My position was being changed and I went from reporting from one terrible boss to two bosses. The New Boss was a rational and reasonable person I’d known for years and was well aware of how much good I could do for her department. First Boss was a tyrant and absolutely convinced that everyone working for her was trying to get away with something, cheating The Company, and/or generally lazy. She may have been projecting.
    Once the reporting structure was established, during COVID while we were all wfh, First Boss decided that she couldn’t see my work product in a clear way and ordered that I keep track of my time. When I asked for specifics on how she wanted that done, she declined to give any other than to tell me to use a spreadsheet. Not giving specifics was a thing First Boss did, it was easier to move the goal posts that way and assign blame.
    In my first week of training with New Boss I didn’t record anything because, in my judgement, none of it would make sense to First Boss and it wasn’t actually producing anything tangible. For this judgement call I was read the riot act and so pivoted to Malicious Compliance. I tracked every moment of my day – how long it took to refill my water bottle, every bathroom break, every email sent, every time I let the dogs out, absolutely everything. I did this for weeks before she broke from having to read through hundreds of lines in an excel document and was forced to give me specific instructions on what she wanted to see.
    Tracking my time like this, in an administrative job, including having to create charts in excel to make it easier for her to read, continued until I pointed out that I spent 2-3 hours a week on the tracking itself, which was included in the spreadsheet. The absurdity of her own micromanagement was pointed out to her by New Boss and First Boss finally gave up. I quit shortly thereafter.

    Reply ↓
  26. Dave*

    I used to work for a major multi-national company in a division which did engineering work for ships.

    Headquarters came out with a rule that we always had to book the cheapest possible flights if we had to travel for a job. Most of us booked sensible flights, ticked the “out of policy – business needs” box and carried on as normal.

    One of the service technicals was booking flights for a job and found the cheapest option offered on the travel booking system was some crazy combination of 5 flights, via places like Istanbul and Amsterdam.

    He promptly booked the flights, spent 3 days in transit and by the time he got to the dockyard the ship had sailed.

    He was very smug about it

    Reply ↓
    3. adorkable*

      I worked for a company that had this rule.

      My boss encouraged me to do zero work while in transit and bill every minute from walking out my door to getting into my hotel room.

      Eventually they switched to preferring direct flights with a formula for calculating the allowable difference based on hours in transit.

      Reply ↓
    4. Lady Ann*

      My partner occasionally runs into a situation where the letter of his work policy requires him to fly out of the closest airport. The problem is the closest airport to us is technically a small airport on an island that he would have to take a ferry to. So far he has been able to work around it but I look forward to the day he has to spend several hours on a ferry rather than driving 45 minutes to the nearest sensible airport.

      Reply ↓
      1. 2e asteroid*

        You would think “the closest airport” would be defined in terms of time instead of distance, but I guess that would make too much sense…

        Reply ↓
    5. Her My Own Knee*

      I did something similar once. I had to fly out and back within the same day, as my boss at the time didn’t want me “missing more work than necessary”, however the only flight I could book after the meetings & dinner flew out at 11:30 and had three layovers in various cities around the mid-west. I didn’t arrive back in Hometown until 7:00 p.m. the next day.

      Reply ↓
  27. Peanut Hamper*

    Between my freshman and sophomore years, I was a shift manager at a Taco Bell. We had a great store manager (Kathy), but they transferred her to a different store when the entire staff walked out.

    They temporarily demoted an area manager (Anne) to run our store, who was very by the books. Strictly by the books. Everything had to be done the corporate way and only the corporate way.

    One day, a cash register came up $20 over. So I did what we always did under Kathy–throw it in the safe because sooner or later a different drawer would be exactly the same amount under. These things happen.

    Anne was having none of it. According to corporate, we were not allowed to run a “slush fund” so we had to deposit it, and she had to explain why we were $20 over (which she could not). And guess what? The very next day, a drawer on her shift was $20 short. She not only had to explain why we were now $20 under, she also had to pony up the $20 shortage.

    Another time, there was a new even in town on a Saturday. I was closing on Friday and asked her if she wanted us to do extra prep for Saturday, since there would be tons of people in town. She said, no, of course not. You see, corporate had a formula for figuring out how much prep to do the night before, based on sales from previous years. But since we had never had a big event in town on the third Saturday in July, the corporate formula wouldn’t take this into account. I tried to explain this to her, but she was having none of it. So that night, we did our usual prep, I locked up the store, and we all went home.

    The next day I showed up for my shift at 4:00 in the afternoon and the store was absolutely slammed. Anne was extremely angry at me, because apparently she had been calling me all day trying to get me to come in and do extra prep because we were so busy and they couldn’t keep up. She demanded to know where I’d been all day (this was before cell phones) and I gleefully told her that I had been at the beach all day, since I don’t work the day shift on Saturdays.

    She was not pleased. I did not care. All I did was what she had told me.

    Reply ↓
    3. Peanut Hamper*

      I forgot to mention that I did actually have my team do extra prep the night before. We just put it in a place in the cooler where it wasn’t typical to find it. I figured that if her team found during the day, it would help them out and I would be the big damn hero. And if they didn’t find it, my team knew where it was and we would have enough prep to get us through the dinner rush and again, I would be the big damn hero.

      And of course, Anne didn’t think to look for extra prep, because she was only looking in the corporate-approved spot in the cooler for the prep, despite walking right past it as she walked in.

      When I put in my two-week notice, she took me off the schedule completely, which rankled many of the people on night shift who enjoyed working with me. But I’ve told that story here before, I think.

      Anne was very extra, with a side of extra.

      Reply ↓
      1. Selina Luna*

        What’s extra weird about this is I worked at a Taco Bell in high school, and corporate rules say that the managers in the store have leeway to change or adapt things that make no sense for their location. This includes having a small slush fund or ordering 3 extra boxes of Fire Sauce for the PowWow, which always happens in September, but not the same part of September.

        Reply ↓
  28. MPerera*

    I worked night shift at the testing site for a medical laboratory network. Patients’ specimens were collected during the day, and couriers brought these specimens to the testing site, starting in the evening and continuing into the night. My shift ended at 7 am, when the day staff would take over. So the night shift supervisor told me that if any specimens arrived after 6 am, I should leave them for the day shift (because at 6, I needed to do end-run quality control on the analyzers and file paperwork).

    But the day shift supervisor, Lily, didn’t like it when samples were left for her staff, and she told me that I should get them done. Then one morning, instead of me on the night shift, it was a guy called Steven. Lily came in at half past six, at the same time that a large batch of late specimens was dropped off.

    “Steven, you have to process those,” she said.

    So he loaded all the specimens on the analyzers. And then, at 7 am, he quietly went home.

    The day shift is busy at the start so at first, no one noticed that he had gone. Then the analyzers started producing results, flagging problematic specimens and so on, and everyone was searching for him. Had he gone to the washroom? Where was the paperwork? What needed to be done now? Everyone was confused, and the situation created far more work than if the day shift had simply taken over from the start.

    Lily hated Steven after that. But she never again told him to process late specimens either.

    Reply ↓
  29. KimW*

    Back in the 90s we performed mainframe backups on 8 of those giant reel to reel tapes every day and we sent them offsite every week to one of those secure storage places to be held SECURELY for up to 7 years. One time I asked them to return a set of backup tapes so I could restore some critical financial data but they didn’t have the tapes. When we audited them, a whole bunch of critical backups were missing.

    We of course wanted to cancel the contract, but they pointed us to the fine print that said we could only cancel one month in advance of the annual renewal which had been about one month prior. They were firm about it despite their lapse.

    We couldn’t trust them with our backups so we transferred everything to another company, but I didn’t want to keep paying these guys for nothing for almost a year.

    So I stored a whole bunch of garbage tapes at their facility and then recalled all the tapes every week (at no charge on the designated weekly pickup/delivery date). This required them to load many boxes into the truck each week and lug them into the lobby, where I would come out to meet the driver, glance at all the boxes, and then immediately send them back to storage. Remember these were huge reels of tape, and there were a lot of them.

    I realize this mostly impacts the drivers, but it was still quite satisfying. I did this for 11 months.

    Reply ↓
  30. Tater Tot*

    IIRC there is a post on here in the archives somewhere about someone maliciously complying with the dress code, which stated women had to wear pantyhose but nothing about pants or skirts, so the lady just came in very professionally dressed but in like…a nice blouse and pantyhose and that dress code may have lasted for that work day and not a minute more, lol

    Reply ↓
  31. Harper*

    Giant kudos to the polo shirt wearer! I despise uniform policies, especially when the uniforms are not size inclusive.

    Reply ↓
    1. Watry*

      When I worked at a thrift store, our uniforms were provided out of the store stock (blue collared shirt, black or tan pants, nothing wildly specific). Thrift stores do not get much in larger womens’ sizes. I was shopping at the plus size stores and wearing everything until I risked dress code violations for ratty pants or stains.

      Reply ↓
      1. Harper*

        I’m a plus sized woman too, and in my last job, we were required to wear a company branded shirt every day. But the nice polos and dress shirts stopped at an XL, and the only shirts in larger sizes were T-shirts. A lot of them were made out of the cheapest, shittiest fabric possible that stretched, bagged, and wrinkled within minutes of putting them on. I escalated the problem but our average-sized male plant manager was completely unmoved. I considered arming myself, a department manager, with an entire wardrobe of shitty T-shirts and just looking like an utter slob every day. In the end, I had some little pins of the company logo made and wore them with whatever shirts I wanted.

        Reply ↓
  33. Holly Gibney*

    My last boss maybe broke the law by telling me I couldn’t work remotely for a few days while recovering from a complication of my disability. It’s an invisible disability and she was a jerk. She told HR that due to the nature of my job I couldn’t be out for consecutive days, which was patently untrue. When they denied my request and instead offered me one additional WFH day per month, I explained that this would be like telling someone who had a mobility issue that sure, they could work remotely for the next month–but only for half of each day. It needed to be consecutive days home for recovery, but I was still able to work. They said to just use up all my sick leave.
    When I accepted another job offer, I didn’t immediately put in my notice. I had that sick leave available and, as luck(?) would have it, the fussy nerve in my foot was ever so slightly acting up. So, what did I do? Explained to them that I was experiencing a mobility issue and wouldn’t be able to come into the office until it was better. And darn, I guess I won’t be able to work from home even though it’s crunch time due to their policy. I enjoyed a week off, came back on a Tuesday, put in my notice, and left that Friday.

    Reply ↓
    2. One Duck In A Row*

      Nice work using up that sick time at that old place!

      This reminds me about when my manager had okayed a couple of weeks of WFH for me instead of my usual hybrid schedule because of some life circumstances that ruled out being in the office but didn’t prevent me from working at home. (Note: my job could be done fully from home, and given the organization of the company at that time my supervisor was in fact the only person I really worked directly with, so there was no reason for her to not understand the full picture when enthusiastically allowing me to switch to fully WFH for that bit.) When HR balked at this information, she informed them that the alternative was that I would work on my usual WFH days, and then use PTO on the days I would have been in the office, meaning that less work would get done. HR quickly shut up and let go of the issue.

      Reply ↓
      1. Holly Gibney*

        Oh yeah to be clear, my job was already hybrid, one day remote per week. And the office stayed open, remotely, during the pandemic. So the job could absolutely be remote for one week. I tried to tell them what your supervisor told HR–if they made me take a week off, they’d be getting no work from me, which would mean more work for everyone else, etc.–but nope. Pretty sure she thought I was lying about the whole thing, and she’s one of those supervisors who underestimates everyone, so she was utterly gobsmacked when I handed in my notice. And furious. Like, between the Tuesday and Friday said maybe three sentences to me, and didn’t even come to work on my last day. Muahahah.

        Reply ↓
  34. Alexandrine*

    When I worked in admin support, I had a colleague (let’s call them Cam) who constantly made up and added new dietary restrictions (I assume as some kind of power play over admins). The reasons I am quite sure they made this up:

    First, I was told by another admin that, when Cam learned that another coworker was lactose intolerant, they immediately became lactose intolerant as well. (Cam had already worked there and been eating at work events for many years at that point.) I once brought in a homemade, very dairy-filled cake (both obviously with a lot of fresh, homemade whipped cream and such, but also it was labeled) and I had to pull the cake server away from them to direct them to the different vegan cake I’d also made and refuse to let them have the lactose bomb.

    Second, whenever I held events, I sent around a link to a form where my coworkers could enter their dietary restrictions. Nearly every time I did this, Cam added a new thing.

    Third, Cam had a new boss coming in who was Muslim and kept halal. Suddenly, Cam reported to me, on the response to their new boss’ welcome party, that they were kosher (one of the options on the form, along with halal–there were checkboxes for some common restrictions, and then a free-text option). Cam was a vocal, devout Catholic, and also had already said they were lactose intolerant, didn’t eat red meat or pork (and I had a standing rule to never order shellfish because of possible allergies), so I was wondering if they were asking for things from a certified kosher kitchen, separate plates/utensils…and also I was assuming that they frankly did not know the difference between halal and kosher. (To this day, I am quite certain that they thought they were sucking up to their new boss, which would be very in character for Cam.) I reached out to Cam to confirm what their restrictions were, and they told me that they were “kosher but not too strict.” At that point my soul left my body.

    The malicious compliance: Cam’s grandboss forgot to ask me to order food for their department’s retreat until the afternoon before. I didn’t have a lot of options for lunch catering for their team of ~15 on such short notice, so I went with a sandwich place down the street. The sandwich place had very few options that would fit all of Cam’s alleged needs (no dairy, no red meat, no pork, low salt, no peppers, no onions, all of the other things I’ve forgotten at this point), so I ordered them what a colleague who was in the retreat dubbed “the malicious compliance sandwich.” I don’t remember exactly what was in it, but I think it was largely hummus and sadness. Cam took one bite, threw it in the trash, and grabbed a nice meaty, cheesy sandwich instead.

    I did ask Cam how they liked lunch, because I am petty AF.

    Reply ↓
    2. Strive to Excel*

      As someone with food restrictions: bless hummus forever. But I cannot imagine a hummus sandwich. I know falafel etc are a thing, but I’m imagining low sodium hummus slapped between two slices of gluten free bread, or maybe just wrapped in a salad leaf.

      Reply ↓
      1. Madame Desmortes*

        I’ve had hummus wraps with lots of julienned veggies inside that were quite tasty.

        But yeah, have also had the “hummus and sadness” experience.

        Reply ↓
    3. HigherEd Escapee*

      I remember the Hummus and Sadness and “Cam.” I’m so glad you posted this. You remain my hero for doing this. :)

      Reply ↓
  37. Elsewise*

    I worked somewhere that had a very strict process of progressive discipline. One verbal warning (which didn’t go on your employee record), two written warnings (which did), and then a firing. HR had to approve any deviations from that process, and the only time I saw them approve it had involved the police.

    I was a new manager, and one of my staff messed up. It was fairly mild- think “didn’t say hello in the company branded way on the phones”, the sort of thing I’d normally just coach. But our VP heard about it and it escalated, she wasn’t well-liked by management (and had recently gotten a medical accommodation they weren’t fans of) so I was instructed to give her a verbal warning. So I did. About a week later, the VP changed his mind and told the director to tell me to give her a written warning.

    Director told me to write her up as if this was her first warning for the incident, since all write-ups had to be approved by HR before they were issued and they’d never approve a verbal and a written for the same mistake. I asked if she wanted me to lie, and she said no. So I told the truth. Predictably, HR rejected the write up and was very upset we’d even considered it. Jane was not written up and was able to find a much better job shortly after, with a reference check that didn’t have the write up on file. I was coached on how to write a proper disciplinary action, and later laid off shortly after Jane left. I look back on this place fondly as one of my most toxic job experiences. I think I would have thrived there if I was willing to let my mentors and supervisors mold me into the sort of manager they wanted, and I’m very glad I didn’t.

    Reply ↓
    2. Richard Hershberger*

      Not really on point, but as a customer I loathe dealing with companies that mandate scripted conversations. The worst are the repeated mandatory apologies. I wish there were a way to get them to take the apologies as understood so we can get on with fixing the problem. It would be both faster and less clingy.

      Reply ↓
      1. Juicebox Hero*

        When I worked in a department store, Corporate, who had no idea what it was like on the sales floor, mandated that we answer the phone with “Good (time of day) and happy holidays. Thank you for calling Hellstore’s (whatever) department. This is (name) speaking. How may I help you this (time of day)?” and called random departments at random times to enforce compliance.

        By the time you rattled all that out, you were out of breath, and the customer was irritated by having to listen to it. At least since everyone at Corporate quit at 5, on the night shift you could answer the phone normally.

        Reply ↓
  38. Alianne*

    At the Big Bookstore, our (nitpicky) District Manager one day decided that the Information kiosk should never be left unattended. Not for one single second. On my first day back after a super-fun bout of food poisoning, I was assigned to the IK. I had to make a break for the restroom (thankfully it was within sight line and not far away) at one point, and returned to find the District Manager, the day manager, and a line of about three people. Rather than helping the line, the District Manager demanded to know–at the top of his lungs–why I was “abandoning my post and ignoring the needs of our valued customers”. Not quite at the top of my lungs but still very audibly, I said “In the future, I will remember it’s preferable to vomit in the kiosk rather than leave it unattended. Can I help the next customer?”

    Surprisingly, none of those customers needed my help after all, and I got to go home early that day after the red-faced District Manager left.

    Reply ↓
    2. CeeDoo*

      I despise ice breakers (I’m a teacher), so when we had one directly after lunch one teacher work day, I used the opportunity to go upstairs and use the bathroom. When my admin asked why I wasn’t at the icebreaker, I said, “I was upstairs pooping.” It’s amazing how she left me alone after that.

      Reply ↓
  39. Sevenrider*

    I worked at a very low-level job as a teller at a credit union. Management was always complaining about how we, the low-wage tellers, dressed, i.e., not professional. They even made us attend a seminar on how to dress. One day I wore what I thought was a nice pant and jacket and was told by the head witch that I looked like a waiter. So, I went out and bought three navy suits, all the same and five white blouses, all the same. I wore the same damn outfit every single day for the next year and remainder of my time there. Funny thing though, I starting working in law firms after that and not one had that strict of a dress code. Now I work in-house legal and can wear jeans whenever I want.

    Reply ↓
    1. Coverage Associate*

      Lawyer working in a financial district here. The security guards are usually the most formally dressed people in the building. Occasionally I see likely finance people in suits, but I assume they are only temporarily in town.

      Reply ↓
  40. Katrina*

    Oo, I have a fun one for this.

    The early childhood education company I once worked for had several school locations across our area and (apparently) a strict and oddly specific set of requirements for classroom decor.

    This was my first job out of college, and I came with enthusiasm in spades. One of the things I was most passionate about was exposing kids to other languages. We had to count everyone before we left the room, so I’d offer my class five different options for which language I’d count in. I played kids’ music in other languages. I read books with bilingual characters.

    When I got back my first classroom evaluation, everything was great except…

    …I was doing an inadequate job of incorporating other cultures/languages into my classroom.

    I thought the director was joking. She told me that no, the standard was that I have *signs* around my classroom in at least two languages.

    Did I mention I was teaching three-year-olds? Y’know, an age group that generally does not know how to read?

    I’d tried to do some very simple activities with combining letter sounds, because I did have a couple advanced students. The teacher for the age group above me–who was also the head of curriculum–told me to knock it off. Teaching the kids to read was her thing. Sadly, she was the director’s favorite employee, so arguing common sense with either of them was futile.

    So to recap: I needed classroom signs in at least two languages for kids who couldn’t read, nor was I permitted to teach them how to do so.

    I made the signs.

    I’d had some signs in my room before, labeling things like “Trash,” “Books,” and “Lights.” I doubled the number, added photos, and put *four* languages on each sign–including Japanese and Russian. Because those at least used different characters and would hopefully clue my kids in that “ほん” is not how you spell “book” in English.

    I highly doubt any of my students gained much from these signs besides seeing that not every language uses the same ABCs. But they ended up being helpful for me, as I was studying Russian and Japanese at the time. So when I spent long hours patting the kids to sleep at naptime, wondering if I should seek employment elsewhere, at least I could gaze around the room and get my vocab practice in.

    Reply ↓
    1. ferrina*

      Yeah, there’s some bonkers politics that go on at daycares. Every single place I’ve worked, the director has had a favorite teacher.

      At one place, that favorite teacher almost lost the contract for the whole center (we were contracted for a specific company and housed at that company’s facility). Her classroom was so badly failing that we were given 2 months to fix it or lose the contract. The director simply moved her into a different classroom, and moved a different teacher into her old classroom with a mandate to fix the classroom. Luckily that teacher succeeded, but it was a close call. Once that director left, the former-favorite was immediately fired.

      Reply ↓
      1. Katrina*

        Ugh, that’s awful! The favorite where I worked was mostly competent at the work she actually did; she just always got away with dumping stuff on other people. She came in at the earliest possible hour and would always “work through lunch” (we were supposed to take an unpaid lunch break), so she could leave at 2pm every day, while the rest of us had to stay until past 5 regardless of what time we were scheduled to leave, because leaving would put whoever we left behind out of ratio (and ergo put the kids in danger because no one can keep an eye on that many small children at once.) In other jobs, it’s easier to leave and let the chips fall where they may when someone tries to bully you into doing their work for them. But you can’t in good conscience leave your students in an unsafe situation, and she knew that.

        She also was a smoker and would take her cigarette breaks (she called them “soda breaks” in front of the kids) whenever she felt like it and just lead her class over to “visit” with mine while she did that, putting me horrifically out of ratio while she was gone. Thankfully, I have a knack for read-alouds that really hold kids’ attention, and I had a few books on hand that were always crowd-pleasers. Basically I had to be ready for emergency story time at any moment, because it was the only way to keep a group of 40 three to five year olds safe and engaged while their irresponsible teacher took a “soda break.” >.<

        Reply ↓
  41. ProfessionalismPaper*

    I had an extremely egotistical and emotionally fragile male boss who was not new to the industry but was new to the area in which I have worked for 20+ years. Shortly after he started he took extreme offense to me rejecting the statement that he was my mentor and I would be his mentee (I told him ” I did not seek nor consent to a mentor/mentee relationship and do not see you as a mentor”).

    He was so offended he made up a professional development plan for me outside of the scope of HR. His “plan” included me writing a “one-page paper with the definition of professionalism in the context of our office”. Ridiculous and belittling, but I did it anyway in the most direct and simple way possible. When I turned it in, he was upset that “I didn’t do the assignment” and I said I did. He then said I didn’t write down my “reflections and how I would change my future responses to him”. When I said that’s not what he asked for he said “I should know what he really wanted and that I was willfully misinterpreting what he asked for”. When I said, “You’re right, we are struggling to communicate and we should take this discussion to HR for some clarity”, he backpedaled.
    I was promoted to another job in the division outside of his area and he was counseled out shortly after.

    Reply ↓
    1. kh*

      To be fair, if that’s the exact wording you used, it was pretty rude LOL but obviously the professional development plan was ridiculous

      Reply ↓
  42. As I live and Breathe, Raisin?!*

    When I was 21 I got a job working as a shelver at my small town library. Shelver was really a title that meant I shelved books, worked the front desk, and helped patrons but also meant that I plunged toilets, cleaned unknown fluids off the tables, checked books for forgotten slices of cheese, and occasionally called the cops on perverts. Our director, who was terrible in a myriad of ways, kept making comments about how she wished the front staff dressed nicer. We wore jeans and library provided t-shirts but this was not good enough to squat on the floor all day apparently. However it happened that my 9th grade formal dress still fit so one day I clocked in for work in a gold floor-length skirt and corset top. She sputtered her outrage and I played dumb because she said she wanted us to dress nicer?

    Reply ↓
      1. Selina Luna*

        I teach teenagers, and I have one phrase for you: Slim Jim Bookmarks. Yes, the extremely red sausage stick. In one of my copies of Treasure Island. Red stains everywhere.

        Reply ↓
  43. Definitely not me*

    I worked for a large government contractor that was bought by one of the largest and most prominent government contractors. Branding became a big issue immediately after the acquisition. Each employee received a sheet of logo stickers for the new company in the mail with strongly worded instructions to immediately cover the old logo on our badges, binders, envelopes, etc. etc. to make it clear to all observers that the first company no longer existed. There were so many stickers that soon every water fountain, bathroom stall, soap dispenser, refrigerator and appliance in the break room was sporting a sticker. We made sure there would be no possible way for staff or visitors to forget that we belonged to Big Company now.

    Reply ↓
    2. CeeDoo*

      Ugh, we did the same thing when I worked for Raytheon. We were Chrysler Technologies, then E-Systems, then Raytheon E-Systems, then Raytheon, then L3 Communications in my 5 year tenure there.

      Reply ↓
  44. I got your "conservative" right here, buddy*

    In the early 1990s, I spent a few years working for a private tennis club, in the Accounting department (which was just four people). I did my two interviews in 1) a modest grey/white dress that fell below my knees and 2) a lovely dark-coloured blouse with an extra button added at my request such that it closed at my neck and a pleated skirt that, you guessed it, fell below the knee.
    [At this time, I was taking classes in Middle Eastern-Indian fusion dance with Fat Chance Belly Dance and our instructor had no truck with the so-called “harem outfit” – we dressed in cholis, very very long swirly skirts, and light-weight pantaloons.]
    During the second interview, I was shown around and introduced to other employees by the club manager, who was a bit of an ass.
    The lovely young women in sales were, sadly, dressed the way young women in sales were expected to dress. During this walk-around, and just after visiting the sales office, the manager made sure to inform me that I would be expected to dress “conservatively”. Considering my outfit was already very much so, the heavy implication was “in short skirts, etc.”, just like the women in sales.
    Oh. You want me to dress conservatively? I will show you dressing conservatively.
    And every single day until I left to return to college, I wore a long-sleeved dark-coloured top that covered my neck, any one of the black skirts I used for dance, pantaloons of subdued colours, and black flats.
    It drove the club manager up a wall but there was nothing he could say without walking into a lawsuit.

    Reply ↓
  45. Jessie*

    During Covid, when everyone was working from home, senior management (who HATED WFH) decided they didn’t trust us and required us to send a daily report of everything we did that day.

    It became clear that no one was actually reading them, but they still kept requiring them. And we are in a business that was slammed during Covid (think public health related).

    I used my daily reports as an exercise in creative (yet accurate) writing. Note that I did tell my staff to stop doing them because they were working g their butts off).

    “After logging in a 5 am to try to get 15 hours of work done in one day, I made a copy of coffee and explored my existential fear that the virus would kill me and I would die at my desk before all the reports were done.”

    “While waiting for a report to run I contemplated my life choices”.

    “I didn’t take a lunch break because we’re stuck in quarantine and there’s no place to go”.

    It was amusing but after a while everyone just stopped submitting reports and no one said anything.

    Reply ↓
    3. Yasssss*

      Did we work at the same place? I had a completely insane colleague who required this and tried to tell the rest of us that we needed to require it of our staff too. She also tried to institute a “tardiness log”. She was the second in command but she was my peer, so I just ignored her.

      Reply ↓
  46. Zombeyonce*

    This wasn’t work but a drama class I took. The instructor decided that one of our assignments would be to audition for a play he was directing, even if you didn’t actually want a part. It was a significant enough portion of the grade that it would give you a big dent if you skipped out.

    The problem was that the play was actually a musical: West Side Story. All the women auditioning had to sing Maria’s “Tonight, Tonight”. Anyone who’s heard the song knows it has some pretty high notes only sopranos can pull off.

    Enter me: not a terrible singer but a solid alto, never interested in singing in front of people, and not knowing that you can sing something in a lower key if it’s too high for you. I gathered my big girl courage and proceeded to sing the hell out of that song—sorry, I meant make everyone in the auditorium feel like they were in hell. The instructor/director sat 10 feet away, cringing in pain, as I belted out the most godawful off-key notes in my loudest voice (we’re supposed to project, right?) for the entire song, including the sustained super high note at the end.

    He removed the requirement for the next class.

    Reply ↓
    1. ferrina*

      Excellent compliance! Mandatory singing (for non-singing classes/jobs) needs to be outlawed. For everyone’s sake.

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    2. pally*

      There are a whole host of students in the subsequent years of this drama classes who are eternally grateful to you. They just don’t know whom to thank.

      Now they do!

      Reply ↓
  47. WorkerJawn*

    This might not count because I was a student, but I really detested my 10th grade English teacher (she was new to teaching and generally overwhelmed, but she compensated with weird power trips and public callouts). One time I was talking to a classmate about the homework assignment while she was explaining something else, so she put me on the spot by ending her instructions with “[WorkerJawn], repeat back what I just said.”

    Of course, I was able to repeat everything back to her verbatim. She snapped “that’s enough” when I started repeating the stuff she said before she was explaining the assignment and ignored me the rest of class.

    Reply ↓
    1. ferrina*

      This unlocked a memory from 10th grade English. My school was big on the Socratic method and group discussions. It was common to have a class of 25ish teenagers sitting in a big circle expected to discuss themes from Brave New World or Lord of the Flies. Naturally, it devolved into a handful of kids arguing, while everyone else was incredibly bored. (most of them had no desire to participate anyways)

      To try to head this off, my teacher instituted a rule that each person could only talk 3 times in our hour-long discussion. A few of our common talkers got into an argument and promptly used up their three times. Not me. I took careful notes, and when I used my first talking time, I promptly responded to the six people who had gone before me, citing who I was responding to, what they had said, why they were wrong, and then moving on to my next victim (don’t worry, these were all smarmy teenage boys who were very comfortable speaking up). And many of them couldn’t even respond to me because they already used their time. Those that could respond knew that I still had 2 more chances to rebut, and now they know I would pick my moment.

      My teacher never tried that rule again, though she did say I should think about being a lawyer.

      Reply ↓
      2. Our Business Is Rejoicing*

        What is it about 10th grade English? I loved school, loved or was neutral to all my teachers except that one. I got on her wrong side in my first week when I knew the answer (having recently visited Washington and being an architecture nerd) when she asked the class whether any of us knew what the statue was on top of the Capitol. That’s a pretty esoteric piece of knowledge and I suspect it was a question we were not expected to know so she could ‘splain it all.

        The compliance: I was a really good student and I knew how to follow rules. When we were working on writing paragraphs, she instituted a rule that no paragraph could have more than seven sentences. Being a huge nerd and quite competent with grammar and vocabulary, I wrote giant, info-dense paragraphs that made liberal use of semicolons. I remember when we had to read the paragraphs in front of the class; I read mine, and she asked me, again in front of the class, to count the sentences. There were seven.

        I got an A in the class, but only by the slimmest of margins as she found all kinds of technicalities to ding me on. It was the lowest grade (percentage-wise) I got in any class in high school, tied with AP calculus.

        I realized later, with my 11th grade composition teacher, that what she had trying to get at was the need to write succinctly and not sound like a prat, but she was incapable of conveying that intent without being condescending. My writing got better.

        Reply ↓
    2. Carys, Lady of Weeds*

      What is it with English teachers?! I swear I had this same teacher but in 8th grade, which was worse, because I was a little 13-year-old who didn’t realize that her ADULT TEACHER was bullying her. (Luckily my mom figured out what was up and I got moved to the other English class the second half of the year.)

      Reply ↓
    3. JR*

      I can absorb music like it’s no one’s business. There have even been some times in busy mall foods courts where we couldn’t actually hear the music from the speakers but I just knew what was playing. It’s a bit insane and completely useless, EXCEPT

      In orchestra, when the conductor is rehearsing a group that doesn’t include you, you’re supposed to still pay attention, follow along with the sheet music, etc. This gets really boring when it’s the same section of music or musicians over and over again. I brought a book to middle school orchestra and read it in my down time. The conductor hated this and didn’t believe I was actually paying attention to the music. To be fair my standpartners did have to nudge me sometimes because I’d be too absorbed in the reading to hear bows up. But I still absorbed the music, which is what we were supposed to be doing.

      If the conductor caught me she’d take my book at for the rest of class. I started bringing two books. She kept taking them. Finally one day, before she even got back to the podium with book #2, I pulled #3 out from under the seat. She saw it, sighed in defeat, and never took my books again.

      She was a mean teacher who did some pretty nasty stuff, but also, I get why she hated me

      Reply ↓
    4. darsynia*

      Oh gosh, good for you! Certain teachers REALLY hate when their power trips fail, hah.

      This activated my memory of 10th grade (1995). My dad passed away on a Friday and by the following Tuesday I was back in school at our very small high school. I got yelled at in the hallway by our guidance counselor because I didn’t smile at him. I explained that my father had died only a few days ago and I was sad about it and I’ll never forget the look on his face, because we were in public and other people heard what I said. He told me to forget about it–but the following start of the semester, he refused to register any of the classes that I wanted, and he was the only person who could.

      Why? He wanted an apology.

      I apologized (because I NEEDED the classes), but every time I saw him in the hallway afterwards I smiled the biggest, most absurd clown-smile that I could. He didn’t say or do anything about it, probably because if I’d escalated it he would have gotten a tiny slap on the wrist and he would have hated that!

      This is the same school that gave me peer mediated threats of suspension because we reported to the school that my bully followed me home and told me I should have died with my father, and their procedures required them to use peer mediation on any student conflicts. So I was told if I ever spoke to her again I’d be suspended for THREE WEEKS. She supposedly had the same prohibition but she talked to me and nothing happened. ZERO TOLERANCE!!

      Reply ↓
  48. Formerly Frustrated Optimist*

    In my first professional job, I needed to take phone messages off my voicemail all day long. I would keep track of them on a scratch pad – one little square for each message. Then the organization started refusing to buy scratch pads. They would, however, buy legal pads.

    We were not allowed to touch the copier, so I was unable to access blank pieces of copier paper. So I took the legal pads, cut them up, and made them into scratch pads.

    Reply ↓
    1. AnneCordelia*

      Why go to all that work? I would have taken my voicemail notes on the full sized, uncut legal pad. One full legal sheet per note.

      Reply ↓
  49. Endless TBR Pile*

    When I worked in now-bankrupt bridal store as a supervisor, the ASM and DM pulled me into a meeting about receipts that had gone missing from a Sunday in March I worked. They alleged that the whole day’s worth of receipts had gone missing, they checked the schedule and knew I worked / closed that day, and were writing me up. I was appalled, and asked for the date. When they gave it, I said “oh, I know what happened!” They didn’t want to hear it. I tried several times, until the DM told me they didn’t want my excuses, but if I had any kind of rebuttal I could fill out a paper to submit with the write up. I just said OK and filled it out. They made me fax it to corporate myself from the front desk, admonishing me the entire time for my carelessness. Before I pressed send, I asked ONE LAST TIME if they wanted to hear my side. No. Ok, off it goes!

    About an hour later I was talking to another associate at the counter, the ASM standing right next to us. My friend asked what the meeting was about, and I told her. She asked what date that was, I told her that too. She frowned, checked the calendar, then said, “but that was Easter! The store wasn’t even opened!”

    “I know,” I said, “but ASM and DM didn’t want to hear it. I put it on my rebuttal sheet, though.” Big smile at ASM as I said it, who looked horrified.

    Less than a week later, I was issued an apology from both of them. In writing.

    Reply ↓
    3. Juicebox Hero*

      As a former retail peon whose shitty and out-of-touch managers never missed a chance to humiliate and belittle, this story is like a nice cup of hot chocolate, a fuzzy blanket, and a purring cat for my icy, flinty little heart. With Kalhua in the hot chocolate.

      Reply ↓
  50. Generic Name*

    That last story is pure gold. I’m saving the phrase: “That decision was direction from the project rather than a technical decision, so Soandso is better positioned to speak to it.” I am a SME at my company, but project management doesn’t always like my answers, and I’ve been in meetings where I realized that they went in and changed my slide after I had populated it with correct information. That’s always fun to say in a meeting, “Hm, this slide has been changed since I populated it with my info. What it SHOULD say is blah….”

    Reply ↓
  51. NMitford*

    Back in the halcyon days when I was much younger and department stores still provided gift-wrapping services, I was pulled off of my register in Women’s Better Sportswear and sent upstairs to the giftwrapping desk because someone had called out that day, there was only one [experienced] person working, and the line was fast becoming epic. I protested vociferously that I was not the world’s best gift wrapper and couldn’t tie a fancy bow to save my life, but was told that it wasn’t up for discussion. I gave it my best shot, but in order to do my best I had to wrap gifts very slowly and carefully to insure that my efforts matched the sample wrapped boxes hanging on the wall that the customers picked from. Trying to do a good, professional-quality job under the watchful eyes of customers who were paying for a good-looking package was incredibly stressful for me and I started sweating bullets after doing, slowly, two packages.
    If the line was fast becoming epic when I got there, it soon stretched halfway across the sales floor. They finally let me just hand out boxes to folks who’d come up there because the register they’d checked out at didn’t have the right size box for them and then sent me back to the salesfloor. They never asked me again, and they actually closed the giftwrapping desk altogether if none of the experienced wrappers were available.

    Reply ↓
    1. 1-800-BrownCow*

      I remember the days of getting gifts wrapped at the department store. I very much remember my mom buying Christmas gifts and we’d go back to the gift wrapping department to get them all wrapped. I do miss having that option as it was so convenient….well, when the person wrapping the gifts was the actual worker in the department and knew how to wrap quickly and make them look great, lol!

      Reply ↓
    2. Sack of Benevolent Trash Marsupials*

      Oh gosh, I am sorry. I worked gift wrap at a department store over the winter holiday break from college in the 80s. I actually loved it because I am a good wrapper. But sometimes that backfires – as the star wrapper, I had to wrap a TABLE at one point, which I had to do in the break room and I hope the recipient never noticed that there were a few smashed olive slices that had fallen from someone’s olive loaf sandwich that became part of the wrapping job because the break room was disgusting and I wasn’t about to clean the whole room first.

      Reply ↓
  52. Pennies from Hell*

    Made a two-minute, long-distance personal call and was told I had to reimburse the company the couple of bucks. Paid them entirely in pennies.

    Reply ↓
  53. Clearance Issues*

    I wrote a training for a proprietary software, and I meticulously documented every single click in the process with photos and text instructions, and ran a recorded meeting to teach the original small team so they could reference back to the video.
    Someone (a man who’s literacy I still question even if we no longer work together) said I wasn’t detailed enough, could not provide an answer as to what he needed more detail on, so I detailed every inch I moved the cursor on screen with a new screenshot.
    I then sent the (once 10 page, now 200 page) process document back as a reply to his request for more detail that included our manager, apologized for not being detailed enough originally and asked if this was enough.
    Our manager called me laughing and asked me to revert it within half an hour because he could give the original documents to a completely inexperienced person with and get a working product, it was just that particular guy who didn’t think the original document was detailed enough.

    Reply ↓
    1. Slow Gin Lizz*

      Hahahahahahaha, as someone who’s written a few SOPs on software platforms and read about and learned how to use plenty of others, I absolutely LOVE this. There’s always that one guy who’s either incompetent or lazy and just wants to whine.

      Reply ↓
      1. Clearance Issues*

        the guy literally had me questioning what wasn’t detailed enough at first: having multiple interns and new hires prove it was enough (and give me genuine feedback on what was confusing) was the only reason I knew it was a him issue.

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  54. Aphra*

    I’m in the UK and had worked in Terrible Department for ten years. The entire organisation operated on Flexitime where we were required to work 40 hours per week but could arrive and leave at any time as long as we logged 40 hours. We were supposed to be able to work up to 11.5 hours extra every month and to be able to take that time off as agreed with management. Every Department but mine operated per the policy and it worked well. In ten years I was never approved to take any Flexitime off, ever. No one in that Department was. We were told by Dreadful Manager that he was keeping a running credit total for each of us (over 100 people) and that we could have the time off when we retired. Despite all that, staff turnover was really low but I knew that the handful of people who left had not been allowed to take their accrued Flexitime and had simply lost it. When I was poached by Excellent Department I, and my new management expected to be able to negotiate an early release from Dreadful Department, as was usual practice for internal transfers but Dreadful Manager refused, meaning I would have to serve four weeks notice. I had intended, with approval from Excellent Management, to help train my replacement in Dreadful Department and to continue to be On Call for out-of-hours clients arrested and in custody until my replacement was fully up to speed but Dreadful Manager’s refusal to release me early changed my mind on that. So on Thursday I went to see Dreadful Manager in his office and asked about my accrued Flexitime which I couldn’t carry over to Excellent Department. Dreadful Manager confirmed the number of hours I’d accrued, which I already knew because I’d kept my own records, and when I asked to be paid for those hours replied “not a chance” to which I replied, “thanks for confirming that. It means that my last day in this Department will be Tuesday next week.” So I served three days notice, entirely in accordance with Dreadful Manager’s awful personal policy and there was nothing he could do about it. I wasn’t allowed to start in Excellent Department until the four weeks were up so I had three and a half weeks time off, fully paid. It was the best three and a half weeks of the entire first ten years I worked there.

    Reply ↓
  55. pally*

    I work in a lab.

    We needed to order chairs for the lab as there weren’t enough for everyone.

    As the budget was tight, management had to evaluate for need.

    “No”, they said. Not in the budget. Lab people can share the chairs. Not everyone is in the lab at the same time. So just share. Shouldn’t be a problem.

    We didn’t like that. Most had a preferred chair, set to their liking (height, lumbar support). Sharing meant having to constantly readjust chairs.

    There were times when all were in the lab. When this happened, I had to kneel on the floor to do my work. Ouch!

    One day I was in the executive area of work. Noticed that the CFO, a very tall woman, and the VP, a very diminutive man, had identical executive chairs, right down to the exact same color scheme. So midday, when all were out for lunch, I switched their chairs. Just wheeled one chair across the hall and returned with the other chair.

    Later that afternoon I made a point of hanging around the exec area. The CFO kept getting up from the chair, loudly exclaiming, “Who touched my chair? Who changed the settings? Who would do such a thing?” as she adjusted it repeatedly to her liking.

    The VP? Well, he sat quietly in his chair, both feet dangling in the air.

    Reply ↓
    1. Ann Onymous*

      We’ve got ancient lab chairs that we can’t get replaced. One of them, in the absence of someone sitting on it gradually rises to its maximum height. I’m short and these chairs are intended to be usable at a tall lab bench. When they’re at maximum height, I can’t get my butt up to the seat. When I need to use this chair, I have to lay my upper body across the seat to put weight on it while pulling the lever to lower the chair. Only then can I sit. My coworkers find this extremely entertaining.

      Reply ↓
  56. ArtsNerd*

    Once had the university’s finance department call me to find out why I filled out a requisition form for a single newspaper.

    Me: “Oh, there’s going to be an article about us and we need it for the press clip.”
    Finance: “And there’s this other one for $10 at Starbucks?”
    Me: “Yup, we have an event and the speaker’s rider specifically requests Starbucks coffee.”
    Finance: “Ok, this is what your p-card (credit card) or petty cash is for. We actually prefer people use their p-cards wherever possible!”
    Me: “Oh totally, but Big Boss doesn’t allow us to use p-cards or petty cash. He wants us all to fill out requisition forms for every expense so he can approve or deny them.”

    A few weeks later, guess who got permission to use a p-card without prior approval?

    Reply ↓
  57. I don't mean to be rude, I'm just good at it*

    I was 6 months out of high school, young and dumb, and working full time and going to college at night. I was assigned to work on the same floor as many of the company’s vice presidents and higher-level managers.

    I also had some technical skills that were useful even though did not pertain to my workload. I was trained to troubleshoot and maintain copy machines, fix our card readers (old primitive computers) and make c-suite happy.

    My new department manager set the rules, you break them, you are fired. I smiled. The next day I walked past 4 out of order copy machines with every c-suite secretary chasing me down the hall way that hey needed copies NOW. I walked by a handful of disabled card-readers with a handful of people unable to process payments.
    I walked to my department and signed in for the day with 7 people glaring at my manager. 15 minutes later, I was in the department vice-president’s office explaining my role with documentation. 18 minutes later, I had the same job, but no longer reported to same manager.

    Reply ↓
    1. Slow Gin Lizz*

      Sorry, but I think I’m missing something. Was there something about clocking in before you start work or something?

      Reply ↓
      1. Red Reader the Adulting Fairy*

        I’m assuming that fixing the machines in question was not actually part of the job, and new department manager ordered Rude to not do it?

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      2. I don't mean to be rude, I'm just good at it*

        Sorry, yes. It was 8:00 am and I had to sign in the book immediately, when I normally fixed everything and signed in when I got to my desk.

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      3. No name here*

        It seems that fixing the copiers etc wasnt part of their assogned tasks. And the commenter was told if they fixed these items and broke them they would be fired. So they stopped fixing them and someone was likely told off.

        that is what I took from that.

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      4. Lady Lessa*

        I think that “I didn’t mean to be rude” was talking about his/her unofficial job was fixing office equipment, but their real job was something else. And their unofficial job was much more important.

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  59. dee*

    At my job we have to record our time in six minute increments to specific electronic files as we are a cost-recovery department. As you can imagine the file opening procedures are time-consuming. For longer matters I’ll open a new file. For brief calls (work will take me a couple of hours, tops), I bill to the general file. We’ve an overly zealous administrator who berates us by email or phone if we don’t have what he considers a sufficiently detailed description of the work done. His emails have reached legendary status as to the amount of vitriol he can insert into an innocuous time-keeping email. Over the holidays, he lost it over an innocuous entry which had all of us perplexed. It had the details he needed: client names, description of work, name of contractor, type of services, when it was done, etc. but he still insisted the clients wouldn’t have a clue what it related to. I literally had no more detail to add other than spelling out the client’s names in full (e.g. Andrea Zingerbon vs. A. Zingerbon, note they both had unique last names not shared by anyone else), so I did that and that seemed to satisfy him. Of course, I billed the time it took to do this and named him in the description.

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  60. Blue Spoon*

    I work in a public library, and for a while we were having an issue where our computers that people used to browse the catalog were randomly locking and required a specific login to unlock them. Our branch manager got the necessary username and password from IT, then instructed me to write that information down on post-it notes and stick them to the underside of the keyboard of each of the (again, public-facing) computers so staff didn’t have to remember the (very short) password.

    I did, but I followed it up with a message in the library Teams chat saying “Hey all, as per what (Branch Manager) told me this morning, the username and password needed to sign into the catalog computers is now written on post-its stuck to the undersides of the computers. Hopefully patrons won’t find that, but let’s keep an eye out for anything suspicious on those computers just in case.”

    Within a couple of hours, I was told to remove the post-its and instead just keep one on a bulletin board in the office.

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  61. Begonia*

    This was in middle school, but we had a very unpleasant teacher who was the spouse of the principal at the time. We also had a strict dress code. The dress code didn’t say anything about colors, but this teacher told me (F) my lovely, bright orange Hawaiian shirt was “too loud” and I couldn’t wear it or anything like it. So I wore a full black ensemble for the next week. I don’t think anyone cared, but it made me feel better!

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  62. Joyce to the World*

    This is a personal story of malicious compliance and not work related. I am very nearsighted and wear contact lenses. When I was home from college and staying at my parent’s house, my older sister came to visit with my adorable new nephew. Thanks to a brief stint as a photography major, my Dad thought I needed to be the one to take all photos. This was way before digital and cell phones. I would be straight out of bed and not even wearing glasses when it would start. “Take his picture!” “Take his picture!”. I kept explaining that I couldn’t see anything, but my Dad wouldn’t listen. After a couple of days of this, I just started taking the pictures. He was not happy that they were all blurry once he got the filmed developed. He did start taking his own photos.

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  63. Zanshin*

    Not me, my awesome mom.
    A career public school special ed teacher way back before it was called that, she was the first NYC teacher trained to diagnose learning disabilities (originally it was simply dyslexia).
    For many years she was teamed with a social worker as a diagnostic team serving probably an entire city district.

    Well, the board of ed in its infinite wisdom decided to get more bang for their buck and told my mom she would have to do the social work assessment.

    She had a wonderful gleam in her eye when she described turning in massive documents on each case (think genealogy, twenty years of family rental history, diet…) easily five times longer than the usual documentation. The superiors were appalled and she simply smiled and said “well, I have no training in this, so had no idea what was considered important.”

    She got her teammate back within 24 hours.

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    1. Coverage Associate*

      I used to read family law and child protective services appeals when I needed a break at a job with a tight firewall. But I had to stop because the irrelevant facts in the opinions would upset me. There was the brand of towel one mother used. The recitations about dirty dishes in the sink. Isn’t that where dirty dishes belong? Dirty bottles in the room of a baby too young to lift her head, let alone crawl or walk or otherwise get a bottle off a table by herself.

      Facts are only supposed to be admitted at trial if they’re relevant, and they’re only supposed to be discussed in the appeal if relevant to the narrower issue appealed. It drove me nuts to think that social workers and judges were taking children from their parents because they didn’t wash the dishes immediately after breakfast.

      But I tried to understand that social workers were overworked, etc. Lawyers and judges should have known better though.

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  64. Jonathan MacKay*

    Many, many years ago, when I worked at a grocery store as a courtesy clerk – (essentially a store go-fer, but mainly dealing with the carts in the parking lot and the returns) management set a requirement that carts had to be brought back in loads of 8 or more. 8 carts was long enough to be slightly difficult to control in adverse conditions, and was actually slower than grabbing them in groups of 4 or 5. ((Groups of 4 or 5 seemed to be the way they most frequently ended up on busy days)) I abided by this managerial requirement for about two weeks, but eventually the store manager had another urgent task he needed me to do that ended up being delayed by about a half-hour because of it. This led to a conversation that turned into a ‘bet’ – I mentioned that grabbing multiple smaller loads was faster than grabbing fewer longer ones. He wanted proof, so we waited for the corral to be filled on both sides, and then I was timed doing both methods.

    My suggested method was easily 3 minutes faster, because I wasn’t wasting time arranging them in the corral.

    The requirement was dropped a week later.

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  65. CTA*

    A story of failed malicious compliance.

    I once worked as an assistant at a very small business. For some reason, the interns would ask me questions about tasks the business owner had given them instead of asking the owner herself. Let’s call the owner Jane. One day, I reply to the intern that “this is my best guess and you should check with Jane to make sure this is correct.” I don’t know if the intern did check, but I got a stern email from Jane saying the intern did the task wrong and I should refer the intern to her on any tasks that she gave to them. I told Jane that i did tell the intern to ask her and I had the email trail to prove it.

    Fast forward a few weeks, I get an email from the intern asking questions about a task from the owner Jane. So I reply to the intern to ask Jane and I cc Jane. Intern replies that Jane had told her to email me. How was I supposed to know that? That certainly wasn’t in the intern’s email And didn’t Jane say to tell interns to go to her for questions? Then, Jane emails me to say she told intern to email me. Jane, make up your mind. I really should have replied back “I’m only doing hat you told me to do.” BTW, this was on my day off. I really should have just not replied because it was my day off.

    Well, I “got even” so to speak. This anecdote was in the middle of Jane taking out her anger on me. She was going through a rough time (death of a loved one), and I tried my best to be the bigger person and be professional. But this intern question thing wasn’t the only thing I was getting scolded on. Later, Jane was participating in an exhibitor event and my attendance for the clean up (along with the other interns). The day before clean up, I emailed “I can’t come, something came up” and I didn’t define what that something was, which is a no no. Something didn’t come up. I was just tired of being a punching bag. I knew there wouldn’t be consequences because 1) it’s not like I’d called out before like that and 2) Jane needed me to much so she wasn’t going to fire me.

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    1. CTA*

      I want to add that the rough time eventually passed for Jane. We’re actually friends/peers now. We’ve provided each other with references when we’ve need one.

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  66. Madame Desmortes*

    I work in higher ed, and because I am prolific in designing new courses, I have a long-simmering possibly one-sided feud with campus curriculum committee, which nickels-and-dimes every single solitary column inch of a new syllabus.

    (I cheered delightedly the one time I got a new course through with only two turnarounds from campus curriculum committee. It’s usually four or five. That’s how bad they are.)

    At the same time, they (and other campus offices) have been steadily ratcheting up the red-tape boilerplate that’s required on a syllabus. None of the new verbiage is anything students need or even care about. (For my fellow higher-ed folks: two-paragraph statements about “contact hours.” If you know, you know.)

    Me, I have this antiquated notion that my syllabus is a communication tool for me and my students.

    So what I finally did with all my actual syllabi — though not the ones I turn in to campus curriculum committee for approval; those are strictly by-the-book — is put a section at the very end containing all the useless boilerplate. I’d title it “Bureaucratic horsecrap forced on me by campus curriculum committee” if I could… but my actual section title is very little less dismissive than that.

    Students haven’t complained. Nor has anyone from campus curriculum committee, and I put my syllabi online on the reg.

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    1. AFac*

      (For my fellow higher-ed folks: two-paragraph statements about “contact hours.” If you know, you know.)

      *Drinks in solidarity*

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  67. Higgs Bison*

    Minor one, but when I worked at a grocery chain on the night shift I was sometimes scheduled to come in at midnight. I confirmed with one of the people involved with scheduling that the system would count midnight as being part of the next day (i.e. midnight and 12:01 are in the same day) rather than the previous day. They said yes, and the time clock didn’t throw an error, so I thought that was that.

    Then I started getting calls from one of my managers wondering where I was, where I would tell him I worked the shift I was scheduled for the night before. After two of these, I clarified with that manager that he wanted me to interpret it as the day before (i.e. 11:59 and midnight are part of the same day).

    Here’s the MC: My next midnight shift the time clock threw an error, expecting me in the night before instead. (It wasn’t a job I needed to live, so I wasn’t too worried about consequences of not coming in when the clock expected.) We had a paper timesheet for whenever there was an error with a section to write why you came in (subbing for another employee, called in by manager, etc). I wrote “using night shift’s definition of midnight.”

    After a week of that, I began getting scheduled for 11:45 instead of midnight. Clarity achieved.

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  68. A Penguin!*

    The Todd story was an entertaining read and I’m sure felt good to do, but I cannot understate how much I recommend against trying this. I’m also an engineer, and anywhere I’ve worked if I tried a stunt like this I would be fired faster than the equivalent Todd.

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  69. Sola Lingua Bona Lingua Mortua Est*

    Professionally…

    I had a job that was a hybrid Programmer/Processor and reported two supervisors. The programming supervisor was my nominal one, and wanted me on a 3-foot leash mounted 10-feet in the air, and the Production supervisor oversaw the Processing side of the job. After Programming supervisor had to roll back 4 hours of my work for details and instructions she expected me to intuit, her instruction was “just stop, leave [her] alone; [she]’ll do it.” So I did. I didn’t speak to her for the next 12 weeks, working for the high-standards but eminently reasonable and cooperative Production supervisor, optimizing the Processing process, and cross-training his employees to process in the event of my inevitable future absence.

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  70. chellieroo*

    I had a hardworking, effective, coworker in a rehab hospital (physical therapy). Dave wore a polo shirt and cargo pants every single day. It was appropriate for the work and looked professional. Dave had ADHD and had a very rigid, effective, strategy for keeping on schedule. That strategy involved an early days Blackberry kept in the pocket of their cargo pants.
    So. One day someone on the evening shift showed up to work in leather pants. Yes, in a hospital. Rather than simply addressing the leather pants, the management changed the dress code to “dress pants only”. No, Dave, you cannot wear cargo pants anymore. The dress code also included scrubs. So Dave purchased several sets of orange scrubs (with cargo pockets). Orange, like the ones prisoners wear. It was glorious.

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  71. A Genuine Scientician*

    High school so not work world, but submitting anyway.

    My school had a brief Homeroom thing, that basically served for the day’s attendance and where we sat for the morning announcements. Our lockers were also placed near that room. Most people were in ones based on their year and place in the alphabet, but a few of the student organizations also had their own (drama club, math team, etc). I was in one of those.

    Partway through the year, we got a second teacher for it, rather new to teaching, who decided to be much stricter than the first teacher was. She assigned me to create the seating chart. OK, fine, she obviously didn’t already know all of our names like the first teacher did, so I started writing down where everyone already sat. She said no, I had to assign the seats alphabetically.

    This is the point where she should have been more specific.

    I *did* assign everyone alphabetically. In a clockwise spiral starting at the center of the room, going from the end of the alphabet to the beginning. Which I explained to her when she complained that I hadn’t followed her directions, to the laughter from the first teacher.

    She decided the point was not worth further argument, and loosened up some after that.

    On the one hand, it was a stupid point for me to really argue. On the other, she only needed a chart so she could mark who was absent, it didn’t actually need to be in any particular format, so it was a poor choice for a power play midway through a year.

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    1. Danielle*

      At a previous engineering job, a big part of my team’s duties was keeping experiments running through our fab. These experiments would take weeks from start to finish and involve dozens (or more) individual steps. The process flow was divided up among us “module owners,” so Alice would own steps 1-10, Bob had 11-20, Carl had 21-30, Danielle had 31-40, etc. Imagine I am Danielle in this story. Each of us could run experiments to optimize the steps in our module, including running material through different sections of the flow if needed to prepare the right kind of samples. We each were also responsible for other people’s experiments if they were in our part of the flow.

      Carl, the owner of the upstream module from mine, was extremely self- important. He would spend weeks setting up experiments in his module and then, with no advance warning, release them downstream into my section. He would always assign his experiments as Priority 1, meaning that any issue would get 24/7 support. So when his half-baked crap inevitably had a problem in my module, I’d get called at 3 am. His documentation was nearly non-existent so it would anyways be a huge scramble to figure out out what was going on.

      The third time happened, and having no support from management, I said f it and (drumroll) called him as soon as his lot had an issue. It was a Sunday morning and I knew he was religious and had church then, but seriously, f this guy. The experiment was Priority 1! that meant 24/7 support! I figured it was time for him to feel the pain along with me.

      He finally answered the phone and was VERY nonplussed. I heard organ music in the background. He coldly asked me why I was bothering him. I told him that his lot was Prioroty 1 and there was no documentation and it was having an issue, so, I could either put it on hold until Monday for us to make a plan, or I could scrap the material.

      He was very angry and I refused to take responsibility for making a custom plan for his stupid experiment on a Sunday morning. Eventually he settled on running our standard recovery process. It needed the tool owner’s approval since there had already been an issue. I refused to call the poor tool owner on a Sunday for that approval, and Carl wasn’t going to lift a finger, either, so the experiment sat until Monday morning. Which it should have done, anyway!

      I wish I could say that he shaped up after that. Honestly, the biggest change was in my attitude. I told the operators to put any lot that came into my module without a plan from me on hold until business hours. There was one more similar issue after that but at that point I was job searching, and I left soon after.

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        1. A Genuine Scientician*

          I had wondered, but I was trying to keep in mind the possibility that there was a connection I hadn’t noticed.

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  72. HSE Compliance*

    So – my background is in environmental compliance, specifically Title V air permits. This is relevant.

    A company I used to work for was a major source Title V, with NESHAP applicability that required a continuous monitoring system (CMS) – think EPA requirements. This company had gotten EPA attention before related to the CMS to the tune of a Consent Decree. IE – this was *very* important and *very* sensitive. Our CMS was old as heck, out of date, and very soon going to be unable to run properly because of IT security requirements. So, given my background and high amount of familiarity with CMS, I led a project in conjunction with our IT department to upgrade and update.

    For some ungodly reason, this pissed off my boss. Boss was insistent that because it is a *software* (kind of?) IT had to fully own it. This highly sensitive, compliance-heavy program. Our IT team for this was based out of country. They were GREAT IT people. They – understandably – had *no idea* what a CMS needed to be able to do. That was my job, right? Not according to my boss. We had a rather blunt argument about it, and I was told *in writing* to drop the project and Boss was going to make IT handle the entire thing. Okay, sure thing, you do you, booboo.

    So I did. I gave IT every bit of information I could, very specific documentation, and walked them through as best I could before I was removed from the project. Boss decided he needed to keep his thumb on it, and I did exactly what he asked, removing myself from all meetings & emails.

    To the surprise of literally no one apart from Boss, the solution that IT implemented did not meet requirements and did not have the support needed for continuous monitoring, including data loss because they did not understand how the sensors worked. All of the issues led to someone *very* high up – several levels above Boss – getting involved. Their first question was “Why is HSE C not heading this up?” Boss had to then backtrack and explain why exactly he insisted that IT head this and not me to said high level exec, and got his butt handed back to him.

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  73. IT But I Can't Fix Your Computer*

    At my first office job, I was an hourly non-exempt employee, and we got an hour lunch break. My job didn’t require any coverage (it wasn’t customer-facing or anything) so if I was in the middle of something at 12 I would just finish it up and then take my lunch break from 12:04 – 1:04 or whatever. This was more efficient, rather than having to come back and re-log into one of our many systems, re-focus on that task, etc. One of my bosses was fine with this but the other would get very upset if I wasn’t back at my desk by exactly 1:00 and accuse me of taking more than my allotted hour. From then until I applied for a transfer on my 1-year anniversary, I would leave my desk at exactly 12:00 even if I was in the middle of typing a sentence.

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  74. LaminarFlow*

    I just really like the phrase “Fuck you, Todd” as a response to any/all of the Todds and their ridiculous requests.

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  75. 40 Years in the Hole*

    Early military, recruit and trades training:
    1- during basic recruit training (all female platoon) we always lined up/marched/called out etc in alphabetical order. During one parade inspection the person who always formed up next to me and I thought it would be hilarious to switch our name tags (1st 2 letters of our name were the same, with remaining letters close enough to cause staff to confuse us). Staff doing the inspection walk by, pause, stare. You can see the gears grinding. Our “punishment” was to write an essay on why it’s not nice to fool military brass.
    Having a minor in psych and a creative writing streak, I went on for pages about the psychology of personality transference, ego/id, sense of self etc. Apparently this was read out to the whole company and staff – who all had a good laugh (whew).
    2- before a later trg phase (still junior rank), I made sure my hair was cut to specs: just above the lower tunic collar edge, per regs. Apparently the staff didn’t think it was short enough (most male staff were clueless about women’s dress specs). So I was directed to get it cut for next day. “But…” I said (wrong answer). 20 pushups. As luck would have it, trg ran extra long that day. Got to the chop shop just as the female hairdresser was locking up. Barber was still going strong so I waited in line; got some interesting looks. Just about to slide into his chair and was gonna go all “high and tight,” when the stylist walks by, rescues me, and gives me a proper – but super short – pixie. The look on the staff’s face next day – priceless. Hubby’s reaction when I got home a few days later…not so much.

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  76. Throwaway Account*

    Omg, I just remembered a malicious compliance from 1st grade!

    We had to use that very wide rule school paper with the dotted lines ant the halfway mark. All our letters had to reach the top of the lines. I could write neatly and legibly in half the ruled space, below the dotted lines, so I did. I assumed the full space was for those who were struggling to form the letters. And I found it a pain to write each letter so large. But the teacher insisted I use the full space. So for about a week, I made every letter as teeny tiny as I could but with tall lines going up to the top.

    The “t” spanned the whole space but the cross was way down near the bottom. The line of the “d” spanned the whole space but the circle part was tiny and down at the bottom. In my memory, the circle of the “d” was a couple of millimeters! I did all my letters this way.

    The teacher just smiled and I gave up after a bit; it took so long to write my letters this way! But I never used the whole space, either.

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  77. Rara Avis*

    This might qualify? I had an infant and was nursing/pumping when I was assigned to chaperone an all-day field trip. Because I taught multiple grade levels, in most years I was excused from this trip to teach the grades not going. I asked to stay back and was told no. So I started with my series of questions — will you contact the museum to find out where I can pump, since by law you have to provide me with a place? Who will watch my group of children when I leave the group (twice, due to the length of the trip ) to pump? If I bring a cooler and ice to store the milk, can you find out if the museum will let me carry it around? Or store it in a secure place? They eventually decided to let me stay back.

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  78. Danielle*

    He was very angry and I refused to take responsibility for making a custom plan for his stupid experiment on a Sunday morning. Eventually he settled on running our standard recovery process. It needed the tool owner’s approval since there had already been an issue. I refused to call the poor tool owner on a Sunday for that approval, and Carl wasn’t going to lift a finger, either, so the experiment sat until Monday morning. Which it should have done, anyway!

    I wish I could say that he shaped up after that. Honestly, the biggest change was in my attitude. I told the operators to put any lot that came into my module without a plan from me on hold until business hours. There was one more similar issue after that but at that point I was job searching, and I left soon after.

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  79. 2ManyBugs*

    I taught English in a foreign country for awhile, with a culture that was *very* steeped in plagiarism, cheating, and gaming the system to get the highest grades possible. The school also had a policy that any failure could be retaken as many times as necessary until they got a pass; this meant the kids would plagiarize cheerfully and consistently, and whenever they got caught, would take the 0 and just redo it, over and over, until they found the “right” balance to get an A. (They’d also intentionall bomb tests to make sure they could get a 100% on the retake.)

    After banging my head against this wall with essays for a month and half, I hit my limit. As I went through my stack of essays, I printed out whatever wikipedia page they’d copied from, highlighted it, stapled it to the essay….and gave them a 67. A technically passing grade that they could not retake. (FTR: This single assignment was not going to follow them; they were 9. I wouldn’t have done it if it could have impacted their college chances, I understand where the pressure was coming from!)

    I didn’t just cause mass hysteria with the students; half the teachers nearly died at my audacity. “You have to make them do it again!” – No, no I don’t have to. I gave them a passing grade. This section is done. We’re moving to the next.

    It solved the problem (for the most part) for the rest of my contract. And at least they got *sneakier* about it when they did give it a shot!

    Reply ↓

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